Rat Bastard

I remember after giving birth to a baby without drugs that the phrase, Hurts like a mother, made… Absolutely. Perfect.  Sense. Lately I’ve found myself thinking the same thing about Rat Bastard… It’s been several weeks since I opened the hood of my car and found the great rodent residence.  And I’ve…

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Enough

It was my half birthday, April 20th.  The day of Columbine. The images of high school kids running in lines with their hands on their heads are forever etched into my memory.  That same year, one of my classmates told me he’d written a play and that one of the…

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Minecraft Muckfest

I’ll never forget the night Nate was born.  Yes, there was the part where he was born so fast James was still wearing his backpack… but I’m thinking more about how he was supposed to be a February baby.  He was perfectly comfortable and five days late and as the…

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Toe to Toe

Let’s just say that when it comes to pop culture, I’m warming the bench. You know that game Celebrity?  Yeah, me neither. Probably the result of my woodland childhood and five staticky TV channels.  (3, 8, 11, 35 and 46, for the record.)  But no matter how wide-eyed and clueless I…

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Pyeongchang

It’s the MOST wonderful tiiiiiiime… of every two years. The Olympics.  I love the little flags.  The suspense.  The heartbreak.  The triumph.  The wipeouts.  I love the columns of numbers and the standings and the milliseconds.  I’d forgotten how much I love slopestyle and halfpipe and snowboarding motorcross.  I love the…

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Cache

Jaimie, please tell me you don’t have any more childhood rodent stories.  Oh, but I do.  And I don’t yet have to dip into my cache of James’ wild college mouse days.  One of my all-time faves… So this one time, living in BFE, my cat had her litter of…

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Rats

Some of my earliest memories involve waging war against the wild.  My first rodent recollection involved a little something scurrying out from under the kitchen trash compactor and my dad’s swift, permanent stomp.  He used to get in big trouble for using my mom’s yellow dishwashing gloves to carry questionable small…

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Slug Bug

Growing-up in Santa Cruz meant I was indoctrinated early into the competitive thrill of one of my favorite care ride boredom busters: Punch Buggy.  This is the game where you see a Volkswagon bug, yell out the color and the associated phrase, and then gleefully sock your fellow passengers.  Plus you…

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Genius

In mid-December, we enjoyed a wonderful weekend visit from our dear, dear friends, Andrea and Andreas.  Yes, we mostly like them because their names match way worse than ours. I’m kidding.  Andrea was my very first work mentor, way, way back when Ebay was the darling of the dot com…

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Life Skills

Nate is six-going-on-seven and let’s just say, he pretty much floats through life.  Maybe it’s a youngest kid thing? He’s never entirely sure where he is in time and space.  Most mornings he asks, “Is it a school day?”  He still references things that happened months or years in the…

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