Whenever I write a column about guns, I get at least a few responses from people who don't call me names, who use proper grammar and present their arguments in a reasonable manner. So when I heard that a pastor in Louisville, Ky., was having a "Bring Your Gun To Church Day," I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. It wasn't easy.

The events unfolding in Iran have left the U.S. in something of a bind. Words appear to be our only option, but without care, words can create serious problems.

Since it apparently is going to rain forever in New England, we have had to get creative with our time. June has been a total washout. My 10-year-old is the king of solitaire, and my husband has developed a fixation with the lighting in our downstairs bathroom. I have been doing a little shopping, while trying to remember our new budgetary restrictions – we have affectionately named our financial state as “crash and burn.”

There are certain things in life that are simply unavoidable. Try as you might, you’ll never stop them — I’m talking about things like winter, or a steam engine, or another season of “Scrubs.” And then there’s my latest addition to this list: my children’s impending teenagerhood.

I was in that sort of half-asleep, not-yet-awake place one morning when I heard the sound of water dripping. At first I thought I was dreaming about a leaky faucet in the kids’ bathroom. Then, as I started to wake up, I thought it actually was a leaky faucet in the kids’ bathroom. But as I became fully awake, I realized it was actually the sound of water hitting the bathroom floor.

Weekly financial Q&A, with items on level pay, salesman tips and marital finances.

Military column from Bruce Coulter: “The VA system is confusing, overwhelming and is not at all friendly to veterans.” Reading the words of Gulf War veteran David Bohan, who testified before a house subcommittee last month brought on a feeling of déjà vu for me.

Did you ever get a dumb song lyric so stuck in your head you wanted to consult a neurosurgeon?
I worked alongside an editor for a couple years who had the mindless habit of humming, “The Girl from Ipanema,” under his breath several hundred times per day.

The miserably dwindling sands in the hourglass have left me with very little time to write this column. I have procrastinated and ignored the inevitable. When one thinks so little about a column beforehand that he has no subject by deadline, he must take what the Writing Piper gives him.

The miserably dwindling sands in the hourglass have left me with very little time to write this column. The Piper insisted I write about Michael Jackson.

First it was the teens on MySpace. Then they migrated to Facebook. Now little bird sounds are coming from their touch screen, GPS picture-taking music-playing “phones,” as Twitter becomes all the rage. It’s not just my teenagers, either. It’s my friends, colleagues and family members.

Jeanne Braham was my favorite teacher. I was a student in the first English class she taught at Allegheny College.

In the 1960s, there was a popular saying among students: Don’t trust anyone over 30. With the recession denying more college graduates work and relegating them to spending hours on Facebook each day, I would revise the saying upward. Don’t trust anyone over 40 – presumably they will be working and fully co-opted by the system by then.

When you hear certain stories or read statistics like the high pregnancy, school dropout rates, or criminal activity among teens in the inner-city, it's really not surprising.

Much like the “shock and awe” campaign that lit up the Baghdad night in March 2003, any initial military clash between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic of Iran would quickly downgrade into a certifiable “turkey shoot.”