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In Praise of Home Economics
I took Home Economics from 7th grade through my senior year. We actually had two different home ec classes – one was for cooking, and the other focused on things like managing a family (I remember a fascinating unit on how birth order impacts personalities), paying bills (and which bills you definitely need to pay first if you can’t pay them all), and sewing (somehow the shorts I was sewing came out with one leg longer than the other – I blame the pattern). Anyway, all through my years of taking Home Ec, which was required, I made fun of it. I got detentions because I made fun of how…
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Glamping in a Bubble
I’m a really big fan of camping – in theory. I love the idea of going to sleep listening to the cicadas, waking up with the sun, and cooking meals over a fire. But in reality, camping and I have a difficult relationship. I get claustrophobic in tents, especially smaller ones that you can’t stand up in. Bugs love me. And I get totally freaked out at not being able to pee without going outside where I could get eaten by a bear. So yeah, we’re not a fit. Which is how I wound up in a bubble last weekend. There’s a bubble hotel just outside our town, about 10…
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That Time a Toad became a Sick Cat
So last Sunday morning I went outside to do some pool maintenance. That’s the fancy word for “turn on the filter and throw a chlorine tablet in the basket,” but having a pool at all makes me feel fancy, so I use fancy words when I talk about it. Anyway, when I turned on the jets-and-filter-thing (technical term) there was a funny suction noise, like the water wasn’t going through properly. I grabbed a chlorine tab, and opened the lid to the collection-basket-thing to throw the tab in, and I was greeted by the annoyed look of a giant toad who was trapped beneath the flap of the basket-thing. I…
