A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
My husband, Frank, and I got married with virtually no fanfare, forethought, or guests at Chicago City Hall on February 7, 2015. Same-sex matrimony had become legal in Illinois the previous year and we had an afternoon free. Cue the Wedding March. We had already been together for more than 8 years by that point […]
Provided there’s no plague on, my husband, Frank, and I take a Big Trip each year. It’s unlikely to be the only journey we undertake from January through December, but the annual Big Trip does occupy the central position in our travel calendar. The Big Trip tradition began in 2009, when we went to Paris […]
Because I’m a writer, people sometimes assume I’ll like word games. Which makes no sense to me. Do you spend your leisure time human resourcing or whatever it is you do to earn a living? Thanks, but I get plenty of frustration and feelings of inadequacy from words during the day—I don’t need more in […]
Back when we still lived in Chicago, my husband, Frank, came home from a street market one day with a stack of square ceramic coasters bearing ghostly photo collages depicting sites of regional interest. There’s a coaster each for the North Side’s Andersonville area, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Goodman Theatre, Evanston’s Northwestern University (my […]
I was born in August 1979, so all but the first four months of my first decade on earth were spent in the 1980s. Consequently, I have nostalgic feelings for hairspray. The same goes for the Smurfs and anti-Soviet sentiment. I recall two notable encounters with the latter attitude during my prepubescent years. When I […]
I grew up in a home with four women—my mom and three sisters—and they used up toilet paper like they had a vendetta against trees. In fact, we had a family rule that when one of us went to the store for any reason, that person was supposed to pick up a four-pack of Charmin […]
Our coffee maker is too small for the coronavirus pandemic. Like much of the rest of the world’s population, my husband, Frank, and I have been on lockdown for three weeks now, following orders to stay in our apartment as much as possible in order to stop the spread of COVID-19. We only go out […]
I heard once that in order to calculate how much water you should be drinking each day, you take your weight in pounds, then divide the number in half, replace the word “pounds” with “ounces,” and there you are. So, for example, since my weight is about 160 pounds, my daily water intake should be […]
I read something at each of my sisters’ weddings. The eldest, whose name is Nicole though everybody in the family calls her Nee, was the first to go. My text was Shakespeare’s sonnet 116: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds” etc. The gist of the poem, according to the commentary in the […]
Indirect Objects 