Today’s headline may draw a host of new readers, for all the wrong reasons. This post isn’t about Vargas girls of days gone by. It’s about finding old stuff – at yard sales, thrift shops, auctions, on the curb – and being thrilled with your new possession. MOB reader Anne H tipped me off to [...]
Yesterday Hugh walked home from school and was disappointed to find that I was the only one in the house. He had found a turtle in the neighbor’s yard and wanted to show it off. He described it as “pulsing” in his hands, which I found ”repulsing.” But thank heavens I had the presence of mind [...]
Yesterday I was reading the Complaint Box feature in the New York Times online. The writer was griping about how common it has become for salesclerks and receptionists to rhetorically ask “How ya doin” without expecting or desiring any answer. She found the inquiry false. This generated a flurry of comments, which quite often raises [...]
Browsing around through the blogosphere, it becomes clear that safety and security are top of mind with many writers. Many so-called Mommy Bloggers, especially those with young children, refer to their kids by aliases. They often photograph their children from the back, or with their heads cut off. No doubt they have read cautionary tales [...]
Perhaps a year ago, I first heard a strange new expression: “Yes, my daughter is going to get to walk at graduation, even though she won’t technically have all her credits.” Wait, what? Walk? Ever since then, the “walk at graduation” phrase – or even just “walk” – has been raining down on my [...]
“Stash” means different things to different people. To my mother, a stash was her collection of quilting fabric, neatly sorted and stored in colored plastic boxes. To certain burned-out people in college, a stash was their collection of buds and leaves, carefully divided out on an open double-album. To a squirrel, a stash is a [...]
One of my mom’s favorite expressions was to say that someone “lies like a rug.” One of our old babysitters used to say to my boys, “The one thing I will NOT tolerate is for you to tell a lie.” She would prod them with “Are you FIBBING to me?” Whenever I overheard something [...]
Yesterday morning, driving back from the gym, I was flipping through the radio dial when I happened upon a surreal piece of real-life radio theater. A woman named Tanya had phoned in to a DJ named Chio, who runs a feature called War of the Roses. Tanya was worried that her boyfriend James was, perhaps, maybe, straying. [...]
Inspired by a middle-aged woman spotted at a gas station near the New Jersey turnpike, I am planning to get a tattoo. This woman had one on her neck. When necks get crepey, cover the wrinkles with gothic printing. People will be so busy reading your neck, they won’t notice that your neck is no longer [...]
Now that our firstborn’s Gap Year is drawing to a close, the jury is in. It was a great decision. Instead of going straight to college, Ian accepted an offer from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) last May, then deferred for a year. As many MOB readers will recall, he spent the summer lifeguarding before going off [...]
