I was inspired in high school by my French class. We learned about a typical French dinner, the many course, the way it took hours, and I wanted to replicate the experience.

In a sorely misguided attempt at doing so, I planned out a complete ooh-la-la French menu and planned to serve it to two close friends in the middle of the night while my parents were out of town. Well, typical teen-age dramas prevailed, and most of the meal was prepared, but none of it was ever eaten.

Still, I’d love to try it again. Amuse bouche, apperetifs, a cheese course, and creme caramel for desert. Who would walk away from a meal like that? I’m sure I’d have no trouble finding friends to invite.

One of the original 50 items I put on the list in high school when I wanted to be a pop star.

I suppose that as teenagers, nearly all of us fantasized about being “discovered” and being a pop star. I had big ambitions and practiced in my room everyday, dancing around and singing into my hairbrush.

As an adult, I realize that my singing voice is passable, but neither steady nor strong enough to sing professionally. Even though I have no more secret hope of being discovered and becoming a pop star, I think I’d still like to do this just because it would be fun.

I did cut a demo tape once, but it was not in a professional recording studio, but in a sound booth at a local church.

One year for spring break, a group of 20 college women car pooled from North Carolina to Miami, Florida. When we arrived, we found our boat, the Shark XIV, and our skipper, Captain Joe, waiting for us at the docks. After a ridiculous stop at a grocery store loading up on everything we’d possibly need for an entire week for 21 people, we loaded it all onto the boat and set sail in the week hours of the morning for the Bahamas.

Captain Joe was determined that we each learn how to sail. We were assigned put into teams of two and each team was assigned a two hour shift, during which that team would be responsible for steering the boat and keeping us on course for the Berry Islands.

We’d have lessons with Captain Joe and by the end of the week, each of us learned a lot, though not nearly enough to go around taking our own sailboats out on trips. It would be fun to learn more and be able to take myself out from time to time.

In an effort to fulfill this goal, I contacted my local literacy council and told them I wanted to volunteer. The program coordinator told me that they didn’t really need any literacy tutors at the time, but that they were desperately short on English as a Second Language tutors. She said that they provided all the training and only asked for two hours a week commitment for a few months at the minimum. I agreed.

I loved the tutoring. It was challenging and it gave me an opportunity to learn about another culture first-hand. My first student was a woman about my age who was married with two children, and a third one on the way. She seemed enthusiastic about our lessons and determined to learn English, but after the first few months, she began canceling our meetings, sometimes less than an hour in advance. Eventually the program coordinator got involved and thought that maybe this student just couldn’t handle the lessons and her pregnancy at the same time, so our lessons were suspended, and I was assigned to another student in the meantime. Actually my new student was my old student’s mother.

Unfortunately, the same thing happened again. A student who seemed enthusiastic and determined at the outset was soon canceling our meetings, often on very short notice more often than she was following through. This was really frustrating to me, as I was taking it upon myself to travel to these women’s homes to give them their free lessons. I began to worry that there was something wrong with my approach.

The program coordinator got involved again. It seemed that my new student was often being called on at the last minute to babysit her new grandchild. It was just such a hectic time in the lives of the family that the program coordinator decided to suspend their lessons until the baby grew a little and they could settle down to a regular schedule of meetings.

At that time, I decided to stop tutoring. I was so frustrated with my experiences, and even though I faithfully filled out my tutor report each month, the program was so understaffed that it was months before any action was taken. I kept on planning lessons and rearranging my schedule to accommodate these lessons that more often than not were canceled. Hopefully, at some point, I will find a student who is more dedicated.

My sister got pregnant and she asked me to be her “backup” coach. I went to the classes with her and her boyfriend and learned all about labor and birth and breathing exercises. I bought her copious amounts of eggnog milkshakes from McDonald’s. All in all, it was a whole lot of impatience waiting for that baby to arrive.

Finally, I get a phone call that gets me out of bed at 4:00am. She’s in labor. They’re going to the hospital. My stepmom is going to come pick me up in about an hour and we’re going to the hospital together. Two hours later, I get a call from my stepmom. She’s lost. She can’t find my place. It takes a good hour before I even figure out where she is. Finally, in desperation (and with thoughts of my sister giving birth without me), I tell her to stay right where she is and my roommate drives me to her. I take over the driving and get us to the hospital.

I run inside to find my sister sitting in a waiting room. She wasn’t dilated enough. They weren’t going to admit her. She was supposed to walk around the hospital for awhile, and then go back to be checked again. If her labor wasn’t progressing, they were going to send her back home. Unfortunately, my sister was in a bad mood. She didn’t want to walk around. She wanted to have her baby. Finally, we talked her into walking a couple of laps around the hospital. She went back to be checked, and guess what? No progress. They gave her a couple of mild sleeping pills and sent her back home. She was supposed to get some sleep and go back to the hospital to be checked again a few hours later.

So, we all headed back to her apartment. Everyone else went back to sleep, but I stayed up, playing video games, and waiting for my niece or nephew. (She hadn’t had an ultrasound, so we didn’t know what to expect.) A few hours later, my sister emerged from the bedroom, saying that she hadn’t gotten any sleep and that her hips hurt. She walked around her apartment for a few hours complaining about her hips. It was like she was miserable no matter what. She was very unhappy. No matter what we suggested, she wasn’t interested. We tried to get her to try a few different positions to see if anything would relieve the pressure on her hips. Nothing worked.

Finally, we said, “We should go back to the hospital.” She refused. She said that she wasn’t going to go back there until she was sure the baby was coming because she just knew they’d send her home again. The pain in her hips seemed to be getting worse. Finally, we talked her into going back. In the car on the way to the hospital, her water broke. They admitted her as soon as she arrived, and gave her an epidural almost immediately.

Things got pretty quiet then. She finally got some sleep and the rest of us spent time watching TV, reading magazines, and talking. Finally, around 10pm that night, something really started to happen. Her contractions intensified and we had to put all of our breathing lessons to good use. She was miserable. She kept saying that she felt like she wanted to push, but the nurses kept saying that she wasn’t dilated enough. This went on for hours. Finally, at about 2 a.m., they decided to do an emergency C-section. Sadly, only one person was allowed into the operating room with her, and of course she chose her boyfriend.

I sat in the delivery room for about a half hour and then got to see him for the first time! My nephew. Aw, what a sweetie! I couldn’t believe that he had just been in her tummy and now here he was…in my arms. He was so red and wrinkly and beautiful. I fell in love with him on the spot.

But I didn’t get to see him being born.

I grew up in Pennsylvania, near the Great Lakes where we were frequently the victims of “lake-effect” snow. Lake effect snow meant it would snow 3 feet overnight and school wouldn’t be canceled. It was such a matter of routine, nobody batted an eyelash as they waded through the snow up to their waists carrying their backpacks full of books and pencils.

Some years the snow started as early as October and some years it lasted until May. All that snow around all that time, you have to find things to do with it besides brush it off your car. So we’d bundle up in layers upon layers of winter clothes and spend hours outside sledding, building snow men, having snowball fights, and occasionally trying out really ambitious projects like giant walls, caves, or igloos.

Somehow, the roof of the igloo always caved in so there was never anything more than a 3-foot high circle of snow with maybe a door built into it if we were thoughtful enough to have left ourselves a doorway. Conventional wisdom, though, said that the Eskimos cut away the door of the igloo last, so more often than not, that’s what we planned to do too. If only the roof would have held up.

I did talk to my grandparents about their childhoods – but only a few times and we didn’t go into depth and detail. I loved to sit with my grandma and look through her photo albums while she told me the stories behind the photos.

I feel kind of bad that I didn’t talk to them more, because now it’s too late. I’ll just have to make sure to talk to my parents and to tell my children and grandchildren as much as I can about my own childhood.

While I was never a huge fan of winter or snow, sometimes as a kid the attraction of sledding or playing in the snow was too strong to resist. And so we’d bundle up in coats, boots, mittens, hats and scarves and spend a couple of hours pulling the sled up the hill or rolling giant snow balls to make the body of a snowman.

Building a snowman seems easy enough, but you have to have just the right kind of snow. Too wet and it only becomes hard balls of ice, too dry and it won’t stick together to make snowballs. We think of a snowman and think of three balls of snow stacked on top of one another, with the largest on the bottom and the smallest on top. Rolling and making the biggest bottom snowball is easy enough but the middle and top snowballs can be so heavy it’s just impossible to pick them up to put them in place.

Maybe I could build an enormous snowman if I had enough helpers to help me lift up the head and body. Maybe I need heavy equipment. I’ll keep trying, though my attempts are probably on hold until I have children of my own who want to play.

I was being a good little saver and saving up my pennies to buy a new car. My old car was getting pretty old (220,000 miles) but was still in acceptable condition.

But then a friend was selling her car – a car I had always loved and envied. I thought about it for a month, weighed all the options, and decided to go for it. I used the money I had saved to cover half of it and took out a loan for the other half. I really would have liked to have waited another year or so and been able to buy a car with cash, but the opportunity to buy a car that I loved at a great price was too much to resist.

I’m already saving my pennies for the car that will replace this one. Hopefull this time I’ll be able to hold out against temptation long enough to have the cash saved up.

Have you ever slept in a king-size bed? If you’re used to a queen or full-size bed, it seems absolutely gigantic – like you could get lost. You can lie sideways and your feet won’t hang off the edge.

In reality, a king-size bed is just twice the size of a twin bed – it’s just two twin beds, side by side. But somehow it feels bigger. I once rented a small furnished apartment that came with two twin beds – with my Mom’s help, I pushed them together, covered the gap with a foamy mattress cover and wrapped the whole thing in king-size sheets and blankets. It just wasn’t the same.

I want to own the real deal.