Dallas Raines and Ralph, my two favorite men
The beginning of the week brought November and summer, it was ninety degrees downtown. Dallas promises that summer will end eventually and I hold onto hope: Doesn't he look like he's delivering the bad news with that stern expression, telling his fans that sad but true we'll have to endure several days of partly cloudy. However will we manage? At least it's not going to be ninety degrees today ag

Procrasticleaning for the masses
I completely missed my calling as a peeping tom. If only peeping tom didn't have such a negative connotation, what with the perversity and sneakiness and dirty-old-man-in-raincoat and so on, because really I do love looking inside people's lives. I like to see their houses and what's on their kitchen tables, and how they managed to make their TV set look always somehow better than mine does in my own living room. I often stare at my TV set and wonder why it never seems to look right in the room, no matter where I put it. Mostly I am speaking of a decorator peeping tom here. Like, more of a peeping Nate Berkus. I think this has something to do with my deep desire to be living some

Shake shake shake your little red handknit Mary Jane booties!
We're only now getting around to having the baby shower for the coworker that I made my first-ever sweater for. I already blabbered on and on about the sweater here, but to go with it I also made the cutest knitted shoes EVER! If I do say so myself. I did however neglect to block them, so I stuffed them with tissue paper instead. Ah, it happens.

In the city ladies look pretty, guys tell jokes so they can seem witty
One of my hidden talents is that I have a freakishly vast knowledge of song lyrics from the 1980s. I can conduct an entire conversation in random song lyrics, which I do sometimes at work accidentally and then I find myself on a conference call saying something like, "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life ..." Which goes over really well. As you can imagine. Crosswords fascinate me. Not the actual completion or challenge of the crossword puzzle -- the only ones I have a shot of getting right

Reader Q&A Day
The immediacy of email still surprises me, mostly because I am not very immediate about it on my end. But just imagine you post some little essay and then you go get coffee, wash your hands repeatedly, flip through an Avon catalog, stare out the window, and fifteen minutes later you check your inbox and you have 149 emails about your forgotten essay's factual inaccuracies. How else would I know when I had neglected to talk up Alaska's tax-free status? I tell this to my friend Work-Jennifer and she says, "Doesn't it bother you that an essay about people pointing out flaws in your fan