As I Was Saying…

Chatter, memories and rants. Please, don't stop me if you've heard this one before.





Personal Blogs - BlogCatalog Blog Directory



  • Shameless plug for my daughter Elizabeth's blog...

I Don't Have an iPod, But My Mom Does

Confessions from the New New Frontier

The fat thing

Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - 2:58 am - My roommate my freshman year of college once told me, “You’re a bigger girl, but it works for you.” I recall that at the time, I was pretty crushed. She fretted when clothes ran small and a size 2 wouldn’t fit, once semi-bragged that she never allowed herself to eat more than 15 grams of [...]

In defense of ?America?

Sunday, March 22, 2009 - 2:24 pm - Orwell was a patriot, a patriot in the sense that he was able to identify things as characteristically “English” which he admired and felt a sense, however intangible, of personal pride in being associated with them. At the same time, he was very open in public and in private about his fierce opposition to British [...]

A belated answer

Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - 11:22 pm - Part of the hiring process in the English Department at UMB is going out to lunch with a group of students so they can check you out and pass along their impressions to the faculty. Yesterday, I was one of these student representatives, and the complimentary buffet isn’t the only thing I’ve chewing on since. [...]

Another post that wasn?t supposed to be about Orwell

Sunday, February 8, 2009 - 8:17 pm - ‘We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word “God” to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!’ he added almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. ‘It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was “rod”. Do you realize that [...]

About AIWS

Everybody looks good in a tux.By the time you get to be a grownup, you may have been lucky enough to have learned a few things, such as…

  • it’s generally better to be happy than to be right
  • a long life brings blessings youth can’t imagine–and burdens youth couldn’t bear
  • people who ask you to sing never want to listen to you for more than ten minutes
  • when you make a mistake as a parent, apologize to your kid–even if the kid is still a baby, and especially if the kid has reached adulthood
  • good fences really do make good neighbors
  • when people say “How are you?” they don’t really want to know
  • your doctor, however, does want to know
  • if you wear nice cuff links and studs, nobody will suspect it’s a rented tux

I’m not on the after-dinner circuit. I’m not a talk show host, and I’ll never be a preacher.

That pretty much leaves blogging for all my memories, rants and chatter.

So here we go.

By the way, your Gravatar avatar will display on this blog when you leave a comment!