Mary Phillips-Sandy lives here.

…it’s not my favorite skyscraper, it’s not the roof of the Met, it’s not the bridges, it’s not the statuary. Mostly it’s the bleary light on the tiles and the free papers in the gutter and the sharp smell of dyed carnations. It’s the traffic island at the mouth of Second Avenue and the sensation [...]

Obviously — obviously — I saw and bookmarked the WaPo “where is he now” story on John Edwards. And obviously (obviously!) I made mental note of the money quote: Yet as he spends his days in his family’s mansion on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, N.C., Edwards can’t help but fret about how Washington and [...]

Ha, so, this. I don’t condone crazed overreaction to innocent mistakes, nor do I “row with a lot of other women who share the same first name,” but I may as well take this opportunity to lay out the guidelines for using my nickname, which, if you have to ask “what’s your nickname,” the answer [...]

Cashier: That be all? Me: Yes, thanks. Cashier: These are two for $2, you know. Me: Yeah. I saw. Cashier: So you want a second one? Me: No, thanks. Cashier [brief pause for befuddlement]: But they’re $1.50 each. You can get two for $2. It’s cheaper to get two. Me: But I only want one. [...]

Developments in the burgeoning Portland* blogroll, of which this Nut House is** a part: a tempest flares and is calmed (?) over at the anonymous Point (who is this fractious critic?). Meanwhile, someone or something who is obviously (?) a pseudonym is reviewing baked goods on the city’s preeminent music blog (??). (Related, will I [...]

All day long people have been chatting and Facebooking and Twittering and starting phone calls with discussions of the rain, and yet no one has taken the initiative to flap-ball-change down the street, at least not in Portland, at least not that I’ve seen.

…there was a Bavarian immigrant’s dry-goods shop in Montgomery, Alabama. Reading such things makes me wonder: Decades from now, will upstart politicians deliver a variant of John Edwards’ “I Had a Mill” speech, only substituting “investment bank” for “mill”? My father worked 120 hours a week, fighting his way up the ranks from analyst to [...]

Mary Phillips~Sandy has a certain flair.

…would be “everything makes me angry.” Only misspelled. And with six exclamation points.

I’ve had it three times in the past six years. Irregular intervals. No, no reason, really. Just one of those little statistics I have filed in the back of my mind.