Survival Tip #158: Get Stubborn/Find Room. This summer, we finally caved and got a window air conditioner. After the third consecutive June night where temperatures in our apartment were just shy of 100 degrees,…
#157 Give Yourself a Sick Day I spent much of my childhood engaged in long drawn-out games of make-believe. Some of these games featured bucolic scenarios of apple picking or making feasts of mud…
Call it poor planning or a general indifference to overly prescriptive projects, but when it comes to capsule wardrobes, I do my best work when looking backward. What did I wear most this summer? What…
Survival Tip #156: Make it sized to fit. On Saturday night, we ate spaghetti. There were two big white bowls filled with pasta smothered in Marcella Hazan’s famous sauce, a smaller wooden one, filled with…
Survival Tip #155: Call yourself whatever you please. Over the weekend, a morning walk to the farmers’ market got us a basket full of fresh vegetables and a dusty wooden crate that a neighbor filling…
First of all, I’d like to mention that I’m on a personal campaign to resurrect the sunflower from its position as pedestrian second fiddle to all of summertime’s more fashionable fleurs. Sure, they bring to…
Tip #154: Spread a little cheer. This morning, the muscles on the underside of my forearms are aching. They’re tender from overuse this weekend, being put to work on tiny apartment improvements that didn’t…
Have you been skinny dipping? Might I suggest that you take up the habit? Not just because it’s terribly freeing to do so but because gosh it would solve the swimsuit shopping conundrum fairly quickly.…
Tip #153: Keep your fruit in plain sight. For every week of June there was a bowl of cherries on the table that we call my desk. It might be shocking to know that there are two desks…
Here’s a helpful thing on the road to a lean closet: clothing that can perform two functions instead of one. Enter, culottes. (Koo-lots.) Not quite a skirt, not just pants. Dress them up or…