Author: marylowd

I got a call from my 14-year-old’s English teacher today. Their assignments had been flagged as probably plagiarized, which was surprising as I was there when my kid wrote them. An agonizing process of convincing them to pull words out of their brain and actually type them…

Turned out the system flagged one of my kid’s assignments — a piece of fiction about their cat flying to the moon — because they’ve turned it into another class previously. (Which was allowed.) Continue reading “Double Check Automation Always”

Life can be… way too much. So hectic.

But this hour, I’m eating my mom’s homemade fudge, listening to Taylor Swift, playing an easy zone in World of Warcraft, and soon I get to watch one of my favorite movies (Scream 2) with a friend who hasn’t seen it before.

This is good.

If my foot goes over the edge of the bed while I’m sleeping, there is a monster underneath who will attack it viciously.

Most of the time she masquerades as a lovely little cat. But if she sees a foot poking out from under the covers, she transforms into pain incarnate.

Once I got so flustered that I said I “felt like a feather pulling its parrots out,” and honestly, it was a much better representation of how I felt than what I’d actually meant to say, and it’s really stayed with me.

If the Sheltie puppy is sufficiently bored, she’ll play fetch. She doesn’t think it’s a very good game. But if the older dogs are being boring, and the humans are being boring… it’s better than nothing.

So much fun helping my kid figure out answers to their high school health class that are basically propaganda for capitalism. Sigh.

At least any kid growing up in my house is subjected to enough anti-capitalist, pro-union rants that they’ll never fall for it. Continue reading “Parenting in the Pandemic”

Damn. The first three episodes of The Morning Show are amazing.

Jennifer Anniston and Reese Witherspoon are just incredible in it, and the story it’s telling — with the developing professional relationship between them — is absolutely gripping.

This is television at its best. Continue reading “Starting ‘The Morning Show’”

No one:

Absolutely no one:

Still no one:

Sheltie: *bark!* *bark!* *barkbarkbarkbark!* *bark!*

My fourteen-year-old declines to add this phrase that I helpfully composed for them to the paper they’re writing for school, so I’m just gonna put it here:

“Unlike friendly air that we enjoy breathing, the air in tornadoes…”

It’s a strange feeling showing a 25-year-old movie you love dearly to someone who’s never seen it before and seeing all the ways it must look different if you’re seeing it for the first time now. Even if it mostly holds up pretty well, it’s existing in a very different context.