All about me

No matter how challenged you are by life's ordinary tasks, you can find someone to help you with them these days. A Chesterton woman has started a business that helps people who are overwhelmed by all the stuff they accumulate. If you contact 123 Clutterfree Me, Lisa Brickley will charge you a mere $50 an hour to help you "realize your vision" for de-cluttering the house:

Come to think of it, it's been so long ago that I can't even remember when:

"When Is the Last Time I Wrote a Letter?"

When I want a good, escapist read in the fantasy/horror genre, I tend to go to Dean Koontz before Stephen King. King gets awfully wordy -- he's so successful he can tell his editors "no thanks; hands off" -- and Koontz still knows how to keep a story moving. Besides, he's a wry observer of the human condition and at at times a gloomy moralist. In a Koontz book, you're likely occasionally to stumble across a passage that says what you always knew but couldn't articulate.

Haven't my people suffered enough?

Food kits recently distributed as part of a disaster relief effort in Kentucky and Arkansas may contain peanut butter contaminated with salmonella linked to a nationwide outbreak, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Wednesday.

[. . .]

Came across this from the illustration service our newspaper uses. I have nothing to use it with today, no reason to put it

I could have gone all year without reading this:

Not that it's anything we think the New York Times Company should do, but we thought it was worth pointing out that it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead.

[. . .]

It's one of my favorite times of the year again, when -- oh, no, another sign the economy is really, really bad:

If you seem to be tearing through those Girl Scout Thin Mints a little faster this year, you aren't imagining things.

Fewer cookies were packaged into Thin Mints, Do-si-dos and Tagalongs boxes this year, and the Lemon Chalet Crème cookies were resized to compensate for the rising cost of baking staples.

Moving is one of the worst experiences of human existence. Everything you've spent years accumulating and arranging to perfection suddenly has to be packed up and hauled away. It's a process that consumes weeks, and often you have to think so much about the new place -- how can I possibly fit this couch in that living room, and didn't there seem to be more cupboard space when we signed the papers? -- that any semblance of a normal life in the old place is impossible.

I worked at McDonald's throughout much of my high school era, and a manager once told me I should seriously think about a career with the chain. Naturally, I dismissed such an absurd idea. Nell Pierce-Boykin of Stockbridge, Ga., was smarter and has just retired at 72 from Mickey D's:

What a  crock. What is the assumption here, that everyone has memory loss or attention deficit as they get older?

Are you always forgetting important dates and occasions? Good news! Soon a memory enhancing pill will be available over-the-counter to help you out.