Who’d have thought I work in a dangerous job? Well, I do, according to the news that’s resurfaced lately, that people who sit for prolonged
periods of time each day are at a greater risk for heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer, arthritis—okay, basically, an earlier death than those who don’t. Apparently I missed all the stories
about it last year, but caught one a few days ago when it
flashed across my homepage (and new research about children and sitting followed a few days later). Yeah, we all know that being a couch potato (or desk potato) equals fat, and we’ve also been told that getting more
exercise can make that fat go away, so what will this “news” tell us that we don’t already know? Shouldn’t I have …
Month: April 2011
The Two-And-A-Half Month Bucket List
While not yet officially in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the term “bucket list” is something most people now know and use thanks to the 2008
movie of the same name, meaning “a list of things you want to do before you ‘kick the bucket’, i.e. die”. Entrepreneurs have happily taken that term and capitalized upon it– amazon.com
currently offers 16 different “bucket list books” including everything from the Sex Bucket List to the Christian Bucket List to the Baseball Fan’s Bucket List; the website
reaperlist.com gives people a place to store their lists, check them off and “discover others who
will see your list and hold you accountable to it”. There are even Android and iPhone bucket list apps…People now also use the term to simply mean things they want
to do before a certain deadline, i.e. they may have a “college bucket list” …
Double Feature Creature Show
My family may live in a suburban neighborhood, with brick houses that look eerily alike, a superhighway nearby and a
Starbucks at every major intersection, but it’s often more like Wild Kingdom around here, especially at night. Medium-sized turtles and small frogs sitting motionless on
the sidewalk, probably pondering how to find their way back to the nearby creek…possums ambling across the alley, trying to get out of the glare of headlights…coyotes preying on neighborhood
cats and howling right outside my home office window (can you say, Makes the Hair Stand Up On the Back Of Your Neck Like Nothing Ever Did Before?) Sometimes we even get
thrills and chills during the day, like the time a gorgeous red-winged hawk walked around my neighbor’s front yard for 20 minutes, or the time Luke cornered a black garden snake in the living
…
A Prom Where Everything’s Legal (well, almost everything…)
I don’t know exactly when/where I came up with the idea. Maybe it started in the shower. I think it really took hold
while driving in my minivan a few years ago, listening to an all-70s radio station, high on coffee so my brain was firing pretty good… and suddenly it hit me—wouldn’t it be a great fundraiser for
a school PTA to host a dance just for parents? Not a party, not a dinner, but a dance. I mean, think about it—I’m always hearing moms complaining that there’s nowhere to go out and go dancing
anymore. You either have to be into country music; or hanging out with 20-somethings at clubs with weird, one-word names like “Liquid”, listening to a professional DJ spin something called “House”
(no thanks); or opt for a smoky bar with a local band that needs to turn down their amps (and spend more time practicing); or attend a …
Whose pep rally is it, anyway?
Excuse me for wondering, but weren’t high school pep rallies originally designed for the students and staff of a school
to “rally” behind their sports teams and get them fired up to win? Later they were expanded to include pep rallies for everything from final exams to “just say no to drugs”—but, back in the
day, I don’t ever remember the audience expanding to include parents. I mean, why would kids want their parents at school, anyway? Don’t parents have a lot of other things to do during the
day? Around here, apparently not. Because as soon as my teen became a sophomore and a full-fledged member of the high school drill team, I discovered that not only did parents attend pep rallies,
there was a whole section of the gym reserved just for them. And it wasn’t just a bunch of stay-at-home moms filling the stands. Working moms, too. And dads– …