Bangs And Thick Hair Are Great ...

... but sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I look *just like* Mandy Patinkin from The Princess Bride.

At least it starts each day with a laugh. For Patrick.

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It's ALIVE!

Remember when we took possession of our new home on our anniversary in July and I joked about how long it would take until we killed the roses?

It took one day.

It turns out the previous owners had moved at least a month or two before we got the keys to the place. And it just so happens that they didn't leave anyone in charge of watering the roses or the lawn. And it also just so happens that we had one of the hottest summers on record. So when we rolled up to make it a home sweet home, our rose bush and front yard looked like kindling. Seriously, Smokey the Bear was *this close* to mauling us.

I tried to bring it back to life. I fed it water and dead headed the rose flowers. I trimmed off the vicious black spot fungus that had overtaken the leaves. And trimmed it again when it came back. And again. And again. I used a special organic fertilizer to spur on healthy growth. The fertilizer seemed to work, not in producing roses but in allowing the branches to grow super long like thorny octopus legs. So I trimmed those dang branches down and continued the cycle of watering and trimming.

And finally, a few days into October:

VICTORY!

There are now two roses on the bush that once had dozens. Whatever! It's progress - and, naturally, just in time for the frost season.

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iSap

This is the mushy note I had engraved on Patrick's first (and clearly dinged up, scratched up, well-loved) iPod. It's a lyric from a song we both liked called Such Great Heights - and it feels rather fitting right now.

Thank you, Steve Jobs.

Oh - also -  FUCK. CANCER.

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Yes, Some Of It Was Pure Fantasy

I sometimes get asked if I actually believe there were women who behaved like stereotypical '50s housewives or if it was a manufactured image. I think the answer is yes to both; there were women who aspired to (and were also pressured into) that particular way of life (and those who loved it, hated it, and existed somewhere in between) and there was indeed a marketing and media machine that perpetuated it. But there were also women who purposefully led completely different lives from what was so prominently idealized, and those whose days featured bits and pieces of what was in the media at that time, and women who carried on, seemingly oblivious to social pressures, as housewives / career women / artists / mothers / labourers / philanthropists / community leaders as they felt that was what they needed to do for themselves and their families. We all know this, right? No? Maybe?

As it happens, I'm in the process of interviewing women who were wives in the 1950s who are willing to share their own life stories (and if you or a member of your family is such a woman, feel free to email me for deets!). Because while it's fun to flip through magazines from that era, to take the 1950s advice to heart for a few weeks, and to theorize about what life was like for women then and what they must have been thinking at the time, isn't it just so much better to talk to them about it? No two women are alike, but it's so far been fun to see what they had in common and how those things differ from the "modern women" I normally interact with.

But here's something that is a universal truth and it's compliments of today's random retro find! I found this ad for a toilet sanitizer called "VANISH" in the September 1958 issue of Ladies' Home Journal:

Let's set the record straight: Nobody in the history of the world has ever twirled and danced from the joy of cleaning a toilet (or because of a tampon, for that matter). Nobody. Never. Ever. Just mark that one down as The Craziest Nonsense You've Seen Today.

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