When Dixie Dew got a box full of doggie treats from one of her fans, she wagged her tail and jumped around the kitchen, eager to dive into them.

“Now, Dew, you know you’ve got to write a thank you note for these,” I lectured as I permitted her one of the treats.

There was no argument. My child knows that acts of generosity require a hand-written note. We sat down together, she laid her head on my lap and we decided what should be written. Dew is a girl of few words but we got the thoughts down on paper and she signed off with a paw pressed into an ink pad and then stamped on the note. Read More»

For the life of me, I don’t get why technically savvy people recommend dusting the insides of a computer with propellant-driven canned air. Maybe it’s because they’ve never been household engineers, a.k.a housewives.

Any household engineer knows that blowing air into dusty corners merely stirs up the dirt and drives it into other nooks and crannies. Why did they invent vacuum cleaners but to pull dust up into a canister, safely secured until it could be emptied outside the house? Read More»

All the cool kids do it. The first time I heard that phrase was in Old Mrs. Crabtree’s’ third-grade class. Ever since, I’ve been trying to be one of the cool kids. Why, you may ask? The answer is simple. It’s cool to be a cool kid. Unfortunately, through the years, I’ve always seemed to fall a little short when it came to the cool meter. Read More»

It’s the bottom of the ninth inning and the opposing team leads by two runs. The team that is behind sends out the relief pitcher. On the mound, the highly paid relief pitcher gathers all his teammates around him and says, “Men, I’m going to do the best I possibly can, but I want to make this perfectly clear — I inherited this situation. This isn’t my fault. The starting pitcher left me this mess.” Read More»