That the link on Serena Williams directs me to a blog post critiquing an article, but there's no link to the actual article. Even on the blog, the link to the article doesn't go anywhere.

I would have liked to have read the original article to see what the criteria for placement on the list were. It's kind of hard to figure out if I agree or disagree without having read it.

But what is the point of having something that's well-crafted? Pride in ownership? Aesthetic appreciation? Seems to me like a mislaid investment of one's discernment.

I think there is some value in it. I don't have a dining room (my husband took it over for a music studio), so I have a kitchen table, made by hand by an artist named David Marsh. It's a little gaudy, with baubles and paint all over it, but I love it and treat it like an heirloom. I spent entirely too much money on it.

If anyone cares, here's what his furniture looks like: http://ethnicarts.com/david-marsh-furniture-c-14

I certainly wouldn't do the whole house with his stuff, and I can't afford it anyway. But, having something that I love and I use every day is very valuable to me.

Unless you consider paying 10 bucks for a two inch wooden train cheap, they are so not cheap. It costs hundreds of dollars to assemble a set of those wooden trains. I've done it.

I live in the DC area and recently went shopping for furniture. I considered IKEA, but I did want better quality than that. However, when doing searches online for stores in my area, I noticed that more than a few of them have gone out of business. There are high-end furniture places, like Ethan Allen, but with a budget of about 5000.00 for an entire room, half of my money would be taken up with just the cost of the sofa. Skan (which we like to call "Ikea for grownups") went out of business a few years ago and even Marlo is gone. The choice that I had was IKEA, or a similar store, like Room Store or Z furniture, or go very high end and deal with doubling my furniture cost. It's crazy.

Personally, I kind of hate IKEA because I'm terrible at assembly. I also would prefer quality furniture that will last. However, if faced with the decision to buy something cheaper now or sit in an empty room while I save for 2 years, I'll go for the cheaper stuff and hope to save for something better down the road a bit. I don't think I'm alone in that.

I lost both my parents when I was in high school, and I can't say that I understand this letter at all. Maybe I'm not the right kind of orphan or something.

It's funny, I was thinking recently about what, if anything, distinguishes my approach to relationships from people who did not lose parents when young. The one thing I could think of is that I have a tendency to walk away from relationships or be very apathetic about keeping in touch with people after I've moved on in life. I thought that maybe because I got used to losing people early on, it was easier to dismiss people from my life. Or maybe I'm just an asshole, but it's a theory.

In any event, I just celebrated 9 years of marriage last week, and I don't believe that I'm yearning for some special trapeze type of love. I'm good. So, perhaps people just shouldn't generalize.

to the Melissa Joan Hart story, she says that it took her 14 months to lose her weight. That's not exactly the type of instant loss the article makes it out to be. It's actually quite a bit longer than the 6 months that the article cites as the average amount of time that it takes a woman to lose baby weight.

I don't buy the tabloids, but I do look at them in line sometimes. They are actually somewhat comforting to me-- I don't have a personal trainer or chef, and still managed to lose baby weight (albeit in a time frame closer to Melissa Joan Harts' than to other celebrities). Trying to lose baby weight, or really any unwanted weight is a pretty widely-held concern, so it's nice to see how the famous folks deal with it, I guess. In the end, though, how I deal with my life is a world away from how the famous people deal with theirs.

It's that many women don't wear pants that actually fit them. For most women, if you wear pants too small, you're going to end up with the nasty muffin top and other jeans-related maladies. Just buy pants that fit!

I managed to lose a little bit of weight recently and went pant shopping. Although I managed to squeeze myself into a pair of pants in a size I hadn't worn since pre-pregnancy, they were tight and uncomfortable and made me look like I was wearing a sausage casing. I went a couple of sizes larger, and suddenly a I looked a whole lot better.

It always seemed that sometimes an editor would get around starring some letters and sometimes not. I've seen some awesome letters without stars.

My only star came from a letter I wrote when I was drunk. Go figure.