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October 6, 2018
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” said the very astute Robert Frost in his poem Mending Wall. I first heard that poem when I was a kid living in Illinois, and I shrugged it off both because I was young and because I lived in a place that didn’t systematically erect walls between neighbors, […]
October 3, 2018
“Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre, but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet’s dream, silent as a city of the dead.” (quoted in The Devil in the White City) Chicago is a really cool city. The architecture and the landscaping are beautiful, […]
October 2, 2018
Have you ever heard somebody say that they were planning a family vacation to Kansas City, MO? Or that it’s on their top-five list of places they want to see? Probably not, but I’m telling you, that’s crazy. That city is full of history, beauty, and culture, and if you’ve never dreamed of visiting it, […]
September 12, 2018
I mentioned in my last post that we are doing a pretty good job of beating up our RV. As if to prove my point, the very next day we sprang a leak in our bathroom behind the toilet. The leak was coming from the fresh water line (THANKFULLY) but that made it no less of a nuisance. It was as if the Winnebago (whom our friend Chad dubbed the Watson Winnie) knew that I had written about it and then sprang a leak just for spite. Watson Winnie, I’m sorry. We love you. Please stop being mean to us.
September 8, 2018
RV’s are not hardy vehicles. At least, the insides of an RV are not hardy. In the short time we’ve owned ours, the front a/c has not worked properly, the water tank leaks somewhere but no one can find where, an air vent cover has popped off, the toilet paper holder has come off the […]
June 28, 2018
Our home is a very happy place, but it is not an exaggeration for me to say that with a toddler around, I feel a near-constant undercurrent of tension, wondering when my adorable little darling boy is going to suddenly explode into an enraged banana monster.
April 29, 2018
Have you watched A Series of Unfortunate Events on Netflix? There’s a line in the theme song that says “This show will wreck your evening, your whole life, and your day.” Change “show” to “shot” and you’ve got the theme song to Kiefer’s nightmares.
April 16, 2018
We’re not one of those “we all do this” kind of families. You won’t hear me say “we’re all night owls” or “we all love chocolate candies filled with copious amounts of peanut butter” or “we’re all super into bird-watching.” We can barely even get ourselves in semi-matching clothes for family photos, let alone get ourselves into unanimously matching tastes and preferences for life.
March 6, 2018
Every music class in grade school taught me that songs in a major key sound happy and songs in a minor key sound sad, and yet I still cannot explain how a certain distance between notes tells our minds to tell our hearts to feel happy or sad.
February 21, 2018
But the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and a mere two days into this heroic new schedule we had one of those “spills and stubbed toes” kind of mornings, a “tears and exhaustion” kind of morning, a “poop-fiasco-that-nobody-wants-to-hear-the-details-of” kind of morning.
