Black Friday, Online Shopping, and How to Keep Your Sanity When Christmas Shopping
Christmas shopping is an unmitigated nightmare. People have died. I’m not great with crowds under the best of circumstances, but a box-shaped maze full of this year’s must-have items and 700 of your neighbors still coming down from a combo of too much turkey and too much alcohol is a bridge too far. A tension […]
We All Agree Late Thanksgivings Are Terrible, Right?
Thanksgiving is always the 4th Thursday of November. But that can be all over the place in terms of the actual date of November. In this chaotic and vaguely apocalyptic year of our Lord 2024, it is on the twenty-freaking-eighth. By the time we finish ungodly amounts of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and the green […]
Books on Fire: Reading IS Political
Literature has long been a part of the political landscape. Authors write what they know. And what they experience. Many are part storytellers and part political commentators. So much so that the mere ability to read has, at times and for various groups, been a defiant and potentially life-threatening act of rebellion against one’s oppressors. […]
How to Make Horror More Horrifying – Immersive D-Box Seats?
My teen and I love horror movies. We see an absolutely absurd number of them every year. Everything from Jordan Peele’s newest deeply thought provoking and scary in an oh-god-this-is-an-accurate-treatise-on-societal-issues type of horror to teens-enter-scary-location-and-are-systemically-killed-but-I-don’t-really-care-because-they-are-all-kind-of-awful type of horror and everything in between. This has led, especially me after many years, to become a little jaded. […]
How I Hilariously Found Unexpected Ghosts at Gettysburg
I’m a naturally skeptical person. Maybe even outrageously so. Ghosts, absolutely not. Psychics, 100% fake. Bigfeet (bigfoots??), I don’t think so. But I do love all the stories about them. So naturally, when planning our epic honeymoon, Kevin and I had to find somewhere that blended our combined interests. Many couples will go gallivanting off […]
The Universe is Unhinged With Its Bad Luck Distribution
Remember that dumpster fire of a time I’ve been having? All that bad luck trapped in such a short period it was almost comical…almost. I was begging for just a small amount of bland, tasteless life for a few weeks. I can only imagine that the moment I hit post, the powers that be laughed […]
The Absolute Dumpster Fire That Has Been My Life
The last few weeks have been nothing short of some terrible Shakespearean tragedy or, depending on the readers’ viewpoint, perhaps comedy because only in a story would so much insanity happen back to back. I don’t even know if I believe it. Let me take you back to the more innocent time of 2 weeks […]
Homecoming: Why High School is Both Great and Terrible
I am long past the days of school dances and lunch table politics. Or so I thought. This year, for the first time, I will have a high schooler. How the actual hell did that happen? Without warning, she reminded me that she needed me to pick up my sister’s old homecoming dresses so she […]
Going To The Same Emergency Room Twice Is Not Awesome
We’ve had a cold going around the family. Nothing particularly serious, but after my middle child R couldn’t get rid of the cough, I took him in to the doctor. Pneumonia. Freaking Pneumonia. He didn’t even seem particularly ill. I had him stay home from school the next day and he spent the afternoon acting […]
Weekends are for Chaos: Coffee, Aliens, and Showers
This past weekend was crazy. Blink and you’ll miss it, I think I saw an alien at one point, and also my sister, and maybe there was cake. I swear to God the “rest on the weekend crowd” is full of absolute nonsense or possibly has access to one of those time turners that Hermione […]