Elise Sereni Patkotak

Blue’s right eye started putting out copious amounts of stuff that shouldn’t be in her eye approximately 30 seconds after her regular vet’s office closed for the weekend so that – mother guilt being what it is – I ended up at Pet Emergency…. a wonderful group with a wonderful service for which you pay wondrous amounts.

Was watching the Colbert Report and Stephen mentioned that some (I think) Internet channel that carries Catholic programming is trying to connect with the kids by using 3 D technology.

Here’s a thought. How about they update their antiquated attitude towards women and condoms before the buy into 3D?

My sister, who works in group sales for a casino in Atlantic City, was showing the property to a potential client. As she pointed out the wonders of the room they were in, her skirt fell off. Yep, off. Completely down around the ankles moment.

For some reason, I smiled the whole day after I heard that.

I may never be stylish, but the advantage of elastic waistbands is they don’t fall down.

When I call Blue to go out and she doesn’t want to, her latest attempt to avoid the inevitable is to stand frozen in the doorway and simply stare at me with an unblinking gaze. There is not the slightest rustle or movement in her. She is clearly convinced that if she stands that way long enough, I won’t know she’s there because she will be invisible. I have timed this frozen stance and she can keep it up for five minutes before even having to blink if, in so doing, she avoids the dreaded outdoors. When I finally have

It’s a toss up between Sarah Palin’s autobiography being a best seller or the fact that a 16 year old kid named Justin Beiber is writing a memoir. I can’t wait to hear about his toilet training days.

I don’t think I’m what you’d really call a tree hugger. The thought of hugging trees honestly makes me very nervous. I mean, they have bugs and insects and sap and all that icky foreign stuff a city kid like me learned to fear at birth. When you consider I left the city for Barrow, where no trees have grown for a very long time, you can understand that my adult life has not exactly been filled with trees either.

However, I am a firm believer in respecting nature and the great outdoors because without trees we would run short

The cell phone generation will never know the pleasure of calling person to person for yourself after arriving safely at whatever destination to which you were traveling so that your mother knew you got there safely without having to pay for a long distance call. And, if you were really quick, being able to shout an “I love you, mom” into the phone before the operator disconnected you when you mother announced you weren’t there and then tried to quickly add “Your clean socks are….” Usually that’s as far as she got before the operator, who was now onto the

Let me say how very nice it was to watch Chelsea Clinton get married before having a baby, without selling her story to US magazine or any of its fellow travelers. Let me say how much the Clinton’s personify a family in that they have stuck together through thick and thin and made their commitment to each other and their daughter the paramount moment in their life.  Here’s a… oh dear lord! liberal… family whose daughter didn’t do drugs or drink or get caught up in any party scene. She got her college education, got her master’s degree, held a

Between her diabetes and old age, her body continually betrays her. She will start up the stairs from the office at 5 PM knowing that dinner is at the other end of her climb. She will bound up the first step and then fall. She will pick herself up with as much grace as possible and then plod dutifully up the rest of the stairs, carefully taking one at a time.

Her heart is still young. The puppy lives within her. But her body remains a continual reminder that time is passing.