A case of the Mondays

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.

Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can.

Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit

to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nashville home to BIG spenders

Woo-eee, do Nashvillians like to spend money!

According to Bundle.com, a site that lets you compare your own spending habits with those around the nation, Nashville ranks seventh on the list of the 25 top-spending cities. Austin, Texas, ranked No. 1. Nashville ranked higher than Miami, San Francisco or L.A.

The list ranks mostly discretionary spending and does not include mortgage, insurance or health insurance. What surprised me is that most of it is spent on eating out.

In Nashville, residents spend a little more than $500 per month dining out. But in my home county, Williamson, residents spend an unbelievable $700 per month eating out.

I can't even imagine. The things we could do with $700 a month...

This might be why Tennessee ranks second in the U.S. in personal bankruptcies.

All this just makes me want to hurry up and write my post, A Case For Cooking.

Small victories

The best way to bond with your 13-year-old son is when he's home for a sick day.

One of my twins called me to come get him in the middle of the day Tuesday. He came home and was VERY ill all afternoon. Then he slept without moving one bit for two solid hours.

It was like one of those red storm lines loving across the TV weather radar screen. A few hours of upheaval and disturbance and then ... peace.

He couldn't go to school Wednesday because he was so weak and needed rest. So I took full advantage of his weakened state and babied him like he's never been babied before. I tucked him in, brought him gallons of Gatorade upon request and made the best toast in the history of toast. And he let me.

When he left for school this morning, I went in to hug him, and he didn't recoil the way he usually does.

I call that a breakthrough.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

The twins will be in eighth grade next year. They get to choose two of their classes. The choices aren't as clear as you might think.

Why hasn't this house sold?

At first glance, it's probably obvious why this house hasn't sold. It's located on a heavily traveled section of Moores Lane, which has become a shortcut from Nolensville and is a major connector road between East Brentwood and Cool Springs. Any time you'd want to get out of the driveway, you'd have to steel yourself.

Upon entering, you'd probably roll your eyes at the dated fixtures. The interior apparently has not been changed much since the original owners moved in in 1973.

EVEN SO, it is a perfect ranch on nearly two acres in Brentwood. It has four bedrooms and more than 3,000 square feet. The property is next door to a historic home, and it overlooks a golf course. At $389,983, it is priced for renovation (for Brentwood).

It's probably not cheap enough and the location's too difficult for a flip, but it'd be great for a family or empty-nesters.

So what's the deal?

Farewell, Fess Parker

It will be a tragic day in our house if Owen finds out that Fess Parker passed away.

Fess Parker is the actor who played Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone in those famous Disney series. We discovered Davy accidentally in the Brentwood Library one day, when Owen and I were perusing the free movies to check out. I noticed the silver spine of the special edition DVD of the Davy Crockett box set, which had six movies on it. It stood out from the primary colors of all the usual kids' shows, and I showed it to Owen.

I could tell that, 50 years later, Fess' pioneer gear, handsome gaze and confident gun pose on the cover were working their magic on my then-5-year-old. Of course, we brought it home.

I think we watched the entire thing straight through that day, and were still watching when my older boys came home from school that afternoon. They got caught up in the depiction of pioneer courage, the friendship between Davy and Georgie, portrayed by the always awesome Buddy Ebsen, and intense but not gory battles between Davy and The Bad Guys.

I eventually had to order our own copy of that DVD so as not to deprive the other Brentwood children from their own Davy experience.

Owen wanted go as Davy on Halloween that year, so I ordered him an amazing costume that he still tries to wear around the house. It kind of works, if you like your Davy Crockett to be clad in buckskin capri pants.

The hat, of course, would be the key to the costume, and the fake fur mess that came with the one I ordered looked like a bad toupee when Owen put it on. So I, of course, scoured the Internet for a better one.

Guess what I found? A website for Fess Parker's winery, which happened to sell authentic coonskin caps.

That hat is considered a true treasure in our house, and it will always be a part of Burgin family history.

Nashville is so Gwyneth

Gwyneth Paltrow has been spending the past few months in Nashville filming a movie called Love Don't Let Me Down with Tim McGraw, and she wrote detailed reviews of her favorite Nashvegas experiences on her GOOP website.

Lots of folks online make fun of GOOP for being about as full of out-of-touch advice as O Magazine, but I enjoyed reading her thoughts on places I might actually visit.

See what you think!

Erin go blah!

I do not love St. Patrick's Day because it has always started off badly in my house.

Green is not a standard color in my family's wardrobe. That means my kids can't easily participate in the holiday's main activity (besides drinking beer), which is wearing green.

Therefore, you can always guarantee that I will begin every March 17 with a stressful dash around the house looking for any shirt in the green family.

Except for the years when I went to Snowden Jr. High School, where our mascot was the Greenies, I have always had to wear something with a green stripe or green letters or green checks.

I spend the day fending off pinchers by saying, "Nope, wait, see this? This little thread right here is green!"

My kids are doing it, too. My youngest, who was the most into the wearing of the green, had to choose between his older brother's too-big gym shirt from Brentwood Middle School or a too-small green T-shirt of his that I'd dug out of a Goodwill bag.

If I were smart, I'd go spend a little green on something green for next year.

Why hasn't this house sold?

For fun, I'm going to start an occasional feature in which I ask, "Why hasn't this house sold?"

It gives me a chance to share one of my weird hobbies, obsessing over local real estate.

When the opportunity presents itself, I'll post a little blurb about a house that I, as a more than casual observer but not a professional, think is a diamond in the rough and shouldn't still be on the market.

Of course, I'm not privy to most of the details about these listings, so there may be a real problem such as liens or a stubborn owner. Other than that, I'm just going on the facts presented by the agent.

Case in point: 304 Deerwood Lane in Brentwood.

For a mere $595,000, the buyer would get more than 5,000 square feet and 3 acres on a peaceful, prestigious road hidden away on the west side of Brentwood. Other homes in this area are listed for twice as much.

I will admit that the exterior is not traditional, there is an indoor pool instead of a bonus room, which is weird, and the lot is sloping. Also, the interior fixtures look like something the pope's little brother might have chosen. OTHER THAN THAT, why hasn't this house sold?

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

I wrote a column for Brentwood Home Page about one of the reasons I haven't been blogging as much lately. You can find it here.

I thought you sent it

Basketball season is finally over, at least for my boys. And my husband.

For the past few months, Tim has coached the twins' rec league team, which means I acted as coach's assistant.

Recreational sports leagues are always in need of coaches, and now I know why. It takes the entire family to coach a kid's team.

We didn't really plan for Tim to coach. We just thought the older boys would be playing on a team together. But it ended up that most of the boys from the last team they played on moved to a different team, and my boys weren't invited.

Mason didn't really like that, so he started organizing his own team in the school cafeteria. I was just so excited that he was taking the initiative and organizing it all on his own that I didn't even really hear him when he casually mentioned that they would need a coach. Then my husband laid down some big boy challenge about how he'd coach if Mason brought him a complete roster.

So Mason did. The roster had 11 boys on it, which, if you know even a little bit about basketball, you know means Tim would have to work really hard to be sure everyone got playing time.

But it's the administrative side of coaching that does him in every time. In these modern times, coaches don't have to call each parent anymore. You can just do everything by e-mail, which is my preference anyway. At our house, however, the creation of our bball team coincided with the acquisition of my new laptop. So our e-mail communications suffered.

I'll just admit it. We never set up a basketball group, so every time I'd need to e-mail the team, I'd have to reinvent the wheel, searching my sent file or my deleted file for an previous e-mail we'd sent to the team. EVERY SINGLE TIME. A couple of times early in the season, we'd use a jump drive and travel from laptop to the old desktop to e-mail or print stuff. Total nightmare.

This wouldn't be so bad if we had joined the YMCA league, but we were playing in the West Nashville Sports League, which is huge and comprises hundreds of teams from all around Middle Tennessee. It also is operated pretty much at the discretion of its boss, so e-mails from him about game time or location changes are many and often.

In the end, it worked out fine. They boys played and had fun. We all adapted, and no one was out of the loop, despite our e-mail slackery.

Still, I'm betting it'll be a while before Tim volunteers to coach again.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Who knew so much anxiety could precede a birthday party? And I wasn't even hosting!