Yep, I did much the same thing. I made friends with a couple of others in my group and went traveling alone or with them. I went to Oxford, Salisbury, Bath, Stonehenge (yeah, it's sort of underwhelming), and even down to Paris. I also saw a zillion things in London and loved hopping from place to place on the Tube.…

I studied abroad in the UK during the summer between my sophomore and junior year of college. Although I was with a group, we all traveled separately and I didn't know any of the other students in the program well. Almost nineteen years later, I still think it was one of the best things I've done in terms of my…

I knocked a wine glass off of a table while trying to maneuver in the dark, unfamiliar home that some friends and I were renting for the weekend. The wine glass broke into a million pieces (of course) and I stepped on one of them (of course). The breaking glass and my yelps woke up two of my friends who came…

I wouldn't lick it, because that would be weird.

I'm on my third IUD. Well, technically my fourth, but I'll get to that in a minute. My first was a Paragard, put in a few months after the birth of my son. While I liked not taking a pill every day (my son was conceived while I was taking the pill, so I was done with that), the Paragard made my period so heavy that…

*eye roll*

So you know my mother?

It's well-known that a steady diet of samoas and do-si-dos helped Buddha achieve nirvana.

*raises hand* I was allergic to gluten and did not have celiac disease. Doctors discovered it when I was a toddler after I cried all the time, apparently. This would have been in about 1978 or so, before a lot of people had heard anything about gluten free diets.

The whole series was rebroadcast a few years ago on some obscure cable channel. It was on during my lunch break, and I lived close enough to work to come home for the hour. I watched every episode. Great show, and I can't believe we don't see more of it in reruns.

A travesty, isn't it?

I know he played FDR several times on TV and film. The first thing I remember seeing him in was as Father McCabe, the founder of St. Eligius Hospital in St. Elsewhere, the most awesomest hospital drama ever. He also played the father of Tobias Beecher a few times in Oz. He popped up in all sorts of interesting…

And so goes the first Christmas we've spent without any extended family - just me, Mr. eejm, and Little Mr. eejm. The veggie egg rolls I made from scratch weren't so hot, but the little smokies, tiramisu, and brie rocked. No traditional turkey and dressing, no forcing myself to be nice to my idiot father-in-law,…

A friend at a former job had a client named Richard Licker. That doesn't make things at all awkward. Nope, no siree.

Hey! Some of us are really into piano slippage porn! Be sex positive!

Now that just makes me think of Sheldon Cooper. And while Jim Parsons is a delight, he's not what I want to be thinking of during sexy times.

Hey now, not in the Netherlands. Levies are referred to as dykes there. So I guess that means it's actually a Van Levy? And maybe we should refer to lesbians now as "levies"? And maybe the women lovin' ladies that read here are thus Levy Jezzies?

It is an excellent movie and indeed very upsetting. In fact, I'd call it the most upsetting movie I've ever seen along with Tim Roth's The War Zone. It does stick with you for some time.

I think the defensiveness you're seeing comes from the original poster seemingly suggesting that grandparents automatically can and should step in to help rear their grandchildren. There seemed to be no qualifiers on this, and this assumption came off to me that it was ridiculous for a person to not rely on their…

That's quite judgmental. I'm reading a lot of comments here in which the family situations just aren't set up for full-time family childcare, or the parents simply want a different option rather than making that kind of expectation of their parents. Why does this mean that western families are somehow wholly…