Thanks!  I have a feeling the all-day-at-the-museum thing is going to be a bit like your ass-kicking relentless mountains, but we'll see.  :)

Fall weather is absolutely the best, and it's been soooooo Fall-y this year so soon.  I couldn't be happier.

Okay, on paper the idea of becoming housebound and then fused to the couch sounds pretty bad, but if the cause of it is too much bacon marmalade?  What a way to go!

I can't wait for my recently-remodeled kitchen to be a hideously hilarious time capsule.  It's going to be tough getting through the painful in-between years, when it's just an out-of-date eyesore, but it'll be worth it in the end.

Hey, discovering you can run a 3K after a week of no running is legitimately good news!  Congrats on being so much fitter overall!  I'm sorry you've been feeling too stressed to exercise, but it sounds like the overall trends are good ones.  :)

Okay, that article is pissing me off, too, because hey — it's also about me.  Fuck them.  Seriously.  Fuck 'em.

Aw, that's so sweet!  And now I have extra motivation to have good news to report!

Slate's redesign is really depressing me, because that's been one of my consistent work time-wasters for years and now it's unreadable.  How am I supposed to kill those last, insufferable 45 minutes at work each day when I can't make heads or tails of what might be semi-interesting to read at Slate anymore?  (You're…

Wow — tomorrow?  Time flies!  Best of luck to you and Mrs. Snape!

Holy shit — caramel apple cider?  How does one make such a heavenly-sounding concoction?  (My apple trees have all of a sudden gotten grown up enough that they're actually yielding some significant crops.  We're getting a cider press and now I'm intrigued by the thought of homebrewing instead of of just making insipid…

I love how camouflaged your socks are against that carpet.  You're practically invisible!

Getting off the news cycle horse was the best thing to ever happen to me.  Being moderately informed and happy is a hell of a lot better than being well informed and creeping toward suicidal.  I might not know everything that's going on in the world, but I don't cry myself to sleep every night anymore.

Liked for "Black Betty"!

I've been neglecting my bitters lately.  This must be remedied, stat!

Oh my god, 50 pounds?  Congratulations!  That's awesome!  I hit 25 last week, and then breezed right past my "10% of my body weight" point this week.  I'm down to 240.0 from 267.2 on June 1.  WOO HOO!  I ran into a former coworker who I hadn't seen in months the other day and he was all, "Yowza!  You've lost so much…

I hate when that happens!  This seems to be the time of year of thumb-sized spiders who build webs right in the line of veggie-picking fire, because they're all over my garden, too.  And yeah, spiders are great and all, but they really don't need to be enormous and suddenly on my face.

We've got turkey vultures up the wazoo in my neck of the woods.  A few summers ago a deer dropped dead in my neighbors' yard while they were on vacation.  Someone dragged the carcass to the curb for them, but the township took their sweet time picking it up, and a flock of vultures took up on the neighbors' roof while…

They really are awful.

That's absolutely why I love Dear Prudence.  It's always so disappointing when her responses aren't totally unjustified harangues.

We pre-ordered it from Amazon and still haven't gotten it.  Grrr…