Not lemon balm but lemon basil, because I didn’t want to waste my new seeds on a blog photo and because I don’t like lemon basil. A good choice, because these little guys fried when I forgot to bring the pot in after photographing it. Greetings from snackHQ, where this week I’m embarrassed. I am good—great, even!—at avoiding internet scams. I do not buy cheap dresses advertised in the middle of news articles or subscription makeup bags except those six months, and I’ve never clicked on “one simple trick” for anything. But I was recently scammed by a seed company. This year I wanted to grow go ..read more

In 2017 I bought 101 cookie cutters because it was the cheapest way to make “Owlette,” “Geko,” and “Catboy” with chocolate sable dough. Now the eater of those cookies doesn’t like PJ Masks, and his dad abhors trays of unevenly-sized cookies, poor font choices, and also the use of the word “font” when someone means “typeface.” I don’t like this doughset either, because it is filled with things that are bulky, hard to clean, and stored in white plastic drawers that don’t fit my shelves or my kitchen aesthetic. I used a cookie cutter twice last year: in June to make gingerbread bunnies and in De ..read more

Can you tell the difference between a caramel deLite and a Samoa? No, you can’t, because these are Keebler’s Coconut Dreams, the least tasty of the three lookalikes, even though they should be tied for second because Keebler also owns the inferior girl scout cookie. I think the problem is scarcity: girl scout cookies taste better because you can’t get them all the time. In non-Pandemic conditions, No special effort is required to obtain Coconut dreams. On the plus side, the package is not re-sealable, so the serving size is 18. On June 7, 2019, then-presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar took t ..read more

Everything! My main story this week concerns John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, which I usually watch early enough to grasp a problem (Student debt! Torture! Pennies!), but too late to want to do something about it. Take this episode about plastics, where John explains that far fewer items can be effectively recycled than we think, that the companies that make those items have routinely avoided responsibility for their proper disposal, and that someone somewhere is throwing umbrellas into the recycling. I’m not sure John’s quite right about the umbrella. Someone one town over from here tossed c ..read more

Q: Did a snake just slither under your deck? A: I can’t know for sure, because I didn’t see the snake. But because I heard the screaming I now know that 1) the gray ratsnake is the most common snake in ohio and that 2) If there is a gray ratsnake living under the deck it may eat various garden-munching rodents, so 3) perhaps Salazar and I can come to an understanding. Q: Why were Kleenex invented? A: To remove cold cream. They were later marketed as disposable handkerchiefs and magic show props. Q: What’s the best bag for sherpaing all the extra stuff my kid has to bring to school now? A: I j ..read more

exclamation march. I recently finished Sasha Sagan’s For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World. It is a lovely book: part memoir, part roadmap for secularists seeking comfort in ritual. I give it my very highest form of praise, which is wishing I had written it. My absolute favorite part of the book is the rituals to celebrate being wrong. Sagan notes that while there are often seasonal precedents for religious rituals (Christmas taking place in the dark nights of Northern winter, for example), we have “no innate astronomical or seasonal cue” for confes ..read more

It’s pronounced du-li-shuhs. Hello from snackHQ, where the dishes are piling up. Because the dirtiers of those dishes are trying to work, I’ve been listening to my usual dish-doing podcasts with earbuds. Because I have no need for Zoom-friendly AirPods, I have the dangly stringed earbuds that have to plug right into the phone. Because I have the dangly stringed earbuds that often get stuck in the top rack of the dishwasher, I keep the slack wrapped around the phone stashed in my back pocket. Because my phone is stashed in my back pocket, I can’t easily skip through the commercials, so have le ..read more

A 3-Log reduction of 1,000,000 perler beads means there are still 1,000 left to stick to your toes every time you walk across the kitchen floor. If you’re 99.9% sure of something, you’re saying you’re pretty sure you’re right, but want to leave room for the extremely rare chance you could be wrong. When I say that I’m 99.9% sure that my husband picked the color of the living room armchair that we now think might be the wrong color, I’m leaving room for 1 time out of 1000 for my husband to remind me that I’d said the chair couldn’t be black because I hate cleaning black furniture and that ..read more

Regular, pro-viral tissues. Pandemic shoppers can’t always be choosers, which is why I recently found myself with a four-pack of Kleenex anti-viral† tissues, which were both the most expensive tissues and the only tissues available. Each blue-and-orange-patterned box evokes the very viruses that the tissues inside the box are designed to destroy, and also boasts a bold, all-caps claim: “KILLS 99.9% of COLD & FLU VIRUSES† in the tissue within 15 minutes.” I flip over a box and follow the superscript daggers to the fine print, which tells me that the middle of each 3-ply tissue contains two ..read more

Book spines aren’t just good for impromptu punctuation marks. The best way to avoid purchasing self-published books is to go to a bookstore or library. If there is shelf space dedicated to a book, it is either traditionally-published or a rare self-published smash hit or was written by a local author, and what monster wouldn’t want to support local authors? But you’re reading this because you probably are using the best method to accidentally buy self-published children’s books, which is to shop at the pen-paper-scissors-book store. If you also shop the pen-paper-scissors-book store for toile ..read more