Paul Merrill
If you’ve never been to a Big Lots store, you need to. It’s a lot like a dollar store, only they have a wide variety of stuff you won’t find elsewhere. Like Belgium Cookies.
My sister and her family live in Belgium. You can’t buy Belgium Cookies there. Which reminded me of when we lived in England. “English muffins” were not to be found. “Muffins?” Yes. (Same phenomenon.)
What is an “inside/outside” term that you’ve experienced?
So, Schick keeps adding blades to their razors.
Why not 12?
(Just a holiday gift idea for that guy in your life.)
I used to have dry skin all winter long. It’s dry in Colorado and combined with the cold, my skin becomes really dry.
Soap makes a huge difference. As soon as the temperature dips down to freezing outside, I switch to fancy soap.
This is not a commercial. I won’t tell you what kind of soap to use (like I did before), because several kinds will work fine. Just experiment. Spend a lot more than you do on your current standard soap.
Your skin will say thank you!
Sadly, my hands still get dry. Lotion fixes this, but then it takes several minutes for the greasiness to die down.
When I was young, an observant teacher identified me as a kid who should take a vocabulary test for students with bigger than average vocabularies.
To this day, hundreds of years later, I remember one wrong answer. The word was “chaos.” In my head, I read it as: “chay-ohss.” Not: “kay-oss.” One of the choices was “a Mexican blanket.” I picked that definition. Spanish was not part of my world yet, so “chay-ohss” sounded like a Mexican blanket.
Photo courtesy of Gwilmore on Flikr.
I went to Target a few Saturdays ago and was amazed to see a black Lamborghini parked in a distant corner of the parking lot. Not a usual sight there. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to whip out my cheap camera phone to take a picture.
I zoomed in here for you to see the whimsical concentric starlight pattern that makes up the taillights. This is a very serious car. Serious price, serious performance. But the designer felt the need to inject a little bit of fun into the equation.
I’d urge you to do the same.
Most Americans are faced with a choice when they enter a big retail store… go through the automatic doors or the push-open doors?
If you are in a wheelchair, there’s not much of a choice. But for the rest of us, I’d urge you to choose the manual side, because:
1. You will get some additional exercise that would not otherwise be part of your life.
2. You will save the energy that it would take to open the doors.
3. You will save the store the cost of the electricity it would take to open the doors.
If you make this choice enough times, you will make a difference. If everyone you know makes this choice, we’ll all make a significant difference.
Note “Sites” in the tabs at the top of this site.
I took my blogroll off my sidebar. I used to have the links of several sites there. I changed that, just for a little variety. And I also added descriptions to each site, so you know the ride you’re about to take.
Take a lesson from the cat, my child.
Our cat is the most relaxed creature in the world. He can sleep just about anywhere. He has to, in order to get his required 23 hours of sleep each day.
Friends fall into a spectrum. Some people we just love – and others – well, not so much.
Of course you know that. But sometimes there is guilt involved. If someone falls into the not so much end of the spectrum, we often feel guilty – that we should like them more.
Relax.
Just let people fall naturally where they fit into your spectrum. But give yourself freedom to realize that your feelings toward them may change over time. Or not.
This letter appears in the December 2011 issue of Automobile Magazine.
I love writing letters to the editor. This is my 15th or 16th letter to get published in a national or international magazine. I get a buzz out of seeing my name in print. Egotistical? Maybe. (Forgive me for that, if it’s true.)
Roughly the same amount of time it would take for you to comment on a blog post – and have 21 people see it – can yield a few more views, if your thoughts are published in a magazine. Print may be dying, but there is still a good number of people who read printed magazines. Obviously, I’m one.
If you’d like to read more of the dead Volvo story, it’s in my previous blog.
And here’s Ezra’s column. The December Automobile Letters to the Editor section had more letters about that column than I’ve ever seen focusing on any article or column before.
