Homeless
I recently read J. J. Brown’s blog post about her debt reduction experiment. Last December I participated in the #reverb10 blogging challenge and one of the goals I chose for 2011 was dealing with debt. Definitely the hardest goal I chose, it’s also the one I’ve successfully ignored for the last 4 months. I can pay my bills and buy necessities but rarely have money for those unexpected expenses like broken cars and leaky roofs. As I get older and my children become independent, I wonder if I’ll just be working to finance all the things in my life? Brown’s largest expense after necessities and education is books. My house is filled with books and about two years ago, I put a moratorium on book purchases. I love the library...
Everyday Vegan presents … A Shepherd’s Birthday
A retweet that sums up my life: @shoreflicks was right, that’s probably the first and last time that will ever be tweeted, more so because (at least for me) it’s true. A discussion about yarn prompted that tweet, and let’s face it, if you read my blog or follow me on Twitter, you know about my new passion for knitting. Much as I love art, I’m more about craft. Before my kids were born, I completed all number of needlework projects, but you can’t take a year on an original needlework design when you’ve got two kids in diapers! Now that my two are independent (or at least close to), I can relax once again with fiber. Enough about me, where’s that Shepherd? Tom Chenal, owner and shepherd at Summerhill Farm in...
Drama
My parents live in Plano, Texas, and each summer my mother, my daughter and I go to the community theater to see a play. We began when Sarah was in elementary school with selections like Cinderella. More recently, we enjoyed Footloose. During the intermission, my mother confessed to my daughter that she always thought Kevin Bacon had a great butt. The tickets were dirt cheap, but the look on my daughter’s face was priceless! Talk about the family drama when we returned to my parents house, and my daughter repeated what Grandma said to her Grandpa and brother. This past year, we saw Dilemmas with Dinner, a play I later discovered is popular around the country with local theater. Set in the 1980s, the cast went all out with shoulder pads, lycra, big...
Dress Code
What do you think about dress codes? Do they make sense in school, restaurants, or places of business? Why or why not? Once upon a time, there was a twenty-something young woman who lived in a land ruled by a former actor and full of people dressed in power suits, sporting big hair, and hefting filofaxes. She landed a job at a large insurance company, and on her first day, was handing a large stack of forms to sign. Some allowed the former actor and his agencies to take money from her paycheck to pay for exciting projects named after George Lucas movies. Others warned her against telling the competition any deep dark insurance secrets. At the bottom of the stack was a dress code form which she signed after looking at her watch, then the title of the form,...
Bullies
If my heart belongs to Top Chef, my mind belongs to Mad Men. An intelligent, contemplative, multi-layered cast of characters inhabit the world of early ’60s advertising, and while much has changed in the work place, some things remain the same. Like adult bullies. I’ve grown to love Joanie, I truly have, and her marriage exposes all of the flaws and gender bias of the Eisenhower era. She may sport the gloss of Jackie Kennedy, but she’s as much a post-war woman as Betty Draper. In the first season, she was the woman I loved to hate. Peggy was so me in my first years in the corporate world (and it doesn’t help that my mom’s name is Peggy). Eager to please, full of trust, Peggy and I were ripe for women like Joan, rapacious and...
Letters
The last two nablopomo prompts ask a blogger to write 2 “letters” to themselves, one an apology for an event or decision in the past, one describing what’s going on now that the writer doesn’t want to forget. I thought about the first letter much of yesterday. While I can come up with a few decisions I’ve made in the past that I regret, most of them occurred before I had my children, and if I made a different decision, the children I have might be different or not exist at all! Overall, I am happy with where I am at in my life, and the things I would change are either entirely up to me – exercise and lack thereof at the top of the list – or I can’t change no matter how much I want to – leaving New Jersey...
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