Here’s the truth about my Girl Scout career: It ended when I was nine years old, busted for shoplifting red licorice from the local grocery store while wearing my uniform. Before that, I managed to rack up a long list of scouting offenses: I consistently forgot my dues which, in 1975, were one shiny quarter…
The other day I walked into the gym and on the massage sign-up board, someone had written “You Are Beauty.” This prompted in me a huge, instinctive internal eye roll. I was cranky and, even on my best days, I’m not big on affirmations — especially when there’s a price tag attached. But then, when…
When I launched this blog in 2007 — with no intention of writing about jam — I googled “Hitchhiking to Heaven” to find out whether anyone else was already using the name. My search didn’t yield much, certainly not anything that concerned me. What I’m saying is that I didn’t find this entry in the…
Who cares if you don’t have a say in this year’s Oscar race for Best Picture? You can exercise your voting muscle in the 2009 Bookseller/Diagram Prize awards for the most bizarre book title of the year. This annual contest kicked off in 1978, when the winner was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on…
Yesterday I asked my grandfather what he remembers about the Great Depression. His clearest memory is meeting a hungry man on the sidewalk and bringing him to the back door of the family home. My great-grandmother fed the man and gave my grandpa a lecture so stern that it’s still with him today. But our…
Today I went to Bed Bath & Beyond to look for a bath mat. I should have known better. BBB has the power to induce in me a confusion and delirium unique in the world of retail. It surpasses even the weirdness of IKEA. I discovered the trouble with BBB years ago, when my friend…
Today I bought and returned my first webcam. I bought it because, with all of Stewart’s travels, we decided it would be nice to be able to Skype each other. The service works with or without video — but wouldn’t it be fun to see each other while we talked? Not so much. The camera…
There are good things and bad things about having two fathers. Thankfully, for me, almost all of the bad things happened in the distant past, when I hadn’t yet grown up enough to learn that being an adult does not necessarily correlate with knowing what to do — especially if you’re a very young adult,…
The other day, my dad sent me an email correcting one of my posts, Snake Oil, in which I mentioned that I inherited his goofy bow legs and something odd about his teeth. To set the record straight, his feet actually point out like a duck and his knees point more or less toward each…
First, I am shocked and dismayed that I didn’t learn until just now that yesterday was National Pigeon Day. Having lived with a pigeon for thirteen years (more about that later) and being a great fan of pigeons in general, I feel that I owe an apology to our noble yet much maligned feathered friends….
I know where my tax rebate is going. I had planned to save it or invest it, but I just stimulated the economy by spending every penny on a complete system of prescription-only skin care products that promises to make my face flake, peel, redden, and look wrinkly. But that’s just the first phase. After…
It’s not unusual for me to show up at work and find bird things on my desk — photographs, books, newspaper clippings, feathers, nests. My office is avian chaos, but I don’t mind. It’s touching when the people you care about know what you love and bring offerings from their wanderings in the world. Yesterday…