Monday, January 7, 2013 at 08:32AM 
As I wrote earlier, I am loving my Leonie Dawson 2013 Incredible Life planner a LOT. I make a big point of planning every year, but with Leonie on board from the start in 2013, I will surely have the most joyful year ever.
With Leonie on board, more joy is inevitable!
Levenger, incredilble life, leonie dawson Thursday, July 26, 2012 at 09:22AM 
As a kid, I would sometimes sneak-watch I Love Lucy, hoping I didn't get caught. That show was verboten by the parentals.
I know I'll be corrected by email any minute now for saying this, but we weren't allowed to watch the show. My mother found the Ricky Ricardo character stereotypical and offensive. She's right. And sure, "start 'splainin'" is most definitely making fun of someone's accent, but damn it, that show used to crack me up, made all the funnier because it was forbidden.
I bet most people can't imagine forbidding a kid to watch I Love Lucy. Maybe you think that's crazy, the equivalent of banning "Miracle on 34th Street." But guess what? That was verboten also. My mother had a thing with Nathalie Wood. She's about to let me know, so I'll pass it on.
Levenger, Moleskine, i love lucy, lucille ball Sunday, June 3, 2012 at 10:38AM 
On Memorial Day we had dinner with some friends, one of whom is an English teacher at a posh private high school here in Marin. We were discussing the practice of diagramming sentences, because of a question that had come up in one of the private tutoring sessions she offers after school and on weekends to make ends meet. As if teaching high schoolers English full-time weren't enough...
Anyway, I realized over the course of that conversation that I never learned how to diagram sentences the way she was demonstrating it -- that just wasn't a thing we ever did at the French American Bilingual School, where I was a student through 7th grade, or at Everett Junior High or at Lowell. I do recall quite a lot of use of my Bic 4-color pen, underlining in red, click, circling in green, click, annotating in blue. But never like the diagram at left. Nope. Never.
