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Cheaper by the Dozen

Beautiful, aren't they? There's something about farm fresh eggs that almost makes me want to quit my day job and become a lady farmer. Almost. For now I will settle for my son's occasional post as head keeper of a friend's menagerie, which happens to include ten chickens. Fortunately for me, these chickens are prolific producers, so when our friends go on vacation, we are the happy recipients of many  beautiful eggs. At first we revel in the most scrumptious omelets and scrambled concoctions. By day four or five, however, I admit to often having egg overload. Not this time. As soon as these eggs started appearing, I began thinking about Ramos Gin Fizzes because when made the old fashioned way, they contain an egg white. If you're like me, this news would normally bring a halt to my experimentation. But my new stock of farm fresh eggs gave me reason to carry on because they came from chickens that I have watched cluck and roost, and that makes all the differen...
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Respecting Our Elders

Many moons ago I set out on an adventure to bike around New Zealand. Looking back all these years later, I realize how Lewis and Clark it was of me to set off by myself to such unknown territory on a bike I had not ridden all that much with a tool kit I had barely touched. Such is the naivety of youth that allows us to head off on such an adventure without any second thoughts about the "what ifs". Two days into my expedition, having  consulted  my "Cycle Touring in the North Island of New Zealand" book, I left the small village of Kaitaia to ride up to Cape Reinga, the northern most point on the island. Surrounded by beach and water on all sides, I envisioned paradise. What I had not envisioned was the condition of the road out to Cape Reinga. As I poured over this book in the weeks leading up to my departure, I often came over the words "sealed" and "unsealed" as descriptions for roads. I figured that unsealed roads were ...
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All Joy, No Fun

As you may have noticed, my productivity has decreased noticeably since last summer. This is not due to lack of interest. No, this is due to lack of sleep. I have a teenager who should be going to his first period class around 9am but instead is learning trigonometry at 7:20. He has a mom who should be sleeping until 7am but is awakened over an hour before her body would like to see the light of day. All work and no sleep has made me a tired and unproductive writer.  I was once asked if I am an early bird or a night owl. "Neither," was my reply. "I am a wimp at both ends." Always have been and always will, I suspect. And so my ears perked up last week while listening to an interview with Jennifer Senior , contributing editor at New York magazine and author of a new book on parenting called All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting . Kids, she points out, were originally part of the economic engine of a family; they were housed and fed and expected to wor...
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