LA’s Griffith Park. There are stretches of road where you can’t believe you’re in the middle of the Los Angeles megalopolis, and an incredible variety of walking/hiking trails.

We don’t have cicadas in Los Angeles. I never thought I’d miss those screaming bugs, but I do.

We didn’t get started with GoT because it was on HBO. As a general rule, we don’t subscribe to pay-extra channels. And by the time the first season came out on DVD we had lost interest. So we’ve never watched it. Not claiming any kind of virtue here, it was mostly due to inertia. A lot of my friends and family were…

I guess being old has its advantages. About the only way my mom cooked chicken was to fry it. My dad would occasionally burn a chicken on the rotisserie grill, covered in bottled bbq sauce.

We got the waterbed in 1978, actually.  :)

I’ve never watched GoT and have never had any desire to. We don’t get pay cable channels (OK, we did get Starz just long enough to watch the first two seasons of Outlander and that was a waste of money for mediocre fanfic).

I’ve always done fitted sheets diagonally, but they STILL DON’T WORK ON WATERBEDS.

Riverdale in Outer Space!

You do NOT want a quiet house when you’ve got a baby in it. Make lots of noise from the day they arrive. Play music. Watch TV. Run the vacuum cleaner. Talk, don’t whisper. Remember, the womb is a very noisy place. Your kid will be acclimated to it. If you keep everything ultra quiet, the first time you drop something…

I’ll just wait till my brother calls me to tell me how much he lost.

I’ve been ordering from JustFlowers for years. 

I’ve been ordering from JustFlowers for years. 

This was a long time before Craigslist.  :)

My daughter is a gifted pianist. For a couple years when she was learning, she had to make do with an old electronic practice piano that we picked up cheap at USC’s surplus outlet. Its action was really stiff and it was hard on her hands. But it was the best we could do at the time.

Arthur C. Clarke will always rule.

I’m really happy with Costco Travel. We got a great package for our Hawaii vacation. And we chose a hotel on the non-touristy side of the Big Island.

My husband got shingles a few years back. Fortunately it didn’t incapacitate him. I went and got the shingles vaccine as soon as I could talk my doctor into it.

That happened to my daughter. She caught the chickenpox when she was a baby. We thought that was going to give her immunity.

With our plumber it’s a “mere” 3K. Oh, and digging up the front yard. Which might or might not cost extra.

Of the four kids in my family, all but one of us were born before 1957. And I know my oldest brother and I caught the measles. Don’t know about the other two. My parents were really lah-di-dah about health care (and for most of my childhood had no insurance) so it could go either way. My youngest brother was born in…

I have an old 10" Galaxy Tab that I turned over to Samsung Kids Mode for my 5 year old granddaughter. She sometimes plays with it for quite a while. Last time she was at our house she got frustrated with a game that didn’t work the way she wanted it to work and showed all the signs of an incipient meltdown.