Why is it still socially un-acceptable to discuss your personal financial security as a married woman?

I’ve had two conversations in the past couple months that have set off a bit of a lightbulb in my brain when I realized that it still isn’t socially acceptable to discuss your personal financial security as a married woman. I will tell you why that’s not cool. (Beware of gendered language ahead…)

How dare you enjoy your own culture

Remember that one time when Nicki Minaj wore a feathered headdress to announce her PinkPrint tour? A lot of people said, “Whoa, girl, why are you wearing a Native American headdress? Not cool, that’s not yours.”

Then other people said, “Simmer down, that’s not Native American, that’s a carnival headdress; it’s cool because she was born in Trinidad.”

It’s the Tumblr trap of trying to stop cultural appropriation in its tracks — but accidentally giving people flack for enjoying their own culture.

Where, when, and how to hunt for morels

If you’ve never had the pleasure of eating a morel mushroom sautéed in butter, you need to go mushroom hunting. Like, now. Or at least the next time they’re in season.

Learning how to prune my everbearing raspberries

The tricky thing about everbearing raspberries is that, unlike summer-bearing raspberries that produce one big crop in late summer, these plants give two smaller crops per year. You can pretty much prune summer-bearing raspberries all the way to the ground in the winter, but if you want both crops from the everbearing, you have to know which canes to cut to the ground and which to prune back carefully and by how much.

How to start from seed

I’ve got a lot of seeds I haven’t used up from the past two or three years, and I promised myself I wouldn’t buy more until I’ve used what I’ve got. With such a variety of ages and sources, there’s no telling what will make it to harvest, especially with the older seeds. But it’s either throw them away or throw them in dirt to see what happens. Here’s my general plan of attack for starting anything from seed…

Rescuing already-sprouted tulip bulbs

A spell of weirdly warm weather got me rummaging around in my little gardening closet, and I stumbled across something that would fill any home gardener with horror. I’d completely forgotten that I had bought a bunch of tulip and hyacinth bulbs late last summer.

I shaved my head, and I feel beautiful

This past Halloween, I shaved my head for my costume.

It’s something that I’ve thought of doing for years. A little bit daring, really easy to do, and wouldn’t it be fun to see what my head looked like underneath the hair?

Want to get to know your neighbors? Start a crazy-stupid, summer-long, front-yard project

Over the course of 12 weekends, we transformed our weed-infested front yard into a landscaped, welcoming entrance to our home. In addition to a nice-looking lil front yard (and a racer-back tan that’s never going to go away), we also got an unforeseen benefit: WE KNOW WHO OUR NEIGHBORS ARE NOW.