August 6, 2020

I’m not brave enough to teach.

I work at a school. This is the second school I have worked at. I love working at schools. The energy children bring is contagious and joyful and invigorating. My coworkers, those who teach and those of us who have the incredible honor to support them, have chosen this career for very specific reasons that have nothing to do with money or fame. It’s all about the heart. Teachers are gashdamn rock stars. I know. I get to see them in action every day. And I know that I could never do what they do.

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November 3, 2018

Granny

When I was a child, fewer things made me happier than when my parents announced, “We’re going to the country.” Going to the country meant visiting my granny and gramps, and the idyllic setting they had created for their retirement. I always had a good time in the country, and I loved spending time with my grandparents.

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April 30, 2018

Oops

I had this brilliant idea to port all the posts from my old Blogger site to here, so that all of my Most Important Writing About Stupid Shit would be in one place, and would be more secure. Blogger is a free platform and once my blog grew into something decently substantial (over 2,500 posts) I always worried that one day it would be disappeared without warning, and that I’d lose everything. Blogger has already been sold at least once (I think Google owns it now), and doesn’t seem as robust as a few of the other platform sites, so I figure it’s inevitable that it’ll wind up languishing with MySpace in an unsupported cyber purgatory. I looked into moving everything when I first launched my new online home, but there were lots of complicated instructions involving exporting and importing and inserting code into the depths of my new website and since I had already taxed my considerable computing skills just getting the thing set up, I passed on the idea.

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April 19, 2018

Clean me

My first order of business, once both my child and husband were safely out of the state over spring break (she to Florida with grandparents, he to California on a business trip), was to clean the house. By cleaning right away, my home would stay tidy for an entire week. I’m not sure what it says about me that this is my idea of a great week, but let’s go with it. I tore into cleaning with enthusiasm normally reserved for an all-inclusive resort with a beach. I worked for most of a day, saving the guinea pig cage for last. Cleaning a guinea pig cage is disgusting, and I wanted to be able to immediately shower after. I’m a planner like that. I was tired but pleased when I went out to the mudroom, stuck the pig in her travel carrier, and got to work. Halfway through, I happened to glance at a narrow ledge on the cabinet that borders her cage. This ledge was always dusty due to its proximity to a piggy cage, but this time there was an added touch.

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April 12, 2018

Rotation

It’s pretty common knowledge that you’re supposed to rotate the tires on your car. Some drivers are more vigilant about doing it, but by and large, people know that it should be done. It’s good automotive maintenance.

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April 9, 2018

Finding myself in Dayton

I went to the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop in Dayton, Ohio, this weekend, which I shall call EBWW because it’s easier to type and because that’s what the organizers call it so it’s all Official-like. I waited years for this. I’m not kidding. I discovered there was an EBWW right after registration closed for the last one, of course, and since it happens every other year I got to wait approximately 913 days to go to this one. In the meantime, I re-read all of Erma’s books and checked that I had the registration date and time entered onto my calendar about a hundred times. I waited. It wasn’t easy. I am not a patient person.

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January 10, 2018

Holiday Smut

One of my book clubs determined, through a great conversation of great fun that shall not be repeated here (what happens in Book Club stays in Book Club), to read “holiday smut” over the break. I was intrigued. I have never read smut. I swore to never, ever read That Smutty Book Everyone Talked About a Couple Years Ago because I heard right off the bat that it was chock-full of really poor writing. (In fact, I’ve heard it’s so terribly written that I won’t even sully the wall of my blog with its title.) There are too many good books to waste time on sloppy writing, no matter how steamy it is. So when one of my friends offered to recommend a smut book for our December read, I jumped at it. The only smut book I really knew about was the best seller that was made into a movie. Which I also didn’t see because I don’t want to throw good money at poor writing in any form. So to have a smut book recommended for reading over Christmas? Perfect. A whole new genre to explore. I’ve studied the Russian masters, the English classics, the new Americans. Dostoyevske to Shakespeare to Capote to Kerouac. Spent a whole term on Chaucer freshman year of high school. Read Lolita in college because Sting sang Don’t Stand So Close To Me. Fell in love with Dorothy Parker’s wit. But through sheer subconscious purposeful intent luck, I have managed to avoid smut. It’s time to expand my horizons.

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December 21, 2017

Just my type

I pulled out my grandmother’s typewriter today, which I have been more or less using as a decoration on the bookshelves in the great room because I love typewriters. I love how they look, how they sound, and that incredible works have been created on them. I learned how to type on an IBM Selectric nearly 30 years ago. My school had a computer lab filled with boxy DOS machines and giant monitors with tiny displays, but the typing class still had Selectrics. To this day I don’t know why I signed up for a typing class, except that maybe my subconscious knew that I’d go on to bail out of engineering school after three terms and move to journalism. My subconscious, then, is way smarter than the rest of my brain. This is not surprising.

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December 13, 2017

Fashion Forward

I am the least-trendy person I know. The only attention I pay to fashion trends is when something pops up that I do not understand and there for absolutely hate. This year’s bared shoulder blouses is a perfect example. What the hell. I have enough trouble getting into my clothes early in the morning when it’s dark and I’m still sleepy without dealing with extra holes. Not happening. And skinny jeans ought to be destroyed. That trend has overstayed its welcome, and makes shopping for regular jeans a herculean task that ends in frustration every. damn. time. Even my tried and true Levi’s has succumbed to this fad. Yo, Levi’s: I weigh more than 86 pounds, thanks.

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