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Smart Car, Dumb Driver

“Please sign on the pad,” the rep says. I’m at the Sixt rental car counter at San Francisco International. From here Tizi and I will drive three hours south and east to Mariposa for a family visit.…

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Ecumenical Meatload–from Get Thee to a Bakery

What got my attention was a BuzzFeed post I saw a few days ago.  I would put it in the snarky-remarks-Europeans-make-about-Americans category. Lots of snark. So much you need subcategories.  What irritates Europeans about Americans who travel…

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Mindful, Bodyful–from The Enjoy Agenda

I had ulterior motives. For a few years, whenever I had a blood pressure check, as soon as I felt the cuff tighten, I waited for the look. Perched on the examination bed at the doctor’s office,…

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Please, Be Seated

Car Seats: A Love–Hate Story of Safety, Parenting, and Time It’s not uncommon to get the call, from a friend, a relative, a neighbor in need. “Do you, by any chance, have a car seat we can…

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Pamalot

I need a can of Pam. The thought occurs to me every year on a day like today.  We’ve just had our first snowfall, 2-3 inches of heavy wet heart-attack snow. A few hours from now, our…

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The Perfect Snow Day Recipe: Pasta with Peas

Sometimes the snow is just so beautiful. Today the flakes are big and fat. Not falling. They’re floating. That should be a meteorological term. Let’s go outside this morning and enjoy the snowfloat. The chairs we might…

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A Review of “You Can’t Stay Here”

Sam Hedenberg’s “You Can’t Stay Here” pulls back the curtain on bartender work, and it is hilarious. We commonly think of bartenders as psychologists, shrewd observers of human kind. Hedenberg is all that and more. He muses…

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Gimme the Ball

Why Baseball—and Every Ball Game—Matters That summer, shortly after the French family moved into the house across the street, we decided it would be fun to give Pierre and Yvette a real American experience. We took them…

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Momentous (from Snapshots)

It wasn’t much of a proposal. Really, it wasn’t a proposal at all. It was a consensus decision. Well, yeah, I guess we ought to get married.  It was 1977.  We were driving south on I-75, coming…

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The Unknown Value

Ask a kid, he’ll tell you. I’m no good at that, I’m no good at math, he will say. Or I don’t get grammar, I’m bad at music, at dance, at sports. I don’t understand science, I…

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