We Barans have a problem with road trips. Not that we don't like them -- the opposite, really -- but whenever we set off on a journey of significant length, a world-threatening disaster somehow befalls us. To be fair, my sister was the cause of 83% of these disasters. You don't want to know the [...]
As a general rule, homeschoolers are good kids. (I say this with trepidation, waiting for the comments telling me I'm wrong because their brother's best friend's cousin's homeschooled neighbor became a serial killer.) But as a general rule, homeschoolers don't leave a path of destruction in their wake. They're more prone to correcting your Silmarillion [...]
I owned a dog for three days. Completely by accident, I swear. I was driving home from work when mom broke the news. “Just so you know,” she told me, “we have a new addition at the house.” As she said this, I pulled into our driveway and was greeted by the shrill, vindictive yapping [...]
I went grocery shopping the other day. This may sound like a normal occurrence for an average person, but you must understand, I am neither normal or average. I'm also the kind of person who would rather perish than leave my house. Whether this is the result of introversion or an allergic reaction to people, [...]
Hello friends, and welcome back to the final part in this series of library shenanigans! If you missed Part One, where the job was obtained through unconventional means, find it here, and Part Two, where an evil ink pad became my best friend, here. Onward to Part Three! As it turns out, small-town libraries are [...]
Welcome back to stories from work! If you missed part one – where I nerded about Dickens with a library director and was promptly hired – you can catch up here. You need to understand a few things about my library. I lived in Washington D.C./ Baltimore suburbia for most of my childhood, which meant [...]
Well, I finally did it. I unlocked the ability to yell at annoying children without getting in trouble. Guys, I became a librarian. My quest to become a shrewish guardian of the book domain started many years ago, and, as I was then still a teenager with crippling social anxiety and nonexistent people skills, had [...]
I’ve come to a disturbing self-discovery of late: Namely, disaster has no effect on me whatsoever. I’m not sure when this vice took root, or how I managed to cultivate it so effectively while remaining oblivious to the evil tentacles wrapping themselves around every aspect of my life. My sister claims I suffered from this [...]
Greetings one and all, friends, comrades, and very large moths! Back in May, a Christian conference was being held in North Carolina with some of my family’s favorite speakers, like Paul Washer and Scott Brown and all those other fellows no one’s heard of before. Due to an insidious evil known as “work,” my dad [...]
Well hello, people! It's me! The crotchety reclusive INTJ in the mismatched socks! Welcome to a new day and another year of chaos! May we all fondly remember how depressed we were this time last year. (Not much has changed.) The last twelve months have been a whopper of an adventure, from getting employed for [...]
The Sarcastic Elf 