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At this moment I should be studying or sleeping, but it's only 2 weeks until my first Project Management exam, so of course my brain finds everything else more exciting. Walmart strike? Letters from Petraeus' mistress? Africans sending aid to Norway? Bring it on! Besides, I did something hard today, it didn't work too well, but when I imagined ( Read more... )

I planned my homecoming carefully: I made a weekly housecleaning plan (with Mikael's blessing) so that the housework gets divided more equally, but I also made a thorough schedule for myself with three goals in mind: More time to exercise, more time with the girls, and routines that will spare me the effort of trying to figure out what I should be ( Read more... )

It's been a different sort of holiday season for us this year, with much quality time with the kids on one hand and much nostalgia on the other, since this was my last Christmas in the wonderful house that Michelle calls "the Pink Panther". During the week leading up to the new year I have been reminded of this fact every day, because we have been ( Read more... )

My first ever video game console was the Atari 2600 back in 1981. I will never forget how the programmers had created something like 100 different playing modes for such a fundamentally simple game like Space Invaders. My favorite was the one where one person controls the left-to-right motion of the ship while the other does the shooting. My best ( Read more... )

My husband isn't the plugged-in, observant type. Just yesterday he took our daughter to a play-date at the wrong girl's house, because he didn't pay attention to the last name of the mother who called and made arrangements. He rarely remembers or bothers to brush our girls' hair or make sure they have a   scarf or extra socks. I'm not sure he even ( Read more... )

Okay, if I am seriously going to be posting every day in November, I have got to make some new user icons. The ones I have are all at least two years old.

Don't you hate it when you have a productive day planned, but then one task just takes forever to accomplish and suddenly it's time to get dinner started? Today I spent two hours trying to find ( Read more... )

Busy busy days here during the harvest season, which is also the birthday season in my family. My Mom turned 70 last week and my sister came over from the States to join us for a few days of good eating, playing with the kids and more driving than is good for me. The new car is a dream, though, and Mental the dog has been enjoying tagging along on ( Read more... )

So, apparently everybody else in my family knew what was happening in Stonega. I think it was just a case of it being such common knowledge that no one realized that I hadn't been told. Unfortunately, the coal mining company is exploiting the area and I assume this was based on decisions made during the Bush administration. The good news is that my ( Read more... )

I’ve had a bit of a shock. I just found out that the last of my roots are gone and I didn’t even know it was in the works.

My father grew up in a cabin in the Virginia Appalachians, just across the border from Tennessee and Kentucky. The end of the world if ever I saw it: you left the two-lane highway for a short trip through the dead, one grocery ( Read more... )