Yesterday a national women’s magazine sent a team of three to get my photo for its April issue. They’re doing a story on moms who make money flogging crap arbitraging rare treasures on eBay. My story of buying this for $4 and flipping it for $2200 had captured the editor’s imagination, and I was one of three women selected [...]
Driving a rental car through Santa Fe last month, Chris asked me to check the contract to see exactly what time we had to turn the vehicle in at the Albuquerque airport. The rental documents were not easily found. Scrabbling around the glove box, yanking out papers and maps, I found an ice scraper (where was THAT when [...]
On Tuesdays, everyone fights over who gets to go to the mailbox. Because the winner sees The New Yorker first, which means turning to the last page immediately. We’re not in this for Talk of the Town musings on violincello mute makers or the long-form articles on microbacilli. No, we love the cartoon caption contest, in which readers [...]
Snow day! White out the window, slush on the streets, two kids in their beds, one on the couch (hooked up by IV to the XBox), two parents drinking tea and trying to wake up. Oh, and one unfunctioning computer. So I’m posting this from Chris’s laptop, which is mercifully working. I have to make this snappy [...]
From the time Ian was born, Chris and I knew we needed to pick a guardian for him, in case, you know, the unspeakable happened. When Hugh and Malcolm came along, we still needed to pick a guardian. But now the job was three times harder, because whoever inherited our kids in the event of [...]
I try to remember that line, uttered by an English monarch during World War II to cheer up the poor bombarded Brits. Hence my choice for a slogan, in my socialist Obama-style poster. To make your own Obama poster starring you or a loved one, go here. Share and Enjoy:
Emily and I talked about starting a new feature once a week, in which we post about a story in the news. I know the real idea is to editorialize about a national news story, but I’m going to start with something sillier. As one of my favorite authors, Bill Bryson, has pointed out, true insight into [...]
The year was 1980. I was living in Washington DC, working as an au paire for a family headed by a Democratic pollster, a Dungeness-crab-loving Jew raised in San Francisco. He was fascinated by the fact that his young live-in nanny, a junk-food-loving Baptist raised in Missouri, was a registered Republican, and I remember answering pollster-type questions [...]
Unlike the disaster averted in yesterday’s plane crash into the Hudson, a horrible disaster occured in New York’s other river back in 1904. It was so awful nobody thought it would ever be forgotten. And yet how many of us have heard of the steamboat General Slocum? Hands? Nobody? Exactly. I certainly hadn’t, until I [...]
Specifically, how to get them to agree to darken the door of a thrift shop, my favorite kind of store. Certainly my three sons have no desire to tag along while I poke through piles of vintage linens and pick through stacks of old books. To get them to shop, you must appeal to their primeval instincts. FInd a [...]
