Well, the pasta machine still needs to be cleaned, so don't be too envious just yet! Cleaning the counter top is infinitely quicker, so rolling it myself is sometimes what I do when I don't want to deal with the machine! :)

I'll take you fainting with your pants down and raise you this: throwing up on the floor from the pain and passing out AT WORK and BEING DISCOVERED BY YOUR 5th GRADE STUDENTS.

Speech teacher here: breathe from your diaphragm! Your chest/ribcage should barely move, if at all, when you inhale. It takes some practice, but it's something that you can retrain yourself to do. (With the exception of athletes and musicians, most people subconciously train themselves out of this at some point during…

Library it! If you can get over the shame of handing this to the librarian...

Yup. Quelle brute. Too bad this book can't be evidence of his abusive emotional control because the writing makes it sound consensual and that she's "happy"... :(

Ha, yup, that's totally me too. I have auto-fart-surpress—the superhuman ability that teachers develop subconsciously to avoid everlasting student shaming. At the end of the day, I come home and let a few rip, and my husband thinks it's the most hilarious ever.

OMG, why did I Google that word?!?

Seconded! Seriously, I never realized how much better homemade was until a friend gave me her pasta maker—gourmet and cheap pasta all the way! I guess now we just need to think about who makes the flour and where the eggs come from?

I'd have to give a vote to making your own. I never would have done it had someone not gifted me with their pasta maker because they were moving abroad, but it is seriously super-easy once you get the hang of it. If you make the more "expensive" pasta too, like pasta from spinach or tomato based doughs, the bit of…

Oh, I knew that you probably weren't, but it's just a very French tendency to only used water/mineral water to wash one's face, :)

You are French! Right? That's what my French husband does. It weirded me out for awhile, but now I totally do that too (albeit with Bioderma fancy water, but it amounts to the same thing). It totally works, and my skin is much better now, too!

I'm so excited about this bill! Makes me love my adopted country even more. Also, I hadn't heard of this bit:

I'm so glad that my husband understands this, if only slightly, from his personal experiences with street harassment. He has the most gorgeous long curly hair, so sometimes people mistake him for a girl from behind. When dudes catcall, most of the time he just ignores them. But, every once in a while he turns around…

And when she's describing what he did to her; she says "cuddliness" for cunnilingus... :(

Sounds like you have pretty awesome parents! :) Mine never understood my reading habit, but at least they didn't try to stop me and mostly trusted my judgment about books that I was reading...unlike my grandma, who told my parents on multiple occasions to "stop letting her read so many books because she'll get too…

(parents TRIED telling me it was scary, I didn't believe them)

Yup, this and The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle were the two books that finally convinced my sister that reading was fun.

Reader-twins! I definitely went to two of her houses too and would have gone to more had my parents been as obsessed as I with the books, :)

Eh, I have a hard time believing this. My husband lived in Paris for awhile, and his 20-something friends apparently loved going to Disneyland so much that they got annual passes. I know another couple of people who worked there as roving characters, and they really loved working there and said that it was way better…

Remy is actually really cute. Remember reminds me (pun intended! groan!) also of those Dear America books, and I think the Puritan one was by Patience Remembrance or Remembrance Patience?