Hit and Run Thanksgiving
It happens every holiday: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter. . . My Mom or I slave in the kitchen and then people arrive, usually late. They grab a plate, eat, and within two hours tops, they are gone. The majority of the clean-up is left behind. My sister and her boyfriend have to hit both families and my sister's boyfriend was also on call and forgot his digital password thing at home. They were there for an hour. My grandparents never make it to dessert. My Pop-Pop doesn't like to drive in the dark and he doesn't like to go to the bathroom at other people's houses. Sometimes, if they come to my kids' birthday parties, they ask me for a

L.A. Fitness is like Hotel California
I cancelled my gym membership at L.A. Fitness in September. My membership expired on 11/14. Yet today and last month, L.A. Fitness charged me for the Kid Klub. Someone explain to me why I would still have a Kid Klub membership when I'm not even a member at the club myself. Mr. BBM saw the charge and called the gym, where some girl with barely two brain cells to rub together explained that it was perfectly reasonable for me to NOT have membership and STILL have a Kid Klub membership, despite the fact that you can't take kids in there for daycare purposes. You must always be on grounds. Yeah, because I totally drop my kids off at Germ Klub

Throw Away the Key
"I know what I did is wrong and it will never happen again," he said. "I messed around with a little girl and I shouldn't have done it. I only did it once a week on Thursdays when I was baby-sitting. "But it wasn't every Thursday," he said. "I don't think the law is fair."Taken from this article on the Reading Eagle dot com. This quote is from a violent sexual predator who sexually assaulted a little girl for years. He served 5 months out of only a 23 month sentence and he's ticked off that new laws will require longer sentences and more

No Sympathy
Last week, I had a student miss both of my classes. Out with the swine flu, she kept in almost constant contact with me, updating me as to when she thought she'd be able to come back, asking questions about upcoming assignments and doing her best to avoid falling behind. After getting the approval to come back to class, she sat in my class on Tuesday and looked awful. Her cough sounded even worse than she looked. I asked her if she was ok and she blurted out, "no." You could tell she felt lousy. She still showed up with a partial annotated bibliography in hand, just to make sure she was doing it correctly. Last night, I got an ema

Blogging Enemy Number 1 Sending Out the Good Karma
I'm not quite sure what it is about me, but my entire life, I have attracted crazies and "haters." Some weird girl tried to get me to join her religious cult on a Pittsburgh PAT bus one day, and for whatever reason, strange people tend to think I'm up for their crazy-talk. Over the years, I've also been the target of online "haters," "trolls" and just plain jerks. One time a whole group of adolescent losers started insulting me and my blog. That drama went on for weeks. Every once in a while some crazy commenter crawls out of the woodwork and tells me off for no apparent reason too. It's usually something stupid and obscure like I say I