It made perfect sense for my mother to have one of those apple corer/peeler things, because in the autumn she went out to the you-pick orchards and came back with her car literally filled with bags of apples. (I could not go with her to help [aww, darn, no getting up at 6 on a Saturday!] because she needed the room in…

Oh, not Max! Mostly because my mother’s dog was named Max, and I think it’s an excellent dog name. (Although one of my brothers-in-law is named Max, and at this point, I would name my dog Hitler before I’d name my dog after that particular brother-in-law, never mind.)

Yeah, based on my family’s stories, I would either have been named “Swingset” or “Marshmallow.” I’ll stick with [Maggie Pye], thanks.

It is pretty common, and it’s weird that neither MrsPye nor I have a problem with cold as such, at least not until it gets down to around -30C. (At which point, my hands and knee locking up are the least of the things making me unhappy, to be honest.) But the humidity is terrible for me, and my doctor once told me…

I have arthritis, and cold doesn’t bother me that much, but damp does. MrsPye is the same way. So we run the air conditioner, because it also dehumidifies the air—we have very humid summers here.

If it has the disposition of a fluffy bunny, you might want to be worried. I have some nasty scars from when our rescue bunny got pissed off before we had her well-socialized.

I saw a lot of celiac sufferers commenting on one of the CBC stories about this saying that they would still probably order the gluten-free options (or a meal that is naturally gluten free), but would no longer have to panic about slight cross-contamination.

My future kid is definitely going to see me wearing not-very-much. And will learn, the same way that MrsPye has, that if you see me wearing boxers and an undershirt, it means that it is a very bad pain day, it hurts when clothes touch me, and it’s time for Jedi mind hugs rather than the real ones, unless you want to…

I just don’t get the lying. My sister-in-law is allergic to cinnamon. I have flat-out told her, “Assume any baked goods I make have cinnamon in them unless I tell you otherwise,” because I love cinnamon and put it in a lot of things, including some that people generally expect to be cinnamon-free. But I’d never lie…

Exactly. My Discworld books, my Harry Potter books, my Peter Wimsey mysteries—they would all be scattered around the apartment, and that would not work for me.

My absolute favorite vet (like, we had a serious discussion about whether, when MrsPye and I move back to the States in a year or two, we can still take our pets to her for non-emergency services [we will be about 14 hours away from her, so, not really, no]) was very, very big on, “I don’t know, but I’m going to find…

That would make sense. I have no idea how many books we own, especially as I’ve had to go through five (soon to be six) major purges of my library since 2000. But it’s way more than 200, and it would get frustrating to try to find the particular book if I had to remember what color it was.

That makes sense to me. We have about ten bookcases (we need more). I don’t always alphabetize fiction, but I group it by author. (The bookcase by my side of the bed has the books I want to read when I’m sick in bed or can’t sleep, so my Heyer, Sayers, Terry Pratchett, and Wodehouse live there.) We also group some by…

I don’t alphabetize my shelves, but if I sort books by color, I can’t keep books by the same author together.

A friend owns an “antiques” (more like, nice-ish secondhand stuff) store in a small town, and she frequently buys big lots of stuff from estate sales. She sells the decent books (usually to a book dealer), but for the crap like thirty years’ worth of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, she sells them to decorators.

I have a couple of friends who were in their 20s in the 70s and had a pretty wild time, and they’ve both mentioned Quaaludes in combination with sex (and both of them mentioned either taking them themselves, or “[sex partner] and I both took Quaaludes, and then...” rather than just giving them to their partners). I’m…

In the United States, communities with low vaccination rates (these days, I mean) tend to be middle-class and above, not poor people who can’t afford to get their kid’s shots.

This! I just looked up the vaccination rates for the county I grew up in (I had an easier time finding Georgia’s vaccination rates county-by-county than statewide, but I only looked for about 20 seconds). For the 2014 school year, of 310 kindergarteners, there was only 1 vaccine exemption (so a 99.7% vaccination…

Exactly. Hell, there’s nothing wrong with “No, you’ll spoil your dinner,” or just “No, not today,” if you really don’t want your kid to have the donut.

And North is at an age where she probably wants to do things just like Mommy anyway, so I’m sure she thinks it’s fun. I raised an eyebrow at the headline, but once I read the article my thought was, “Oh, okay. That’s no big deal.”