Marcia Fine's Blog, page 9
April 6, 2010
Boomerang Kids and No More Small Talk
When Michael moved home and brought Rosa with him, we made the best of a tough situation. It took a lot of patience and a year to get them situated in their own place. Recently 80% of college graduates have exploded into their parent's spare bedrooms with dirty laundry and electronics in hand. While we were all doing our best to get along I picked up Boomerang: When Life Comes Back to Bite You by author Marcia Fine. It was like she was peering into our...
March 30, 2010
Maury Takes me on a Trip
We are getting everyone in our family plus good friends together for a celebration this week in Florida so I won't have much to say until after we have all disbursed to our separate dwellings. Hopefully, everyone will still be speaking and we haven't offended each other too much. Anyone else find squeezing all generations into one event filled with joy and sarcasm stressful?
We haven't left yet but my mother has announced in true guilt fashion: "Jean, if Asia (my...
March 25, 2010
Golf Discrimination and Turkey Vultures
I am a big golf fan because it gets my Maury out of the house two days a week. He also watches all tournaments on TV which takes up hours of his time when he could be assisting me with cleaning out the garage, replacing sprinkler heads and re-potting a few plants. And can I mention something high on my priority list and low on his that's giving me stress in Scottsdale ? Cleaning off the top of his dresser in our bedroom which leaves no clear space because it is...
March 23, 2010
Hormone Replacement Therapy and Rainy Weekends
Listen, I'm a Scottsdale resident so I see lots of unusual sights here but sometimes even I am surprised at the level of self-promotion. In multiple full page ads in free magazines you can pick up at coffee places, a local OB/GYN physician displays an almost full length picture of a woman in a gray fitted sweater dress hugging a chihuahua, her spiky hair a halo around her head. She also sports a huge diamond ring and red nails.
It turns out after you read the copy you ...
March 18, 2010
Billionaires and Snails
Out of the thousand-plus billionaires listed on the Forbes list we have FIVE in Arizona! How exciting! Not that they know who I am and why I'm stressed. They include a soup heir, a founder of a university who wants to clone his dog, his son who's probably upset his father doesn't want to clone him, a guy who owns a baseball team and another one who makes tires. Lots of them. They're all set for life. And they don't have my mother reminding them, "Jean, you were born...
March 11, 2010
Scottsdale Sleaze and Deadly Golf Courses
As if I'm not stressed enough I now can add atrazine to my list of boogey-men and mutated frog nightmares. Atrazine is used by farmers to kill weeds which it does very nicely. It also gets into the water supply after coating the food we eat, unless of course you're Oprah and you have a chef to shop and chop organic for you. Major scientific reviews are telling us that male frogs are developing female characteristics so that they're mating with other male frogs and...
March 9, 2010
Paranoid about Garbage and More Crazy Politicians
Now we all know some fans go through celebrity garbage for tokens of their favorite surgically-enhanced, non-talented blond starlets and identity thieves think that's a good source of information (so if you're not shredding, start now!), but now we have the threat of microchips in our garbage! Stress! In London, the high-end of a nanny-state, the local governments have installed 2.6 million microchips in people's garbage to find out if they are recycling.
I knew it! My mother was r...
March 7, 2010
Kooks as a State Resource and Disagreeable Flight Attendants
Now I've been concerned about some of our state legislators for years. Some of my favorite legislation was the representative who wanted to ban co-ed dorms at all state universities. Little late for that. Or the woman who brought a bill that linked abortion with breast cancer without any scientific information. But it gets better than that. After a recent editorial from snowbirds who said they won't be coming back because they ran into so many "birthers" here, I had to...
March 2, 2010
Spas in Scottsdale and Puppet Cleavage
Why do baby boomers flock to the spa? Stress relief, of course! In this time of taxes, 24-hour news cycles, wars, poverty and congressional gridlock, it makes sense to have your body pushed, pummeled and stroked. You can even leave a few shades darker because some have tanning beds that measure a person's UV light sensitivity to adjust the output of rays. I have about as much interest in that as a Brazilian wax. My mother says, "Jean, spend more time on...
February 25, 2010
Golf Sponsored by Garbage and the Most Bizarre News
The Phoenix Open, a much-anticipated event in the Land of Golf Courses and Fake Lakes, has had various sponsors in years past. But the rowdy crowd who drink too much and sometimes throw debris at golfers they don't like, has a new sponsor: Waste Management. Which is a nice way of saying gar-bage. "The greatest show on grass" has found a green sponsor! And they'll haul away everything 538,356 fans leave behind which includes a lot of beer receptacles. In its favor WM has ...
