I so agree!!! Every year we have a barbecue. I've stopped asking guests to bring a dish, as they invariably bring something barely edible picked up from the grocery deli on the way over, the worst offender being the mushy, overly-sweet, tubbed excuse for potato salad. Sure, they still bring things, but I always make sure there is plenty of homemade potato salad! Thanks, Mr. Keillor. This needed to be said out loud.

Moving? Who's moving? We're $30,000 underwater in our house. Guess we might as well invest in that oak bookcase!

Unless the writer herself is using the term ironically, I cannot quite understand why she continually refers to the "satire" in these books. The most frightening aspect of these screeds as I see it, is that they are, in fact, intended to be completely & utterly, heart-attack serious. Some of these wackos may be chuckling inside their rotten little hearts as they cash their royalty checks, but the reader is not supposed to detect any "satire" in these books.

Where the writer reads satire, I read frighteningly serious.

I'm a little taken aback by the venom flying over the idea of parental leave. It's not a vacation, and it's not, truly, for the parents. It's for the child. Unless anyone thinks that putting a week old infant in the care of a daycare worker making slave wages with no benefits is a good idea, for the sake of the children, who, by the way, were not asked to be born, and are completely helpless and dependent upon their parents to care for them, AND, who we hope will someday grow into healthy adults who can run this country of ours, some sort of paid parental leave would only benefit our country. Try to see the forest through the trees, people.