Elise Sereni Patkotak

There are some people who think Hillary Clinton is solely responsible for the phrase, “It takes a village”. They blame her for the whole touchy-feely, new age-ist concept that children are not raised in a nuclear family but in some hippie commune sixties environment. I’m sorry to inform them that this concept cannot be laid at Hillary’s feet. It should be laid at my mother’s feet.

Growing up I thought of this as being raised by committee. My mother did little with her children that didn’t start off with a phone call to her sisters and sisters-in-law.  Great discussions were

Apparently our Juneau legislators are finding it difficult to get a good meal from a lobbyist for $15.  They want the lobbyist to be able to spend at least $50 per meal on them before it has to be reported or… gasp of horror… they might have to order the most boring thing on the menu.  Poor babies! Maybe they should have the lobbyists take them to Bean’s Cafe for lunch. Then they wouldn’t have to report anything and they might actually reconnect with the reality far too many of their constituents face on a daily basis.

And may I

I went out the other night. Got back late… well, what passes for late now in my life which is about 11 PM. Had a piece of delicious sugar free cheese cake I’d picked up on my way home. Took two bites. It was delicious. Realized that if I ate the whole piece before going to bed that I’d never be able to sleep.  Yet another indignity in the pantheon of indignities that bedevil old age. 

Am I the only one horrified by the message that pervaded the Olympics about McDonald’s somehow being the official food of Olympians? Here we are worried about an obesity epidemic among out children and the message from the Olympics is that you can have an Olympian body AND regularly eat at McDonald’s because that was the Olympians “favorite” food. This is true only if you are cross country skiing ten miles a day at an Olympic race pace. And even then you’d be doing your arteries no good.

What a horrible message to send to our kids as we try

I wake up from a sound sleep with two things foremost on my mind. One, I have to go to the bathroom immediately because apparently part of the aging process is the shrinking of your bladder until it is approximately the size of a pea. Two, I have a brilliant idea for a column. I pull out the pad of paper in the drawer next to my bed because I know by now that if I don’t write it down, tomorrow I won’t remember it. And at 3 AM, this idea definitely seems to be the one that will win

The house rule is this – if I have to get up and go down the stairs to let the dogs out before we go to bed, then the dogs have to go out. Blue and Blondie are old enough that they now fall fairly soundly asleep by 10 PM.  And I do mean soundly. I have to practically stand over them screaming their name before an eye even twitches to indicate they are slowly realizing someone might be standing over them getting red in the face with effort. Why, you ask, don’t I shake them awake? Well, because I’m

In 1961, then FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow famously said, “When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that

Ah modern life. I was standing in my utility room getting dinner for the downstairs birds when the phone rang. Suddenly, a disembodied voice came from the phone after just one ring saying “bag lespee”. I thought it was odd that my answer machine was picking up in only one ring. I thought it was odder when I went in to the office to find no message. If no one had recorded a message on the answer machine, then where had the voice come from? I picked up the phone and there seemed to be nothing on the other end.

Turns out that having two hundred extra channels on TV doesn’t necessarily translate into having something worth watching. I now just have to scroll through more channels on the TV guide before turning the TV off and reading.