She did have. She chose not to go out to the minivan because she didn't want to schlep out there with three kids. So she had multiple options that did not involve shit in a restaurant dining room.

Yeah, my favorite local place is in a tiny little building; maybe ten people can sit in the restaurant at any one time. They have a public bathroom (basically, it's there for the employees but customers can use it), but I can't figure out where you'd put a changing table in it. Your knees bump the sink when you sit on…

I've been in a few places where there literally would not be enough room for them. Yes, they are wall mounted, but they have to open up, and there wouldn't be any space. (These are tiny restaurants where it's obvious the bathroom wouldn't meet modern codes, but are grandfathered in.)

I don't remember them having that there. I think some of it's regional, though. (Chicken fried steak, while not utterly unknown there, is not exactly common.)

Eek. I usually tell nurses up-front that everyone has trouble finding a vein for blood draws/IVs, but it's generally apologetic, just an FYI. (Something like, "Just so you know, they usually have lots of trouble getting a vein. My right arm seems to be the best, but sometimes they have to take blood from the back of…

The one in the town where my father lives has a buffet. It has the chicken (and chicken livers), plus the standard KFC sides, a tiny salad bar (very tiny, very sad) and a few other things that weren't on the KFC menu (I remember chicken and noodles, and one or two other things). Sadly, in that town, it's one of the…

I'm pretty sure the only reason my youngest niece didn't GIS "naked Harry Potter" at 5 was that she couldn't spell it. At two, she was obsessed with "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" because of the scene with Harry in the prefects' bathroom. If you asked her what DVD she wanted, it was always "naked Harry." Her…

Then you have schools that have more than just 9-12 in high school. I started high school (in the US) in 7th grade. I was also a year younger than my classmates, so I was 11. That was a private school, but I interviewed at several small public schools that were 7-12 or 8-12, because the school system was just that…

I was also 13 in 9th grade. I was a "late bloomer," too—I didn't really go through puberty for at least another year after that, and I wasn't particularly interested in sex. But my friends and I knew enough about bondage to understand (and to make) jokes about "handcuffs" and "whips and chains"—basically, the…

My niece is 13. The girls in her class last year (Grade 7, first year of high school here) passed 50SoG around with post-it flags on the sex scenes. I'd sure as hell prefer a kid to get a paragraph in a textbook explaining that bondage exists (especially if it follows up with "and as long as both people consent,…

I know this feeling. We have an old cat who doesn't exactly piss EVERYWHERE, but does definitely piss on anything left on the floor (and sometimes just on the floor—luckily, we have linoleum tile everywhere in this apartment). We'd like him to stop, but we haven't even considered having him put down. (And we didn't…

Even if I did not recognize the smell, most cat owners would be able to tell that it WASN'T the smell of cat pee.

It depends on how they heard about black light making cat pee stains show up. For years, that's all I heard: "use black light to find out where the hidden cat pee stains in your carpet are." These days, I've seen it on TV enough to know that it works for (most? all?) body fluids in general, but for years, all I ever…

Ah, I made it through, I finally got my surgery, I'm fine, and now I never have to do it again. It was more an, "I hear you, FUCK that got expensive."

Before my hysterectomy, I had two years of all-gushing, all-the-time. (It had been bad before, but not like that.) I went through two to four packages of the "overnight" pads PER WEEK—so I was spending around $100 a month just on pads. One of the added bonuses of my surgery (you know, besides the "no more throwing up…

$70 pants are moderately priced if they are pants of halfway decent quality. If they're approximately the same quality as the pants I can get at Wal-Mart or Target (I bought very similar pants at Lane Bryant and at K-Mart a few years ago. Guess which pair is still fit to wear? The one that cost about $17, not $70.),…

The thing is, if this was the bride's private list of reasons why she wasn't inviting people, okay, fine. But she actually TOLD people, even without being asked, "This is why I am not inviting you to my wedding."

That WAS my mother. My mother made a big deal about how she wasn't coming to my wedding (she refuses to admit it's the thing where I married another woman. It's money. Except I offered to pay for her flight, food, and hotel room, AND for the fees for her to get her passport renewed—and she's retired, so she didn't…

This is why, even though my father-in-law offered to pay for it, we opted not to have alcohol at our wedding (we had a very small guest list, with primarily very close family members). Both of us drink occasionally, but neither of us likes being around certain family members once they've been drinking, and we didn't…

This. I'm a US citizen living in Canada now, and our lettermail (first class) postage—which I just had to look up because I never use it—is a dollar if you buy individual stamps, and 85 cents if you buy booklets/coils of stamps. The only time I hate having to pay for postage is when I didn't want to send the thing to…