Alexa

Elephants Never Forget.

June 30, 2011

My mother got into town about a week ago, and it has been grand. My Uncle Al and Aunt Mo—two of my very favorite people in the world—drove from North Dakota for a visit last weekend, and all was impossibly raucous card playing and brisket making and drink quaffing, and my mother dug out and [...]

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Youth is Wasted on the Young.

June 17, 2011

Simone started Camp on Monday: The program is run by her preschool, and thus many things are familiar: same location, many of the same teachers, the same friends she’s been babbling on about all year (I’ve now learned their proper names, thanks to Simone’s much improved intelligibility—the last to be discerned was little Quinine, whom [...]

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Greth Becomes Her.

May 31, 2011

In Zug, not far from where my mother lives, there is a statue of a woman bent under the weight of a Basket Full of Fool. Here: It’s a statue of Greth Schell—as the legend goes, her husband made a habit of going out of an evening and pickling himself at the local Inn, and [...]

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Operation: Shock and Raw.

May 15, 2011

Probably, as you sip your morning coffee, you gaze glumly out the window, cursing the day ahead and longing for the halcyon days of high school science classes. And so you will no doubt be delighted to learn that you are about to re-experience one vicariously, thanks to yours truly. (I am told the experiment [...]

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No.

May 13, 2011

We didn’t get the apartment. It’s too early to break out my new absinthe, especially as I have a busy day ahead of me and I’m pretty sure absinthe consumption would negatively impact productivity what with the tulips on my legs, so I am trying gamely to console myself with something else I brought back [...]

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Schoolgirl Crush

May 12, 2011

I’m going to put up some more Paris pictures tonight or in the morning (you guys, I have SO MANY PICTURES. And SO MANY STORIES.) but I also wanted to give you a non-Paris Re-entry Update, and I’d like to keep the Alexa Abroad! bits segregated so I can put it in a link-y category [...]

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Statuesque

April 29, 2011

I wonder if people who live in Paris walk around all day saying “Mon Dieu! What a beautiful city! How it fills me with joie de vivre and I don’t know what!” Probably they do. Or maybe their feet hurt too much. (I have the worst case of Cobblestone Foot in recorded history. I am [...]

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Alexa Abroad! The Sequel.

April 25, 2011

For the first leg of my trip, hectic as it was, I had planned to do much of my posting on trains and at cafes and such. Alas, I forgot about the cost of allowing data to roam internationally via my iPhone, and have been proven very much mistaken in my assumption that Europe would [...]

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Things I Have Learned Since My Last Entry

April 6, 2011

1. I underestimate people I was TERRIFIED when I pressed publish on that post. I imagined your tens of eyeballs (not YOUR tens, all on one of you) (two eyeballs per person, you understand) rolling in unison. How, I imagined you wondering, did she manage to go on for 4200 words without reaching any useful [...]

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Only Slightly Shorter Than The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, But at Least You Don’t Have to Memorize It.

March 29, 2011

{Delay in posting brought to you by Seeing My Father for the First Time in Four Years, Under Circumstances Appropriate for Depressing and Overwrought Short Fiction—no, no I’m NOT kidding, and like most every other event of the past three months, this is a matter deserving of a whole entry of its own, and I [...]

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It Didn’t Got Build in One Day, You Know.

March 15, 2011

I honestly thought that today I would finish the post I’ve been working on (understanding, naturally, that by “working on” I mostly mean “thinking about while lying laying reclining in bed at night/loading the dishwasher/driving places.” But it is a tricky one, and that is probably why I chose instead to procrastinate by fiddling with [...]

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0, 1, 2, 3.

February 8, 2011

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I Fed a Man a Peanut…Just to Watch Him Die.

February 1, 2011

One of January’s little amusements was a sudden and unexplained increase in bandwidth that crashed my site several times over the course of the month. God knows it wasn’t from traffic, as it’s a miracle anyone still comes around here anymore—you people have the patience of saints—and according to my hosting company the culprit appears [...]

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UPDATED Parade! (Magazine, not “of Ailments.”)

January 23, 2011

As a kind reader helpfully reminded me in the comments of my newest post, I forgot to mention that I have an essay in today’s PARADE Magazine, which may well be slipped between the folds of your newspaper right at this very moment. Quick, run and check! It looks like this: I am this week’s [...]

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Janus in Fragments.

January 22, 2011

Sunday the 16th After some unbloggable unpleasantness last week, I thought at least I knew what January had in store for me this year, but no! Simone, not content to confine herself to one illness at a time, has both CROUP! and pneumonia. This is not the you-won’t-even-know-I’m-here pneumonia a person just walks around with, [...]

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It’s Always Feast or Famine Around Here, Isn’t It?

January 2, 2011

I hear that Mercury has been Retrograde—or it was, anyway, from December 10th, a few days before I last posted, until last Friday-ish—and that this Retrograde-ness is simply DREADFUL for communication, or technology, or communicating with technology, or whatnot. Can I blame Mercury for my lack of posting even if I don’t believe in astrology? [...]

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If You Squint, It’s Perfect.

December 13, 2010

Saturday, I did not cross one single thing off my To Do List (or should I say LISTS, “Consolidate Lists” being an item on one of them), a state of affairs that usually throws me into a—well, I can only call it a panicked torpor, though I know that sounds entirely nonsensical. Anyhow, the point [...]

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Sonata For Wee Viola.

December 9, 2010

{This post is highly, HIGHLY annoying, and I strongly suggest you read what I wrote about the recent crop of catalog models instead. —Management} If you follow me on Twitter, it will not surprise you that Part Deux of my previous entry is on hold: Scott lost his job. If you are feeling an overwhelming [...]

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It’s Mostly Lint (Part One).

December 7, 2010

It must get tiresome, reading all of those “in my day, we had to blog UPHILL BOTH WAYS” entries. Posts about how blogging has changed aren’t exactly easy to write, though, either—they always seem to leave someone feeling prickly and defensive, to give the impression that you are criticizing others under the pretext of analyzing [...]

Fridtsam.

December 3, 2010

So, here are some links to things! Some of these I have been meaning to post for ages. They weren’t enough to constitute entries on their own, so they loitered in a folder, waiting for their time in the sun. That time is now, when I have decided to allow myself to publish un-posts once [...]

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Kinderwerkstatt!

December 2, 2010

Never was I more tempted to take a hiatus from last month’s hiatus as the day of parent/teacher conferences, when I saw a few choice pictures of Simone taken in her natural habitat. I have been waiting for this day, the day I am finally able to share them with you. They weren’t the first [...]

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Not Worth the Wait.

December 1, 2010

Less than an hour ago, I had decided not to post today after all. I had good reasons, too—plenty of them: 1. It was 11 o’ clock, which is practically midnight. 2. I haven’t finished the redesign. I’m still busy massaging my curly brackets (though the lovely header image created by the lovely ladies at [...]

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Notice.

November 1, 2010

For many, today marks the first day of National Blog Posting Month. I am taking a different direction: NaNoBloPoMo. I am taking a hiatus for the month of November. I’ve never taken a formal hiatus before. Sure, I’ve been informally lazy, but this is different. Oddly enough, this decision is partially the result of realizing [...]

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Airborne.

October 17, 2010

So! I was on the radio. I feel like I’m doing some virtual equivalent of scuffing my toe in the dirt and blushing, here, but I can’t help it: I squirm unbecomingly when asked to discuss my accomplishments or accept a compliment. It’s a squeamishness I ought to have outgrown long ago, and one of [...]

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Interrupting My Busy Pacing Itinerary For an Important Announcement. Or Three. UPDATED!

October 15, 2010

UPDATE, 2:49 PM (CST): So, Now I am told that the times have changed, and my bit will air at 4:50 and again at 6:50, both EST. Again, individual stations do things differently. I believe the whole show is two hours, but some stations seem to play only one, others repeat the whole thing twice, [...]

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Breaking News Update Bulletin! (NOW WITH MORE UPDATES!)

October 13, 2010

UPDATED, WEDNESDAY 3:25 P.M.: So, almost as soon as I posted this, I got a call that the air date has been moved to Friday. Of course this is subject to change as well, so I will update again as necessary. (Also, for those who were concerned: I got a ticket, but was not towed. [...]

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Yes, I’m Bringing My Paper Bag.

October 12, 2010

An hour from now, I’ll be in a studio, taping an interview for All Things Considered. ALL THINGS CONSIDERED! ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. All things considered, I am petrified. I’ve written before about my status as an NPR fangirl, and I suspect that, having heard it almost daily since birth, the Doo DOO Doo doo, doo [...]

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Your Body May, In Fact, Be a Wonderland. This Has Not Been My Experience.

October 4, 2010

September was a bad month. A wicked month. And these last two weeks have been the worst of all. Where have I been, you ask? Why, I’ve been here, being tormented by the human body—both my own body and the bodies of my loved ones. This website is about sharing, and so I feel badly [...]

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Nobody’s Perfect.

September 23, 2010

I have never written a sponsored post before. I get offers, but this is the first one I’ve done. I had to set up a separate page category to satisfy ad regulations, and figure out how to truncate a post so that anyone who is offended by the idea of sponsored posts wouldn’t have their [...]

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Slip-Sliding Away.

September 20, 2010

The Tuesday before this past one, the day after Labor Day, Simone started preschool. I say preschool, but it is more like glorified daycare—now that she is allowed to be around other children I thought a group setting would be better than a nanny, and I do have to work, so off she goes, Monday [...]

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I Miss You, Face Sleepers.

August 31, 2010

My plans for the week got derailed a bit when Simone threw up last Tuesday night, taking her virus airborne and infecting Scott. Why a sick husband should cause more challenges and disruptions than a sick child is a mystery I am not qualified to solve, but there you are. Our household descended into chaos, [...]