Saturday is usually the day when we don’t have to set an alarm. For that reason alone, Saturday is my favorite day of the week. Today we had to set an alarm but this Saturday is still my favorite day of the week. We had to be up reasonably early to run an important errand. Last Saturday, when we did not set an alarm and were not up and out of the house early and were still in our PJ’s…
We have come to that time of the semester where I am forced to give tests. I don’t really like giving tests. In fact, I hate giving tests. It seems to me that they never really adequately measure a student’s grasp of the material over which they are being tested. Tests merely give a somewhat accurate reading of how well students holds up under the pressure of a testing environment. That said, I have to give tests. The powers that…
My friend Debra and I had a Play Date today. She and I see each other at least once a week because we are in a book group together. Though that is a fun thing, it is not a Play Date. We are there to study a book with four other women, not to play. Sometimes we even see each other twice a week because we attend the same church. All that really means is that on Sunday mornings we…
It seems that these days I need a list just to function in a nominally productive manner. To be honest, maybe “a list” is an understatement; I need many lists to successfully get through any given day – grocery list, chore list, reading list, to-do list for school, home maintenance list, errand list – and the lists go on . . . Without my lists, something gets forgotten. It’s OK if that overlooked item is something like dusting the door…
As far as I am concerned, crackers are the perfect food. First of all, they are a carbohydrate; that propels them way up there in the direction of perfection. Secondly, they are tasty by themselves and they serve as a luxury vehicle for the delivery of other delicious stuff like peanut butter, cheese, hummus, fruit . . . The one thing that has kept the crackers in my world from reaching absolute perfection is that I buy them pre-packaged. I…
What does one do for entertainment in Texas over the Christmas holidays? According to the media, most people shopped until they dropped. Then they got up and did it again. Sports fans got the best Christmas gift they could imagine when the NBA began its season on Christmas Day. The Dallas Mavericks, however, unwrapped a disappointing opener for their fans. And football games are aplenty. We were neither at the mall or at the arena. We went to the Dallas…
So here it is, New Year’s Day, the beginning of 2012. Funny, but nothing really seems new to me. (Possibly because I haven’t yet written the date on anything and had to change that last digit from “1” to “2” by tracing over it eight or ten times.) Another reason that I don’t have a feeling of newness today is because my life is structured by the academic rather than the calendar year: so my “new year” begins at the…
As I write this, we have survived the celebration of four birthdays in the last week – my two girls, me, and Jesus. That is a lot of celebrating even when you do it all rather simply. Our season of celebration began with the arrival of Offspring No. 1 from Chicago. She is home with us for three weeks. For me, this alone is reason to celebrate; she has not been home for an extended stay in a while. This…
Up until this moment, only a very few people know that one of the things on my bucket list is to get stoned. Well really, I just want to smoke pot. I’m not sure whether to be embarrassed by or proud of the fact that to this day, roughly one week shy of my fiftieth birthday, despite having spent nearly a decade on college campuses as a music major, I have never been stoned. Now that it is about time…
It is hard to believe that Thanksgiving and Black Friday are over and we have started the official countdown to Christmas. We had a wonderful Thanksgiving despite a few obstacles. It was perfect in that both girls were here with us. The obstacles were, in hindsight, minor – the kitchen is still not finished and Wednesday morning the dishwasher decided that it would cease to function properly and thus would be unavailable until addressed by a repairman on Monday. Neither…