A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
Over the last decade, a bunch of states, including three of the four where I have been a resident—my home state of Arkansas as well as Illinois and Massachusetts—have enacted laws requiring public schools to teach students cursive. (The fourth Zac-affiliated state is New York, which has no such requirement.) In the case of Arkansas, […]
My husband, Frank, has a bulky blue cooler he keeps around in case we go on any outings that require cold beverages. Beach days, picnics, that sort of thing. When we lived in New York City I was a strong advocate for getting rid of the cooler because it took up precious closet space that […]
The front of the holiday card my husband, Frank, and I sent out this year features a photo of us in front of some evergreens. The location where the image was captured is just outside of our apartment building. Full disclosure: The boughs over my head were digitally enhanced to appear fuller than they did […]
What do the contents of a person’s wallet reveal about its owner? Let’s take a look inside my own billfold and see what we find. I don’t have any photos or other sentimental keepsakes in my wallet. As far as I recall, I have never felt the need to hold such items on my person […]
I’ve had my current cell phone ever since I had to replace the previous one because I dropped it into the ocean while trying to take a picture of a bear. This happened in British Columbia. I’m going to go ahead and assume bear encounters top the list of reasons cell phones get lost or […]
Turns out I was incorrect a month ago when I wrote that my dog, Lucy, hadn’t yet reached the final stages of her heart disease. She died on Wednesday, July 5, around 8:30am. It so happened that she was scheduled to get her annual leptospirosis vaccination later that day. But in the morning she began […]
When Nordstrom killed off Trunk Club last year, they sent me a gift basket to thank me for being a loyal customer and, presumably, to nudge me toward shifting my business to whatever personal-shopping service the company had devised as a replacement. I had been a member of Trunk Club since 2015, which meant that […]
When I was a kid, my parents put up a big bulletin board on one of the walls in my bedroom. It was probably 5 feet wide and 3 feet tall. Or maybe 6 feet wide and 4 feet tall? The thing was huge. I don’t know what prompted this design choice, but I went […]
Of the historic homes I toured during family vacations as a child (we really knew how to have a good time), I can remember precisely one thing about each site. According to the Monticello website, Thomas Jefferson had two dumbwaiters installed in the dining room for the purpose of bringing up bottles from the wine […]
Not long ago, a travel reporter from the Washington Post contacted me about a story she was working on. The topic was tiny lights in hotel rooms—the annoying little beams emitted from TVs, smoke detectors, alarm clocks, air conditioners, and so on. Many hotel guests find this constellation of artificial twinklers unwelcome at, say, 3am. The reporter […]
Indirect Objects 