I found this picture at MoCo Loco.com. Ginger’s post the other day about the difference between barbeque and a cook-out made me think of some other regional terms, as well as some that might just depend on the era in which one grew up. For example, a sofa has several other names: Davenport, Settee, Chesterfield, and Couch are the ones that come to my mind. My grandpa used to call it a Davenport or a Chesterfield, and he was born in Oklahoma, but came to California as a young man, so I’m not sure where that came from. I grew up saying ‘soda’ when I wanted a soda. The CEO…

Yesterday’s parenthetical about my ex-coworker (circa 1990) saying he was surprised that Ted ‘let me’ buy floral sheets got me thinking…thinking about the way that couples communicate, and how power struggles come into so many relationships. The idea that I should only buy masculine sheets, because Ted’s virility might somehow be at stake if he slept on floral sheets is insane. The idea that he should only buy floral sheets because I might defect or something on solids or stripes is also insane. It reminds me of a couple we know. I’ll call them Bill and Meg, which aren’t their real names, just in case they ever should come across…

  Anyone who has ever been shopping for new sheets knows, it can be a tricky project.  I remember once going to buy sheets, and not even knowing about thread counts and so on…I came home, put them on the bed, and that night was pure torture…it was like sleeping on sandpaper.  (We won’t even get into a discussion about my then-coworker, who was surprised that Ted “let me” buy floral sheets…I said, “Ted doesn’t ‘let me’ do anything.  I buy what I want.  If he wants more manly sheets, he can buy them.”  Really, I hadn’t considered whether Ted would like them or not…we had just moved in together,…

These last few weeks have been SO busy….the kind of weeks when you realize how much quieter your life would be without children. We had a parent appreciation potluck, which I was inclined to skip, but they were having a play about mother earth, and Maya was playing a member of the Boston Tea Party, so who can skip that? There was an end of year potluck at girl scouts, where they received their bronze award (boy, the girls worked HARD for that one…very proud). There was a talent show at school, in which Maya performed a dance number with her best friend (I have been forbidden from posting video,…

Want to know why?  In addition to getting to ‘meet’ all of you wonderful people, some of whom I feel like have become friends, all of whom I really enjoy reading and ‘knowing’ a bit, sometimes, you get cool stuff! I recently won a drawing over at Lotus Reads, and was awarded a book as a prize.  The book I won is titled, My Name Is Red, and it turns out that it won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which makes it eligible for my Book Awards Reading Challenge.  Double Plus Good!  So, I’m adding it to my list as an alternate, which is pretty handy, since most of my books…

Does anyone but me remember Koogle? According to Wikipedia, it came out in 1971, and was discontinued sometime during the 70s. Gosh, I loved this stuff. Chocolate flavored peanut butter. What’s not to love about that? I’m not sure why we were allowed to buy this stuff, since we weren’t allowed to buy ‘sugar cereal’, but why ask? Just be happy and eat your Koogle. Look at the ingredients…is partially hardened vegetable oil the same thing as partially hydroginated vegetable oil? Hmmm. My mom and I were talking the other day, and we were remembering these raisin cookies that we used to like, but which are no longer available in…