3 Ring Binder

We've owned our car for two years and just found out that it has an Automatic Sound Levelizer.  Apparently the adults who drive the car suffer from an acute lack of curiosity that the newly-promoted-from-back-seat-to-front-seat child does not.  That’s kind of sad, really, but the discovery has added a bit of auditory thrill to our acceleration/deceleration cycles.  Okay, maybe that's kind of sad, too.  In other news, our car also has intermittent windshield wipers and automatic windows, both of which we recognized right away. 

We did it! Yes, that's right, we . For my third adventure with eating The Whole 30  way, my husband (willingly) and our daughter (kicking and screaming) joined me! What a thrill (or pain-in-the-ass depending on who it is I'm dealing with) it was to have them both on board with the only eating plan designed to jump start good eating habits for life by eliminating processed sugar, grains, vegetable oils, and dairy (my husband's only hold-over from the last time I did it).  Results - we survived!  Not only that, we made some very important discoveries along the way.  Here are mine: My daughter's stamina for complaining knows no bounds.  Eating well will not cause an underweight person to lose weight. Well Fed has inspired me to move from mere eater to cook! (No small feat.) Our kitchen is too small. We will never buy mayonnaise again! (We make our own a la Well Fed.) Corn, sugar, and soy derivatives are in almost everything!  You can go to a party,...

Cutting down a live evergreen, installing it in your house into a heavy duty vase, then embellishing it with little trinkets and lights is just plain weird. Yet, every year we look forward to the piney smell, the sparkling lights, revisiting our favorite ornaments, adding new ornaments, and making little stories up about the goings-on between the little figurines hanging there (if not to the constant watering and needle clean-up). In this one minute look at our efforts and effects, you can see a few of our plastic couples kissing, actual photographs of family, the Christmas puppies looking frightened of the Michael Vick NFL series figurine, and the macabre world of Tim Burton spilling over onto the now headless Felicity of American Girl fame. Except for a few NYC ornaments, our places visited collection seem to be missing among the boxes in the holiday decorating production staging area (aka: the living/dining room). Then there are the casualties. Two years ago, BOOM! Our lovely ...

Gearing up for my annual Girls Weekend, I was at the store today to stock up on a few necessary grocery items. (Okay. Let's face it - it was for garnishes for my fantabulous Girls Weekend drinks.) Seeing no standard limes, I picked up a bag of ugly looking tiny Key limes and inspected them. Suddenly, up from my hands wafted this most wondrous smell!  It was them! They had the most splendidly sweet and citrusy subtle scent of a sultry summer soirée.  I wanted to bathe in them! (It's happened often enough that you could say this is my standard reaction when I really like the smell of something.) Then I spied the big, uniformly green, regular limes for much less in the next aisle.  I wondered aloud if I should put back the more expensive bag of little discolored ones in favor of the pretty standard limes. They were going to be for decorative touches after all. My daughter chimed in and said, "But did you smell these limes?" holding up the bag of Key limes. She k...

This isn't a story about my husband in social situations; this is about our real fish out of water. Early Friday evening, I went to check my email at my desk in the living room.  My desk is in a little dark corner behind the free-standing bookcase. You really can’t see me unless you know I'm there.  I like it that way. Anyway, this isn’t about me, but the location of my desk behind the bookcase, the location of the betta tank on the bookcase, and flippy/floppy sounds that pierce the darkest corners of the night. So, I'm sitting there waiting for my email to download and I hear something rustling over near the stairs (my desk is in the corner and butts up against the landing on the dog-leg staircase). I figure it's a bug that somehow got in the backdoor and is now looking for a way out. I hear it again. I think, why is the bug in this darkest corner of the living room when bugs usually seek light? It must be a moth. I read my email. I hear it again. This time, it's...

She makes muscle-ups look quite balletic.

Today. Three weeks later.

It’s not as if we came from the BIG city, but moving from an (in)famous city to a little town brought its share of culture shock.  Where was the Home Depot, the WalMart, the hospital? Sure, I can get to those staples of civilization if I need them, but they are all now just a little further away than may warrant the trip. With the exception of banks and gas stations – of which our little town has an inordinate proliferation – I needed to satisfy my consumerist urges with a paltry few mom & pop stores with their limited selection and high prices. I’ve gotten used to this inconvenience over the years. Then came last Saturday. Starting out as any typical Saturday, we made our early morning trip to the dump [n.b. Curbside trash pick-up is one more of the shocking shortcomings of small town life to which I have not only grown accustomed but begun to embrace. While you must make the trip to the dump, you can do so three times a week and not have to accumulate particularly smelly th...

Wallet, check. Phone, check. Prescription sunglasses, check. Camera, what? It doesn't fit! Why? All the rest of this stuff was hiding in my purse, taking up valuable space. In my defense, I have used everything in my "Emergency supplies:" list within the last month and just added the Eames business card holder (I love it so). It's the dozen tubes of lip stuff that I don't use which is simply out of control. I mean, how many Shades of Nude do I need to buy before I realize that I'm already packing nude lips! Geesh. While I don't have Vicious Trollop , I think the names of the lipstick/lipstain colors are why I buy them. Nude Brat Lust Beloved Whisper Pink (that one's a mystery) Nearly There Earthly Ore Champagne on Ice In the Red Fabulous Fig (Or  Shades of Kamala , I like to call it.) And those are just the ones I had stashed in my purse!

You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose. An old friend of mine used to say that and laugh hysterically afterward. Sure, it’s a goofy expression, but it has a point.   We have the ability to make important choices for ourselves. We can choose our friends based on a variety of reasons, we can choose how best to live our own lives, but we really can’t choose how others should live their lives.   In friendships, if conflicting values far outweigh the shared ones, we can choose to end the friendship or, if no clean break is necessary, simply let it fade away. With family, it’s different. The same people keep coming around again making it nearly impossible to let it fade away, and a complete break with one person in a wider family is difficult to establish.   I was reminded of this problem recently. Within forty-eight hours I was an incidental party to two family rifts in two unrelated families.   While I’m one of the...

Like most parents, the good ones anyway, I take pride in my children’s burgeoning physical independence. First steps, last diaper, beginning of school, end of having to wipe them after they use the toilet (which—if no one has told you yet, let me—comes surprisingly much, much later than the last diaper), are all part of the independence process.   Then one day you realize that not only do you not have to make sure they bathe themselves correctly, that frankly, they just want you out of the whole personal hygiene arena.   Instead of bittersweet, I found this realization liberating! But let’s face it, no matter how much I want to do my I’m free! I’m free! mommy-dance, the reality of water, soap, hard surfaces, sharp corners, and small electronic appliances all mingling in perilously close proximity to one another makes using the bathroom facilities fraught with hidden dangers to the developing child.   So I still listen. I listen for the uninterrupted sound that water s...

At the recommendation of my husband, who will listen to virtually anything he can get his hands on in the library for his commute to work, I am listening to the audio book written and read by Mireille Guiliano.   [If you listened to WCRB, the classical music Boston radio station, before it became “listener supported,” you would probably recognize her voice from the popular Veuve Clicquot commercials.] Ms. Guilliano was the spokeswoman and CEO of the French Champagne House, Veuve Clicquot. Her book, French Women Don’t Get Fat , is simply a series of ways she enjoys her food, drink, and life and she imparts the lee-tul tricks she has learned so she can eat anything she wants and not get fat.   While her common sense approach to mindful eating is rather run-of-the-mill, her enthusiasm for celebrating life everyday is infectious; I’m actually really enjoying her guilt-free gastronomique ravings as well as listening to her silly accent (Monty Python reference – not that Fre...

This is not that kind of tea party. Since we couldn’t make it to Washington, D.C. this weekend, I’ve decided to host a mini virtual Tea Party protest right here on 3 Ring Binder. You regular readers (Hi, Bob!) may recall that I was particularly reticent to join what I was certain was a worthy cause because of the slate of mixed messages – some of which I found plain wrong – supported by the various protestors. I am not a Republican, I am not a shill for any special interest group, I am not against the American government. I support those who are rallying to protest the burgeoning governmental programs proposed under guise of promoting the common welfare at the expense of individual rights. I support the very principles on which this country was built. To start this party, I offer you some quick videos regarding the principles underlying these tea party protests. Here is Dr. John Lewis giving his tea party speech in Boston on the Fourth of July this year. Dr. Lewis gets right to the h...

Since I came from a country guilty of the worst tyranny on earth, I am particularly able to appreciate the meaning, the greatness and supreme value of that which you are defending. So, in my own name, and in the name of many people who think as I do, I want to say, to all the men of West Point, past, present, and future: Thank you. Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, 1974 THANKS TED (next screen) THE PEOPLE OF MASS Massachusetts DOT, Electronic Highway Sign, Sunday, August 30, 2009 In the first thank-you, I would resolutely include myself among those who are grateful. In the second, I have been not only included without my consent, but also made to pay the bill for the public display.

This article in today’s New York Times brings up an interesting point. It’s not that “Consumers have a right to know when they’re being pitched a product,” or even that technology is changing too fast “for consumers and regulators to keep up” – both of which are insidious assaults on the rationality of men and attempted justification for an overreaching government – it’s that when a federal bureaucracy seeks to make a change to its scope, it advertises, or notifies the public through one particular document: the Federal Register. What is the Federal Register you ask? From the Government Printing Office : Published by the Office of the Federal Register , National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Federal Register is the official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents . It is updated daily by 6 a.m. and is published Monday through Friday, except Federal hol...

I took Anatomy and Physiology in high school. I successfully graduated from college and graduate school which included some biology classes. I enjoy great literature. I have never thought of myself as stupid, but as sure as I'm sitting here typing this admission, last night I was ready to argue that women had one more set of ribs than men! Was this a hole in my education? Was I home sick from school that day? Did I learn the truth and then supplant it over time with the more deeply rooted biblical stories from my youth? Why hasn't this come up since then? These are just some of the questions that have been racking my brain since last night. The number of ribs was noted by the Flemish anatomist Vesalius in his key work of anatomy De humani corporis fabrica in 1543 , setting off a wave of controversy, as it was traditionally assumed from the Biblical story of Adam and Eve that men's ribs would number one fewer than women's. [1] A small portion of people have one ext...

Monday, on the way to driving my fifteen year-old daughter to dance class, I had the radio tuned to NPR. My daughter hates it when I listen to NPR and usually makes several consecutive attempts to force me to listen to her more upbeat thumping pop jams. But during that drive she just sat passively in the passenger’s seat in what I determined to be a moment of typical teenage sullenness. Then All Things Considered came on with a two minute report about the increase in the price of the first class stamp to 44 cents. I thought the little fluff report on the frustration of trying to get make-up postage was mildly humorous until I heard this: “Many people who bypass stamps altogether – pay their bills online and correspond by e-mail – know that they are in part to blame for today’s price increase...” “What?” scoffed my daughter incredulously before I could even manage a raised eyebrow let alone a full eye roll. “How does that work?” At that point, I’m sure I acknowledged her assessment ...

I am reading this little book entitled The Supremes’ Greatest Hits . My sudden interest in it may be due to my recent viewing of “Dream Girls”, or because like many books I own, its smooth spine mocked me from its place of prominence at my bedside for more than a year, and I had had enough of it. Whatever the case, the spine is now irreparably stretched out and I’m hooked! Michael Trachtman, author of the book subtitled The 34 Supreme Court Cases that Most Directly Affect Your Life , is a practicing attorney who claims that he has “spent thousands of hours learning how not to write like a lawyer.” I believe it because I can understand him! I recommend the book to anyone who lacks his J.D. but is interested in the history of liberty and the impact of Supreme Court decisions in this country. The decision of the title case I’d like to present here was issued in 1937. Trachtman subtitled it, What Gives Congress the Right to Regulate Private Businesses? I thought it might be of particular ...

My decluttering efforts sent shockwaves not only through the house, parts of which I hadn’t seen in quite a while – namely, the floors, which suddenly screamed out “HELP ME” – but also in my appreciation for the art of homemaking with style . It was only natural that I expand the scope of my housekeeping to include floor maintenance. The central vacuuming system that came with our house, in addition to sounding like a 747 which would soon land in our yard, never worked quite well on the carpeted floors. Our upright vacuum was too big and clunky to clean the carpeted stairs, and a mass of hair (let’s be fair to the dog – it was mostly the long human hair that screwed things up) constantly caused the driving belt to slip which created tremendous friction and eventually caused a nice burnt rubber smell to permeate the house each and every time we vacuumed. Yes, these are some of the better excuses reasons my floors are never quite as clean as they should be. Now, those reasons no longer ...