Like most families struggling to climb the never-ending series of financial peaks along life’s path, we are in a constant state of semi-panic. Mortgages, car loans, school tuition, music lessons, credit card payments, repair bills, sports fees, application fees, grocery bills, insurance bills, and all the other costs that encumber the typical middle-income family, can…
Holidays
Thanksgiving’s Forbidden Fruit
As a kid, my favorite part of the Thanksgiving meal wasn’t the turkey. I didn’t drool over the mashed potatoes or my father’s giblet gravy. I didn’t love, or even like for that matter, those miniature pickles and what-nots on my mother’s sectioned relish tray. I thought the stuffing had too many unidentifiable objects in…
From soup to nuts, and back again
No sooner did I drop my husband off at the airport, than I felt the tickle at the back of my throat. He was off on a Navy trip to Bahrain for a couple of weeks, leaving me in charge of the house, the bills, the kids, the dog, the trash, the leaves, our…
The calm before the holiday storm
As you pop that fun-sized candy bar you just rummaged from your kid’s dwindling Halloween booty into your gullet, consider this: You only have two weeks left. Two weeks before the grocery store starts looking more like a Caligula-era Coliseum, when otherwise mild-mannered citizens try to scratch each other’s eyes out and grocery carts become…
What I believe about Hell and hand baskets