• Confessions,  Do I Really Want My Readers To Know This?,  Friends,  Fun in Chicago,  I've Got Mad Skillz

    Just Noh.

    November 19, 2014

    I’m in a mood this afternoon, because I scheduled a workout for 4:30 p.m. and one of my least favorite things to do is drag myself away from whatever I’m doing to go take an afternoon class. I used to do my workouts mostly in the evening or at 5:30 in the morning almost exclusively, so it’s not like I’m new at this, but I’m a creature of habit and changing up my schedule today hurt. I’ve grown quite accustomed to doing my 8:30 a.m. class and then being finished for the day. Actually, the fact that this is bothering me so much really tells me that I probably need…

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  • Best Thing Ever,  Childhood Memories,  My Friends Have Mad Skillz,  Something That Could Change Your Life

    It’s A Very Brady Birthday

    November 6, 2014

    It’s my birthday today, and over the past couple of days I’ve put some thought into what I might want to write about this year…and came up completely empty. This is my eighth birthday blog post, and I feel like I’ve covered all of the angles already. I mean, how much can a person really write about her own birthday? Then a friend, Erica, who I will now call “the Amazingly Wonderful and Hugely Tremendous Erica” whenever her name crosses my lips to infinity and beyond, did something really nice last night and unknowingly gave me the perfect gift. Make that two gifts; she gave me a gift AND the…

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  • Confessions,  Do I Really Want My Readers To Know This?,  Reflections on Parenting,  UGH.

    Empty Nesting Is Awesome, Except When It’s Not.

    October 29, 2014

    I love my life the way it is at this moment. I have one son who graduated from college and supports himself with an actual job, and I have another son who is a college sophomore, living only two hours from home. I work from home. I have the freedom to sleep in if I want, workout for as long as I want, not cook dinner for a whole week if I don’t want to, and most of all, pack a bag and take off to visit friends or accompany Jim on a business trip if I want, with no problem. Many of my friends who still have kids at…

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  • Roxie,  Travels

    Roxie: Keeping Things Unpredictable Since 2004

    September 12, 2014

    Last weekend my sister and I drove down to our parents’ house in Tennessee on a trip that was planned with less than twelve hours’ notice. For various reasons, I decided to bring Roxie along rather than board her as I normally would, and I was not looking forward to that part of the trip in the slightest. Roxie hasn’t been on a road trip since she was a puppy and, at ten and a half years old, she is set in her ways. She barks for the duration of every ride to the vet and every ride to Petsmart, both of which are less than ten minutes from my…

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  • Travels

    A Little Like Stopping To Smell The Flowers

    September 10, 2014

    I’ve written a few times about how I don’t look too hard for souvenirs when I travel, because the photographs I bring home on my camera card or in my phone are the best takeaways, in my opinion. The very best thing about traveling is the potential for experiencing people, places, and things that you can’t find in your own neighborhood. One day while in Costa Rica last spring, we were on a bus and traveling up a mountain to look at a dormant volcano up close. The bus trip seemed to take forever and the weather was terrible. It was a rainy day and visibility grew worse as we…

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  • Friends,  Music

    What I Learned Last Friday Night

    August 13, 2014

    Last Friday night Jim and I, along with Dawn and Scott (our oldest friends, who reside in central Illinois), road-tripped to the First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre in Tinley Park to see Mötley Crüe perform on the Chicago stop of their final tour (or so they say). This post is not about the concert. This post is about what I learned that night. 1. I learned that it is really kind of stupid to drive from our home in the western suburbs down to Tinley Park on a Friday night. Traffic was ridiculous. That includes the traffic on the highway, the concert traffic we were in the first time when we…

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  • My Kid Has Mad Skillz

    Buckle Up!

    August 11, 2014

    My nineteen-year-old son J is very good with money. He has a job during the school year when he’s away at college, and this is the second consecutive summer he’s worked his tail off at his job here in town for the express purpose of making a maximum contribution towards the cost of his tuition. I think it’s all that squirreling away he does with his money that doesn’t make me blink an eye when he tells me he’s spending what I might think is a crazy amount of money on something. He works hard, covers his tuition commitment to us, and is otherwise responsible with his finances (all good…

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  • Confessions,  Proud Moments

    Office Space

    July 8, 2014

    There’s a running joke in this house about Melisa’s office space. I have lots of offices here. Err, I should say “offices”, in quotes. I have a family room “office” (on that couch), a living room “office” (on the other couch), an upstairs “office” (the little rolltop desk in D’s bedroom, which I have actually never used as an office but it sounded good when I mentally took it over a while back), and a basement “office” (which Jim now claims as HIS office, but I use it every now and then). I am in my family room office (on that couch) about 75% of the time I’m working and…

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  • I've Got Mad Skillz

    It’s A Process.

    June 18, 2014

    In my newfound* quest to try and change up my work routine so that I can achieve some work/life balance, I’ve had a really productive week. And by “productive”, I mean “sort of successful according to my newly-created standards”. I didn’t open my laptop all weekend, instead only using my phone or iPad sporadically to hit social media–but not any work (blogging included, and truth be told I’m kicking myself a little for that one right now.). Instead, I did things like: ~nap ~visit with D, who came to see us for lunch on Saturday ~make dinner with Jim (instead of one of us cooking while the other one does…

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  • Childhood Memories,  Confessions,  Do I Really Want My Readers To Know This?,  Music

    Kiss, Cher, and Rock and Roll

    April 16, 2014

    Buckle up for this one. It’s going to be a crazy, zig-zaggy ride. When I heard the news a couple of weeks ago that Kiss was finally going to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I was thrilled, but surprised that they weren’t already in there. Sidenote: You might be surprised to learn that I’m a big fan of Kiss. Surprise! I like their music a lot, I think Gene Simmons is one of the smartest business-minds out there, and shhhh! Guilty pleasure alert: I loved watching the adventures of the Tweed-Simmons family on A&E’s “Gene Simmons’ Family Jewels” (“Scripted Reality” or not, that was good…

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