Thanks to the bucketing rain outside, I find myself with an unaccustomed gap in my afternoon. Normally I’d be walking the dog right about now, you see, only my dog is a bit of a Mr. Prissypaws when it comes to getting wet. Where by “a bit” I mean the protagonist in an Oscar-worthy performance [...]
Two days after the Belovedary and I returned from our sojourn to visit family in California, I missed a step while exiting a coffee shop and went kersplat on the pavement. The above is a visual representation of what going kersplat on the pavement did to my right knee. As a result, I’m spending my [...]
Some people I know like to share links to articles and reports about the various purported health benefits and risks of particular foods. I’m not naming names and not pointing fingers, because there are actually quite a lot of them and it’s a pretty common behavior. It goes on in public — what are all [...]
Note: This post is not about food and it contains what some people refer to as “adult language.” If you object to either of these things, you have been warned. Lately I’ve been trying to eliminate profanity/insults from my vocabulary if they are based in hatred or condemnation of marginalized groups. It strikes me as [...]
It has become clear, in reading the comments that you lovely and insightful people have kindly left here on Homework, that at times, when I express a strong opinion about a particular issue, some people take it very personally. Some people appear to feel that when I express a strong opinion about, say, the questionability [...]
I suppose it’s all connected to the whole New Years Resolution change-your-body-change-your-life thing so many people do at this time of year, but all month I have been hearing and overhearing conversations where people talk about what they’re giving up, food-wise, and what benefits they think they will realize by doing so. There are the [...]
A few years ago, a visiting friend’s toddler, in mid-meltdown, was mollified by being offered the chance to sit in the Princess Chair at my kitchen table. This is not, I hasten to clarify, something that anyone would readily identify as being particularly princessy. It is not sparkly or pink or anything, or even particularly [...]
A bit like a hairshirt of unfortunate cut, the holidays are upon us. Thanksgiving has come and gone and now it’s nearly time for the conglomeration of midwinter events collectively known in our household as Pigduff. Pigduff is the phoneticization of an acronym, PGDFF, which was invented many moons ago by my friend Agnes and [...]
I distrust restaurants that cannot spell their own menu items correctly. Not just “bruchetta” and “au juice” and “capuchinno” and other perhaps predictable errors with languages that are not necessarily that of the restaurant staffers, but things like “stripped bass” and “deserts.” Perhaps especially “deserts.” You may be able to prepare it, but if [...]
I was a little shocked when I found out that canning had become trendy. It was as if shining your shoes had become the hot new hipster domesticity pastime, or perhaps repairing toasters or darning socks. The mental dissonance of discovering that something you’d been doing all your life — sometimes grumpily because your mom [...]