By Diane Laney Fitzpatrick – I took  a rare, long vacation overseas and decided to unplug. And by unplug, I don’t mean that I waited until I got over there to realize that the Italians and the French don’t have normal electrical sockets. (They don’t, by the way, but I arrived prepared with six adapters and two converters, yet still couldn’t get my daughter’s hair straightener to work, so I had to buy a French hair straightener. The French charge way too much for straight hair.) No, by unplug I mean I decided to go without TV, phone, texting, Facebooking, Tweeting and other modern means of communication.

By Diane Laney Fitzpatrick – Stores have gone survey-prize crazy. Is it me? Don’t I recall receipts being way shorter and retail stores not giving two hoots about what my opinion was?

By Diane Laney Fitzpatrick – Want to know how American you really are? See if you can answer these questions.

By Diane Laney Fitzpatrick — Get a whiff of change on a New York cab ride in a yellow Lexus. The seats weren’t ripped, and it smelled like something that was definitely not …

By Diane Laney Fitzpatrick — Attention airport security: Florida clothes in carry-on may cause blindness.

By Diane Laney Fitzpatrick — Poor Helen Thomas. She’s really in it up to her neck, isn’t she? She said something anti-Semitic and even though it was obviously the confused rantings of a 125-year-old woman, it still didn’t come out very good. It caused her to quit her job, one she’s had since Kennedy was president. We’re talking about a major “I-can’t-believe-I-said-that-on-camera” moment, when it ends a career that began when Jackie was wearing the pink pillbox hat.

By Diane Laney Fitzpatrick – Believe it or not, there are still drive-in movie theaters all over the country. Not where you live, of course, but everywhere else. There are lists online of all the drive-ins all over the heartland. At first glance, you might think there are tons of them, but many of the listings have “dark” written after them. As if they’re a Broadway theater and they could open back up as soon as the actors get a little rest.

By Diane Laney Fitzpatrick – Every morning, I turn on my car radio while I’m driving my daughter to school and I listen to Lisa Stewart report the local sports news. This most recent sore throat was a really bad one. When she signed off with her signature, “That’s your 88.9 FM sports minute – I’m Lisa Stewart” I whimpered a little bit and wanted to run a cup of hot herbal tea with honey and lemon over to the studio for her.

By Diane Laney Fitzpatrick — I’m on Day 4 of having no natural gas coming into our house. On the plus side, I now know more about my house and what energy sources power which appliances and systems. In the negative column, I have developed an unhealthy Stockholm-Syndrome relationship with natural gas and I would do something illegal and immoral for it, if it would just come back to my house.

I was reading a column at FloridaThinks.com about bill collectors (“Have You No Decency, Sir?”) and I’m not an angry person; I don’t get all in a rage when I read stuff. But I was actually getting a little hot under the collar from reading about debt collectors who harass people about unpaid bills. I myself am fortunate in that I pay my bills. Not because I’m better than anyone else, but because I am able. But being from Youngstown, Ohio, I know lots of people who have been laid off from their jobs and were unable to pay their bills. My friend Arlene is a legend in my own mind for personally chasing off a repo man who tried to take her car in the middle of the night. I think she may have been wielding a hockey stick or a broom.

I was sitting in the color room of my salon the other day, trying to figure out whether the plastic from the earpieces of my reading glasses would react with hair dye and cause me to become an accidental LA Law redhead around the temples, when one of the stylists came around collecting old hair. She said she was going to send it to this place where they’re going to stuff human hair into pantyhose and line them up on the shoreline to absorb the oil when it washes up.

Our yard is infested with snakes. We have rats, too, and cockroaches, lizards, Palmetto bugs, killer bees, and I’ve been told that because we have a large pond in our neighborhood, alligators are not out of the question. Strangely, we have almost no mosquitoes. So while danger lurks behind every cabinet door, it’s actually more pleasant to eat outside here. But SNAKES!!!! …

Steve Jobs orchestrates an over-the-top hype for the iPad to the point where I’m barely able to carry out daily bodily functions, I’m so excited about it. He gets us all at the edge of our seats, putting in a rare Howard-Hughes-like appearance in that black mock-turtleneck and showing us how magical this thing will be. But when will it arrive?

Who runs to CVS at 11 p.m. and spends $9.50 for a quart of ice cream? The desperate and rich, that’s who. CVS charges that because it knows they’ll pay it.

Here are some tips to get some writing done when you don’t have a boss standing over you looking at his watch, and mine don’t involve getting up before 6 a.m.