ArcaMax

The great thing about handbags is that no matter how much weight you gain or lose, they always fit. This is why I love bags and have more of them than I am willing to admit in a column or a court of law.

As obsessions go, it is a relatively harmless one. The only downside is moving all my stuff from one bag to another. In an effort to simplify ...Read more

"Can you pick up some more tissues at the supermarket?" I asked my husband.

"I'm not going out right now," he replied. "Just use toilet paper."

I looked at him, aghast.

"I can't do that," I said. "It'll scratch my nose."

"Does it scratch your butt?"

"No."

"Then why would it scratch your nose?" he wondered.

"Hmph," I hmphed.

I shook my ...Read more

There was a wild turkey in the middle of the road. And this turkey, it seemed, was in no hurry to go anywhere.

Had it been the size of a normal turkey, I would have just honked, or gotten out of the car and shooed it away. But this was not a normal turkey. This was a ginormous turkey. This was a turkey on poultry steroids... switched at birth...Read more

"What did you say?" said my husband. "You think I need to get my meerkat net?"

"No. I said, 'I think you need to get your hearing checked!'" I sighed.

"My hearing is fine," he argued. "You were mumbling."

I shook my head. I am not a mumbler. Nor am I a soft talker or a dog whisperer. If anything, I'm typically whisper-challenged, which is why...Read more

I've had a love-hate relationship with my scale for as long as I can remember -- mostly hate -- and so, when we packed up the house to move, I decided to simplify my life and see if I could live scale-free for a while. I'd been told that it's much healthier to gauge your weight by how your clothes fit rather than by how much you weigh. However, ...Read more

In the world of melons, you've basically got your cantaloupes, your honeydews and your watermelons. You can generally expect the cantaloupes to be on the smaller size, watermelons to be large and the honeydews somewhere in between. So, it can be very disconcerting when one day you order a cantaloupe from the supermarket, and it doesn't arrive ...Read more

"Where do you want me to put the dead body?" asked my husband one night as we were getting ready for bed.

"I don't care," I said.

"I don't want to put it someplace and then have you yell at me that I shouldn't have put it there," he replied.

"OK, fine," I said. "Dump the dead body on the chair."

"Don't you want it out of sight?" he asked.

"...Read more

Years ago, when we lived on a cul-de-sac where the houses were far apart, we got very few trick-or-treaters for Halloween. Nevertheless, for some reason each year I would panic that we would run out of candy and I would have to resort to handing out boxes of raisins, which would definitely result in my house getting egged by disgruntled trick-or...Read more

There are two kinds of shopping carts in the world: ones with normal wheels and ones with wonky wheels.

The normal carts glide along through the supermarket aisles quite easily. The ones with a wonky wheel pull off to the side like a drunk sailor, causing you to constantly have to yank the cart back into the aisle lest you smack into the cereal...Read more

"The squirrels ate my pumpkins," I moaned to my husband.

"Is that a secret code for something?" he wondered.

"NO! I had a whole bunch of pumpkins on the front stoop and the squirrels massacred them. Look!"

I pointed out the window to our front lawn. There lay three pumpkins... or what was left of them. They were strewn about the lawn with big...Read more

"When will you be here?" I texted a friend I was meeting for lunch.

"What do you mean?" My mom texted back. "We're not coming up until Christmas."

I immediately realized I had mistakenly texted the wrong person.

"Sorry, Mom," I texted. "Wrong number. NM."

I was about to move on when she texted me back, "What's NM?"

"Never mind," I texted ...Read more

"The dog is barking," I said to my husband, looking at the new puppy barking at my feet.

"I can hear that," he said.

"What do you think he's trying to tell us? It sounds urgent."

"He has to go out?" suggested my husband.

"No, he was just out."

"He's hungry?"

"No, he just ate."

"I don't know, honey," said my husband. "I don't speak dog."

...Read more

I have a dryer that doesn't dry. You would think that if you are a household appliance and you only have one job, you should just do it. And yet our dryer seems to have missed the memo and only kind-of-dries in the most minimal way a dryer can dry, which is to say, not really much at all.

I've had petulant appliances before. There was the ...Read more