Mondrianyone

Yeah, but my specialty is fiction, so that's what I do mostly. Although, strangely enough, I've worked on two books about pandemics in my checkered history. One about the Spanish flu and one about SARS. Those helped me decide to stick to fiction. I do know someone who edits a lot of financial stuff, but she's up to her ears in work right now. Good luck, emma! Don't forget to breathe!

Like the 18-year-old naked Ukrainian girl. Because they tend to be a bit more manageable when English isn't their first language and you can hold a green card over their head.

I've also been working from home forever, so this seems completely business as usual to me in that respect. My husband works from home, too, and the cat claims to as well, but she's never produced a paycheck, so I'm dubious. Our house is big enough so that we can have lots of space between us and not get on each other's nerves. I work in the publishing industry, so most of our projects are in a pretty long pipeline--manuscripts that the authors have been creating for years very often, and when I get a manuscript it's usually six months to a year from hitting the bookshelves. So I'm fully employed for the foreseeable future. As for the unforeseeable future, who knows? Most of the authors whose books I work on have been on the bestseller lists pretty consistently, so I don't think they're going to just disappear. At least I hope not. 📚

In addition to the dramatics and the vocal fry and the uptalking, Caroline seemed a little high . . . on something, I don't know what. Definitely. A little weird that their dog was named Susie, given the wife's name is Susan. At first I thought it might be the dog she took over from the first wife, but wasn't that first dog black? This one was white, so not likely the same dog. Also, as a left-handed person, I always pay attention to issues of handedness when they arise in these cases. They claimed she cut her right wrist using the knife in her left hand. Since about 90% of Americans are righties, the odds are she is, too. So who would use her undominant hand to cut the wrist of her dominant hand? I wouldn't risk lifting a spoonful of hot soup to my mouth in my right hand because I'm so incompetent with it. It's not definitive for sure, but I was surprised that no one brought up which hand was her dominant one (or they did and we didn't hear about it). And I really believe he went into the bedroom to find her on her knees holding a knife. If you have that much time to devise a story, you should be able to come up with something better than the nonsense he concocted.

I have that one, or one just like it. It has a rounded blade that protrudes from one side of a shaft, and as you corkscrew it down by turning the handle on top, it slices through the meat of the pineapple. When you draw back the handle once you reach the bottom of the fruit, you have a spiral of slices that you just cut apart into rings. Pretty handy gadget!

Except for Michael, who's no doubt leaving the orange tulips at the foot of the driveway. Because we can't descend into tulipless savagery, can we?

Any cat I've ever known would be fine with that arrangement. I'm kidding. Sorry about the allergy. Maybe you could get one of those horrible-looking hairless cats. That'd probably scare the mice to death.

Or you could get a cat and name it Peanut Butter! 🐈 We live out in the country, and field mice getting into the house was a big problem. We've since closed the gap around our garage doors, and not such a problem anymore. But before we figured out where they were entering, we lost our beloved dog, and my husband said no more pets, he couldn't stand losing them. I finally was able to persuade him to say yes to a cat. She's like a mouse-catching machine! And I pretend she's a dog, so everybody's happy.

God, she's becoming such an embarrassment. Poor Byrd. He obviously still wants to hold on to this job. I'm old enough to remember the Watergate Hearings. This reminds me of Senator Montoya telling witnesses to "talk into the machine." He meant the microphone, but he was too old to know what it was called.

Could you arrange for, say, a flowerpot to accidentally fall off your windowsill and land on the windshield? Of course I will disavow all knowledge of your mission should you choose to accept it.

Not a surprise that the hoarding is happening, but definitely crazy that anyone thinks that because a protected time slot has been set aside for the most vulnerable population--a rare show of humanity and compassion--that those older people are taking advantage to load up on beer and rib eyes. It'd honestly be laughable if it weren't so horrific.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about this guy, who clearly broke out of his assisted-living facility to snap up all the printer paper in the Southern Hemisphere. Seriously, does anyone believe that old people are responsible for the selfish panic buying that's going on?

I'm sure that some 85-year-old woman who eats a tin of tuna and a cup of tea every day is stripping the grocery shelves bare. Look, here are some of those greedy oldsters right now! These two frail senior citizens lost their shit when they weren't allowed to buy out all the Mountain Dew in the store. Imagine depriving them of the very staff of life! And Grandma Moses here:

Not relevant to the story at all, but did anyone else think that Jayne looked remarkably like Annette Bening? I'm so sorry for those kids, going through what they did and then losing their mother after it seemed as if the sky had finally cleared. But obviously they were raised right.

It's probably worth remembering that he burned his girlfriend's house down after she ended the relationship they "never had." So any doubts about his guilt re Judy, which I also "never had," kind of went up in smoke. As it were.

Those bed sisters obviously got their values from the same well. At first I was totally on Def's side--Plain seemed like the typical grifter who's been working the system and anyone else she could work (without really working) for a very long time. I thought it was interesting how she hesitated when JJ asked if the guy in the extremely large very pink shirt was her husband. Not a question most married people need to mull over before answering. But then sister who bought the $2,000/$4,000 bed admitted to living on student aid. I have an actual J.O.B., and my bed didn't cost nearly that much. These girls kind of scared me, if I'm honest.

She had the meal that actually involved some cooking. Alton's menu was shrimp cocktail, steak, and chocolate-chip cookies. Seriously?

Here's a list of somebody's 8 Best. It seems like a good resource for figuring out what features are most important to you and basing a decision on that. I've had this scale for about ten years. I switched from a bigger, more cumbersome one when I didn't need to pack up and weigh manuscripts to ship anymore (that's all digital now!). I actually have two--the second one I got on sale for $15, and I use it in my project area for weighing nonfood items. It would be nice to have the pullout panel that chessiegal mentions, but this Escali has a hold button that fulfills the same purpose. I love all the colors it comes in, and it takes up almost zero storage space. I just lean it against the backsplash when it's not in use. Also super easy to clean, just swipe off the glass. I do wish it had a light-up function, though. P.S. This shows range of colors, but the price for the green one is much lower at Amazon.

Would just a couple of days wrapped in a wet towel be long enough to generate that much rust, though? (Not being argumentative, just wondering.) I thought it was strange that it got rusty that fast, so I Googled the kind of gun that was used, and apparently the metallic part of the body is stainless steel. (There are several body types, but the gun they showed as hers was shiny under the rust, so I'm assuming this was the stainless model.) It seemed very quick, unless the gun was kept in the wet towel for some time before the killing. But then . . . why?

At first I was shocked that her credit-card company hadn't alerted her that someone had applied for (let alone received!) an authorized-user card on her account. I get alerts from mine if someone spends a buck-fifty on my card in a place that they flag as unusual for me. But apparently he'd been filtering out email from her financial institutions, so if she'd been alerted, she wouldn't know it. Yet if an accountant noticed she was missing a quarter of a million dollars, you'd think there'd be a more urgent alert than just some casual emails. Also not to victim-blame (well, maybe a little), but these were all mature, successful women. You have to know better than to invite some total stranger into your house and leave your laptop open, your phone lying around, your checkbook in a drawer that anyone can get into without a key, then go take a shower or lie down for a nap and give this person unfettered access to your whole life. Maybe it's just been way too long since I've dated.

It's safer than having nothing at all, if you can't get commercial hand sanitizer. And it won't be gooey if you don't put anything gooey in with the alcohol.

You can make your own hand sanitizer. It was the first thing I Googled when it became obvious that it was hard to find and that sellers were price-gouging. Just mix 2/3 cup isopropyl alcohol (91% strength or stronger) with 1/3 cup aloe vera gel (so it's gentler on your hands, though you can use just plain alcohol). You can add a few drops of some nice-smelling oil also, if you want. In a pinch, you can use overproof booze, but the alcohol strength needs to be at least 80%. If you have a clean, empty pump bottle, you can use that to dispense it. Here's one article, but there are tons of recipes out there. It's absolutely disgusting--and should be criminal--for people to be profiteering at a time like this.

She really wasn't. She shared the couch with her (older?) sister, and her sister seemed like a normal person. Destiney was a total attention/drama whore then, too. I liked almost all the couchies, but Destiney was not one of those. I think you could save a lot of money getting your hair to look like Reza's if you went over to your local AutoZone and brought home a bottle 40-weight motor oil to dump on your head.

The bar could not be lower, and yet they somehow managed to slither under it this season. In the past I've always gotten the sense that at least one contestant learned something. But not even close with this crew. I don't know whether it was these particular people or the attitude that Alton brought to the party (I'm leaning toward the latter), but I feel as if every single person this time around, including the chefs--or maybe even especially the chefs--could've stayed home and achieved the same result.

Well, they're all married women. I'm a married woman, but the last thing I would describe myself as is a housewife. It's a pretty reductive term, when you think about it.