Annabel Monaghan's Blog, page 3

I’m Turning Into My Grandmothers

I love those Progressive Auto Insurance commercials where they joke about how we’re all going to turn into our parents. Precocious as I am, I’m starting to think I’ve skipped a generation. I’m turning into my grandmothers. I had two grandmothers who were totally different from each other. Dora, my maternal grandmother, was a bit […]

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I Went to the DMV

I walk into the White Plains DMV not for the first time. I vaguely remember that I have to park on the roof and descend a flight of stairs that might give way at any moment. My husband has just gotten a really good deal on a used car, and I have been tasked with […]

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Motel 55

I’m running a one star hotel. I’m not worried about improving my rating, as it’s peak season and all of the rooms are full. There aren’t a lot of other options for my guests at this time of year, so the myriad complaints to management about the quality of service go largely ignored. Breakfast is […]

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Dog Park Rookie

When I got a dog I was excited to start going to the dog park. I thought it might be just like going to the playground with little kids, standing around shooting the breeze with other parents. In fact it’s been so long since I’ve lingered at a playground that I thought the dog park […]

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The Cleanse

There’s nothing more annoying than a person on a cleanse. Or even just a person who wants to talk about their diet: what they’re eating, what they’re not eating, what they have eaten but are not likely to eat again. A recent conversation with a man who was in the middle of a month of […]

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If You’ve Got Five Kids, You’ve Got A Lot of Teeth

“That’s just so many teeth,” I said to the confused mother of five seated across from me at lunch. It was a weird follow up to the pretty standard suburban question: “how many kids do you have?” Depending on your point of view, there are plenty of more appropriate reactions, including “how wonderful” and “so […]

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The Headshot Decision

A single friend of mine just joined a dating site and showed me, with much hilarity, a string of guys who have expressed interest in her. There was nothing really wrong with these guys on the surface; they seemed normal enough. But it was the profile photos they’d chosen that cracked me up – three […]

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Field Notes From the Wilderness

I just read a book about a family surviving in the Alaskan wilderness. They had no heat, no electricity and no running water. In the depths of winter they would use their four hours of sunlight to collect firewood so that they could melt snow for drinking water. As always happens with great books, I […]

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The Upside of Scarcity

Many years ago, my son received a Thomas the Tank Engine train and a circle of tracks as a gift. He was two years old and could zoom Thomas around that track for hours, frontwards, backwards, crashing into imaginary obstacles. He loved it so much that I bought Thomas a buddy, his faithful passenger coach […]

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How I Became A British Aristocrat

I was laid up for the month of December. I was recovering from surgery, and I’d gladly tell you all about it but after watching a solid month of Downton Abbey, I’m starting to think maybe I shouldn’t talk about such things in mixed company. I mean Lady Mary had some kind of women’s surgery […]

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