This story actually began in 1999 when I was working at a local health club. I was friendly with the general manager–well, we all were–and whenever I met him in his office he would open his dorm-sized refrigerator and offer me a can of flavored carbonated water. I hadn’t heard of La Croix before I met him and always politely refused the offer because it just didn’t sound very good to me. He drank it like it was going out of style. I mean, he had a refrigerator in his office for the sole purpose of keeping his La Croix cold. One day, after many days of sticking to my…
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Garage Sales. Don’t Get Me Started.
Garage sales. Sigh. I’m not a fan of attending them, and I’m not a fan of hosting them. When I was a kid, my mom hosted multiple garage sales every year, and I wasn’t enamored with the process at all, to put it lightly. Sure, my sister and I got to be the creative geniuses behind the signs, which took hours thanks to my mom being an evil genius (story here), but we also had to do the work of going through our stuff, helping to price it, and sitting outside watching strangers pick through it all. Of course I completely get that many people LOVE garage sales as a…
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Picture Perfect Memory
Recently I saw a meme floating around Facebook that said something along the lines of “I’m so old, I remember days when I didn’t take one picture”. I laughed, because I am that old, and then I stopped laughing and thought, “Huh, wow.” That meme was a think piece. There really was a time when we didn’t take pictures of everything, every day. When we weren’t all that concerned with remembering each moment. When only professional photographers knew anything about filters. When we–ack!–didn’t even have cell phones. Developing photos taken with traditional cameras, the ones that don’t allow you to talk or text with others or surf the web, is…
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Grief Is a Jerk.
It’s been nine weeks, and depending on when you ask me I’ll tell you either it feels like forever ago or it feels like it was yesterday. Regardless of how it feels, it wasn’t yesterday. Yesterday I was dreading what I had to do today, spending an hour dicing apples into tiny pieces for the charoset I am taking with me to a Passover seder this afternoon. I wasn’t dreading the task itself; I was dreading completing it without the presence of my kitchen companion. I think if dogs could claim to have favorite holidays, Passover would have been high on Roxie’s list because of all the apples. Anytime she…
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Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.
Today I’m participating in an old school Blog Hop, organized by my friend Nancy over at Midlife Mixtape. (Thanks for inviting me, Nancy!) The theme, as you may have guessed by reading my post title, is “Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.” Way (way) back in the summer of 1979, my family was preparing to move away from the Chicago area for the very first time. My dad was hired to manage a Holiday Inn outside of Ft. Worth, Texas. I was very upset about the move, specifically because I was scared to leave the the home I knew and loved and my friends and everything that was…