I was recently asked what I have against shopping malls. “What are you, some kind of commie?” “You have something against capitalism?!” “Don’t you know that malls are what make the world go round?!”

My answers:
1) Stay on topic
2) Sort of, but we’re talking about my aversion to MALLS
3) Isn’t that taught in seventh grade science?

So let’s examine my mall issues, shall we? I’m not against buying/selling/trading or eating greasy hot dogs on a stick for that matter. Sure, I prefer to buy my Steve Madden platforms online, but that’s just laziness, not fear. Malls are fine. Overpriced, but fine. I don’t even mind the occasional “Excuse me but would you like to sign up for Cricket and receive a free Samsung phone?”

My problem is with the Read on …

I completely abhor raking leaves. It comes from growing up in Maryland, where there are a LOT of leaves, and a LOT of wet, gooey leaves. In fact, when Bryan asked me to marry him, I said yes only on the condition that I would NEVER have to rake another leaf again. And Bryan had held true to that promise for the most part.

Except here in Colorado, we have lovely, dry, crunchy leaves. So I actually pitch in every once in a while. Every ONCE in a GREAT while.

And now we have a 5-year-old minion to do our bidding.

So the boys did a bunch of raking this weekend. And bagging. And raking. And bagging. And I yelled “woo hoo!” from the porch.

Until we had a gigantic pile of bagged leaves sitting on the front lawn. Declan was amazed at how many bags we had from our little yard. (So were we.) Read on …