On the food thing, it is like any issue. You need someone over the top to win reasonable solutions, because otherwise the reasonable solutions are considered the extreme ones.

When it comes to titling the new blog, I got nothing. Well, one bad idea I'll share in case it sparks a good one for somone: "better than wonderbread".

is that a good trade off?

No, she said that was the one big downside to the piercing. Well, that and the time she thought she'd lost the ball that was originally in her lip right after she had the piercing done and spent 30 minutes tearing her apartment apart, only to find it in her half-eaten spaghetti.

Above anything, it's the way of life that bothers me -- the "fast food" mindset. It never struck me until we had kids, but there's no consideration for dinnertime anymore, or family time. In my experience, too many school events and baseball games, etc., are right around 6 o'clock. Bussing means a lot of kids don't go to neighborhood schools anymore, and are on the bus incredibly early and getting home late in the afternoon -- which not only cuts into the relax and play time I think kids need after school, but also means they're shipped right off to swim practice or gymnastics or whatever as soon as they get home.

I don't want to live in the '50s, exactly, but I would like the pace of modern society to slow the fuck down. One of the reasons I quit working in NYC when we lived in Bucks County was because I was getting on a train at 6:50 a.m. and getting home roughly 12 hours later, meaning I got to kiss the kids before I left and spend maybe an hour and a half with them before bed. I was exhausted all the time, and I can tell you this, if *I'd* had to make dinner, it would have been takeout pizza or mac-n-cheese 95% of the time.

Elsie just died. I'm not quite sure how we get from here to the next 20 books, but she was so upset about being sent to the convent school that she feel into a fever, and has been hallucinating for the past 20 pages or so, while her father prays that Jesus might take mercy on a sinner like him and bring his daughter back, but the doctor just declared her dead.

She'd had her aunt write up her will. In addition to things like which of her cousins got which of her dolls and books, she also said that she wanted her father to send a missionary to the heathens each year.

Hmm. Retcon in the next book?

Oh. In what has to be at least 20 minutes or so after the doctor said she was dead, she started blinking, and then opened her eyes and asked for water.

I know that nineteenth-century medicine wasn't all that advanced compared to what we have now, but surely they could tell the difference between alive and dead?

You have got to be kidding me. Elsie has amnesia. She's forgotten everything since just before her father first arrived home a year and a half ago.

Her father, by the way, has now pledged his life to serve God, because Elsie's illness has made him see the wickedness of his ways.

I don't know - I think that there are actual stories of people in comas being buried alive. Don't know that they were from as late as the 19th century but the stories would have been out there.

I heard that's where the term "saved by the bell" came from. People were buried with a string in the coffin that was attached to a bell above ground. that way, if they woke up in the coffin, they could ring the bell and someone would dig them up.

Elsie got her memory back, and asked her father if he's still planning to send her to the convent school. He says no, he's learned to love Jesus, and he'll never again ask her to do something contrary to God's word.

Oh. This entire scene had much weeping, too.