Elise Sereni Patkotak

Read the comics last. That way the front page news gets forgotten in the laughter of the comics.  Read Get Fuzzy first.  It makes my day start better than the headlines would warrant.

The Oscars are over so my tiara is retired to its box until next year. And what, you ask, did I get out of this year’s event? Well, I learned that little kids in tuxes are almost inevitably darling looking and when they try to practice their English on national TV, it makes you want to just grab them up and hug them. And I learned that despite the amount of talent that apparently works on this show each year, it is heading down the path of the Miss America Pageant when it comes to keeping an audience interested for

Look, I’m about as animal crazy as you can get. My birds and dogs absolutely come first in my life and the wild birds I take care of come second. People are a distant third. My friends and family made peace with that reality a long time ago. But even I find the relationship between the chimp that ripped a woman’s face off last week and his owner way over the line. She apparently gave him wine in long stem glasses while feeding him rich foods as he sat at her dinner table (it’s no wonder he weighed two hundred

I don’t know about you but this is the most glamorous day of my year. I will mix myself a smart cocktail of sugar free juice and ice, put on my best (cleanest?) sweatshirt and least torn sweat pants, prop my slippered feet on my hassock and sit elegantly wrapped in a warm blanket on my couch while making fun of all those skinny girls in weird dresses. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

There are thousands of biographies of Abraham Lincoln and yet it still feels as though we have barely scratched the surface of the intricacies that created him.

We now have two biographies of Sarah Palin and it feels as though the subject is thoroughly exhausted.

I got a call from a company that apparently has some deal with my health insurer to provide me with my prescriptions at no co-pay. Needless to say, they are a mail order company. As attractive as it was to have no co-pay, I simply couldn’t bring myself to do it because it would mean the loss of yet one more person to person interaction and the addition of yet one more phone tree to my life. I just couldn’t handle that. I like the personal contact. I like that they know me. I like that they are more than

Joseph Patrick Kanayurak Stuermer joined our world at 2:37 AM on 2/19 weighing in at 7.5 pounds and 19 inches long. Mom and baby doing fine. Old aunt who didn’t get back to her house to go to sleep until 4 AM may never recover unless she can find a way to sleep 24 hours straight.

When my foster bird Wilson, a beautiful conure, first came here, he would get hysterical if he saw a moose in the yard and start screaming at the top of his lungs.This morning, I went to his cage to get the old food and water out and there was a moose standing not half an inch from the window his cage is next to. He didn’t make a sound. Just stared at the moose and then went back to ringing his bell which is what he does when he thinks his meal is late. So either he has come to