I owe this tip to the Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman who visited last spring.  He annoyed the crap out of us and ust would not go away, but I did get one good idea out of it  See, the cleaning product they use in their super-duper $2000 carpet shampooers has a fabric softener in it, […]

So here’s something new I learned today: if you need to have a lipstick stain you want to remove — like, let’s say you have a dog, and maybe he isn’t very bright, and he likes to chew things, and maybe there’s a tween girl living in your home who has a tendency to leave […]

Readers of StepDadding might be interested in a post I wrote for lifehack.org as a kind of remedy for the rampant consumerism of “Black Friday”: Teaching Kids Charity and Clarity with Pre-Christmas Cleaning. The idea is one I got from my brother and sister-in-law (and they got it from who-knows-where) — go through your kids’ […]

Lisa Hendey of Productivity @ Home suggests several ways to encourage thankfulness in children. At the top of the list is “pray together”, and we’re not a praying family at all, but the rest of the tips are good, especialy the fourth, “Remember to thank your children”:
Next time your child brings home a test that […]

Parent Hacks describes a situation perilously close to what we deal with here:
Both my kids are notoriously tight-lipped about what happens at school. The general answer to “what did you do?” is nothing, and “what was your favorite activity today?” is I don’t remember.
A few weeks ago, I turned to my step-daughter at the […]

I’ve been on a bit of a Neil Gaiman kick lately, since Stardust came out and I read and enjoyed Coraline. Although I’ve been way too busy to read much more (I picked up M is for Magic and another Gaiman book about a month ago) I did have a chance to listen to […]

Well, not yet, but on the table. Here’s the story:
My partner works for the division of the health department that monitors and reports infectious outbreaks. Last month, she was sent our to gather samples from several neighboring families of Ethiopian refugees, some of whom had mumps. Since this kind of exposure is part of […]

Shall I write a post since I’ve been away the last couple of days? OK, here’s a quick one.
Today, my brother and sister-in-law took our kids to the airshow. Every year my sister-in-law’s stepdad, an ex-Navy (I think) flyer and owner of an aerospace company in California comes in to take his grandkids […]

Earlier today the stub of a post I’m writing on Scott O’Dell’s Sing Down the Moon eas accidentally posted to the site.  It’s obviously not done, so I’ve removed the post, but it might have turned up in RSS readers.  My apologies for this error; the post will be up sometime next week.

I’m at Blog World Expo today and tomorrow, so this post has to stand in as my daily post to fulfill my “one post per weekday” commitment (that I realize I made to nobody but myself).  If anyone happens to be at the Expo this weekend, drop me an email — let’s meet up!