by Carolyn Bickford
In the past few years, Comic-Con has become too much for me to deal with. Each year, it’s gotten bigger and flashier, and since San Diego built a sports stadium downtown, almost impossibly crowded. I’m nostalgic now for the days…
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As they’ll tell you themselves, Europeans are better at foreign policy, cuisine, and fashion than troglodytic Americans. In order to help you, my readers, towards the path of becoming as suave and sophisticated as our betters on The Continent, I…
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We’re not football fans in any sense, but Peter and I have a longstanding tradition about the Superbowl. Each of us has to pick a team to root for, and the person with the losing team has to make or…
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We love parties, and we especially love parties we don’t have to host. So when the effervescent Candace invited us to the birthday party she was throwing for her husband George, we were delighted to accept. It had people from…
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Every so often when I have the time, the weather is right, and I don’t have to haul anything too big to fit in my backpack, I’ll ride my bike instead of driving. As you might guess from my criteria above, I don’t do it very often. And Kelly weighs 35 pounds, so after 4 or 5 (flat) miles, my legs are quaking. At most, the choice to take a bike instead of a car saves me 50 cents in gasoline.
But I do feel very proud of myself for biking instead of driving.
Shiaw-Ling likes to use Leet, a curious way of writing which requires you to replace Latin alphabetical characters with the non-alphabetical characters whenever possible. A typical example sentence looks like this: 7|-|3 [,]|_|1(|< |3|20//|| |=0>< ]|_|//|?5 0/3|2 7|-|3 |_42`/ [)09….
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California state’s fourth grade history curriculum focuses considerably on California’s Spanish missions. Personally, I think it’s a terrific tool for learning early California history, since the story of the missions incorporates native American studies, European colonization, America’s independence from Europe…
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But if I only alude to the Montessori Method’s failings, even in passing, I discover that nothing will get a Montessori parent shrieking faster and louder than evidence that their expensive private school may be shortchanging their child’s educational potential. It really is like a cult against which nothing negative may ever be said.
The weekend before last, I opened up my RAZR phone and discovered the screen was broken. I was devastated, especially since we don’t have a landline at home we can rely on. I could still use the phone to make…
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A few seasons ago, Peter and I enjoyed the TV show Joan of Arcadia. In it, an apathetic 16-year-old girl suddenly has God talking to her in the form of random people she encounters. When she follows their cryptic instructions,…
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