Jeanenne is my assistant. Of sorts. It was unclear what her job was when I hired her. She is sort of the nanny, but I don't really need a nanny. I am with the kids almost 100% of the day. You might wonder how I can do that and still have a job. The answer …

I have never been a fan of vacations. Why would I need a vacation from my life if I like my life?
Also, I’m a fanatic about routine. After years of obsessive research about what makes people happy, I have determined that self-discipline is the key to happiness. And self-discipline is really difficult, but not in …

You are probably wondering if I think about Melissa having an affair with the Farmer.
I do. I think about it all the time.
As a preventive measure I tell the farmer that if he cheats on me, I'll stay with him. Forever. I'll never leave him. He'll be stuck on the farm with me, in misery. …

Our cat has been peeing on everything. He especially likes the our bed sheets and my younger son's shirts.
Finally we took the cat to the vet and it turns out he had crystals in his bladder. I'm not going into the chemistry lesson of acid and base and crystals. Mostly because I couldn't follow the …

You hear all this talk aobut how you have to march to your own drummer, think out of the box, blah blah. The truth is, you can't change anything until you know all the rules.
Advice admonishing you to break rules is so shallow. How can you break rules without learning them first? People who understand …

My friend Melissa is here for two weeks. She is one of those Gen-Y jet-set types. But she flew here, to Wisconsin, from Hong Kong, where she just quit her job in finance to become a nanny in Italy.
I was going to tell you that I love her because she is taking amazing photos with …

We took a trip to NYC because I was worried that we are were not being exposed to enough visually stimulating inputs. I want the kids to see new things, do new things, and I wanted to see the Barney’s Christmas windows. The theme was foodies. I was stressed that I was not up on …

I smashed a lamp over my head. There was blood everywhere. And glass. And I took a picture.

I think my life is getting better because it used to be that I wrote everything. In order to cope. Now I can take pictures. So I have two coping mechanisms.
The best way to judge someone is not …

Book snobbery takes many forms in my life. For example, when I worked in bookstores, thinking my life was over because all my friends were lawyers, I spent a lot of time mumbling “Philistines!” as I reshelved A Hundred Years of Solitude under G instead of M.
But the truth is that if you reshelve a …

Recently, I covered my hallway in wallpaper I bought online (via Wallpaper Weekly). Everyone I showed the wallpaper to said the it would be too busy a pattern. But I loved it. So I bought it anyway.

There are a lot of problems with my hallway now — most notably, I used Elmer’s glue instead of …

Remember the donkey in the last post? Well, here's the story of the donkey. The farmer bought it, but he doesn't know very much about donkeys, except “Horses need to be ridden,” he said. About ten thousand times.
The donkey is not trained. And we don't have any riding gear for the donkey, so I rode …

We drove to Iowa City yesterday, to have Rosh Hashanah with my family. I took the kids out of school and told their teachers it's the Jewish New Year so the kids will miss school. I said it in front of the kids so I can teach them that we take off a day for …