January 25, 2022
I Like Banned Books and I Cannot Lie
My home state is in the national news again, because of yet more spectacularly poor decision-making by the most closed-minded members of its citizenry.
• • •
January 9, 2022
Killing Me Softly With His Door
“If he can’t learn how to close the motherfracking door softly, I’m going to murder him while he sleeps.”
• • •
January 1, 2022
2022 Comes With…Teepees?
Happy New Year, friends! Kicking off 2022 with lots of good intentions for this next trip around the sun. My morning meditation told me I have to be open to new possibilities and to new people but my default position is to sit on my couch and not move so we’ll see how that goes. I did step way out of my comfort zone and sign up for a spring writers retreat in Cabo where I’ll stay in a teepee. Granted, it’s billed as a “luxury teepee” and comes with a king-size bed and a bathroom, so it’s closer to a conical hotel room than an actual teepee. It looks like a teepee on the outside, though, so let’s just stick with that.
• • •
December 1, 2021
Welcome to Amytown
When M and I were first married, the ink not yet dry on our marriage certificate, he began to act strangely. Instead of coming home each night after work, he went to his grandmother’s. “I am making her a plant stand,” he said. “She wants me to make her a plant stand.” Okay, fine, but when it was taking days, then weeks, I had my doubts. I had seen Grandma’s plant stands. A plant stand was a slab of Formica with a kitchen cabinet handle affixed to each end and casters mounted to the bottom. This allowed her to place tall plants in giant pots wherever she wanted in her house. She already had quite a few, built for her, I suppose, by her incredibly handy husband. He had passed away a couple of years before we got married, though, so I guess she needed another one and it was up to her grandson, who had inherited her husband’s mechanical inclinations, to make one.
• • •
October 15, 2021
I don’t understand why people hate the DMV
I can’t even with the DMV.
• • •
October 10, 2021
Headed Toward Divorce
It started off so, so good. We were constantly together. I loved the connection. I grew reliant upon it. I altered my lifestyle according to the nudges, the encouragement, and I was happy. Until I wasn’t. Until I realized that I was behaving in ridiculous ways just to avoid the nagging, the subtle comments intended to motivate but that really only induced guilt. Panic would set in if I didn’t conform to expectations. Really, who can live up to that constant pressure? It was time for, at the very least, a trial separation.
• • •
October 5, 2021
Light’s Out!
Sometimes it’s not the technology that malfunctions…
• • •
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.• • •
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.• • •
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.• • •