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Day 24: Reading Rain

For obvious reasons, many us have been thinking about children this week.

Side note: If you missed President Obama’s moving, loving, funny and horribly sad remarks on Sunday evening, you can watch them in full at Gawker.com.

In memory of the beautiful kids who are no longer with us and the beautiful future kids residing in many of my friends’ bellies, here is a list of children’s books I continue to love:

A Chair for My Mother by Vera B. Williams
After a fire destroys their home, Rosa, her mother and her grandmother save all their coins in a jar until they can purchase a big, cozy chair together. Family love trumps all.

Imogene’s Antlers by David Small
Easy-going Imogene wakes up one morning to find she has sprouted antlers. The story is funny and sweet, and illustrates children’s abilities to persevere smilingly, even when their respective adults lose their cool.

Stone Soup by Marcia Brown
It’s an old, enduring, sneaky story about feeding a town with a soup made of stones. Once everyone adds a little “garnish”—a carrot here, a potato there—a stone soup becomes a delicious and nourishing meal. When we all work together, we all eat together.

Mousekin’s Golden House by Edna Miller
It’s not about ghosts, candy or costumes, but there is a Halloween pumpkin. A mouse finds an abandoned jack-o-lantern and makes it into a home for the winter. Whether in a squash or an apartment, home is what you make it.

The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown
Who doesn’t love this book? Clement Hurd’s artwork gorgeously illustrates a story of a mother who will always be there for her bunny, even when he runs.

Ivy Cottage (Biscuit, Buttons & Pickles) by E.J. Taylor
Miss Biscuit, a retired nanny, moves to the countryside with Violet Pickles, an adorable anthropomorphized rag doll who is unhappy about the move. Luckily, Miss Biscuit is a brilliant seamstress and creates Ruby Buttons, a new rag doll friend for Violet. It’s a lovely story about creating your own happiness.

I could go on forever about great children’s books. For more current stories, check out TurtleAndRobot.com. And read this great New York Times opinion article about what kids should be reading these days.

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December 14, 2012

Day 20: Here’s The List

I love a good list. I really do. I make them all the time. Unfortunately, I tend to lose them pretty swiftly after making them (I found one from 2009 in my costume box last week). Since it occurred to me today that my youngest sister is visiting me in one short week, I am making a public list of stuff I need to do before she gets here. I can Google it whenever I forget what it says.

For usability purposes, I wrote it to myself, as myself. That way, it’s like a good pep talk (go get ’em, tiger!).

To Do

1. Hide her presents. You love telling people what you got them before they open their gifts, but it’s really only fun if they haven’t already seen the goods.

2. Fix the constantly running toilet. You’re crafty and you have two hands—you can adjust the chain or get a new plugger thingy. Better yet, you can use your dexterity to call the landlord.

3. Give Brian Boitano some fresh water. Seriously, he’s living in a marble slum right now and it’s embarrassing.

4. Ask her if she drinks dairy milk or soy milk. And then buy more soy milk.

5. For goodness sake, throw away that old grape. Your science experiment turned it into a raisin and now it’s just an old raisin.

6. Either put the vacuum back in the closet or use it. It’s been sitting in the kitchen since Thanksgiving and it’s starting to look like a sculpture.

7. Come up with a list of medical mysteries she can solve while she’s visiting. She’s a med student. She knows everything.

8. Come up with a list of things you know more about than she does so you can demonstrate that you’ll always be older and wiser.

9. Enlist your middle sister for help with number 8.

10. Optional: Finish making the college graduation gift you promised to give her two and a half years ago when she graduated. And then hide it.

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December 11, 2012

Day 17: Good Neighbor

Here are eight ways to to be a good neighbor in a Minnesota winter:

1. If you’re outside walking and someone near you slips and falls, don’t ask them why they’re wearing Uggs. Just help them up, acknowledge the slippery surface and assure them that there were no other witnesses. If you’re really feeling generous, go ahead and take a fall yourself. As long as neither of you breaks any bones, you might make a new snow friend.

2. Try to convince the tow truck driver that moving your neighbors’ snow-zone-parked cars to the other side of the street is a more efficient use of time than towing them away. It’s not, and you’ll be told to scram. But at least you tried.

3. Sitting inside your warm apartment, drinking tea and watching the college student across the street try to spin her Ford Fiesta out of a snow bank is only fun for so long. Put your coat on, get out there and give her car a good shove before she yells, “Mother f**ker!” one more time.

4. If you’re stuck in the snow wishing you’d banked some better Karma by pushing the Ford Fiesta out sooner (and no, Karma doesn’t work that way), be patient and try not to swear too much.

5. When trying to befriend the mail carrier during a blizzard (which, if you’re a freelancer, you should know not to do by now), try not to say things like, “Wow, it must be awful to be out there all day!” It is. And since you’re inside listening to holiday music in your pajamas, your take on the situation isn’t really appreciated.

6. When someone helps you detach your vehicle from clingy snow, press the gas, roll down the window, yell, “THANKS!” and keep moving. Whatever you do, do not stop the car. The helper would rather see you free as a bird and rolling down the street than be thanked by you face-to-face, stuck five feet from your original location.

7. Get a shovel and offer to use it.

8. If your landlord plows your parking lot three times in 24 hours, thank him profusely and resist the urge to be irritated by the number of times you’ve had to move your car. You’ll appreciate being able to get in and out of your spot for the next six months.

4 Comments

December 6, 2012

Day 12: Good Advice

I’ve been freelancing for a little less than two weeks and I’ve already learned some very good lessons.

If you freelance or work from home, here is a list of suggestions for you:

1. Don’t wait until you think you might be leaving your office/apartment/dwelling to brush your teeth. The reality is that you might not leave at all, so you’ll end up brushing your teeth twice at 11 p.m. just to meet your daily quota. You most likely don’t have dental insurance, so this is an important point.

2. Waking up and heading straight to the computer is a bad idea. Wake up and take a moment. Grab a glass of water. Change into your yoga pants. Brush your teeth.

3. Eat something. Anything. Four cups of tea into the day, you might not feel hungry, but your delirious and semi-angry emails to people you don’t know will say otherwise.

4. Take advantage of the flexible schedule. Now that you can work at night instead of in the morning, don’t blow off the morning dance/yoga/insert-your-own-passion-here class you always used to miss. Get your butt out of bed, brush your teeth and go!

5. Don’t ever turn down a coffee or beer date. If someone wants to hang out with you, immediately say, “Yes. WHEN?” Your daily interaction with Brian Boitano will not be enough to satisfy your very basic need to be around others.

6. Don’t depend on your mail carrier to hang out and talk to you.

7. Before you spend 30 minutes blowing up your fit ball so you can work and develop killer alignment at the same time, make sure it’s the right height for your desk. If not, you will get really excited only to sit down and find your keyboard at eye-level.

8. Make yourself some reasonable short-term goals and then chill out. Not sure what you’ll be doing a month from now? It’s okay. Right now, you’re probably just hungry.

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November 30, 2012

Day 6: Landlord Learning

I have a great landlord. I really do. “D” keeps the common areas clean, responds quickly in emergencies and painted my walls taupe for me before I moved in. Taupe!

Here are some things I have learned from him:

Bedbugs are bad. (Note: I do not have bedbugs.) D’s dad is a bedbug exterminator. As a result, he knows everything there is to know about bedbugs. D made me promise that whenever I return from an excursion (to a friend’s apartment, my parents’ house, New York—especially New York, etc.), I will not bring my bags inside. I will transfer my laundry into plastic bags in the car and bring the potentially damaged goods straight to the laundry room. Then, I will disinfect my luggage in the parking lot or throw it in the dumpster.

Candles are bad. Candles don’t necessarily start fires, but they do get soot all over the walls. I haven’t experienced candle soot first-hand, but I don’t doubt it exists. I guess potentially sooty walls are reason enough to put a no-candle clause in the rental agreement.

Windows must be closed in order to work properly in the winter. I live in a 100-year-old, beautiful, quirky, poorly insulated building near downtown. Last year, I called D with a plea for heat after we experienced a series of days in the 30s. Before agreeing to turn on the heat, D let me know that the windows needed to be closed (I agreed); that the 60-year-old caretaker next door was perfectly comfortable with the temperature in her building, and she’s old; and that the temperature is always a few degrees warmer in the city than the suburbs, so I shouldn’t place too much emphasis on the weather report.

Sometimes neighbors light things on fire. Like dumpsters. Once a dumpster fire has occurred, D will no longer allow receptacles to sit underneath dry, wood-framed windows.

Scented plug-ins are good. Wrong. They’re awful. Every morning, I unplug the purple liquid thingy stuck in the hallway outlet near my door. Every evening, that darn thing has jumped right back in. I will plug my nose and play my part in this vicious scented cycle until I die.