A couple of days ago, my garbage disposal stopped working. This is not the first time that this disposal stopped spinning suddenly. When you have 40+ year old appliances, you come to expect outages now and then. In fact, one of the perks of my apartment building is that there’s an entire […]

I have spent large chunks of my day reading letters that my mom wrote to my grandmother. They mostly date from the early years of my parents’ marriage, but some go as far back as late fifties. Those are primarily requests for clothes, pistachio nuts and woolen pajamas that my mom wrote from […]

Last Friday night I went to Tria with my friend Georgia, to help her spend a gift certificate that her boyfriend had given her. We had a couple of glasses of amazing wine, shared a salad and panini and talked for several hours straight. It was quite lovely.
The salad was baby arugula, beets, […]

Yesterday morning, just before 11 am, I found myself racing through Reading Terminal Market, looking for the stairs that would take me up to the administrative offices. As I walked, I pulled my gloves off and folded my umbrella, trying to get myself presentable for the meeting I was about to have. The […]

I have always been a sucker for a picnic, packed neatly into a basket, with sliverware neatly slotted into elastic holders attached to the lid, cloth napkins tucked carefully around the cheese and sausage.  Not that I’ve really ever had any picnics like that, but still.  When I was a kid, I so romanticized the […]

The first power tool I ever bought was a little Black and Decker cordless screwdriver. I bought it my sophomore year of college to put together my bookshelf. My primary Christmas request that year had been for a large book case that “collapsed into a pile of boards” and my dad, with the […]

Whenever I come to Portland, I make sure that my stay includes a Monday. This is because when my mom turned 55 three years ago, the only good thing (by her own admission) about becoming a senior citizen, was the 40% discount it entitled her to at Value Village on Mondays.
One summer, years ago, […]

There is a thrift store, just down Sandy Blvd. from my parents’ house, called the Teen Challenge. It is a international program to help young adults deal with issues of substance abuse. A good cause, but not why we go there.
There are occasionally phenomenal deals to be had at Teen Challenge, because often […]

I think I have a problem.
I have too many books.
I have no more shelf space left and yet, in the last two days, I’ve purchased 20 books (at 6 for a $1 at two of my favorite thriftstores).
Having all of these unread books doesn’t stop me from requesting more from the library or borrowing them […]