to-thrift-or-not-to-thrift

It seems I find a bin, tucked in the back of every thrift store, filled with metal knives and forks and spoons. In my house (I don't know about yours), forks have this way of disappearing. Maybe they go the same place as the mates for my socks (forks and socks: star-crossed lovers?). In any case, I...

Babies. Sigh. They grow up so fast, don't they?Take it from a mom. Yeah, they do. So fast that anything you buy them will be too small within weeks. Babies wake up from their naps bigger than when you put them down. Toddlers grow like little weeds, AND they play so hard their clothing gets worn out...

Everyone has one (or two) of them in his family: The official holiday spirit monitor. Always pulling out the precious collectibles (whether that's emotional or monetary value should be left to another blog post). The bad news? Their houses are virtual minefields for little children, or the more...

Around the holidays when I have the luxury of sitting back and thinking about the gifts I want my loved ones to buy for me, I usually start lusting after kitchen appliances. This year it was an ice cream maker I wanted (but I didn't ask for -- more on that later). Last year I was so enamored of a...

I'm not much of a shopper, but there's one place in Columbus that turns me into a kid in a candy store. That place is The Habitat For Humanity Build It Again Center.The Center, a K-Mart-sized building on the north side of town, is jammed with building supplies donated by homeowners, contractors,...

I'm one of those people who believes in the power of books. Books should never be given away! Books are always good for you, no matter how bent or broken their spines. Books can solve anything.That was, until I had small children. Who also loved books. So much so that they sucked on, ripped,...

Back in college when I was a knitting demon and had no cash to spend on high quality wool -- I came up with a solution that worked like a charm: I would go to thrift stores and buy handmade sweaters that some ingrate had cast off. I'd unwind all that hard work that some grandma put into a...

As a girl, I was a perfectionist. I can remember my boxes of watercolors, and how I obsessively rinsed my brushes between colors so as not to turn them into a rainbow of blacks and browns. Pastels were even more precious, and took a soft touch to blend them on paper, but not on the instrument...

Part of the problem inherent in cookbook shopping is that it's really hard to take it for a dry run, first. You can get a feel for a pattern book by the photos of the finished object; for fiction, you can read a few pages and see if it draws you in. But you don't cook for how a meal looks, and all...

If you enjoy a hot beverage once in a while, you've probably felt it: the conviction that a lovely mug would make you happy. Do you know the domestic bliss encapsulated in that tableau; a clean surface, a project you enjoy, a mug that signifies your style? It's the still-life art as life.But...