The raison d’etre for childhood is learning. Much of that learning is done by trial and error. Sometimes it feels like the raison d’etre for parents is to point out the error in childhood trials. Take yesterday evening (please?). Twenty minutes before bedtime our kids voiced unanimous desire for an apple. They spent the better part of that twenty minutes sitting in the hallway with…
Can you believe it’s almost October already? I can. I can believe 2006 is three quarters done too. I can believe it’s fall. I can believe the federal fiscal year is over. I can believe lots of things when I wake up on the couch after midnight, discovering that it’s been two hours since I decided I should get up and go to bed.
This could be one of the more difficult times to find…
For those of you who don’t know, Costco is one of those membership only, discount warehouses… one of those places where you can get tartar sauce in a convenient 8 gallon “party pack.” (You never have to embarrass yourself at a fish-fry again.) It so happens that my in-laws are members, and we take appropriate advantage now and again. Yesterday afternoon was one such…
Have you ever faced a deficit of will when it came to mowing the lawn? This is the time slot for my weekly appointment with the yard, and I’ve got to tell you… I really don’t want to go. The house feels so cozy inside. I could… GASP… even be content doing housework all day.
What is wrong with me? My desire to avoid the lawn is perfectly in line with my history of…
If you read the sports section of the St Pete Times, you may have read a column by John Romano about the new owners of the Rays. The title of this article is: “New boss looking too much like old boss.”
As you may have guessed, I have a problem with this article (why else would I be writing about it?). In order to address my issues I must first point out the problems with the…
I’ve come to the point in my week when our stores of name-brand products have run dry. I’m almost exclusively down to the generic alternatives I bought on Friday, following my most recent fiscal epiphany. First let me say that anyone who claims generic tastes the same as brand either never tried both, is lying, or is incapable of picking sugar out of a line-up of artificial sweeteners.
“… and the heavens opened and water poured forth like a reading from the Old Testament.”
– Excerpt from Tuesday afternoon.
It was one of those Florida afternoons where you could see the rain coming like an omnivorous grey beast. I was on my way to pick up Beth from Tae Kwon Do, with Adam in tow, when I realized there was no way I was going to herd two hyper kids into the…
I love gift certificates from my favorite online retail establishments. It’s one of the few places or occasions when I find I have a credit balance. You may think that a gift certificate is restrictive… that there’s more freedom in cold, hard cash. If you take a hard line, emotion free view of life and gift giving, this is true. Yet when I pull up iTunes or eReader.com and see my…
Have pity on me dear reader, for I must forsake my beloved paper in the name of good mental health. By “paper,” I am of course referring to the news… or the printed version thereof. I can not look at it for fear of what I know I will see: a large cover story about a certain local sports franchise with a pirate motif, who laid a second consecutive egg in the face of their…