I have never been a fan of vacations. Why would I need a vacation from my life if I like my life?

Also, I'm a fanatic about routine. After years of obsessive research about what makes people happy, I have determined that self-discipline is the key to happiness. And self-discipline is really difficult, but not in the context of routine. So I love routine and I hate vacations because they disrupt routine.

So I was surprised when the Hampton Inn offered me free nights in any hotel if I would write about it. After all, it's not just that I don't like vacations. Also, I'm the person who wrote about why I think travel is a waste of time, and one of the most popular posts on this blog about vacations is why it's okay to work during vacation.

But now that I am basically raising farm boys, I am careful to take them to the city so they know what it's like. Digression: I have heard that one of the biggest problems the Ivy League has with attracting kids from rural America is the rural kids with high enough test scores simply can't handle living in a city – yes, New Haven counts as a city to a farm kid. So while you are sending your kids to SAT tutors to get your kids into college, I'll be sending my kids to ride NYC subways.

So, back to the hotel. I used the free offer this week to stay in the Skokie, IL Hampton Inn while I was at Suzuki cello camp with my son. That's right. This is my idea of vacation for my kid. He's only six years old, so he doesn't know other kids are going to Disney World.

We do five hours of cello lessons during the day, and then we come back to our hotel. And I have to say, he totally loves the hotel.

The whole day is very structured for my son. So when we come back, I let him do whatever he wants until bed time. (more…)

If you ask the Farmer, he would tell you that I was really really nice to him last week while he was in bed, immobile, strung out on six Percocet a day. I made him pies, and French toast, and meat at every meal because there is no amount of Percocet that would make him not want to eat meat.

I watched gunslinger movies with him when he was groggy and I made sure to talk only about innocuous topics like the state of world politics, something that we’d never fight about.

I can’t tell you everything went smoothly. I forgot to let the chickens out a few days. I lost the new bag of Cat Chow and served ground beef for two days of heaven on earth for the cats. And, there were a few times the goats got into the house. But we figured out how to handle everything.

Until the Farmer felt better: His back didn’t hurt so he wanted to work. So, he just stopped taking the Percocet. Cold turkey. And because we live in the country, the doctor gave the Farmer sixty Percocet pills with no instructions for how to go off narcotics. (more…)

My garden is full of vegetables that I never would have guessed I could grow. There is so much that I am not sure what to do with it all.

Because the acorn falls close to the tree, my son decided he wanted to sell rhubarb at our local farmers market. To be clear, a farmers market looks very different in a community of farmers. It's very unregulated, and people sell stuff off their trucks. Also, two farms sell heirloom rhubarb, ours and one owned by an Amish family. If you haven't noticed, the Amish are very good at what they do. They know their customers, and they always have something fun to sell, no matter what's in season.

My relationship with my customers centers on my ability to always piss off someone, no matter if it's on my blog or in person. To make up for that, I tied ribbons around the rhubarb. I think the only thing I accomplished was a nice picture.

My son is enterprising, though. And he realized that what people really want is our eggs. (Farm eggs are way better than supermarket eggs — even organic ones.) So he sold those at the market, and we took the rhubarb home. (more…)

You are probably wondering if I think about Melissa having an affair with the Farmer.

I do. I think about it all the time.

As a preventive measure I tell the farmer that if he cheats on me, I’ll stay with him. Forever. I’ll never leave him. He’ll be stuck on the farm with me, in misery. I try to create a scene in his head like a Beckett play:  Two characters isolated from the world, in a room, making each other miserable.

Melissa and the Farmer always assure me that they will never do that.

One night, in bed alone, I ask the Farmer: “Do you think about having sex with Melissa?”

He says, “Well, I notice her body. But I don’t think about having sex with her.”

I say, “Of course you notice her body. She has a size 00 waist and a size C bra cup.”

“Well, okay. Then stop talking to me all the time about having sex with her and then I’ll be less likely to think about it.” (more…)

Ten years ago, when I was pitching my book to publishers, one publisher leaned back in his chair and said, "I don't get it, she's never worked in Human Resources, she's not part of Generation Y, and we can't even figure out what her career is. So how is she qualified to give career advice to young people?"

I got sweaty. I had pretty much run out of money, and I had spent my last dollar on getting clothes that would hide that I was pregnant. Every time I thought about this book deal falling through, I felt sick.

My agent said, "She is great at seeing trends. She sees trends before everyone else. Generation Y is going to be huge in the workplace. Alternative careers are going to be huge. She is the only person talking about it. She is a franchise. She will be writing books about trendspotting for the rest of her life."

I could have hugged my agent. I had never thought of myself the way she described me. I mostly just thought of myself as someone who couldn't even handle playing on the professional beach volleyball tour for more than a year.

So, with my agent's endorsement (sort of—I think she has fired me because of my insolence when it comes to not following publishing industry conventions) I present my three favorite trends of this year:

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