Picturepocket's Blog

Tag: culture

  • Neighborly

    Today I want to talk about our Spanish-speaking neighbors to the South. Not Mexico, the literal neighbors that live next door to us on our southside. They have lived there ever since we moved into the house nearly 10 years ago.  The adults don’t speak much English, but they’re nice, and we have had a…

  • Running the Numbers

    Through the activity of selling life insurance, I have been given a fascinating window into how people are doing. In order to qualify someone to buy insurance, I have to gather information about age, weight, prescriptions and debt-to-income ratio and plug it into my computer. The prices are then based on actuarial tables pulled from…

  • Old Year, New Me

    This year has a few leftover days, so I am going to use them to catch up on all the reflecting I’ve been putting off. To be honest this year was a mixed bag. We got hit a couple of financial and social setbacks in the spring. Both relationships and circumstances left us feeling in…

  • Unreliable Narrators

    Netflix has dropped a movie about domestic violence right into the mix of holiday romances.  It Ends with Us has all the trappings of a classic Hallmark story.  It introduces a girl with a floral name opening up a flower shop and choosing between two handsome men, but this story is not all roses.  Pretty…

  • Bad Romance

    Recently there has been an uptick in an online hustle called a romance scam. It is usually starts over social media where someone will get an unsolicited compliment from someone pretending to be in love with them. The pictures are too pretty and everything is too easy. Soon there the is a wedding proposal, and…

  • Of Men & Gods

    If you’ve gotten a glimpse of Netflix’s Kaos and Jeff Goldblum playing Zeus, you’re in for a wild time. It’s a modern retelling of some of the Greek and Roman myths. It would even be a comedy, if it didn’t all feel so familiar. Hera and Zeus live on a mountaintop mansion that looks like…

  • The Hard Rest

    With school starting next week, I finally did a reset in the kids’ room.  On Monday and Tuesday, we went through all of the clothes and got rid of the fall and winter clothing they outgrew since last year. We also pulled anything lighter that won’t make it next to summer, size-wise. We were rewarded…

  • Faux Pas

    I thoroughly enjoyed the Olympics this year. One of my favorite parts about the games was the diversity of people participating and the variety of activities.  What I want to talk about is one of the controversies of this year’s Olympics. Not that controversy, I did not watch the opening ceremonies. Instead, I want…

  • Don’t Mind the Cursive

    I keep seeing posts from folks bemoaning the loss of cursive and  complaining about what books the kids these days are or aren’t reading. I guess that Facebook has become a place to vent frustrations about the educations Gen Z and Alpha. So here’s mine: please stop. Seriously, as a parent of two school children,…

  • Approval Rating

    Now is the time when we hear of politicians and their approval rating by the population. These numbers are gained by doing surveys. Someone running for office needs at least half of the voting populace to approve of them during the first week of November.  But how do the rest of us stack up, and…