Do the Yak

I'm so inspired by the fact that someone I've never even met posted a comment on my last entry that I'm going to have top pursue this rich topic further. I refer, of course, to "water closets," and no I will not be sharing any more personal adventures therewith, but seriously, indoor plumbing is something we have to deal with soon in earnest, picking out fixtures and whatnot for the new house. So work with me here. In the interest of fairness, we should briefly look at sinks, which aren't nearly as interesting as toilets except for the occasional unintentionally amusing ones. In a fancy plumbing store a few years back, a salesperson showed us one like this , and before I knew it, I had blurted out, "It looks just like a tampon!" Well, it DID. She couldn't HANDLE the truth, is all. As we can imagine, the call of nature was something to be dreaded in the days before the invention of the toilet. You had your Roman group privies without stall walls

Toilets and I, we have issues. Not that I don't like using them -- I was only kidding about outhouses, really -- but sometimes they plot against me, and now they're after my daughter as well. Last weekend we went to some people's house for brunch. I'd met them briefly once or twice -- Ben knew them from elsewhere and they were super nice. Which is why it was a tad embarrassing to report to the man of the house that my four-year-old daughter had managed to clog their toilet. Yes, folks, she has talent, as we have documented . It gets worse; this family does not own a plumber's helper. I'm not even going to discuss what I did to try (unsuccessfully) to solve the problem. I offered to go back to our house and fetch one, but the Man tut-tutted and headed into the bathroom. Silence, followed by some disturbingly vigorous sounds, and then a triumphant flush and gurgle. Turns out he had employed the toilet brush in ways not recommended by the manufacturer. Exactly how

The month of November has been designated National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo , by Fussy . Participants commit to posting a blog entry every single day during that month, even if it's just a picture or an inarticulate squawk. I'm up for it. At least it's less masochistic than its progenitor, NaNoPoMo , where you commit to writing a total of 50,000 words in one month, or about 175 pages of a novel -- from scratch. This is a great way to overcome writer's block, as the organizers cheerfully note, "Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality... Make no mistake: you will be writing a lot of crap." That is, of course, assuming you actually have the time to type that many words in one month that make any sort of sense at all. What the jargon on "ER" used to sound like Yes, we have HIV, cancer and plenty of other unsavory ailments, but there us

Just got back from Seattle late (really late) Sunday night. We were supposed to return by dinnertime, but Someone (ahem) didn't leave enough time to get to the airport and they wouldn't let us on the plane even though it wasn't scheduled to depart for another 30 minutes. Fortunately Sea-Tac airport has a fully padded play space for hyperkinetic youths. Then we were selected (randomly, I think) for the Whole-Ball-of-Wax search, involving full-body pat-downs and swabbing our stuff for explosives residue. Fortunately we had answered the kids' questions about security with deliberate vagueness ("Oh, just to be sure you're not bringing anything... that's, you know, not allowed") since I could clearly envision one of them piping up "Mommy, are they looking for bombs? Do you have a bomb? I have one! In my stuffed kitty! Hee hee hee!" I can happily say that I am still walking free even though I had inadvertently left a small bottle of Purell hand-sa

But first, sports. Click on the icons for details; they automatically go to the latest data so you can come back again and again. Like any sporting event, it's always satisfying when your team is ahead but it's most exciting when the contest is close – especially when the stakes are this high. Of course the House race got a little more interesting since the Foley scandal broke. Brian McGrory of the Boston Globe compares the GOP leadership to the Catholic hierarchy in light of sexual molestation in the ranks: ignore the wrongdoer and conceal everything. Saturday was Museum Day sponsored by the Smithsonian – you could get two free passes to pretty much any museum of your choice on that day only. So all four of us went to the MFA (kids get in free). I wasn't expecting too much and Becky did indeed get noisily bored after a while, but Sarah was really into it, to the point of bringing a sketchpad and copying in pencil some painting and a mummy case, complete with one-letter c