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Ten Reasons to Skip Spring Cleaning
Because once you have looked under the couch cushions, where does it end?
Your children will just use it as an excuse to eat more salsa.
There is very little to be gained from knowing what is under the rugs in a house full of teenagers.
It will take you weeks to reset the bar on what constitutes "clean enough."
A clean house is a sign that somebody is not living the life somebody deserves. Anybody?
The longer you put it off, the later in the year you can celebrate Clean House Day Hour.
(Clean House Hour celebrations never end well.)
Trust me: You don't really want to know where that smell is coming from.
Caring is the first step on the road to Utter Resignation. Why not just get there already?
If you really believed it would do any good, you would have already done it.
from the cleaning archives: CSI Suburbia
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How to pay for college with witchcraft
The boy and I are in New Orleans to visit a local university where everything is covered in Mardi Gras beads and smells like crawfish. It's awesome, frankly, and I briefly consider enrolling myself instead.
But, as the result of a bad decision many years ago by Richard Nixon, the boy's father and I have not managed to save
enough any money to pay the ridiculous cost of room, board, books and tuition at our local beauty college, let alone Crawfish U.
The boy has earned some scholarship money, but there's still what might be called "a gap," or less euphemistically, "a shortfall," or in academic terms, "a magna cum big fucking hurdle" between what we have and what we need.
The financial aid counselors have been extremely helpful, pointing out the various organs we are still young enough to sell and noting that if we were to sell our house and all our possessions, we could pay off our college debt by moonlighting for no more than a few years.
But they don't call it The Big Easy for nothing. I haven't even started drinking yet when I stumble into a witchcraft shop somewhere in the French Quarter, where two practitioners tell me my troubles are over.
All I have to do is purchase the right spell, light the incense and say the magic words three times. Then I have to come up with $20,000 to $30,000 a year over the next four years. Needless to say, I jump at the opportunity.
Photos: Top left, crawfish remains on the French Quarter, making magic at Esoterica Occult Goods on Rue Dumaine, and a beaded tree on the Tulane University campus.
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How to cook a steak in 5 easy steps when 4 of them are really too much trouble:
At his request, I am teaching the boy how to cook steaks under the broiler when I notice that something is missing: It's the boy.
He reappears just as the steaks are coming out of the oven.
I can't believe I fell for it again. Bon appe-teen.
From the Teenlandia archives: How to eat like a 17-year-old
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Scotch tape may be the answer but now I have forgotten the question.
I know. I recently led you to believe that thumbtacks were the way to go. And I'm not saying they don't have a point.
It's just that my current system (binders, thumbtacks, Paris-themed sticky notes, profanity) does not seem up to the job lately. I don't know exactly how Sheryl Sandberg does it, but around here there is way too much leaning in. Don't you people have anywhere else you could be leaning?
So when I find myself copying 35 pages of tax returns at 6 a.m. because of a scholarship application Boy Esq. needed to file five minutes ago, I begin to wonder - and not for the first time - what the fuck is wrong with my life system?
Also, what happened to the extra copies I assembled a month ago and filed in a blue folder marked "To be Lost Immediately"?
That is when I realize I should have taped the extra copies to the desk, along with my scissors, my favorite pens, my Notes-to-Self. That way, when I get up in the morning at zero-dark-thirty, everything will be exactly where I left it just before I went to bed two hours earlier.
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Idiot's Guide to Mom Facial Expressions
Clockwise from top left: Mild disbelief, disbelief tempered by experience, disbelief tempered by utter predictability of the unbelievable, disbelief tempered by Côtes du Rhône.
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