Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Putting the TMI in absentminded

Author: Ellen S______

  • Mom’s letters: the summary

    It’s remarkable to me how consumed I have been by Mom’s letters. It’s helped me plot the jumble of my childhood. I know the date Jerry broke his collarbone and made us touch his scalp stitches. (Same day Mom flew me to Saint Louis.) But then why was David in the car with us? (Because…

  • TWIL: Britain celebrated Mother’s Day last week

    Britain’s version of Mother’s Day was on March 15, just a week ago. My British podcasts made reference to the past holiday and I freaked out. I learn this every few years. No matter that it’s been almost 20 years since Mom died, I still panic in March if I think I’ve missed Mother’s Day.…

  • Still chipping away at the diversions

    I’m also still chipping away at the broken links, and I found myself fixing a link on post shown below in some fancy intra-blog link style that you may never see again. No idea how that happened. The post from 2010 is similar to the AFI best movies posts, in which I beat myself up…

  • The state of Gary on this, the day of his birth

    Seventy-two years old, and forty years married. I’ve always thought year four was the worst year of marriage. Is year forty ten times worse? Kinda. Yeah, kinda is. I’ve always known that one of our hurdles is how we deal with illness. He’s a baby, expects to be spoiled; I was raised by stoics, expect…

  • Weekly Paint Progress: 3/19/2026

    So this is where I left off … I liked this one. Looks flat though. Hope I don’t futz it up.

  • ShowMe: part the third

    Naked ladies! ShowMe had crossed the line. The Board lost their minds. The December issue of ShowMe would not be going out until their penalty was decided. Instead, the magazines would sit locked in the ShowMe offices while the Board conferred. ShowMe held a drunken party at the editor Noel Tomas’ apartment, attended by the…

  • ShowMe: part the second

    ShowMe had a variety of editors, but it was always a college humor magazine. It always had photos of pretty co-eds, jokes, cartoons, and a pre-digital layout. It had to be profitable, so there were also lots of ads, sex references, and pandering to college rivalries (lots of references to how vacuous the girls at…

  • ShowMe: part the first

    Mom worked for a while on the University of Missouri college humor magazine, ShowMe. A remarkable number of college stories stem from the nine months she worked there. Before she landed there at UofM in Columbia MO (Mizzou), Mom went to a local college for two years where she wrote a column for the school…

  • TWIL: How to fix a Toto toilet that makes excessive noise when you flush it

    We have Toto toilets in both bathrooms. I love mine: it flushes with a satisfying ka-chunk-whOOOssshhhh sound that hits me in my solar plexus. The one in Gary’s bathroom was installed a year after mine. It was lovely at first, but in the last year his ka-chunk-whOOOssshhh sound has turned into … ka-chunk-whOOOssshhhh … ka-chunk…

  • The mystery of cousin Cindy: solved

    Here is the impossibly perfect cousin Cindy. Blonde, petite, sporting a mod ‘60’s turtleneck, not a nonsensical purple/white number. She is actually my second cousin. I believe her grandmother was Jerry’s Mad Aunt Jo, my grandfather’s sister. Her mother was the sympathetic woman Mom stayed with during part of the separation. The only other thing…