Ashley Haugen

On March 28, 2009, at exactly 11:14 p.m., I was asleep in bed when I heard my husband Scott’s cell phone ring on the night table next to him. A heavy sleeper, he didn’t budge, but I thought the late-night phone call was strange, so I climbed over whim and took a peek at the caller ID. It was his brother Ryan. Odd, I thought. The two don’t talk too terribly often, but when they do, it’s usually at a decent hour.

MARCI AND DAVID!!

Chalk it Up

After the wedding dust settles and it’s back to the daily grind, help the happy couple keep tabs on each other with their very own His and Hers chalkboards. The gender-specific signs are perfect for honey-do lists or sweet nothings to remind them why they fell in love. Available at uncommongoods.com for $30.
 

Storytellers

“Oh, WAIT! WAIT! WAIT!” my friend Leila said as we were getting off the phone the other day.

“What?” I replied, stopping short of hanging up on her.

“I forgot to tell you!” she said excitedly. “Annie got married!”

Her sister Annie, a writer living in New York, met a guy a few months ago and had reportedly traveled to Dubai to visit a friend and then met up with aforementioned “guy” in India, where they tied the knot.

It was March of 1982. The moving vans arrived at our new house on Knox Valley Drive to deliver the contents of our family of five’s new home. Once the bikes were located and off-loaded, my sibs and I jumped on and began riding around in the garage, which led to the cement-floored basement. While my parents delegated which boxes went where, my brother, sister, and I followed each other around, riding in and out of the dark, damp nooks and crannies of our new home’s bottom-most space.

A few years ago I read a newspaper article about how “girl groups” were becoming more popular. Not to be confused with boy bands, the girl groups the article mentioned were literally that: groups of girls who got together to hang out, catch up, bond. The writer of the article interviewed several different women from a variety of groups. One group gets together once a month for dinner, taking turns with who picks the restaurant. Another group formed a book club, and they rotate whose house they meet at and who selects the next title.

Got the travel bug but not the airline budget? Load up the car, and check out these car-close destinations.

Have Taintor, Will Travel — Anne Taintor corners the market for vintage humor. Her trademark style — classic pics coupled with smarty-pants captions (“Wow! I get to give birth AND change diapers!”) — adds a touch of fun to any trip. Taintor’s travel line includes passport covers, cosmetic bags, coin purses, luggage tags and anything else a self-assured globetrot-ess might need. Oh, and don’t forget her sassy flasks!

We have a running joke in our family. Whenever we’re out somewhere, my dad — an extrovert in every sense of the word — takes on the accents of those with whom he’s speaking. If we’re talking to someone from the Deep South, he suddenly sounds like he was born on the bayou. Chatting it up with a New Yorker, he’s instantly Tony Soprano. And one time, when we were all dining at a lovely Japanese restaurant in Atlanta, Dad channeled Mr. Miyagi and gabbed with the server for quite a while.