OK, boys and girls. We're having a contest

To come up with the best Valentine's Day idea for our significant others. You first!

Psst. Right now I'm procrastinating, hiding and looking busy

My husband thinks I sit in my office and fart around on the Internet all day. Yes, I say, I do this for a living. They pay me good money (well, not so much) to do so. But today I really AM farting around and not working very much because I am tired, sort of depressed and feeling really quite desperate, and I just don't want to write or edit anything important. So I shan't. I shall fart around all I please until it's time to go home. Then I shall watch mindless television, drink a bit or two of wine, snack on something fattening and welcome Miss Barky McSchnauzer for the next two weeks.

Miss Barky is the purse puppy belonging to a pair of my husband's better customers, Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell (not their real names), and so he volunteered us (i.e., ME) to care for her during their two-week jaunt to St. John (like that alliteration, you language geeks?). Miss Barky (not her real name, either) comes with her four little boots so her tiny little paws don't get raw with road salt when we walk her each day. Which -- and the Howells probably wouldn't believe this -- we don't do. I can't stand walking dogs. Hey, I tried it when we had one of our own. I just don't like doing it. You can't really get going at any decent pace when you walk a dog. It's not like the treadmill, unless yours is all herky-jerky and downright stops and sniffs sometimes. But we act like we'll dutifully walk Miss B morning, noon and night just so they won't worry that they're dropping off their little dog into the clutches of hell.

I still like Barky anyhow, even though Maisie, the cat who lets us live with her, will probably retreat into the rafters down the basement for the next two weeks. Barky really does bark, and Maisie just hates all that damned noise. Besides, she has to eat her food on top of the dryer, for godssakes, when Barky is around or there won't be any. It's enough to drive a kitteh krazy.

No, I am not drinking anything at the moment. I am in my office where no one is watching me. They should know better than to leave me alone with the Internet.

Merry Christmas!

OK, so I didn't get the cards done this year. I'm a little, uh, late. Hey -- if we were multicultural (or at least if some of us were tanned) and we weren't standing in front of the ginormous Christian symbol, I would wish you a happy MLK Day, a day late! Which I do anyway.

It's a nice picture of our family anyway, isn't it? We had the photographer son-in-law take it when we were in Florida (in the lobby of Disney's Vero Beach Resort) shortly after New Year's Day.

Photo notes: The young lovers in the middle got engaged on Christmas Eve. They're quite attractive, don't you think? And there's Emily's boyfriend in the yellow shirt. Isn't he handsome? They had to stand me on a high step so I wouldn't disappear completely. What can I say? I gave birth to these tall, Germanic children. The Reich would have been proud of me. But one day, one day, a recessive gene and poof! One of my grandchildren or a stray third cousin twice removed will be, like me, short and sunburnable. In the meantime, I have 3-year-old grandboys who look old enough to be in kindergarten, am dwarfed by everyone in my family and get the 30 sunscreen all to myself. It is a tad intimidating to scold with an index finger shaken to, uh, a belt buckle. Oh, well.

'Little boxes on the hillside ...'

There's a certain kind of twilight at this time of year that reminds me of how it felt to come home from school when I was a kid. I don't know why that is, but around 4:30 in the afternoon, when I drive home from work and pass the row of little '50s houses (read: ticky-tacky boxes), it takes me back. In the late '50s and '60s where I grew up, it seemed we didn't pay too much attention to people's houses. In the postwar building boom, they all looked alike. Yeah, some people had great gardens and gorgeous lawns, but everyone's houses looked alike: little "living" rooms, eat-in kitchens, a couple of bedrooms (if you had three, that was large) and a bathroom. Most had cedar-shake siding (making them a bugger to paint). Some had shutters or awnings, but most had little "curb appeal," to use a term foreign to our parents, beyond a "picture window" in the front.

These standard houses made visiting pretty easy; you could always see who was coming up the walk, and you never got lost in a friend's house because it was identical, in most respects, to yours. Because of that, you didn't spend a lot of time envying anyone's house. Neither did your parents. You didn't hear grownups talking about so-and-so's beautiful countertops in this pre-Pottery Barn world. You might have heard a mom or two sing the glories of coved-corners in her linoleum floors, but that's because they were easier to clean, not easier on the eye. Appearances weren't all that important, I guess - no, wait. Appearances were important, but not in the way they are today. It mattered that your home was tidy and squeaky clean because that elevated your moral standing in the community. It mattered that you tipped your hat or nodded when greeting someone on the street because friendliness was valued even more than privacy.

My musings have to do with trying to figure out how I can employ these basic values comfortably in the consumerist, individualistic world in which I find myself now.

I'm not done with this post yet ... to be continued.

Dear Santa: Pall Malls and a DustBuster, please

Last night I managed to lure my husband to the Mall of America for a little Christmas shopping, about an hour's worth before my neck started to get a little stiff and my eyes began to glaze over -- a tipoff that claustrophobia, loud music and plain old volume overload were taking their toll. So we bought three gifts and left. The rest, we'll make or order online. Yeah, it's a little late in the game for that, but I think I'd rather shop naked at a gas station convenience counter than go to the mall or any mall again this season.

I just hate to shop. No doubt about it. I hate it more fiercely than just about anything other than Republican politics, war and famine. While some women are consummate shoppers and do it almost recreationally, I am (you've heard of the AntiChrist?) the AntiShopper. I go out of my way to avoid shopping whenever I can. My home and my wardrobe are living proof: Both are pretty spartan. It's kind of embarrassing, especially when many of my contemporaries are at the House Beautiful stage of their lives.

Yeah, I admire nice clothes and beautiful homes, but I'd admire them so much more if I didn't have to shop or pay for the myriad items our bodies and abodes display. I find myself overwhelmed by too many choices, colors, styles. I find beauty rather easily, so when someone says, "What's your favorite color?" I can't pick one. Scarlet? Love it. But depending on the day, I might feel maroon or chartreuse. Beige comes on in waves, especially when purple is nearby. And then, when I see the prices, I must make still another, more difficult choice: beauty or, uh, food? Soon, my whole being cries, "Retreat!" I get a much stronger sense of well-being when I open a full fridge than when I dig through a stuffed closet.

There is one type of store, however, that I tolerate quite well. I enjoy old-fashioned hardware stores, the kind with sawdusty boxes of odd-size nuts and bolts in the back, where items have prices scrawled in grease pencil (no UPCs, no scanners in these places) and a guy named Dick or Wally can find anything you need. And not only does he remember what you bought there last. He remembers what your dad bought there too. Hey! Maybe I could do my Christmas shopping at the Hardware Hank. Heck, it worked for my Dad. Then again, he thought a DustBuster, a "bottle" and a carton of Pall Malls to be "just grand" Christmas gifts. He might have been right after all.

Norway's not cold at all

Reading about Walter Mondale’s appointment today as Norway’s new honorary consul, I saw a link to a new Norwegian producer of, you got it, galoshes. I saw some cute yellow shoes on the page and gave it a click. These little numbers are called “Swims.” But you don’t think sex sells everything, take a look at the gallery of these ladies galoshes. Whew!

Funny. My dad used to call these overshoes “rubbers.” I can just hear the howl of 13-year-old boys everywhere.

But I do like the shoes anyway.

Read between the lines

In my world we talk a lot about journalism ethics, and how the craft of journalism is changing; some might argue that good journalism is dying. Why? Well, because many people write well enough to establish some credibility with readers, and these people now generate audiences for themselves even though they know nothing about the tenets of good journalistic practice. Anyone with a computer and Internet service can pretend to tell you what he or she thinks is true. But these new media stars don't think about fairness. They don't care about libel laws. They don't much care for facts, really. And they surely don't tell all sides of stories. They write the sexy parts (which attract the readers) -- or the parts they want us to hear (mainly their own voices). And because most people don't understand the difference between writers who are educated, ethical journalists and pundits with an ax to grind, from Ann Coulter to Coleen Rowley to Jon Stewart, most of us suffer as a result. We just don't learn the truth about issues because we end up listening to the wrong sources. Informing ourselves used to be fairly easy: read a couple or three good newspapers, watch a national newscast, and you could be pretty good to go. Throw in National Public Radio and Bill Moyers, mix well and boom! You could watch an issue and feel fairly confident that you could figure out what was really going on. No more. Now it's really tough to separate the wheat from the chaff. There's just too much out there to choose from, and you really have to read and listen carefully, or you'll fall victim to the stupidity -- yes, stupidity -- that's now passing for journalism in this country.

Let me put it this way: Just because someone has a smart mouth, an applauding audience or a series of clever sentences doesn't make him or her worthy of our respect. Think for yourself, but do your homework.