Nom de Plume

There is a house across the street in the throes of repossession. Again.
The background is worthy of a soap opera, and has been dribbled in by various neighborhoodly sources. Laurie and her first husband lived there. They had a kid. Then they got divorced. Laurie kept the house,married Kevin, transferring the property into his name […]

Reuters article, reprinted in its entirety.
My favorite line is “The Bush administration rejects Munshi’s views …”
US envoy says Iraq rebuilding plan won’t work
By Sue Pleming
WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) - Kiki Munshi was showcased by the media in September as a seasoned U.S. diplomat who came out of retirement to lead a rebuilding group in Iraq.
Now […]

Merge means that you’re supposed to merge, not that I am supposed to slam on my brakes to let you in while you flip me off.

Life is so unfair. Or rather, what one inherits is unfair. When it comes to skin, I get big pores from the Indian side, and a tendency towards redness from the white side. About a year ago, I got my skin zapped. It really helped and I should have gone in for another treatment, but […]

I hate doing the books. I barely understand how to do the books. And I really, really don’t understand the $3,657.32 discrepancy between my bank account and QuickBooks.
My head hurts.

… and i’b tired, with a stuffed up dose. I think I caught it frob Elizabeth who cabe over on Saturday.

Saturday night, Steve and I went to La Medusa for dinner — a restaurant in Columbia City that we’ve been meaning to try out for a long time. Every time we’ve gone in there on a whim, they’ve laughed when we say, “A reservation? No, we don’t have one.” So I finally made a reservation. […]

For the past few months, Steve has been toiling away at an apartment complex on Mercer Island. The job has gone from bad to worse, for many reasons — and apparently, there are lots of tenants who are as impossible as the owners. Case in point: he thrust a piece of paper in my hand […]

Steve spent most of last week being sick. And of course, being a sharing sort of person, he passed it on to me. I don’t have the full-on flu that he has, complete with sniffles and congestion–but I’m TIRED. Argh.

That’s what this is. I have stacks and stacks to write reviews, great visit with Pammy, lots of e-mails from my insane mother to share, and unfortunately, lots and lots of work to keep me from updating. One day I will return!

Mom left for Iraq last Friday, and we managed to talk for a few minutes before her cell phone cut out. It made me a little teary. Neither one of us is good at the emotional farewells and so on. But she’s there, safe and sound, and I just got this:
A quick note before I […]

My mother, who is going to Iraq tomorrow, has been in training classes for the past week and a half. She’s been busy and so have I; thus, we’ve been playing phone tag. Serious phone tag. The latest? She was just at the shooting range, practicing with an AK47, a rifle, and a shotgun.
She’s in […]

It died a gruesome, grisly death, 23 to 8.
A Mercury News editorial sums it up quite nicely:
Just as lawmakers in Congress are pushing a bill that could increase competition in video and high-speed Internet services, they’re willing to allow phone and cable companies to subvert that competition.
Then again, as CNet says:
AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, […]

There is, of course, nothing quite so tiresome as someone explaining why she hasn’t been posting more regularly — so I won’t bother, except to say that it’s been a crazy week with no end in sight. But spring is really here! We spent Sunday working in the yard; I cleared off the deck, started […]

This is something, by the way, that I tell her on a regular basis and she says, “Well, at least you inherited it legitimately.”
So. My mother is going to Iraq. I’m still not precisely sure what she’s doing, but it has something to do with leading a team out in the field to help […]

The defense budget, that’s where. And check out where the environment and education fall into this. Those two little slivers epitomize the Bush administration to me. It is apparently a worthless exercise to invest in the future.

The Concord Coalition via Chekhov’s Mistress

Does anyone in Seattle know of a good accountant? April is looming …

There is such a thing as too MUCH customer service.
Take, for instance, my car dealership. After I bought the car, I received a phone call, asking me to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 my experience buying a car. Then I got a questionnaire in the mail asking the same thing. I was […]

How does one broach the subject of e-mail forwards with very nice, sweet relatives and acquaintances of a certain age for whom e-mail is the best thing since sliced bread? It’s standard stuff — jokes, pet pictures and those horrible “send this to 20 people or you’ll die a gruesome, painful death” missives. So […]