Essay: Hush Money
By Betsy Bitner/Life@Home I should have planned better. A glance at the clock tells me I’m almost out of time. Our babysitter would be here in minutes and to make matters worse, she’s new. I much...
View ArticleEssay: Life’s Messes
By Rachel Fiske/Life@Home We all have visions for our homes. Mine, since first venturing out on my own, has been immaculate cleanliness. I like things to have places — bowls neatly stacked in my...
View ArticleEssay: Confessions of a kitchen-gadget addict
By Betsy Bitner/Life@Home My name is Betsy and I collect kitchen gadgets. Not the pedestrian kind like ladles and spatulas. My tastes run toward the esoteric. Olive pitters, oyster shuckers and pancake...
View ArticleEssay: Lawn care
Grass Roots Rebellion By Betsy Bittner/Life@Home Search the Internet for “lawn care” and you’ll come up with almost 19 million results. Search my garage for lawn care and all you’ll find are three...
View ArticleEssay: The death of the phone call
By Clive Thompson/Life@Home My phone bills are shrinking. Not, unfortunately, in cost. I mean they’re getting shorter. I recently found an old bill from a decade ago; it was fully 15 pages long,...
View ArticleEssay: The Empty Nest
By Jayne Keedle/Life@Home It’s a warm summer evening and the tinny sound of the Sailor’s Hornpipe emanates from the ice cream truck as it trawls the street, luring children from their homes like the...
View ArticleEssay: Gazebo take me away!
By Lee Nelson/Life@Home About 10 feet beyond our dining room and through the sliding back doors, a quaint, screened-in gazebo invites me in morning, noon and night. It’s not much to look at, really....
View ArticleEssay: October 2012
Scare Tactics By Betsy Bittner/Life@Home Dear Neighbor, I regret to inform you that you are not pulling your weight. It’s already October and you have yet to festoon your property with so much as a...
View ArticleEssay: Urge to Purge
By Jennifer E. O’Brien/Life@Home How clearly I remember when we moved into our house five years ago. My husband and I marveled over our new space: Four bedrooms! We thought of how we could spread our...
View ArticleEssay: Gathering Power
By Wendy Page/Life@Home By the time the last cookie has crumbled and we wake up New Year’s Day feeling as if we’ve been visiting people every day for six weeks, it’s easy to vow to make 2013 the Year...
View ArticleEssay: Feeling robin’s-egg blue
By Megan Willis/Life@Home Not turquoise, nor powder blue. Not sky blue or azure or aquamarine. Robin’s-egg blue. My husband and I awoke one morning to declare that we had grown sick and tired of every...
View ArticleEssay: There’s a new boss in town
Cat Scratch Fever By Betsy Bitner/Life@Home The Animal Shelter Annex at Clifton Park Center seemed harmless enough — a storefront filled with cages containing cats and kittens in need of a home. I’d...
View ArticleHome Life: Color Their World
By Janet Reynolds/Life@Home When I was a child, we lived in a three-bedroom house. For reasons that were a mystery at the time and remain so today, my mother insisted that my sister and I share a...
View ArticleHome Life: The Mulch Man Cometh
By Betsy Bitner/Life@Home All I wanted was some good dirt. Not the kind you get from scanning the tabloid headlines while waiting at the supermarket checkout. I’m talking about the kind that’s brown,...
View ArticleHome Life: Now Where Did I Hide that Money?
By Megan Willis/Life@Home While I’ve always been fairly thrifty and mostly debt-free, I also know this truth to be self-evident: I will spend every dollar in my wallet and obliterate any balance in my...
View ArticleHome Life: Goodwill Hunting
By Lee Nelson/Life@Home As a child, I would sink low in the front seat of our car as my mother hunted through dumpsters in the back of stores and through people’s garbage sitting outside on the curb. I...
View ArticleSee Child Go
Run, parents, run! By Janet Reynolds/Life@Home If you’re one of those newly liberated parents who could barely contain your cheers after you dropped your last child off at college — following a...
View ArticleHomeschooling in the Capital District
Stay-at-Home Students By Kathy Ceceri/Life@Home Where do kids learn if they don’t go to school? For homeschooling families in the Capital Region, the answer is all around them. Today’s homeschoolers...
View ArticleHome Life: House Entropy
By Laurie Lynn Fischer/Life@Home Entropy. Look it up on Wikipedia, and you’ll probably see a Google Earth satellite shot of my house. Entropy is a scientific term for the natural tendency of all matter...
View ArticleHome Life: Generation love
By Rachel Fiske/Life@Home “Got some room there?” Maxine mumbles, pacifier hanging from the corner of her mouth, belly sticky with raspberries from the bush out back. She is staring up at her...
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