Laments About Muddled With Family

Happy Thanksgiving: From A to Z

Best Wishes from our Home to Yours

Here’s a Happy Thanksgiving Day alphabet primer to get you and the family started on holiday fun. Turkey, togetherness, travel, talking, and tag football. Enjoy it and your day with family and friends! Don’t eat too much. Make sure at day’s end, only the turkey is stuffed!

Happy Thanksgiving: A
To the apple lovers (computer and fruit) in your house.

Happy Thanksgiving: B
To bakers who labor so hard on this special day and bankers who get the day off! Read more

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Wildfires, Earthquakes, Power Outages

Just Another Day in CA

Earthquakes, fires and power outages

Forget about a Zombie apocalypse. I live in California where we worry weekly about wildfires, earthquakes, and “scheduled” power outages.

Back East, we worried about terrorist attacks, but since moving to the San Francisco Bay, I’ve learned the true meaning of terror. Here dinner conversations are just as likely to focus on “What’s in your ‘to-go’ bag and earthquake kit?” as on politics, the environment, and favorite TV show. Read more

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Will Techno Wonders Never Cease? Can They Still Increase?

Gadgets I Could Use

Rube Goldberg's self-operating napkin

We live in an age of techno wonders – drones, talking devices that tell us the time in Kuala Lumpur and how long to boil an egg. We can push a button on our smart phones to adjust the thermostat and raise the window shades. But helpless, hapless, middle-aged me still needs help.

Here’s a list of techno-assists I desire:

1. A loud (really loud) buzzer that Read more

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21 Signs You’re Getting Older

21 signs you're getting older

I mostly celebrate my age — 65 —but I admit some aspects of aging aren’t joyful. Here’s my list of 21 signs you’re getting older. Check it out. See what you’d add!

You know you’re getting older when …
…. You go to a rock concert and your friends pass around earplugs instead of drugs.

You know you’re getting older when … Read more

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Single-Use Devices. Salvation or Sin?

Or How Rambo Came to Rule My Roost

Single-Use Devices

For most people, culinary single-use devices like strawberry hullers and cherry pitters are handy time-savers. But for cooking-klutz me, they are mostly cabinet space-stealing clutter, rarely, if ever, used.

I’ve got ceramic pie weights to hold crust down and fancy cake pans in graduated sizes. The former was bought in a moment of wild baking optimism. Yet, I’ve never even opened the package they came in. The latter, I used once to disastrous results.

But in my household, the undisputed master of wasted single-use devices is
– drum roll, please – Read more

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My Mission Impossible? Control

Don't Gen. Al Haig and I wish

My Mission Impossible? Control

Each morning I swear I won’t. Yet every morning, I begin a new round of my personal Mission Impossible. My impossible mission? Get control of my house AND my life.

Each morning I swear I won’t. Yet, first thing each day I make the bed and fluff up the “just for show” pillows. I maniacally wipe down the counters, speed-spritz the fridge to eliminate fingerprints and Windex with a fury the glass dining room table.

Each mid-morning, I swear Read more

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My Mother and Mink

Her Pelts. My Punishment.

My Mother and Mink

My mother was pro-mink. She believed fur symbolized luxury, style, wealth and to the manor born. Not me. I was decidedly anti-fur. I grew up in a cloth coat, pea- jacket, egalitarian world.

My mother was a native New Yorker, so fur was practical too, good for keeping the cold out. I, on the other hand, grew up in sunny Las Vegas. So I avoided the cold and the culture of fur for a long time.

The Fur Flies

But in my late 20s, I was D.C.-bound for an exciting new job. I was also in possession of a small insurance settlement from a leg injury. For my mother, the stars were aligned. She saw fur in my future and pounced. Read more

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50 Shades of Green

Leather Fetish? Nope. Lettuce Fetish!

50 Shades of Green

Remember when salad was simple? Throw together some iceberg lettuce and a few tomatoes and you were done. Now when you shop the produce aisle, you wade through 50 shades of green. Dine out and you wonder if you’re reading a foreign-language menu, so unknown are the leafy options.

These days you need a Ph.D. to make and eat salad! To help sort through the confusion, join me for a walk on the wild produce side. Ready, set, lettuce go! Read more

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I am an Amazon Warrior

Wonder Woman has Nothing on Me

I am an Amazon warrior

I am an Amazon warrior. Not like Wonder Woman, all tricked out in hot pants, a bustier, and bullet-repelling bracelets, but still … Read more

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My Not-So-Merry Market-Go-Round

Modern-Day Mercantile Madness

my not-so-merry market-go-round

Growing up, life was simple. My mother shopped at one supermarket, two at the most. Now I’m on a non-stop, not-so-merry market-go-round, shopping at six different stores. It’s modern-day mercantile madness.

If it’s Tuesday, I go to Whole Foods for oh, so pricy organic produce and meat. Wednesdays, I’m at Safeway. That’s where I get the family prescriptions and non-organic, unhealthful food, like Lay’s potato chips and Diet Coke. By Friday, it’s anybody’s guess. It’s a regular basket free-for-all!  Read more

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