The city’s outdoor pool closed for the season after this weekend. It was only open from the beginning of June until now, mid-August, which seems like such a short time when I consider how much I paid for the season pass. Sigh. You see, my family used to get a season pass every summer and I and my siblings would drive out as often as possible to find respite from the summer heat. We didn’t have air-conditioning, and my sister’s favorite active recreation is swimming, so we’d go out almost every day as long as the temperature didn’t dip too low and my dad could give us a lift. When I got my license I’d take us out to the pool just about four or five times a week, and even if I didn’t get in (I have a low tolerance for chilliness) my brother and sister would. They’d spend an hour or two chasing each other around in the deep end, or fishing for misplaced pennies at the bottom of the pool, and still would whine just a little when I told them it was time to head home. In short, the pool’s

I actually own a few books that I’ve never read in my life. Amazing, huh? Or maybe just another fact in the life of a voracious reader. It happens. And I’ve even borrowed some that I’ve been meaning to read and haven’t yet. What a thing to do! So these are six books that either I’ve borrowed, from family or the church library, or that I own. All of them are what I’ve been meaning to read, for one reason or another, but haven’t yet gotten around to. Which should I start first and why?

I made banana bread last night. The two bananas left in the bunch I bought most recently were beginning to drip juice. A little got on my stamps, too, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to salvage the stamps. No, I don’t know why I stored bananas and postage stamps in the same bowl. Chalk it up to eccentricity. It’s really easy to make a batch of banana bread, in the tiniest loaf pans I own, and slowly, or not so slowly, eat the dessert-like bread over the succeeding days. Last night’s batch is half gone already, possibly because I added cashews to two of the mini-loaves and got addicted to the banana-nut bread during the movie last night. So I don’t have to worry too much about having leftover banana bread become a science experiment in the refrigerator, even though I make the recipe in the usual amount, instead of halving it or something. Casseroles are another story. The reasons? One, the very mention of casserole conjures up an image of a church potluck with dozens of people and a

First of all, how does one spell laundromat? Is it laundramat instead? My computer puts little red squigglies under both versions so now I’m desperate for an answer. Never mind that the dictionary is on the second shelf of the bookcase that’s about eight feet away. Second of all, the actual blog post. One of the consequences of living on my own is that, instead of sharing one washer with four other people (my immediate family members), I share, say, twenty washers with a thousand other people. OK, maybe not a thousand. But you get the idea. It’s a lot like college, really. Take your laundry, sit somewhere and do “homework” (read: free time reading) while your laundry tosses and turns in its cylindrical prison. Except at college I could walk about thirty steps and arrive at the laundry room door; here, I actually have to take my laundry, set it in the back seat of my car, and drive somewhere. Like a mile and a half of somewheres. The laundromat I use is one the tenant above me recom

You probably had no idea, but last weekend was the Lincoln Highway Buy-Way series of garage sales stretching from PA to who knows where (somewhere out in Indiana no doubt). And it ran right through my little town. I love garage saling to start with. I’m good at finding deals, I think, merely because I’ve been to so many growing up, with my parents. So I rejoice to have so many garage sales and church rummage sales going on for my enjoyment! Except that they all occurred over the same very busy weekend which included a wedding to attend, two and a half hours away. Not that I’m complaining about the wedding at all! But I would rather have had my cake and eaten it too, ya know? So, at the same time that I was snapping pictures of the garage sales for the newspaper and planning the weekend’s wedding voyage, I perused the various cast-off articles for sale and tried to decide what I really needed and what would have been more of a “hey, this is cool and I’m bored” purchase. In the end, I

I’m used to roommates. My sister and I shared a room for years, then I lived with a couple of girls in college. I considered finding a roommate for living on my own after college, too, but it worked out that I didn’t need to. (It would have been very difficult, anyway.) So here I am, happily living in my own apartment without a roommate for the first time in… well I don’t know how long. And then someone decides to move in. A few someones, actually. At least, they started out as only two or three. Now there must be fifteen or twenty. I think the banana peels started it. I love bananas, so I went through my bunch in maybe five days (had to be at least five on the bunch). I thought my kitchen trash can, with its reliable WalMart bag covered by its fancy little foot-lever lid, would be able to keep the banana peels out of sight (and smell) until trash day. I couldn’t smell the bananas, so I was happy. Until I found out someone else could. They took up residence in the trash can, so I o

A quote was mentioned in a comment to a blog post written about the religious views of the man who killed several dozen campers in Oslo, and the quote was attributed to Chesterton. Being the Chesterton fan I am, I looked it up via Google; and not only did it sound like something he’d say, it was something he’d written. It is not enough to say “Christians persecuted; down with Christianity,” any more than it is enough to say, “A Confucian stole my hairbrush; down with Confucianism.” We want to know whether the reason for which the Confucian stole the hairbrush was a reason peculiar to the Confucians or a reason common to many other men. —G.K. Chesterton, “The Eternal Heroism of the Slums” chapter in his book The Blatchford Controversies P.S. This was the blog post , noting that the Christianity that Anders Behring Breivik purportedly espoused was cultural rather than spiritual. If that makes sense.