December 2007

Frugal Household Hints: Stovetop cleaner

December 31, 2007

With everyone getting ready for New Year’s Eve entertaining (or maybe just taking advantage of a day off to clean up after the Christmas and Hanukkah festivities), this seems like a good time to launch a weekly feature: household hints for the tightwad. So, let’s start with this one: Liquid stovetop cleaner made for glass-topped [...]

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Lights in the night

December 30, 2007

At first I thought it was a helicopter. But copters don’t dodge around at sharp angles, reverse themselves on a skyhooked dime. Then I decided it was undoubtedly a flying saucer. Well, except for what looked like a red tail light. Helicopter viewed through the atmospheric distortion of a cold desert night? Tonight is clear [...]

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Make a New Year’s to-do list

December 30, 2007

In my experience, New Year’s resolutions fade from memory along about January 7. Several reasons for this: we make unrealistic vows (“I will lose 100 pounds this year”); we cast our resolutions as broad generalizations rather than as specifics (“I will put more money into savings”); we ask ourselves to do things that don’t fit [...]

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No kidding?

December 29, 2007

News flash! Researchers have discovered that, when it comes to job satisfaction, money matters more than a warm-fuzzy boss or an office decorated like a fern bar. “Conventional wisdom,” we’re told, has it that a pleasant environment and an understanding boss are more important to worker happiness than compensation. New York Times columnist Paul Brown, [...]

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Freedom’s just another word…

December 28, 2007

Continuing the project to declutter every room in the house, so rudely interrupted by my job, today I attacked the office and cleaned off all the work surfaces, the bookcase, and the file cabinet, built new hanging files for the various projects that have been stashed in mounds here and there, and tossed or shredded [...]

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Life in the big city

December 28, 2007

For the second time today the cop copter is buzzing the neighborhood. This morning it was over the fierce apartments to the west; now it’s racing back and forth above the two-block-long residential street to the north of me. For this mission it’s been up there almost an hour, and because it’s so close, my [...]

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