I live exactly 16 miles from work.

I never know how long it's going to take me to get there. Last Monday, for example, it took 40 minutes, door to door. That's nirvana. This morning, it took almost two hours. It took one entire hour to move a grand total of six miles - along a six-lane limited access divided highway, no less. The only reason for the bottleneck was that a car had broken down in the right-hand lane, about… Read More

Joe and I have been immersed in Home Improvement Projects for the last two years so that we can sell our place.

We started this when the market was hot and you could ask people to buy you expensive gifts in addition to paying inordinate amounts of money for your rundown fixer-upper.

Now, however, buyers expect everything in the house - like toilets and kitchen appliances - to actually work properly and look nice. They even expect that you, the seller,… Read More

Joe and I took my 95-year old mother to Sakura, a local Japanese restaurant, for lunch today. It's the type of place where you sit around the grill and the chef cooks your meal for you.

"Cook" is really not the right word, because in between grilling your steak exactly the way you want it and mixing up the fried rice and taking the shrimp from grey to perfectly pink, he's also juggling the utensils, turning onions into volcanos and tossing… Read More

On "All Things Considered" this afternoon, Melissa Block interviewed Clay Violand, who was in class when Seung-hui Cho entered the room and started shooting. Clay dove under a desk and survived. In the interview, Violand talks about how he maintained eye contact with the girl next to him, trying to "stay human."

That phrase hit me in my gut.

You see, I am a survivor too. Shortly before I turned 21, four men kidnapped me from my campus and spent… Read More

How do you make sense of a senseless act?

There are 33 dead at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Among the dead, an Asian boy, age 23. From the reports I've read, he allegedly shot two dead in the dorm, then 31 more in a classroom across campus, and then he shot himself. An article in Salon.com reports that one of his teachers described him as "troubled."

A college campus is supposed to be safe; a place to learn and… Read More

Elsewhere on Family.com, Joe LoCicero has a great article on 10 staple foods for your pantry. If you haven't read it yet, go do that now. Then come back here. Go on, shoo!

I have one more staple to add to the list:

Bisquick.

I love Bisquick.

Bisquick is the premade baking mix that enables cooking-skill-impaired people like me to whip up tasty treats quickly and easily.

I adore their recipe for drop biscuits: Bisquick and milk. That's it! Even I… Read More