This morning I went to the gym early so I could swim some laps. There were about twenty cars in the lot when I arrived at 7:30, a half hour after the club opened.

Many years ago, on a Thanksgiving Day when I had to work the holiday at Children’s in Chicago, it was no ordinary day. While two of my sisters and a brother-in-law were visiting from out of town and home with Jason, holding off dinner until I got home after 3:30 p.m., I was in the NICU with a newborn baby who was dying. Her father was at her bedside, but her mother was in another hospital, trying to recover from a difficult delivery. Her baby had been swept from her side and transported to Children’s in hopes of being saved. The baby’s father was driving back and forth between the two hospitals, trying to hold his family together.

Photos are not only my treasure, but also my bane. At least the ones in the boxes upon boxes in my closet. And with this blog, I'm constantly in need of photos, but most of the time, they're in those boxes and I have to remember in which envelope. It costs too much to have someone else convert them for me. So my goal after this book launch is to convert them all myself to digital so I can organize them in an iPad like an electronic photo album. And yesterday—cue exciting, epic, rapturous music—Spencer found a new quick easy app for me to use I just have to share. This sounds like a commercial but it's not. (Well, okay maybe it is a little bit in some sense, but no one is paying me.) It's this cool Google thing that takes pictures of pictures without it looking like a picture of a picture. Takes out the glares, and you can easily fix the edges and corners. I'm so excited! I just wanted to share it with everyone because it's soooo cool. I've been using my flatbed scanner but this is way better. 

Sad news this past week to learn of the demise of yet another celebrity in a plane wreck. Joining the ranks of Richie Valens, the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jenni Rivera, John Denver, Jim Croce, Patsy Cline, JFK. Jr.—this list goes on way too long—another beloved entity, lauded and followed by all, has perished: Brangelina. Brangelina came to an untimely demise in international airspace when one member of the pair apparently did something so outrageous up there in that private jet of theirs that not long after they hit the ground, the other member of the entity rang up her lawyer and started  putting plans into place to dissolve the existence of Brangelina.

Mr. Rich had a bucket of Stuff and he was going to use it to get a lot of Buy for himself. He took his Stuff to Mr. Larder and told him he Hoped it Could Save the World. Mr. Rich talked him into using Stuff, to mix it in with all the food before Mr. Larder gave it out to the people in his village. Mr. Larder said, “But Mr. Rich, this costs a lot. How will I pay you for it?” Mr. Rich explained that Mr. Larder could just collect more Buy from the people and he could get rich too. So that’s what he did, and Mr. Larder and Mr. Rich made sure Stuff started getting into everything, and Mr. Larder got a little more Buy and Mr. Rich got a lot more Buy.

Last year in the high school parking lot where my sister’s kids went to school, my sister was driving in to pick up my nephew Caleb on his last day of high school. She spotted him just when he was hit by a Jeep right there in the parking lot. Before her very eyes, he was struck, shot up onto the hood, then flew back off again and went under it. She called me from the ER to tell me she didn’t think they were going to make it to my sons’ graduation party. I figured out pretty quickly she must have been in shock, because she was just way too calm to tell me that way that a Jeep had just hit Caleb and run over his legs.

If the government still allowed DDT to be sprayed on people, would you be sick of hearing about the nuts who kept bringing it up over and over, trying to get the practice stopped? Are you sick of hearing about GMOs? GMOs in our food source is no different from if DDT were still sprayed ​