One of the best things about writing a daily blog is you can pour out your heart, express your frustrations, confess your weaknesses and occasionally, when you’re in the mood, embarrass your family.
 

You can talk about your son’s piano lessons, your daughter’s new bed and your sister’s old boyfriend, and not get fired.
 

“Just, whatever you do, can you leave me out of it?” my daughter Amanda begged tonight as I ran a made-up quote by her. “I think you need to keep your personal and professional lives separate.”
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Heard from Marty Biviano. This made my sister nearly choke when I called. I’d like to say, being the communications professional that I am, that I was not surprised. But I choked a little too.

I mentioned Marty Biviano in a blog I wrote several entries ago on coed dorm rooms now being allowed at the University of Chicago.

I was trying to illustrate how much dorm life has changed from when my sister attended Lincoln College in the late 1960s and men had to sign in with the dorm mother. Men like Marty Biviano, my sister’s boyfriend her freshman year in college.  Read more...

It’s just a bed.

A little twin bed with a tendency to creak too much for our daughter’s liking.  It’s also way too small, according to Amanda, who is prone to exaggeration and has been dying for a new one for the last few years.

I remember when we all used to be able to fit in that bed. The whole family would  climb in together – Amanda, Rick, me and even Alec, who usually ended up falling into the crack between bed and wall and had to be rescued.  Read more...

I kid my son that I miss watching his baseball games (he was finished last month after the house league season ended) in much the same way I looked longingly at the high school gym at my daughter’s orientation until she finally urged me to go in and sign myself up for intramurals.

I remind them, whenever it seems appropriate and sometimes when it’s not, of my athletic prowess at their age. And as much as I am scornful of the kind of parents who live through their children’s usually meager athletic feats, I can’t imagine how I would keep still if I had kids who were gifted in some sport.  Read more...

I am writing this on the family p.c. Why, you ask, would I be writing on a big, clunky computer when I have a nice, new laptop I have finally grown accustomed to and even like after weeks of learning how to live without the track ball thing on my old Tribune laptop?
 

The answer is that for the second time in the last month, I left my brand-new power cord to my brand-new laptop in a press box, this time at U.S. Cellular Field after the White Sox game last night. Once again, I got away with it because it was found and I will get it back. But this time, God decided I wasn’t going to get away with it quite so easily and I discovered I have no battery power on my laptop.
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