I can hardly believe it, but we’re coming up on a full year since the nightmare known as Hurricane Helene barged into our lives, flipped everything upside down, and left us all wondering if Mother Nature was going through something and needed a nap and a snack. Like much of North Carolina, we’re still knee-deep in the cleanup… emotionally and literally. We were among the lucky ones, damage-wise, but lucky doesn’t mean unscathed—it just means
In case you haven’t picked up on it, there’s a shadowy underbelly to my little Disney-esque cottage life. Sure, the birds chirp and the breeze gently sways the trees—but sometimes nature stops singing show tunes and reminds you it’s actually nature, red in tooth, claw, and beak. Take our extremely fertile bunny population. For a while there, it was a bit of a situation. Flopsy, Mopsy, and their 800 cousins were frolicking around like they
I get asked about my laundry room cookie jars a lot—usually with a furrowed brow and the kind of tone you’d reserve for asking someone why they keep ketchup packets in the hall closet. “Why cookie jars?”“Don’t the soap pods clump?”“Isn’t that where, you know, cookies go?” Valid questions. But here’s the reality: I live in a very charming (read: tiny) cottage. Our “laundry room” is really more of a well-lit hallway with identity issues.
Sometimes I long for the good old days when phones were attached to the wall—right there in the kitchen, with that six-foot curly cord that somehow managed to stretch 47 feet. You never lost the phone back then. You might trip over it, get strangled by it, or yank the toaster off the counter while talking to Aunt Mildred, but you never lost it. As we evolved, it did become possible to lose the handset,
One of the great misunderstandings about ADHD is the idea that everyone who has it must be a hyperactive extrovert who talks with their hands, makes friends with stray dogs, and starts 17 new hobbies before breakfast. Now, to be fair, we can be like that—briefly. But the truth is, a huge number of ADHD’ers are actually introverts. Deep, cozy, people-are-fine-as-long-as-they’re-over-there introverts. But you wouldn’t know it. Because we’re also expert maskers. Masking is basically