I'm Not Hannah

In Order to Make It Through the Election Season

2012-01-26T08:27:00.001-05:00

...there are a couple of things we need to discuss. See, I've been engaged in a series of "debates" on Facebook. It's that time of year, you know...the earth is stirring, the sun is coming back, and folks are acting like asshats because the election season has begun. In the past twenty-four hours, I've been accused of being ignorant (TWICE...lawsy), on drugs, stupid, and un-American. I've also been advised (by the same person) that I should pray to God that we get a God-fearing man in the White House next year. Sigh.

I can't say that the way in which I engaged my...er...debate opponent was nice. But the truth is that I'm just ANGRY. (This next part is taken directly from a Facebook convo I've been having, so if you and I are Facebook friends, look away or file your fingernails or go get a snack while I go on this diatribe. Just skip to the list, mkay?) I've spent three years listening tolies and half-hidden bigotry and insults regarding the man for whom I voted. Ihave been called ignorant, un-American, a sheep, and a friend of Satan (in whomI don't even believe.) I've ground my teeth and tried very, very hard to be aslevel-headed and kind to the people with whom I disagree as I can. I have triedto rise above the muck that gets slung at me day after day after day by peoplewho call themselves Christians or who say they love me. And I'm sick to deathof it.

I'm tired of trying to come up with yet another way toexplain the first amendment (never mind the 14th or 10th) to people who claimthey want absolute freedom from the Federal government while demanding anevangelical Christian president, Congress, and Supreme Court. I'm tired ofasking for proof that our president is Muslim or Kenyan or Communist orSocialist. I'm tired of arguing that the president is, in fact, a black manbecause his father was from Africa. I'm tired of people bringing up thepresident's childhood and then saying that a candidate's past means nothing--inany context. I'm tired of trying so dang hard to act as Jesus instructed hisfollowers to behave in Mark when I'm not one of his followers--and his followerscall me stupid or ask if I'm on drugs. I'm tired of ignorance masquerading asintelligence, of meanness masquerading as debate, and of prejudice masqueradingas righteous fear.

So I've simply decided to let my anger have a littlefree rein. If folks want to come at me with thoughtful, reasoned, intelligent,fact-based criticism (and there is PLENTY to be had, I know) of the man forwhom I will vote this year, I will engage them likewise. However, if the bestsomebody has is lies about a man's religious belief and skewed facts about jobperformance they got in a chain email...let's just say I'm going to let myinner Morrigan out for a bit.

If you don't enjoy experiencing me go all three-aspect on you, I suggest you do the following:

Don't pretend that you are interested in any sort of intelligent conversation if you want to tell me that monotheism is compatible with science during a political discussion. Because...really? The only monotheistic religions present in the Western world right now feature a dude getting swallowed by a whale and living to tell about it, a god making people out of seven different colors of dirt, and a deity who is killed and is buried and then comes back. All of that sounds to me, with respect, like science FICTION, but not, in any way, science. If you want to believe that science and monotheism are BFFs, I suggest you consult Galileo or the lawyers in the Scopes monkey trial. I am not in any way knocking monotheism (follow your bliss, my friends), but to say that it's compatible with science is to have basically missed the last...er...500 years or so of world history. During that time, monotheists regularly enjoyed imprisoning and/or making social pariahs out of scientists (many of whom were "good" Christians, Jews, or Muslims.) Again, I am not trashing monotheism. But to suggest that monotheism is more compatible with science than, say, an earth-based faith during a political conversation is baseless and missing the point of monotheism at best and, at worst, makes you look like a complete idiot. I do not suffer idiots any more.
Don't try to make any of the following terms mean the same thing: conservative/Republican, liberal/Democrat, liberal/atheist, conservative/Christian, progressive/liberal, liberal/asshat, Republican/asshat. There are liberal Republicans (the ones who believe that Americans deserve equal treatment under the law regardless of societal norms.) There are conservative Democrats. (Helllloooo, Ben Nelson.) There are Republican atheists who take the separation of church and state seriously. There are liberal Christians who can (and do) cite numerous Scripture for their political beliefs that dictate the party for which they vote. I know a metric buttload of conservative Pagans. Two of the biggest turds (in terms of political discourse) I know are a conservative Republican and a progressive Democrat (and watching them snipe at each other makes me want to eat my own face.) Our Founding Fathers were progressive: they sought PROGRESS away from a stifling political system. They also owned slaves and didn't count women as human beings when it came to political representation. They were Christians who refused to give our country a religious affiliation and who, when drafting a motto for our country, came up with one that is pretty much Communism in a nut shell. My point is: do your dang research and stop listening to what "they" tell you.
Pretend I didn't yell, "My president has got BIG BRASS CAJONES!" during the State of the Union Address.
Ahem.
Don't argue with me that a person's private life is their private life and shouldn't have any bearing on their presidency and back that argument up with the statement that you have to have a person who prays the way that you pray in the White House and that a president's college transcript should be public domain. I mean, you CAN argue with me about that, but then I'll have to point out your vast hypocrisy and make you all flustered so that you type in all caps. I'd hate to do that, mainly because it causes eye strain, but also because it makes you accuse me of smoking Teh Drugs, and I don't smoke anything these days. Heck, I don't even smoke my own Boston butts.
Don't blather on and on about entitlements and then complain that you're going to lose your Social Security. I mean, I don't want to lose my Social Security, either. But if you don't know what the word "entitlements" means, don't use it, mkay? Further, do me a favor and don't pretend like the public assistance programs aren't screwed up seven ways to Sunday, mainly because the states do a craptastic job of monitoring how money is spent. In fact, how about everybody actually figure out how public assistance works in their state before they start talking about it? THAT would be awesome.
Don't tell me that the past doesn't matter. Seriously. Because that means that you have no concept of...um...anything, particularly if you are a believer in a monotheistic religion that centers around a man who rose from the dead roughly 2000 years ago. Because that was a looonnnng time ago. Or if you are a believer in the Constitution, which was written roughly 200 years ago. Or if you were ever at any point in time affected by things that happened to you more than one second ago. OF COURSE THE PAST MATTERS. Gah. What Newt did twenty years ago? Matters. What happened to Santorum's family 10 years ago? Matters. How President Clinton lied about Teh Oral Sex in Teh Oval Office? Matters. If it didn't, we wouldn't still be talking about it.
Don't be mean and don't lie. I guarantee somebody will get their feelings hurt, or be mean back at you, or expose your lies. That somebody will probably be me and I will CACKLE at your discomfiture as you backtrack and finally resort to calling me "ignarant." I do not ENJOY getting angry at you when I go on Facebook, but I am no longer rising above it and asking myself what Jesus would do, because while I've got much love for him, it is baldly apparent that some of his most vocal followers discount the red parts in the Bible, so I'm giving myself permission to ask what my high school debate coach would do instead. She was a steel magnolia in every sense of the word and she was not above telling somebody exactly how much of an idiot they really were.
Don't point out the way a person salutes (or does not salute) the flag, goes to church or doesn't go to church, is like you or is not like you is the criteria of being a good president. However, you may use aspects such as intelligence, voting record, military experience (or lack thereof), college education, marital status (you heard me...I loved me some Bill Clinton, but I honestly don't believe that we'd be in the mortgage mess we're in or be suffering under DOMA if he'd kept his junk in his drawers), diplomatic aptitude, and political history. I'm cool with that.
Don't cite any email you got as fact. Don't tell me straight up that you haven't verified something but you're going to post it anyway. (You're doing this to stir the pot and, dude, that pot is about to boil over, so back away from the damn pot.) Don't tell me you "believe" something as an argument in a political debate. I believe that a rock I found on the farm contains the essence of Mother Earth. Do you think that makes it so? No? Then don't tell me you believe our president is being funded by Islamic extremists unless you can trace the money trail for me.

I am not talking to any one person here. Well, that's not true. There is one person in particular who got me riled up over the past few days, but I doubt highly that this person reads this blog. So. I don't care if you are conservative, liberal, Democratic, Republican...whatever. Don't be an asshat. Because then I'LL have to be an asshat, and I promise I can be a bigger asshat than you. I don't WANT to be an asshat.

But I have to be honest and tell you that being an asshat felt so dang goooooood yesterday.

I'm back to being all civil and junk today. It feels more like myself.

But just to let you know, my inner Morrigan is awake, y'all. She looks a lot like my high school debate coach.

Defiantly (You'll Understand at the End)

2012-01-20T18:02:00.000-05:00

If your kid is an Aspie and you watch TV, chances are that you are aware of the show Parenthood, because it features a kid named Max who is an Aspie. On the whole, I like the show and the portrayal of Max. I mean, sure, I wish somebody would talk to the writers about IEPs (muhgawd, that kid needs an IEP), but mostly, it feels fairly "real" to me. What I think the show does best is, first of all, not portraying Max as some kind of angel trapped in a circumstance outside of his control. He's frequently a butt--like a lot of people are--and his family doesn't act pious about loving him. Second, the family's frustration and awkwardness and, yes, embarrassment over Max's behavior is so perfectly portrayed that it's all Will and I can do not to break down in sobs during the Max-centric episodes. One episode not too long ago had Max participating in a Math competition. The excitement and worry and awareness on the faces of the actors portraying Max's parents was so TRUE that I had to cover my head with a pillow.

It's hard for folks who don't live with Aspies to understand, but things like Math competitions or class parties or Sunday school talent shows are pretty much mental horror shows for some of us. There are the other competitors who might not know your kid, the other parents, the other teachers, the kids you know are mean to your kid...all of those people are little bumps over which your family must travel. You can't NOT do that stuff; that stuff is what people do. But you don't look forward to it with your video camera out. You think of it as a challenge that must be met to get to the other side of the weekend, to the snuggle time on the couch or the video game marathon in which your family is whole and perfectly happy, unwatched and unjudged by the outside world.

That sounds pretty dramatic, doesn't it?

Today, Jeffrey competed in the school spelling bee. He got second place in his class bee a few weeks ago, and that meant he had to compete in the school one. As in, get up on stage in front of people. As in, not fall over or pick his nose or yell into the microphone or zone out or spazz out or cry because he lost...I sort of went into a state of shock over it. I may or may not have hyperventilated.

This morning, I wanted to barf. BARF, I tell you. I was nervous. Jeffrey was...indifferent.

"I'm nervous. But it's okay," he said. I only nodded, because of the barf-wanting.

I dropped him off at the school and went home to put on some mascara and take a couple of shots of mescaline.

Heh.

I didn't, really. I played about seventy-nine games of Bejeweled Blitz, though. It's my new mescaline.

When I got to the school, Jeffrey was onstage. Fidgeting. Twitching. Blowing into the microphone. I swear to Pete, it was all I could do not to run onstage and grab him and run far, far away. I sat down in my seat and immediately starting Tweeting. It was the only thing I could do to pull my shit together, y'all. It was that or tackle the lady beside me who had a pack of Marlboros peeking out of her pocketbook.

The first round went by. He spelled his word and sat down. He sat down with his legs up in the chair, looking like a little owl, but he sat.

The second round went by. He was loud, and he stood too close to the microphone, but he spelled his word and sat down.

Third round, check. We had a moment there when he started picking his nose (OH MY GAWWDDDD, JEFFREY, DON'T PICK YOUR NOSE....), but he caught my eye and desisted with the spelunking.

Things get hazy now, because kids started misspelling words.

The other kids. The ones that weren't my kid. They misspelled words, but he didn't. He fidgeted, he commented on how one girl who went out might have been using the British spelling, he looked around aimlessly, but he spelled his words.

Finally, it was down to him and a girl.

My boy. And a fifth-grade girl.

He misspelled a word. He didn't cry or freak out or get spazzy. He said, "Aw, mannn," like every other nine-year-old in the world and sat down. The girl spelled the word right. And so that was the end and I was so proud of my guy, so proud that he sat down and he stood up and he spelled like a man on fire and

That wasn't the end.

The girl had to spell a word. She misspelled it. Jeffrey spelled it right. The contest went on.

Y'all. I don't know a whole lot about spelling bees, but I know that what I sat through was the longest and most intense spelling contest I have ever dang seen. It was emotionally draining.

At one point, Jeffrey had to spell choreographer. He spelled it DRASTICALLY wrong, mispronounced it and stood there for a second while the judges tried not to crack up. He rolled his eyes and grinned--GRINNED--and said, "Uh. I know that's wrong. Come on."

Everybody laughed and he sat down.

It went back and forth and back and forth for yeaaarrrs.

Once when he sat down, he spotted a bug crawling across the stage. "Oh, my stars and garters," I said to myself, "PLEASE don't let him jump up to identify it or yell out loud that there is a HUGE roach or tell the guy beside him the bug's genus and phylum." He didn't. He just sat there and watched it. I was afraid it would break his concentration, but he pulled himself together for a couple more rounds. (After it was all over, his principal and I were talking and she said, "Listen, I almost jumped up there and stomped the damn thing." I luff her.)

I looked toward the back of the cafeteria near the end of the competition and all of his teachers were there, sitting in a line, cheering him on, laughing at his foibles, because HE was laughing at them. He was a complete natural, grinning and goofing and being...charming. He was kinda charming, my friends.

The girl stood up to spell "defiantly." But she misspelled it and here came the Critter. (His teacher told me later, "When she said 'defiantly,' I said, 'Oh, shoot. We GOT this!'")

He spelled the word right, of course. And then he got "interpret."

"I-N-T-E-R-P-R-E-T. InterPRET," he said, unaware of the irony.

"Congratulations," the lady said. "That's correct."

And he sat down.

My heart was pounding. Everybody was looking around. The lady in charge of the spelling bee leaned toward the lady calling out the words and said, "You need to tell him he won."

So she did. And he said, "I did? Cool!"

I cried, y'all. I couldn't help it. It might seem like a small thing, the school spelling bee. But trust me when I say that mine weren't the only tears shed. See, people love my boy. And they have watched him struggle before. Jeffrey had first grade at this school and it ended badly and nobody wanted it to. I was very bitter and angry and sad. I wasn't alone in that, either. And now, to see him do so well, to hold himself together for forty minutes and WIN something is...well, it's just sublime.

I went up to the stage and he jumped down and I might have wanted some Hallmark "triumph over adversity" moment, but Jeffrey gave me a quick hug and said, "I want a cookie." Right. Cookie.

I called Will, who told me to bring Jeffrey to see him, so I went to his classroom so he could tell the kids he'd won, and when he walked in, they cheered for him. LOUDLY. They called his name and congratulated him and asked to see the dictionary he won as his prize. It was all I could do not to collapse on the floor.

Again, this may seem like a small thing. But...I don't get moments like this. I get a lot of moments where Jeffrey holds himself together and THAT is the winning. I get moments where Jeffrey doesn't pick his nose or insult anybody or have a meltdown and everybody high fives. I'll give you the obligatory, "But I have good moments and I love my kid and I'm proud of him and the ribbons and awards and accolades his peers get don't touch my happiness." But I'm not being totally honest. I'm proud of my boy every day of his life, but other people don't get the chance to be proud of him and I have never seen Jeffrey's peers praise him and tell me, "He's so smart. You must really be proud." (Can I get a "Wow, that's some good parenting!" for the mama and daddy of the kid who said THAT to me?) It was fricking AWESOME to watch him win. It was awesome to be his mother at that moment, the mother of a winner.

IT WAS AWESOME. It was a tear-jerking, smile-inducing, high-fiving, moment and EVERYBODY at that school felt it.

By the time we got halfway to Will's school, his principal had already emailed everybody who had ever come into contact with my kid and my mother-in-law called me so excited I was afraid she was going to pass out. Even as I write this, former teachers and principals and folks who knew him "back when" are FBing me and calling with love and happiness for this WIN!

You know how I feel about some of the things that have gone on in Jeffrey's schooling. It hasn't always been pretty or smooth. There have been many, many, MANY times I've felt isolated and defeated and hopeless.

But not today. Today, I was part of a community and we had all gotten Jeffrey to a point where he was a winner and moving on to bigger and better things.

And if felt awesome.

Tomes on Tuesday: A GROWN-UP KIND OF PRETTY by Joshilyn Jackson

2012-01-17T10:15:00.001-05:00

My reading pizza

What?

You don't have a reading pizza?

Sigh. Okay, a reading pizza categorizes the books you enjoy reading. It could just as easily be a "reading bar graph," but I dislike all those angles. It could also just as easily be a "reading filing cabinet," but I don't want to cause anybody any spiritual confusion, so I'm sticking with "reading pizza."

Anywho, my reading pizza is generally divided into four parts. This doesn't mean that I don't occasionally swerve off and take a bite out of, say, a mystery calzone or a paranormal romance bread stick, but, generally, these are the genres that are my "go tos." My cheeses, if you will.

Like this:

You will note that I've helpfully added examples of my favorite authors to help you better grasp this concept. (I'm nothing if not helpful, right?)

Now, you know when you order a pizza (a real pizza, not a reading pizza) (in case you were unclear) that's half pepperoni and half mushroom and onion and occasionally a pepperoni will migrate over to the mushroom side, creating a delicious crossover taste? That happens on reading pizzas, too, as you will note below:

As you can see, the A Gracious Plenty cookbook falls under both nonfiction AND Southern Literature, as you can find recipes within of a decidedly Southern flavor, as well as quotes about food by Mark Twain and William Faulkner.

Terry Kay is a writer known both for his grasp of Southern life as well as his embrace of those things which you can't see, but sense are there. (Uh. Magic, y'all.)

Joshilyn Jackson is not.

I know, I know. I just really wanted to use the reading pizza thing, mkay? Ms. Jackson falls squarely in the "Southern literature" quadrant of my reading pizza and I love her for it.

Known for her ability to draw in readers by creating characters they know (or for her ability to translate an alien culture to folks living outside of the region), she has once again created a perfect little world in A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty.

The world is not perfect as in it's all sunshine and roses and happiness, though. It's perfect in that the characters react to each other in real-feeling ways, the situations in which they find themselves are dramatic without feeling too "made up," and the environment in which they live is solidly built.

The story is told in first person by three different characters. Ginny Slocumb (known as Big) is the matriarch, a forty-five-year-old grandmother who had her own child at age fifteen. That child is Liza. Liza was a wild one, a free spirit who ventured into drug abuse after having her own little girl at age fifteen. A few months prior to the opening sequence of the book, Liza suffered a debilitating stroke.

Liza's child is Mosey, who has spent her whole life being conditioned to NOT fall victim to the Slocumb curse that seems to come along with turning fifteen. Mosey is a good student and a sweet child, it would seem, but her fate seems less certain when the willow tree in Big's front yard is removed, revealing a long-buried secret that threatens the security of their little family. What follows is a journey to do many things: hold the family together, discover the secret of the bones found in the front yard, find love (in Big's case), make friends, keep friends...basically what people do every day. (With the exception of the bones.)

Jackson does many things well in this book, but the best things, in my opinion were:

Fleshing out the secondary characters. From the lecherous high school football coach to the icy Baptist social queen, from the poor girl living on the wrong side of town to the cuckholded (and adulterous) wife, you've met these people. And either loved or hated them. That Jackson can engender that love and hatred in her readers means she is a champion of characterization, which is so often missing from books today. (MOSTLY--see below)
Making a far-fetched situation seem plausible. Many of Jackson's works hinge on a mystery that must be solved or an identity that must be ascertained or a life that must be risen above. A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty is no different. But whereas sometimes authors seem to have to invent scenes or devices, because Jackson portrays her characters so strongly, she rarely has to do this. (MOSTLY--see below.)
Making the environment a character in and of itself. I can't speak for other regions, but in the South, we are intimate with our environment. We have favorite trees, favorite hills, favorite winds. It might be because we are privileged to be able to be OUT in our environs most of the time, but we think of the places and objects around us as important. Mourning a tree (or using it as a hiding place or a way to mark sacred events) is normal for us.
Picking a book cover. Goodness me, the cover of this book is gorgeous. Everything from the (blurry but obvious) open arms of the subject to the slight browning of the apple tucked into her belt is perfect.

I like this book. It probably will go on my book friends shelf. BUT there are a few caveats:

Mosey uses the word "retarded" (or variations thereof) a lot. Enough that I started wincing about it. I understand that teenagers do fling this word around as a light-hearted insult (bleagh), but it infuriates me when they do it. So it was hard reading it over and over again. I THINK I know why Jackson did it (I've created an excuse in my head), but I wanted to give a heads up to those of you who are bothered by it.
A rather pivotal character in the climax of the novel does not behave in a way that previous clues about her make you think she would. In fact, her behavior was rather jarring to me, not because it was awful, but because I expected it to be. This was the lone point of characterization weakness I found, but it made me feel like the climax was a bit "made" and not "reached naturally."
A rather pivotal object used during the climax of the novel was found in a way that seemed odd to me. Again, it seemed an issue of having to create a tool rather than the tool showing up naturally. Especially given the other actions of the object's owner, I couldn't really understand why the owner would have the object in the first place. (Consider it a point in Jackson's favor that I can't be more clear about this without giving giant plot parts away.)
The climax was physically powerful, but it was the weakest part of the story from a story-telling perspective, which was a bit of a let down. Part of it, I think, was that the narrative had already given away so much that the situation itself HAD to be extreme. Does that make sense? It was almost as if, by figuring out the story beforehand, the climax was something the reader had to get through before the resolution could take place. The resolution was GREAT, but the climax? Not so much.

Those four things, for me, were not enough to detract seriously from my love of the story. I don't think (from a literature teacher standpoint) that the climax should be something a reader feels underwhelmed by, but my love for the characters and their places far overreaches that quibble.

If you're looking for an engrossing read with lovable (if flawed) characters who ooze Southerness, run out and read this right now: .

Might I Have a Bit of Earth To Douse With Purple Rain?

2012-01-10T11:24:00.000-05:00

The Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog came the other day and I licked the cover. NO, not really. (I only smooched it and rubbed it over my torso.) (NO! Not really.)

What I'm trying to say is that it came and I was very, very happy and immediately set about reading it and stroking it and calling it George. And once I had looked at it twice over, I got down to the nitty gritty and began picking out my seeds for next year.

My yearly "gonna plant a garden and it'll be goooooood" resolutions have been...uh...disappointing the last couple of years. A wilt destroyed my tomatoes the year before last and we were fricking infested with brown widows last year. I mean...it was creepy. And, yes, I know they don't bite often and their bites aren't fatal and pretty much everybody should run out and get a few for pets like those people who wind up being eaten by their "pet" tigers.

What?

I DON'T LIKE THOSE THINGS.

Anyway, this year, Will is trying so hard to be supportive and is actually evincing eagerness to plant a big garden and get the kids involved and that helps, like, a bunch. It is also very romantic, because my husband would live on beer sausages and cheese in a can if he could. He'd be gouty, but he'd be happy. So when he says, "Oh, yeah, I definitely think you should plant four or five types of tomatoes," I pretty much want to jump him right then and there. I'm just being honest. You call it "planning out the garden." I call it "foreplay." (Have I said too much?)

I went through the catalog looking for varieties specifically suited for the South, or--even better--traditionally grown in Georgia. "Cherokee Trail of Tears" beans and "Cherokee Purple" tomatoes will join a squash called "Candy Roster-North Georgia" (I'm going to try this winter squash with a certain trepidation, as the acorn and butternut squash Heath gave me that he grew had a texture that made me want to cut out my own teeth and mail them to him, demanding a refund on the dry, thready, barforoodley squash) and a watermelon called--wait for it--"Stone Mountain!" (How cool is that?) Of course, I'm also going to be growing French varieties of melon (grown by one T. Jefferson at Monticello...if T.J. thinks it's groovy, so do I...well, except for slavery...I'm not okay with that) and carrots and cucumbers and some Chinese long beans. I also seem to be growing a lot of purple stuff.

There's the tomato, aforementioned, and also a variety of cauliflower, a tomatillo, some popcorn, and, of course, the beloved (by Southerners, y'all) purple-hulled, pink-eyed pea. It's like I'm trying to grow a garden to lure Prince down here. Which...isn't the WORST idea I've ever had. Nothing like chilling out in the backyard after a long day of pulling weeds with a cold beer and a serenade by a sexy MF playing his purple guitar. I assume.

Why, you might be asking, is it necessary to plant THIRTY-FIVE varieties of fruits and vegetables? Well, it's not NECESSARY. I suppose. I mean, I guess that we could continue whittling down our vegetable choices to a few hardy, easy-to-ship, less than tasty specimens, but...why? If I have the time and the will and the money and the land to do it, why wouldn't I encourage my children and friemily to enjoy as many of the wonderful tastes that Mother Nature has thoughtfully provided us?

Oh. Yeah. Land. See, here's the thing: I don't really have the square footage to grow all of this stuff. I have a nice-sized garden off my back patio that grows all the herbs and greens and tomatoes and green beans and onions that my family can eat during the week. BUT things like corn and popcorn and lima beans and field peas require a lot of space to produce enough...er...produce to store for the winter. A stalk of corn yields one--two if you're really lucky--ears of corn, which is enough for one serving per person. If you plan on eating a lot of corn (a reliable vegetable/starch in our house), you need to plant a lot of corn. The variety of lima I'm planning on getting (Dixie Speckled Butterpea, in case you were wondering) has a high yield BUT you only get four or five beans (butterpeas, whathaveyou) per pod, so one plant yields enough for one serving at a time (generally.) Ergo, you need to plant a lot of them. The tomato varieties I'm growing are all fairly high yield (Cherokee purple isn't, actually, but I MUST have it), and so one or two in the house garden are fine, but if I want to can tomatoes as sauces and stews and salsas, I need to grow at LEAST ten or fifteen plants to make it worth my time and money.

This isn't possible in the backyard, as we want to keep it as a recreational haven for friemily, butI have an idea that if I can find some pictures of pretty vegetable gardens, I might convince Will to let me turn some of our (mostly unused and probably 1/4 of an acre) front yard into a tomato patch. (In fact, I'm totally pinning some on my "How My Garden Should Grow" board at Pinterest right now!) Of course, there's a lot to be done prior to that: the brown widows that LURV the front yard and porch must be dealt with. I'm getting an organic spray today when I do my errands. (It smells like lemons and mothballs at the same time, but it kills the spiders, so...yay!) And we'd have to rearrange our walkway and put in paths and then there would be tilling and rooting and manuring and composting and....) But I think it could be doable.

However, I'm concerned that this STILL wouldn't yield enough of the food we actually eat. My kids (and hubs) don't eat things like eggplant (at all) or peppers (except when diced so fine they're practically mush), so while I could move some things like tomatoes and herbs to the front for prettiness' sake, I'd still need room for corn and peas and beans (and squash and melons, which need room to roam if they're going to produce.) So I'm thinking about sharecropping. I am totally serious. Nothing in Dingleberry is more than five miles away from itself and surely to goodness there must be SOMEBODY out there willing to give a girl a bit of earth in which she can grow some corn. (Ten points AND a jar of cream-style corn if you know where that quote comes from.) So, Dingleberrians, if you know anybody with some yard or land they're willing to share for a cut of the produce, I'm looking to sharecrop. It needs to have sun and access to water. I'll take care of the rest. Just shoot me an email, mkay? Mkay.

And now, lovies, I must go and ship some picture CDs to folks. (Those seeds don't pay for themselves...yet.) Local peeps, don't forget the Valentine's special going on at Heather Ray Photography (not local peeps, don't forget it either...heh). Have good Tuesdays!

You KNOW You Want a Weekly Wrap-Up List

2012-01-08T21:32:00.001-05:00

Some people start their weeks on Sunday. I find this a ludicrous habit, one which is symptomatic of, I believe, insanity. Y'all. Sunday is for reading and snuggling and clinging to the precious moments with your babies before the frenzied rush of a school week begins all over again. Or taking a giant nap. Or vaguely staring into space wondering what you did with your H-hook. You NEED your H-hook. (Don't panic. I found it.) I start my week on Monday, because I'm not insane--at least not on a weekly basis. I mean on a weekily basis. Weeky basis?

You know what I mean.

Anywayzers, here's the weekly wrap up, my loves:

Have I mentioned my job is magic? Bella Baby Photography is a great company to work for and I get the pleasure of shnoogling newborns and making parents goo and gah all day long. It comes with some surprises and stress (I've worked with tragedy and police officers and nontraditional families this week), but it is, by and large, a great job. Woohoo, me! I got a great job!
I'm going to do some mini-sessions for Valentine's Day that will come with a choice of personalized Valentines for friends and family or a CD of the session over at Heather Ray Photography. I'm also going to offer press-printed Valentines using customer pictures. (For you Paganistas out there, how about some Imbolc-themed cards? How fun would THAT be?) Be sure to check out the Facebook page and/or the blog (which has been sorely neglected for lo these past six or nine months...) for more details in the upcoming days.
All of THAT business out of the way, I must admit something: I kinda love Tim Tebow. I KNOW!!! IT'S AWFUL!!! (Pause for all of my Bulldawg beloveds to find a handy corner to vomit in.) Okay, but here's the thing: I enjoyed making fun of ol' Tim on the rare occasions when the Bulldogs made him cry during his time at the University of Florida. Honestly, I enjoyed making fun of him EVERY time he cried, but that was only, like, five times. (I relished every single time.) But a couple of things. First, the kid is winning football games. It isn't pretty and it isn't...you know...RIGHT according to NFL standards, but he's winning. And I LOVE when the dude who isn't supposed to win wins, you know? Second, I might think that he's a bit...er...zealous in his beliefs, but bless his heart, he is sticking to them, isn't he? I doubt seriously that we'll read any stories about him getting shot (or shooting somebody) outside a nightclub in Atlanta or rumors of him groping somebody at a nightclub in rural Georgia or getting caught with guns in an Atlanta airport. (Hey, NFL dudes. Stop coming to our state and messing up. We have enough problems here without your criminality, mkay?) We probably won't hear about strippers or drug dealers or what have you. And...that's sort of refreshing, isn't it? Maybe he's just a good guy who can play good football, and if he wants to say it's because of God, well, okay. It doesn't particularly hurt me that he does. (Plus--and let's be honest here--if he DOES get caught with a male prostitute snorting crack on the roof of the Peachtree Plaza, OMFC, how AWESOME would that be?)
I just opened the giant Hershey kiss Will got me for Christmas. It is sort of...uh...nipple-like. I'm just saying. I feel a little dirty. I'm kind of blushing.
That does not, in any way, mean that I won't eat it like a chocolate-eating fool.
It does mean that I can't figure out how to eat it. Like, I don't necessarily want to BITE OFF the tip, although that makes the most sense. HERSHEY'S. You are killing me, here.
Having decided that gnawing on the ~~areola~~bottom part of the kiss was the least disturbing strategy, I will now tell you that I am already sick of the 2012 presidential race and the Republicans haven't even chosen a candidate yet. I can't decide of whom I'm sicker: the candidates or the would-be voters. The Republican candidates suck, y'all. I'm sorry. They just do. Watching them scrabble to "out conservative" each other while walking some weird, wavery trying-to-get-the-gay-vote-while-not-actually-saying-"gay-people-are-awful" line and falling back on some pre-Civil War "let the states decide" thing is exhausting me. Please believe me when I say that I loathe Rick Santorum more than I loathe most people and he is RUINING sweater vests for me, the little pissant. Would-be voters, though, are KILLING me, too. If you haven't learned from the last three years that being president does not mean that you get to A: do away with the federal reserve, B: do away with laws that limit civil rights, C: impeach judges you feel are un-American, or D: do any damn thing without Congress saying, "Oh, yeah, we can do that," then you need to...well, frankly, you need to wake up and smell the Constitution. Or read it. Either one. I don't care which. Hell, eat it if you want to, just make sure that you don't hold out any hope that the majority of the candidates can do a sliver of what they're promising.
I can't even talk about--AGAIN--what happens when a state (given the power to regulate society-based interactions) runs up against personal freedom. But I have a long list of U.S. Supreme Court cases that you might be interested in.
I worked out to Jillian Michaels' Thirty Day Shred yesterday and I feel like an 900-year-old woman today. My shoulder CREAKED when I lifted my camera this morning. And I don't want to discuss what I have to do to sit down on (or, heaven forfend, get OFF) the toilet. It involves clinging to the shower curtain. I think I posted about this DVD before, but it bears repeating: Jillian Michaels is a beast. If I can manage to do this workout again with any kind of regularity, I have no doubt that I will be shredded. (My shower curtain probably will be, too.)
Am I the only person who now cringes when I hear the words "Tim Burton" and "Johnny Depp" in the same sentence? What combination of weird hair, white face, and funky eyes can they come up with next and WHY won't they stop? And, my friends, the other day, I heard Burton was going to get his paws on Pinocchio AND Robert Downey, Jr. and I yelled at my computer, "Not my ROBBIE! Run away, Robert Downey, Jr! Run awwaaaaay.
I also yelled at my computer when my printer was like, "Hi, sweetums. I'm not going to scan anymore, okay? Okay." WTF, printer? This is not okay. This is not okay, at all. But it still sits there, refusing to print. I dream of a new printer, but I don't say anything out loud, because at least that sucker still prints, and I'm afraid if I offend it, it will stop doing that.
It is entirely possible that I personalize objects in my life too much.
At least I don't objectify people though, right?
Except for my Robbie.
Ruuuuuuunnnnnn, my Robbie! RUUUUNNNNNN.

Attack of the Blue Polka-Dotted Panties

2012-01-05T15:01:00.000-05:00

Y'all. OMFC, my panties tried to kill me today in Hobby Lobby.

(This should serve as fair warning to any male person who loves me who reads this blog and who doesn't want to read about my panty issues. Panties abound in this post, specifically MY panties, so you might want to look away and go read something about how Alabama can totally take LSU. Or whatever.)

I have this pair of panties that I love. Actually, these panties are (does the word "panties" sound funny to you? Panties. Paaaaanties. And now I'm thinking of John Goodman...)

What?

Panties, right. Okay, so these panties are part of a four pack of cotton, boy-cut panties that are comfy and make my butt look cute and I like them a lot. They are white with blue polka dots and they make me feel all cheeky (ha) and flirty. Not that I'm bouncing around showing them to everybody. I'm just saying: I like my panties.

Well, I likED my panties until today. Right now, I feel absolutely baffled by my panties and a little afraid of them.

It happened in Hobby Lobby--or as I like to call it, "Cracky Lacky," because of all of the crafty, crochet-y, photography proppy mess crammed into it that makes me all dizzy inside--when I was looking for ribbon with which to adorn some CDs I'm sending out to clients. I beebopped through the doors when I realized that...uh...something felt funny in the general vicinity of my Nether Regions.

Do fuh? I thought, giving my jeans a discreet tug, because it didn't occur to me at that point in time that my panties were suddenly possessed by Satan.

I wandered around looking at Christmas and Autumn decorations that were 4000 percent off and not buying them because I'm being all frugal and stuff even though I reeaaaallly wanted to buy them, you know? I was contemplating a wire basket that would look adorable stuffed with a snoozing newborn and then things felt even weirder around my Nether Regions.

"Seriously?" I said out loud to the gorgeous faux-leather suitcases I was coveting. I went into the deserted "Summer Fun" aisle and did some covert explorations and discovered that my panties were...y'all...they were falling down. INSIDE MY PANTS.

How does this even happen?

It isn't because I've lost any weight over the holidays, you can trust me on that. And it isn't because I gained any, either. (Yay, me...) But somehow, my favorite panties decided that maintaining their position below my hips was just not going to happen and they were drifting downward.

I did what any sane person would do, which was stick my hand inside my pants and tug those suckers up. Then I went to go look for ribbon.

I want to point out now that Cracky Lacky is a Christian store and so the Muzak that plays inoffensively while you shop is generally Jahweh-oriented. This doesn't bother me a wee bit, and I get to hum along to songs that I don't hear a lot any more. ("Rock of Ages" is good no matter WHO plays it, ammiright?) I'm telling you this because in a few minutes, things are going to get even more bizarre.

I realized as I made my way through the glassware section that my panties were migrating again and that they had totally parted ways with my ass and were, in fact, dangling around my thighs. I had a moment of panic thinking that maybe they would actually slither out of one pants' leg, because I'm not a Physics major and I forgot that things like the crotch of my panties (errant though they were) and, you know, my torso would keep them relatively in place.

I made it to the ribbon aisle (having broken a sweat in my panty panic) and started looking for the perfect ribbon, but of course I couldn't find the right shade or texture or width and my panties were tickling the backs of my legs. I decided to get down on the ground to look for some ribbons, which turned out to be a DRETFUL idea.

See, women's jeans are not made for ladies who've had babies and declined to lose the baby weight. The inseams are roughly three inches long on all my jeans, which means if I bend down, my panties might occasionally show.

DO YOU SEE WHERE THIS IS GOING??

Yes, my friends, I popped a squat in the fabric section of Cracky Lacky and the entire store got a good look at my butt. I yanked down my sweatshirt and tried to scootch around to somehow encourage my jeans to NOT reveal my hinder parts, but the damage was done. I was trying to decide if I should just go ahead and die of embarrassment with two rolls of organza ribbon in my hands and my butt pretty much dangling out for the entire world to see when "Rock of Ages" went off and "Wade in the Water" came on.

Wade. In. The. Water.

Muzak-style.

JAZZ Muzak-style.

With horn skirls and little bass break aways and other jazzy, Muzak-y things.

It was all too much for me and instead of dying of embarrassment, I started laughing so hard that I was afraid I was going to wet myself (which might have served my damn panties right). The ribbon lady cleared her throat, which I was pretty sure meant, "Honey, take your panty-challenged, hysterical self out of my section" and so I grabbed some ribbon and fled.

Of course, I still wasn't done with my errands, so I went to the grocery store bathroom as soon as I could and pulled my panties up and gave them a stern lecture about staying put.

And they did.

Y'all, I'm pretty sure my panties were trying to prevent me from spending too much money at Hobby Lobby. Like maybe Will implanted them with some sort of microchip triggered by money-spending endorphines or the smell of my debit card that caused them to release their elastic. Or maybe the Filing Cabinet was working some sort of magic, being privy to my bank account.

Whatever the case, I took those jokers off as soon as I got home and replaced them with a pair of inoffensive, non-perky, white cotton briefs that are doing nothing more than sitting on my fanny being panties. The blue-polka dotted ones?

They're sitting in my laundry basket, looking all innocent.

But I know their secret. I know that as soon as I turn my back, they're going to be plotting against me.

(Is it weird that I'm actually now a little afraid of my panties?)

(You don't have to answer that question.)

Early Morning Political Rants Are The Best Kind: Election 2012

2012-01-04T06:37:00.001-05:00

The other day, a friemily member posted something on Facebook about how politics were possibly the reason why humans couldn't find intelligent life in the Universe besides ourselves. The basic gist of it was that if a people were too "smart," they'd eventually develop weapons that would annihilate the folks they hated and voila! Dead planets everywhere. (To read the article in such a way that it makes actual sense, go here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/are-we-alone-in-the-universe/2011/12/29/gIQA2wSOPP_story.html )

Although I realize that it's sort of being the ultimate Debbie Downer to embrace this concept, I think that it's just as good as any other reason why the vastness of space seems as empty as Charlie Brown's mailbox on Valentine's Day, especially when you consider the idiocy going on in the Republican primaries right now.

I'm not trying to be ugly (okay...not THAT ugly) when I say this, but one reason America might lose big in the race to destroy our planet (or possibly win...but that would be losing, too--this is a difficult metaphor to grasp before a giant mug of tea) is that while we embrace technology that allows us to communicate with folks halfway around the world *waves enthusiastically at my lovies halfway around the world*, we also embrace politicians named Newt who run on Morality Clauses after shtupping and discarding roughly forty-three wives. AND THEY ARE NAMED NEWT. (Liberal witches everywhere are pretty much snorting themselves into tizzies over his name on a daily basis.)

I started to write a post about how and why people like Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry couldn't win the nomination, but then Rick Santorum came in SECOND PLACE last night in Iowa after spending a week making statements that made my face turn inside out at the idiocy of them all. I'm pretty sure that repeating them all would make me vomit, but my favorite was either the one about how, as a black man, President Obama should be more concerned about abortion or the one about how states should have the right to outlaw sodomy and birth control, because neither one of them was in the Constitution.

OH MY FILING CABINET, Y'ALL.

You know what ELSE isn't in the Constitution? Sex. At all. Of any kind. No sex, people. STATES CAN OUTLAW SEX.

Know what else isn't in the Constitution? Cheeseburgers. BAN THE FLIPPING CHEESEBURGERS, STATES, BECAUSE THEY AREN'T IN THE CONSTITUTION.

I place all of the blame (ironically, since Santorum beat him in Iowa) on Ron Paul's skinny little shoulders. Here's the problem: when you start saying things like, "Let the people decide, turn power over to the states, it isn't in the Constitution," folks go batshit crazy, because somehow, they've decided that things like, you know, the federal Department of Education and Medicare and, I don't know, Planned Parenthood, are TAKING THEIR FREEDOM. They start frothing at the mouth and running amok and yelling, "Give me back my freedoms, you socialist, communist, fascist bastards." And the politicians get all excited, too, and they start doing things like saying states should take away a citizen's right to have oral sex or not get a sexually transmitted disease because those things aren't spelled out in the Constitution.

Do you see the problem here? No? I'll spell it out: trading a federal government that does things like require businesses to not pollute the environment for a federal government which allows states to deny people the right to screw who and how they want to is trading down. Conservatives, I've got much love for you, but if you want to live in a world where our federal government is FORCED to put sodomy in the Constitution, keep pushing people like Santorum and Paul.

There's a reason why things like sodomy aren't in our Constitution: they are private things that have no bearing on other people's liberty or pursuit of happiness and, thus, our founding fathers thought that it wasn't necessary to say, "Oh, and people should be able to have anal sex if they want. Let's make that Amendment Number Seven." The British Crown wasn't banning anal sex, but it was making sure that the people couldn't defend themselves, or speak against the government, or, you know, have representation in Parliament. Anal sex really wasn't on the damn radar.

So for people like Rick Santorum to decide that in order for us to really honor our primary document, we need to let states tell adults they can't avoid getting pregnant if they decide to have sex...are you kidding me? Guess what happens when states decide that they want to pass laws that violate a person's personal freedom? The person sues the state. And, almost without fail, those cases wind up heading to federal courts where, almost without fail, the person wins because our Constitution is a document of FREEDOM.

UNDERSTAND: Ron Paul might be a true libertarian at heart (with the exception of abortion) and he might honestly believe that the states would be the best vehicle for the most freedoms. I think this is naive and vaguely dangerous, but I don't think he's trying to remove rights from people so much as he's trying to shrink the federal tax burden and he can't think of a better way to do it than by removing federal departments and responsibilities.

But Rick Santorum? Rick Santorum is a vitriolic homophobe who wants to allow states to make homosexuality a crime. He's a religious wingnut who wants to allow states to tell consenting adults that they can only have sex to procreate. (Hence the whole birth control thing.)

AND HE WEARS SWEATER VESTS.

You know what else isn't in the Constitution? Sweater vests.

Or Rick Santorum.

I KNOW! How about we allow states to ban Rick Santorum? Now THAT'S a political agenda I can get behind.

Out With the Old

2011-12-30T10:01:00.000-05:00

It's that time of year again: the annual NotHannah Family Get All the Crap Out of Here to Make Room for More Crap GetRidAThon. The kids were gifted but good this year for Christmas AND we still have several gift cards waiting to bring more joy into the house, so out a bunch of stuff went:

Little People sets and board books to Mr. E (my newest nephew)
an antique table that I love but is simply gathering dust and cluttering up the foyer to my mother-in-law or sister-in-law
more books and vases and decorative bowls and Happy Meal toys and stuffed animals and a grilled cheese sandwich maker (really? I mean...how hard is it to fricking make a grilled cheese sandwich?) to the Goodwill
tons of papers and scraps of artwork and "keepsakes" and fol-de-rol that I've been hanging on to dumped in the trash or the recycling bins

Undecorating for Christmas and tossing (removing...reLEASING?) old stuff is always bittersweet. Most of the items we box up or ship off were used with love or in times of happiness, and so it hurts a little to get rid of them, even as their removal brings a certain lightness to the house. I was feeling a wee pensive last night as I cleared off my desk (again. For the 80th blue million time. My resolutions for this year totally center around finally taming my spaces...) and then I found it: my college day planner.

I bought it at the beginning of my last year at UGA, when I was feeling quite impressed with myself that I would graduate and stuff. (Little did I know then that I would be plagued with indecision and financial woes and a blizzard of panic attacks that would render me pretty much useless for doing anything but watching Days of Our Lives and making my would-be husband anxious about asking him to marry me. Good times...) It's covered with a dark, swirly, tapestryesque fabric, still holding up after all these years.

I have meant to throw it out for years. But I haven't been able to, because it's filled with my past:

The dead guy's name, but not his number or address, because he moved right when I got the planner and then I lost the planner for a while and then he moved again and then, you know, he died.
The dead guy's family's addresses and numbers. I haven't used the addresses and numbers for years and they don't work now, anyway.
The numbers for UGA's student affairs and financial aid offices, for the Dean of the English Department, for the Records department. Haven't used those numbers in a while, either, although I've been pining to go back to Athens and learn them all over again, lately. (Fall is hard on alumni of beautiful schools surrounded by funky little shops and fielding decent football teams.)
The addresses of and directions to about seventeen places where Moglet lived in Atlanta. One listing says "Moglet the Urban Adventurer."
The addresses of G and A when they lived not On the Mountain and when they didn't have kids.
The addresses of tons of friends who are no longer married, or no longer straight, or no longer alive. Or who are still married and straight and alive, but who are married to different people or living in different houses or using different phones.
Several attempts by myself to figure out the best signature for my married self. My old, unmarried signature.
Notes to myself about getting records, about grading tests (I used it my first years of teaching, too), about buying cat food.

I couldn't get rid of those, could I? This little book was a history of myself, a chapter of the girl I was before I became the woman I am.

But...I have pictures of those times. And good friends I can call up to remind myself of them. And, dude. I married that guy with the anxiety and had kids with him and so pretty much any time I want to, I can go up to him and say, "Remember when I had all those panic attacks?" And he can say, "Yeah, that sucked. Can you clean up the laundry room?"

And then I'll get all pissy because he's ruining my trip down memory lane and I'll call up Miss Mary (who ALSO remembers the panicky-attack girl) and we'll bitch about husbands a while (because we know that we love ours and so bitching about them to each other is perfectly legal and healthy) and then she'll remind me of how far I've come and how awesome my life is and so...really...why do I need that little tapestry-covered day planner?

I don't. That's the simple answer and the reason why I chunked it in the trash can and forced myself not to take it out of the can all night long. It's the reason why, when I realized that Will had taken out the trash, that I didn't freak out.

I mean, I might have cried a little, but I didn't freak out.

Much.

I'll probably be incommunicado (again...heh) for the next few days, but I'll be back in the new year with a cool scrapbooking giveaway, some home improvement twaddle, and lots more blathering. Check out the Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/NotHannah) if you feel like you can't live without hourly updates about threatening candy or Grinches or my odd children.

Luff y'all and Happy New Year!

The Best Sugar Cookie in the World, Revisited

2011-12-19T10:28:00.001-05:00

This is a post from September of 2009. However, I thought that you would want it because you are probably baking cookies for Santa right now and I'm not trying to hurt your feelings, but your cookies are inferior to these, because they are the best sugar cookies in the world. They just are. If you don't believe me, go ahead and bake up a batch. You won't be sorry and you will have baked the best sugar cookie in the world and your loved ones will pretty much make you Queen of the Universe, so it's a win win for everybody.

I spend a lot of time thinking about cookies. Cookies and politics. Cookies and politics and exactly the right way to honor one's religious beliefs. Cookies and politics and exactly the right way to honor one's religious beliefs and why two-year-old girls are so much HARDER than two-year-old boys, can I get an amen?

What?

Cookies. Right.

So, for the past couple of years, I've been trying to find THE perfect sugar cookie recipe. The recipe I have in mind yields a soft cookie, slightly cakey, crisp around the edges, sweet (but not too sweet to take a good butter cream-ish icing.) I'm not sure the recipe actually exists outside of my head. I mean, I've been looking for a while.

The ones I've tried have yielded doughs so wet and thin that the cookies can't be lifted onto a sheet, cookies so floury that they're bland, cookies that taste okay--but won't hold a shape to save their lives, cookies that never fail to bake without bubbles...ARGH!!

This weekend, I helped another woman throw a wedding shower for my Mary and I baked a batch of sugar cookies. I hated them. They didn't hold their shape AND had bubbles and the best thing about them was the chocolate icing I concocted for them. Ar to the gh.

The kidlets were horrified that I was daring to make cookies for somebody other than them. What kind of mother WAS I? I assured them that we would have a cookie-baking bonanza on Sunday, which appeased them enough that they stopped moaning on the floor. (Seriously. River: "WHA-utttt? No coooooookkkkiiieeessss? Ohhhhhhhh!!" Aaaaanand cue the collapsing to the carpet at my feet part.)

I sort of dreaded the making of the cookies, because there would come the requisite disappointment at their odd shape, weird taste, or wretched dough-consistency. I finally decided to go back to the recipe of my childhood, a recipe that comes from an Amy Vanderbilt cookbook of my mother's that is pretty much falling apart and has been since I've known it. I cannot even tell you the number of cookies we baked as children with this recipe. Millions, maybe. With mama's old metal cookie cutters and sugars we dyed with food coloring. Some of my favorite memories involve this recipe, which makes me wonder why I ever left it in the first place. Sometimes, it's okay to do it like your mother did, people. I'm just saying.

Y'all. The cookies were awesome. They aren't the EXACT cookies my wretched imagination keeps insisting on, but they're pretty close and I'm thinking the addition of a bit of baking soda might give me a bit more loft. In any case, they are so frickin' simple to make, they're delicious, they hold the shape of a cookie cutter like a dream, and they have just the right amount of chew or crisp, depending on how long you cook them.

Best Sugar Cookie Recipe Ever

Ingredients:
1 stick of butter (OR margarine OR 1/2 cup butter-flavored shortening), softened
1 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon milk
2 cups all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt

Directions:

Cream butter and sugar
Add egg, vanilla, and milk. Mix until smooth.
Combine flour, salt, and baking powder.
Add flour mixture to wet mixture slowly. The dough will be very stiff.
Wrap the dough and stick it in the freezer for an hour or so.
On a floured surface, turn out the dough and roll to 1/4 inch. (I put the wax paper over the top of it to keep it from sticking to the rolling pin and to avoid adding more flour.)
Cut out the cookies and lay them on a baking sheet. I prefer to use parchment paper or a silicone sheet, but you can stick them on an ungreased sheet and they should be fine. Sprinkle with sugar, non pareils, jimmies, or whatever other thingabobs you have in your pantry--oooh, cinnamon dots are SO GOOD on these things when you bake Christmas wreaths. You can also ice them when they're cool after baking.
Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes for a softer cookie, up to 12 for a crispy cookie.

This is what we wound up with:

Please note the beauty of the ducks and the dragonfly. (The bats from the halloween sprinkle sets make GREAT duck eyes.) I should point out that I use shortening when I'm making cut-outs because it prevents the cookies from spreading so much, especially when it's warm and muggy.

But I use butter for everything else I make with these, because let me tell you, this dough is the most versatile stuff ever. You can substitute between an eighth and a fourth of a cup of cocoa for the flour and make chocolate cookies. Grind up candy canes for peppermint candy cane-shaped cookies (oooh, dip them in chocolate.) Mix in some chopped pecans, roll the dough into little balls, dip the hot baked cookies in powdered sugar, and make wedding cookies. Roll the dough into little balls, dip them in cinnamon sugar, and have snickerdoodles. I'm contemplating substituting lemon extract for the vanilla and doing the powdered sugar roll thingy for some lemon chiller-type cookies. Maybe some anise or lavendar into the mix?

It's entirely possible that these cookies might change the world by their old-fashioned wonderfulness.

If you make any cookies with this recipe, let me know. I'm interested in charting the world-changing.

It's a Hap, Hap, Happy Holidays Blog

2011-12-14T08:34:00.000-05:00

If you've been around for any of the SIX (I missed my blogiversary last week...happy sporadic writing toooo meeeeee!) years I've been writing this thing, you'll know that I love the holiday season. From Halloween to New Years, I am generally a hap, hap, happy camper and I laugh and smile and chortle and carol and skip and sew and freeetiddle around like an elf on crack.

This year, the freeetiddling is taking a while to get warmed up. I WANT to have the Spirit

(let's diverge here and offer the standard "I celebrate the week of and after Christmas as a Holy Week, one in which I contemplate the awesome power of the sun and earth at the Solstice and the sacredness of family and hope at Christmas and the magic in black eyed peas, collards, and pork tenderloin at New Years" dislaimer. I don't care how you celebrate the holidays, if you worship one god or the other or no god at all. And by "don't care" I mean, I wish you a merry whatever it is you celebrate or don't celebrate and if you want to wrap yourself in tinsel and call yourself Mary Lou Retton, rock on, my friend. Rock your bad self on.)

but it seems there are any number of things that keep tripping me up.

There are politicians who think companies are countries, who believe the federal government shouldn't keep church and state separated, who want to outlaw abortion AND child labor laws at the same time. (How conveeeenient.) (That would be Rick Perry, Ron Paul, and Newt, for those keeping track at home.)

I read a statistic yesterday that one in forty-five children in America are homeless. (ONE IN FORTY-FIVE. As I said on FB yesterday, think about the number of kids in your kid's classroom or on his soccer team or in her Brownie troop and ponder that number.) Later in the evening, I read an article by perhaps the most dense idiot on the face of the planet about how if poor black children just avail themselves of the "cheap" three hundred dollar computers he's obviously being paid to shill for and all of the swanky apps that come with them, they, too, can learn how to best please the 1% and rise above their generational poverty.

I'm reading status updates from people who are claiming that Jesus is the reason for the season and bitching about the president (or liberals or gays or the long lines at HellMart) two statuses later.

I'm reading about our completely useless government which is wrangling over pipelines and tax cuts while real people are hungry or dying or suffering a block from the White House and then reading about the absolute nimrods who want to live in the White House next time around.

I'm reading about people putting signs in their yard talking about God and how disbelief in said god means that you shouldn't live in America.

I'm reading about businesses that are so influenced by the almighty dollars that line the pockets of people who call themselves the devotees of an itinerant preacher who was the earthly son of a carpenter that they will pull advertising from a television show that seeks to educate Americans about a religion not centered around the itinerant preacher who told people to love their neighbors.

I'm reading about Kim Kardashian and Demi Moore and that little Bieber boy in his saggy pants and ridiculous hair.

I'm reading about Donald Trump, people.

And it is bringing me down.

Now, the obvious answer is to stay away from the internets and TV and radio and spend every day trying to bake and clean and decorate myself into a cheery mood. Fa la la la la la la la la.

However, I have to say that there is a perverseness in me that says, "Why the hell should I have to stay away from MY interwebs because other people keep forgetting the whole "good will toward men" thing or the Constitution thing or the "pick one way to part your hair" thing? In fact, there is a LARGE part of me that says, with a certain desperation as if in the bottom of a wishing well, "This is MY interwebs and I'm taking them back. I'm taking them ALLLLL back."

And then I take a few deep breaths and think about how good a Baby Ruth would be right now and I realize that, really, since the interwebs are a big part of the community with which I identify and because I think that they can be tools for good and because I think that this is a season of light and love and family and togetherness and hope and YES, GOLDANG IT, peace on earth, good will toward men, I want to do something from a not desperate, angry, frustrated place.

So what I'm proposing is this: from now until New Year's Day, I'm going to turn I'm Not Hannah into a Hap, Hap, Happy Holidays blog. I will post happy things. I will find hopeful stories to share with you. I will remember faithful friends and days of auld lang syne with a smile in my heart. And I will drag myself up out of my grumpitudiness and spread some cheer, by gosh, by golly.

Wanna join me? I mean, not in an official "it's a blog carnival oh, my gott, I've got to come up with a post" way. Just in a "Hey, here's a funny story or cute cartoon or LOOK HOW PRETTY MY YULE COOKIES ARE" way. I don't care if you are Pagan or Christian or Muslim or Jewish or File Cabinetcentric. I don't care if you don't put up a tree or a stocking or bake a single cookie. (Although...y'all. Why aren't you baking cookies? Come ON.) What I care about is giving folks who would rather not read about Newt or Harry or Kim's rank asshattery at a time when we're supposed to be feeling comfort and joy something else to read.

Who's with me? If you are, YAY! Give me the good stuff: Christmas tree stories, cute pictures of kittens, your favorite wassail recipe. Lay it on me. You can lay it on me here OR you can visit the nifty new I'm Not Hannah Facebook Page (that's right...I went there) and lay it on me there. http://www.facebook.com/NotHannah

If you REALLY want to get all jiggy with the Christmas (or Yule or Kwanzaa or Organizational Day) Spirit, lookee what I did:

Awww, I made a Hap, Hap, Happy Holidays BUTTON. (This totes makes up for my lack of NaBloWriMo buttons, right? Riiiiigggghhht?) Copy that little sucker right there and you can slap it on your blog or any post that makes you feel like you just chugged a few eggnogs down (the good kind...with rum.)

I'm off to clean the bathroom, mop the kitchen floor, throw up Christmas doodads, and mix about seventy different Christmas cookie doughs up. Because I am FULL OF THE SPIRIT, YO.

Blink.

You understand that the phrase "throw up Christmas doodads" means "decorate my half-decorated house with assorted spangles and frippery," right?

Because, you know, I've eaten a LOT of candy canes, but not enough to actually, you know, make me puke.

Yet.

Here's a story about Jessica Lynch to take your mind off of that particular image. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/14/jessica-lynch-former-pow_n_1147802.html

You're welcome and hap, hap, happy holidays to you!

I Made Laundry Detergent

2011-12-07T10:41:00.002-05:00

The other day, I was in the grocery store buying echinacea tea and lozenges and a flame thrower to try to dislodge the sore throat from Hell that was threatening my Thanksgiving when I ran into a former student. I had actually taken her little girl's pictures a few months earlier and we chatted for a while. Upon learning my intended purchases, she laughed and said that she was there buying ingredients for homemade laundry soap. How fun! The only two hippies in Dingleberry hanging out in the grocery store. (Well, three...her husband was there.) She touted her recipe's cleaning power and showed off the softness of her clothing and then I staggered away to find vitamin C drops and forgot all about the homemade laundry soap.

Until my beloved Tocaya mentioned it on Facebook. Or Pinterest. Or possibly Google+. Or all of them. (GAH. Social media is hard.) I said, "Really, girl?" And she said, "Honey, yes..." And I said, "I don't know..." And she said, "Oh, you've gotta try it." And I said, "Okay."

I clicked on the recipe link she provided (here 'tis) and found myself staring at a fairly simple list: Fels Naptha soap, borax, baking and washing soda, and one of those oxygen-based stain remover powder thingies. Easy peasy. I found all of the ingredients in Kroger (I had to do a little searching for the Fels Naptha) and spent about fifteen dollars on it.

Back home, I followed the instructions as best I could (see below) and in about fifteen minutes, I was ready to wash my first load of clothes. The results were...good. I can't say that my clothes were CLEANER than they were with "regular" soap, but they were certainly AS clean. I definitely didn't waste fifteen dollars on supplies, which is good, because I have a metric ass-ton of laundry detergent right now.

You want me to break it down, list style? (Awwwww, yeah...) (Are you picturing me as Barry White, cruising around my laundry room?) (Please don't. That's just weird.)

This detergent is NOT green. I mean, it's white in color, but it also contains petroleum products and some chemicals. I try really hard to be as green as possible, but the truth is that, much like my beloved Curel, I'm okay with my laundry detergent containing a few chemicals. In the case of the detergent, the bad stuff is spread out by a looooooot of "natural" products, so, you know...yay. The purpose of this experiment was NOT to be greener than the average bear, but to be cheaper than the average bear.
Of course, bears are probably harder to be greener or cheaper than, given that they live out in the woods, eat what they forage, and avoid using petroleum products. Unless they eat a PERSON. (Did I tell you somebody saw a bear a few miles away from here? Yeah.)
Fels Naptha soap is STRONG. It apparently used to have some chemical in it that caused cancer and made people sick and, I don't know, acted as a homing signal for aliens, but now that chemical is gone. It still smells strong and the package warns that you should avoid prolonged skin contact with it. If you have a food processor, grate it in there. It takes about five minutes and then you're done.
All of the powders (the borax, the sodas, and the oxy-clean stuff) have a tendency to cloud up when you pour them. The original poster talked about how mixing the detergent made your house smell great, but she failed to mention that mixing it also had the potential to coat you with a white film that tastes fairly awful and probably isn't good to ingest or inhale. (This is NOT a reason not to make this stuff. Just because something is "natural" doesn't mean you should eat it or breathe it. Allow me to introduce you to castor beans and methane gas.) I mixed mine outside on the patio.
The original poster suggested mixing the detergent in a plastic bag-lined five gallon bucket with a lid, which I of course didn't have. I did, however, have one of those enamel-coated canning pots with a lid, which worked just fine. Mixing the stuff was challenging. I did put it in a plastic bag inside the pot, but it was a CHEAP plastic bag and one of the corners burst and I cussed and spilled some of the powder onto the floor and then I slipped in it and I cussed some more. Maybe if your plastic bags aren't bootleg, they work better for mixing, but I gave up and dumped it all in the pot to mix. I put the grated soap in first, which was a mistake. Next time, I'll probably mix the powders together first and then add the soap in little by little, because I'm still not sure that it's all the way mixed up.
This makes a loooot of detergent. Like, this much.
I know this doesn't seem like a lot, until you look at this picture, which is the size of the scoop you're supposed to use (for what it's worth, I use a heaping scoop every time):

This stuff is going to last forever....
Although highly scented in the container, this soap is NOT highly scented on the clothes. You can smell it a bit when you put them in the dryer, but when they come out...no. Mine smell faintly of the compostable lemongrass-scented dryer sheets I use, but otherwise, they just smell like...cloth. Not dirty, but definitely not store-bought highly scented. This is fine by me, as I have gotten to the point where I think it's weird that you can smell folks' laundry detergent months after they washed their clothes. (I got some handmedowns from a friend who uses a different brand than me and after almost a year in storage, they still smell like Gain. Not that Gain smells BAD, but what does that mean, you know?) I worry that it will freak Will out, because he equates "chemical smell" with "clean." You should see the array of bottles he bought to clean the bathroom he uses. It makes me sneeze just to think about it. I've scouted around online and found that folks have added scent crystals to their mix or just use highly scented dryer sheets or those dryer bars. Until the Chemical Brother complains, I'm going to avoid this.
My clothes are clean. I want to stress this. They don't seem dingy, the whites are whites, and the brights are brights. I can't imagine, given that it took such a short amount of time, why every single person I know isn't doing this. (To be fair, I have used this only on hot and warm water; I rarely wash stuff in cold, because my kids are germ magnets and they are frequently covered in gross mess.)
This detergent is going to last me a loooong time. Given that I spend around fifteen dollars a MONTH on detergent and stain remover booster stuff, I figure I'll save (at the least) ninety bucks over the course of six months, which is pretty cool. Every bit I DON'T spend on chemical-laden, expensive cleaning products can go to organic veggies, fruit, and pop tarts. Or organic flour with which to make organic pop tarts with my organic frickin' fruit, yo! (Once you start this stuff, it's like a drug. YOU NEED YOUR FIX.)

Yeah, so I did it. It took fifteen bucks and fifteen minutes. You can totally do this.

Georgia On My Mind

2011-11-18T08:54:00.001-05:00

Over on Facebook, Kallan from The Secret Life of the American Working Witch and some others decided that the DC 40...well...they sucked and that instead of pairing a state with a Christian-centered, dogma-drenched "goal" for the future of the United States, it would be much better to point out the awesomeness of each state from a secular standpoint. And I was all, HECK, YEAH, especially when I found out that Georgia was assigned the day the DC 40 would bash another religion.

Here's the thing: as a liberal Paganista, folks are always telling me that I ought to move. I ought to leave my state and move to Portland or Maryland or Vermont or Massachusetts or some other awesome place of awesome liberalness. Beyond the snow and cold that would make my husband break down into shuddering sobs of misery, there is another reason I wouldn't leave Georgia: I love it.

I love Georgia. I love its history, even the awful parts. I love its geography. I love its climate. Now, there's stuff I don't like, which is mainly stuff that the DC 40 would love, but overall, this place is my home and it's a good home. I love it. In FACT, I love it so much, I'm going to write a list about it. Woohoooo!

Otis Redding, the Allman Brothers, The Indigo Girls, REM, Arrested Development, the B-52s, James Brown, Ray Charles, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Shawn Mullins, Outkast, Little Richard, Widespread Panic, John Berry, Vic Chestnutt, Alan Jackson, Kenny Rogers, Sugarland, Tricia Yearwood, Roland Hayes (FROM MY HOMETOWN, Y'ALL), Lena Horne, Johnny Mercer, Robert Shaw, and Usher. You are welcome, my friends, because Georgia brought you these musicians, in addition to loads more.
Other states have buckeyes. We have peaches. Have you ever bitten into a buckeye that was so sweet and firm and luscious that the juice rolled down your chin and made you blush? I didn't think so.
You want mountains? We got 'em. You want rolling hills? We got 'em. You want old growth forests? We got 'em. Grasslands? Swamps? Big cities? Oceans? Sand hills? Rivers? Lakes? Small towns? Historical places that will stuff your brain full of good stuff? Yes, ma'am. Come on down. We have your geographical and historical needs covered.
Conrad Aiken, Coleman Barks (my creative writing professor, dontcha know?), Roy Blount, Jr., David Bottoms, Olive Ann Burns, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Pat Conroy, Pam Durban, Lewis Grizzard, Joshilyn Jackson, Terry Kay, Sidney Lanier, Carson McCullers, Judson Mitcham, Margaret Mitchell, Flannery O'Connor, Anne River Siddons, Alice Walker, Stuart Woods, Kevin Young, and James Dickey, among many others. You're welcome, y'all. These writers call or called Georgia home.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jimmy Carter. Two of my heroes are Georgians.
People say "bless your heart" here. This is the best phrase ever, as it covers a variety of expressions, from "thank you" to "I'm so sorry" to "you are dead wrong AND bat shit crazy at the same time." Observe: "Bless her sweet heart, Michelle Bachmann thinks she has a shot at being president."
People also say "please" and "thank you" and "yes ma'am" and "no sir" here. A little civility can go a loooong way in these trying times.
Hello? Julia Roberts. Also, Lawrence Fishburne, Holly Hunter, Joanne Woodward, Dakota Fanning, Danny McBride (that's right), Chris Tucker, Burt Reynolds, and BONES FROM STAR TREK.
We have the Fabulous Fox Theatre. You have not lived until you've seen The Nutcracker at the Fox Theatre.
We have the University of Georgia Bulldogs, who (with luck and prayer and the aid of 98,000 screaming fans) are about to clinch the SEC East this weekend. There are other teams and schools, but, frankly, I'm not going to mention them at this juncture.
Except to say this: across the interstate from GA Tech is a restaurant called The Varsity, which features the most delicious onion rings in the entire world, best eaten with a PC, which stands for Plain Chocolate, which is chocolate milk on ice. ON ICE, y'all.
The smell of magnolias on a warm May night.

There are a million reasons why I love my home state. All of the above, plus the memories of my family and friends, the softness of the air, the way you can tell if a woman is from Savannah or Dalton based on her drawl and whether she says "yonder." I love that we've overcome so much and even that we have so far to go because my children will SEE it. I love that I can grow a garden in November. I love wondering if it will snow this year and how excited and nutso everybody gets when it does.

I love driving the backroads instead of going through Atlanta. I love driving through Atlanta because it means I'm going to see my family. I love that a river is always just a few minutes away.

I love red clay and kudzu blossoms and flirting with old men at hardware stores.

I love boiled peanuts bought at a roadside stand along with a basket of muscadines.

I love this place and though it's tempting to think of living amongst folks who are more like me philosophically, there's no way to divorce my philosophy--my history and my blood and my soul and my education and my long talks around the fire--from THIS place. My home.

My Georgia.

A List About Decking the Halls

2011-11-14T05:48:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, while taking a break from our Sunday of Pajama-Enwrapped Sloth, I went to go pick up some melatonin for Jeffrey. On the way home, I was flipping through radio stations when I heard, to my horror, a CHRISTMAS SONG.

Egads!

Say it isn't so!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Ahem.

I'm not really sure why it struck me as so much of a terrible thing, but apparently, in the argument raging (occasionally pootering forth?) over when to begin celebrating the holiday season, I have come down on the "not before Thanksgiving" side. I don't know when this happened, as I consider myself fairly unGrinchy and loving of Christmas and all of the festive and spiritual aspects of it. But apparently, at some point in time, I said, "NO. We will have the Day of Turkey and THEN we will start the DAY OF TREE."

I have no idea why. I mean, I'm one of those "try to keep Christmas in your heart all year 'round" kind of folks, so one would think I'd be all "hang up some frickin' LIGHTS, yo!" in....say...September. But no. I'm grumping around in my CRV going, "Fie on you, Mariah Carey, and your jingly little Christmas ditty." I decided to examine my Yuletide insanity, list style.

Awwwww, yeah.

The List in Which Not Hannah Contemplates Why She is Not Decking Her Halls Yet:

She does not want her children swept up in the commercialism of the holiday. Uh, no. That isn't it. Having wrestled with the Spirit (various and assorted Spirits, actually), I've come to realize that when Hobby Lobby puts up the cinnamon-scented glass balls in early October, I do a little happy dance of cheer. I'm sorry, but the American Christmas, with Santa and reindeer and twenty-four hours of A Christmas Story is sort of saturated with commercialism, and I decided quite some time ago to embrace the glitter and magic and fizziness of it while leaving the "buy this stuff now" behind. I mean, watching the Macy's Day Parade and seeing the REAL Santa Claus was and is a humongous part of my Christmas season, but I'm not hurrying out on Black Friday to Macy's, know what I mean?
She does not want her children to forget the spiritual Reason for the Season. Can I be blunt here? Last year, I was so inundated by both the Christian culture and Paganistas I love online and the war of "Who Has The Most Claim to the Third Week of December" that I wanted to barf until tinsel came out my nose. The end result was that we celebrated neither Yule nor Christmas with any spiritual backdrop, and nobody was struck by lightning OR visited by a vengeful king of any vegetable variety. (If you aren't a Pagan, it's probably best to move along. Nothing to see in that last sentence. Alternately, you can ask me about it. I'm easy like Sunday morning when it comes to discussing the Holly and Oak Kings.) Now, this doesn't mean that I didn't MISS a spiritual backdrop to the holiday. I did. There is magic in the Return of the Sun and magic in the Birth of the Son and can't we all just get along?? (The short answer, in America, is "no. No, we cannot.") I would LIKE for my children to know the spiritual Reasons for the Seasons, and plan on teaching them in as organic a fashion as I can, but I have also made peace with the concept that, for better or for worse, the American Christmas is just as much about Santa and elves and reindeer as it is about Christ or the Winter Solstice, maybe even more so. Frankly, given that neither Santa nor the elves nor the reindeer have ever been used as an excuse to persecute anybody, it strikes me that embracing the secular aspect of the holiday would be a good idea for the most spiritual among us, a sort of break from the tedious nit-picking of American politics and religious disagreements. Haul out the holly and you better be good, for goodness sake and all that. SANTA IS WATCHING YOU, people.
What?
Nevermind.
She still hasn't taken down the Halloween stuff. Okay, this one is true. My living room counter holds the vast majority of the Halloween deckings waiting to be repacked, but one can still find the odd (plastic) spider or (real, unfortunately, River the Magpie strikes again) pumpkin lurking in the bathrooms. I'm not sure where Will put the Halloween tub and since he still hasn't put up the tub of winter clothes too big for River or the Tub of the Jackets from when he took them down weeks ago, the idea of taking out another tub (or typing the word "tub" again) of holiday accessories is, shall we say, daunting. I think I'll tackle the Halloween stuff Wednesday as I work the first two days of the week, but there will still be some Harvest-oriented things that I don't know what to do with, which leads me to...
She doesn't want Thanksgiving to feel neglected. This one is SORT of true, too. But, unlike Halloween and Christmas, Thanksgiving doesn't have built in cute decorations. I mean, okay, yes, cornucopias are cool and all, but after that you've got...what? Turkeys? Ears of corn? I'm NOT going to start putting ceramic Native American figurines on my mantel, and let's be honest: a pilgrim around Thanksgiving wasn't all rosy-cheeked and smiling. Gaunt and sore-ridden people dressed in buckled shoes do not belong on my front door wreath. Don't get me wrong. I ADORE Thankgiving. It is the holiday without spiritual obligation, a time to reflect on the year and enjoy one's family and friends and eat until you feel guilty. But it isn't much on decorations. And, yes, I understand that one might also consider Thankgiving as the jumping off point for the mass genocide that our American founders enacted. I didn't say that Thanksgiving was without a massive amount of guilt. Pretty much what it boils down to is, I want to eat my turkey and dressing in peace, and that does not include any obligation to deck the halls with tiny lights shaped like cranberry sauce wedges.
She is simply too busy to consider taking on holiday decoration of any sort. This is a handy excuse, and I wish I could say it was true. However, an examination of my time spent lately leads me to believe that I could get a lot more done if I removed myself from the fruitless, aggravating, dumbassery-laden political discussions on Facebook and turned my attention to other things, like vacuuming, hanging with the kidlets, or, you know, sleeping. I am more busy now than I was three months ago, but I am hardly falling over with the business. Not in any real way that would mean I was struggling to do things like throw up a few strings of light or a jingle bell or two.
Secretly, she hates Christmas. This is categorically untrue. I love it all. I love the story of the little baby in the manger, I love the story of the Holly King, I love the return of the sun (even though the coldest months are ahead of us). I love the cookies and candy and sausage balls and wassail. I love Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant and Boris Karloff (the Grinch, people, come ON) and Tom Hanks' dead eyes (that part of The Polar Express gives me the hoobies) and even, heaven help me, Vanessa Williams being visited by that dude from Duran Duran. I love Rudolph and Frosty and the little drummer boy (sing it for me, Bob Seger, and throw in a little sax while you're at it.) I love the tree and the wreaths and the blankets and the pine straw angel that is always the last ornament unpacked. I love wrapping presents and taking the kids to see Santa. I love making lists. I love the WHOLE DANG THING.
What am I waiting for?
THE HALLS. THEY WILL BE DECKED! STARTING ON WEDNESDAY!

I feel so much better now. Lists are so awesome, aren't they? In the faith of The Filing Cabinet, they are totally The Psalms. Why isn't there a holiday to celebrate The Filing Cabinet? With a tree made out of sticky notes. And individually colored sharpies hanging from the chimney with care? And...and...cookies shaped like accordion folders?

One holiday at a time, y'all. One holiday at a time.

To Color or Not To Color

2011-10-29T07:45:00.000-04:00

I'm not particularly freaked out about getting older. Call me morbid, but when you lose two friends before the age of twenty-five, the idea of growing older and living a full life is less freak-out inducing. I've got a few fine lines on my face now and two deeper grooves (one between my eyebrows--I need sunglasses) and one beside my mouth (I need to sleep sitting up?), but they really don't bug me that much. The zits that I keep assuming will disappear as I get older and then they don't, the little bastards, keep me feeling young in that respect.

However, in the last few months, grey hairs have begun popping up on my temples. I actually grinned at the first one: "Aw, look, my first wisdom badge." Snort. The second one was a bit less grin-inducing, but it still was barely a blip on my radar. I've got about ten now. And my radar's blipping.

I considered plucking them out, but honestly, my hair has never been that thick and the idea of losing a bunch of it (particularly hairs with body, as my greys seem to be) is not appealing. I considered just letting them be. They aren't bothering anybody. They won't cause me to get sick. They don't whisper to me while I'm dozing off about terroristic plots.

But.

They are sorta bothering me. I think it's part of my whole, "Oh. Huh. I've been sitting around focusing on my kids and house for the last few years and I sort of let myself go. Let's fix that." thing. Like, I try to shave every other day now. Or actually wash my face at night. Or not eat an entire bag of candy in two days. I wear makeup at least four days a week now. It's all very exciting. So maybe I should go ahead and color those suckers so they can keep up with the rest of the makeover.

The thing is, I'm not really into, you know, hair maintenance. Truth be told, if I thought Will wouldn't fall over dead at the sight of it, I would cut off all my hair right this minute and revel in the ease of a pixie cut. But I like my husband, and so instead, I wear my hair in a ponytail all the dang time. It's fine, but it's hardly stylish. And that's OKAY with me. I'm hardly stylish, myself.

I dyed my hair exactly once in the past, when I got a little crazy with the Sun-In bottle. I was about as blond as a person could get AND I was brown as a berry and my hair was in this crazy asymmetrical thing with a rat tail. I...I don't like to talk about it. I call it "The Summer of My Hair Insanity." Shudder.

After that, I swore off hair dyeing. Because it made me crazy. I have always looked with wonder at those of my friends who get their hair colored. These ladies, whom I love, are always getting highlighted and lowlighted and streaked and while their hair (generally) looks Teh Awesome, it's exhausting for me to consider. Nevermind the wallop it would put on my budget.

That's the other thing holding me back: coloring your hair is fricking expensive, yo. For the price of a color and cut, I could buy a bajillion papers for card design. Or a set of reflectors. Or a few mini-defusers. (These are all photography things. Check out my term-dropping.) Or, you know, a lot of bread and milk. For a budget-conscious, eco-friendly, cultural-norm-eschewing gal, coloring my hair seems to be a glamorous deviation from Heatherness.

Like, on the days when I don't go to the hospital, I'm going to look really faaantastic with my colored hair as I weed the turnip rows. People in Kroger will be all, "Who is that ravishing thing in the holey sweatpants cheering over a sixty-cent coupon for dishwashing soap?" How are the pictures I'm editing going to fully appreciate my lustrous mane?

I don't know. It just seems sort of silly to me to spend a lot of time on my hair. Crazy. Wasteful. Un-fricking-natural.

And yet, those grey hairs.

Those ten grey hairs don't seem really natural to me either right now, particularly as I finally feel that I'm settling into the person I was meant to be professionally. Is that person grey-headed? She feels...not grey-headed.

I don't know...what do y'all think? Should I color or not? Do YOU color? If so, why? Do you use a salon or a bottle at home. (I'm hopeless at this kind of girly mess. Heeellllp me.)

Caramel Frosted Pumpkin Mini-Muffin Cupcake Thingies

2011-10-27T17:34:00.000-04:00

First, thanks for all of the responses to yesterday's post. Will and I sat Jeffrey down and explained to him that while we appreciated his curiosity, he simply wasn't old enough to understand the implications and emotions and issues related to the Holocaust and, specifically, life in concentration camps. We let him know that he could study about World War Two and the issues around it, but until we were sure that he was ready to understand the horrors, he wouldn't be reading books about it. His response was anger and sarcasm ("Oh, yeah? Well, how about when I'm an honor's student and I go on a trip to Europe and we visit a concentration camp and I have no idea what happened there and I look stupid?" Sigh. Count to ten. "If I'm letting you go to Europe, I'm pretty sure you will be ready to read about concentration camps." "Oh.") and we had to be very kind and firm for a good thirty minutes. As to the nonficion/fiction thing: Jeffrey loves fiction, but his attention span and imagination being what they are, he needs for fiction to be read aloud to him for him to really grasp it. I've read the Harry Potter books up to book five to him and Will's reading The Ranger's Apprentice series to him. (I have to leave the room when he does; those books are not...er...written the way I like things to be written.) He and I are reading the first Percy Jackson book, having watched the movie this summer and he was receptive to us reading the Egyptian myth series by the same author. We're also reading Farmer Boy out loud as a family, which will be the last Little House book we read for a while, since the Ingall's girls are getting all grown up now. Not sure what the family book will be after this. (We read out loud a LOT in this family.) Suggestions?

Moving on, I had planned to write a post about how I'm having a hard time with the current chapter of the book I'm working on right now. But the hard time revolves around race and perspective and I'm not sure if I can articulate it well enough, so instead, I'm going to write about mini pumpkin muffin-cupcake thingies.

Yay! Mini pumpkin muffin-cupcake thingies instead of anything remotely thought-provoking!

Anywho, I discovered this recipe on Pinterest and immediately loved it and called it George, even though the first couple of times I had issues with it.

The first issue was because I had read somewhere that some lady who makes awesome cookies only mixes her ingredients until they're barely combined. This led to me having giant, weird streaks in my cookies that were where the butter and brown sugar had combines. The streaks tasted delicious, but they made for ugly-ass cookies.

The second issue came when I realized that because there was so much pumpkin in the recipe, the cookies wound up being flimsy. Pumpkin gives things a velvety, smooth texture, but in a cookie, this sort of translated for me into limp floppy mushes of cookie, especially after they were frosted. Tasty, but not very efficient.

I decided to fix my issues by A: mixing everything until its mixed and B: slopping the dough into mini-muffin tins.

And then little acorn-capped angels of Autumn sang from the corners of my kitchen while sprinkling me with orange glitter.

Here's the recipe, adapted from this one at Let's Dish Recipes.

Ingredients for Cookies:

1 cup softened butter

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1 cup canned pumpkin

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon ginger

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 cups all purpose flour

Ingredients for frosting:

3 tablespoons butter

1/4 cup heavy cream

1 cup confectioners' sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

pinch of salt

Let's do this:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a large bowl (I used my stand mixer), cream together butter and sugars. Cream them until they're EVENLY MIXED. (Gah. Still can't get over that advice.)
Add eggs and vanilla and mix well.
Stir in the pumpkin.
Don't stick your finger in for a taste yet. It's not as tasty without the spices.
In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, salt, and spices.
Add this sllloooowwwly to the pumpkin mixture and mix well.
Now go ahead and take a taste, just don't blame me if you get salmonella. Yuuuum.
Spray a mini-muffin tin with cooking spray. I suppose, alternately, you could use mini-muffin-cupcake baking papers, but I have no idea if they even make those.
Dollop a spoonful of batter/dough into each tin. Aim for the magic "two-thirds full" rule of muffin/cupcake baking.
Bake for 10-12 minutes, or until the top of a muffin springs back when you press on it. Or until a toothpick inserted one comes clean. (Seriously, y'all have made muffins before, right? You should have enough for two twenty-four count mini-muffin tens.
While mini-muffin-cupcake thingies are cooling, combine butter, cream, and brown sugar in a medium saucepan and heat it up over medium heat.
Cook this delicious mixture, stirring occasionally, until it begins to boil. (Do NOT let it boil for very long AT ALL. Otherwise, you get pralines, which are good, but not what you're after right now.)
Once it boils, remove it from the heat and stir in the vanilla.
Allow this to cool for a few minutes, then stir in the confectioners' sugar.
Spread on cooled mini-muffin-cupcake thingies.

This is a dessert that is rich and smooth and delicious and spicy and awesome AND pretty. Now here is where I should be showing you the pictures of the mini-muffin-cupcake thingies I baked weeks ago, but I have somehow lost them. It is a sad, sad day.

But not without benefits, because check it out: I can totes bake a batch tomorrow and take pictures of them. And then eat them. Wheeee!

At War With Jeffrey's Reading Habits

2011-10-26T07:40:00.001-04:00

At nine-years-old, Jeffrey is into farts. He's also into poop, boogers, slime, mucous, vomit, diarrhea, plaque, pus, and pee. Not an item in this list is remarkable or disturbing to me. I grew up with three little brothers and so, basically, this is an affirmation that at the end of the day, Jeffrey is a normal boy. (Will, who grew up with two sisters, is disgusted by the whole thing.) He also draws messy and intricately detailed battlefields and/or military plans and plays video games in which he fights dinosaurs. All of this is fine. Boy stuff. Got it.

However, I've started noticing that his reading habits (which have always run to more mature material) are ramping up a wee bit and I can't decide what to do about it. First it was the "I Survived" series. Hurricane Katrina, the Titanic, the bombing of Pearl Harbor: some kid survived it and an author wrote about it. This is fine. My love for survival stories is well-documented and anything that keeps him from reading The Encyclopedia of Fifty Blue Million Facts for the 843rd time is awesome.

We've moved past that, now, and I can't say I'm all that tickled. Last week it was something like You Wouldn't Want to Live in a Medieval Prison. First of all, REALLY? Living in a medieval prison is something that kids fifth grade and under think about? Or need to think about? Second of all, dudes, that book was fairly gross. Plague and starvation and all sorts of yickness. Other You Wouldn't Want to Live... books followed.

This weekend, when we went to the high school library, my boy wanted to check out a book on epidemics and poisons and antidotes. Erm. No to the poisons, thanks. Yesterday, he brought home a book about life in a concentration camp, complete with awful pictures of ragged, starving, horrified people.

Okay, now, listen. I remember reading about Anne Frank in fourth grade. I remember being taken with her story, and being devastated when I found out she didn't survive. It was sobering and awful and frightening to me, and I don't believe that my state was wrong in attaching her story to the fourth grade curriculum. I think nine-years-old is plenty old enough to grasp that evil and injustice and prejudice exists.

However, it wasn't until I was an adult that I fully grasped (and was fully able to grasp) the horrors that millions of people endured at the hands of the Nazis. I read Night by Elie Wiesel and something about the matter of fact and yet lyrical way he presented the disintegration of his life CHANGED me. I taught it to dozens of fifteen-year-olds and watched as the majority of them grasped, for the first time, the limits of mankind's spirit--on both ends of the spectrum. It was a powerful lesson for them AND for me.

I don't know that Jeffrey is ready for such a lesson. For one thing, being an Aspie (for him) often means that he'll latch onto one aspect of something and become obsessed with it. I don't want him to be obsessed with horror, you know? I want him to understand what happens when people are afraid to act or speak up, but I don't want him to go over and over pictures of skeletal children standing half naked next to piles of trash in his head before bed. As bizarre as this might sound, I want him to understand the motivation and the consequences and the FEELINGS behind those pictures before he pores over them, not just bluster through them with Aspie detachment.

For another, I don't know how appropriate it is age-wise for him to be learning these truths. Will and I were talking about it last night. He remembers learning all about World War Two when he was in fourth grade and drawing tanks and watching shows about Iwo Jima and being fascinated by the scope of the war. I suggested that he guide Jeffrey into an interest in that versus the concentration camps.

I'm not sure what makes this more "okay" in my head. War is war, right? Machine gunners and trenches and tanks aren't exactly the stuff of fluffy bedtime stories. But...somehow...World War Two as a subject is less horrific than Buchenwald for me. Maybe it's simply that hundreds of men being killed on an aircraft carrier go fast, in a fireball that doesn't allow for pictures of fingers grasping fences or piles of naked bodies in ditches. War between men in uniform is impersonal. Children being tattooed is far too personal for me.

What do you think? Am I overreacting? Should I guide him through this history lesson or gently redirect him toward a different aspect of the varying ways men kill each other?

It's awful that I have to even consider this.

Tomes on Tuesday: THE SCORPIO RACES by Maggie Stiefvater

2011-10-25T07:48:00.001-04:00

I have to admit I was somewhat skeptical when I heard that Maggie Stiefvater was writing a book about water horses, the creatures from Scottish myth. Water horses, in case you were wondering, are fairly...er...brutal beasties, with a penchant for eating people and/or jumping off cliffs with them on their backs. They didn't strike me as very good story fodder. In a YA market saturated with vampires and werewolves and ghosts, however, I was willing to give The Scorpio Races a go, mainly because I would read the description on a roll of toilet paper if Ms. Stiefvater wrote it.

This book...this is a different book. It doesn't plop you down in the middle of a immediately romantic tale or whisper about magic. No, it's pretty much: so there's this island and there are horses that love you as much as they want to eat you and this boy is really, really good with them. And there's a girl, too, whose life is coming to a fine point because of the horses. So the bones of the story are there for you right from the start: bare and looming and without any question.

But, somehow, the story doesn't unravel in jarring chunks. (That sentence made me a little queasy, how about you?) Instead, it unfolds quietly. The magic and horror of the water horses is commonplace; how the people in the story go about living their lives around the horses is what Stiefvater decided to show us. Sean, the male protagonist, is quiet and steady, with a world of longing and ideas inside his head. His position is desperate in a simple way: he wants to be free of the wealthy man for whom he works--and he wants the water horse with which he wins the races.

The Scorpio Races of the story? A yearly event taking place in November during which folks die--on the backs and at the teeth of the water horses. Winning the race means you live and get a nice monetary reward. There's a whole lot more about the races I could go into, but weirdly enough, the races seemed almost secondary to me by the end, even though they were the beginning and end of the story.

Anyway, vying for the reward is Puck, the female protagonist of the story (Stiefvater once again uses a two-person narrative.) Orphaned by the horses and trying to keep her family together and on the island she loves, she decides to enter the races on her "real" horse.

You've counted two protagonists, right? But I'm going to step in and say that there are actually four. Ish. Collectively or so. There are Sean and Puck, but there are also the water horses and...weirdly...the island of Thisby on which everybody lives. A cold, rocky, sandy place, it's a mixture of warm small-village life and fear of the horses and need of tourists. It reminds me of the island of Skua from Witch's Daughter by Nina Bawden, a book from my childhood that you need to read after you read The Scorpio Races. Stiefvater really outdoes herself with the imagery here; the island feels like a real place where you can go to drink tea and eat bread and watch (from a safe distance) the capall uisce.

The water horses--now THESE are some freaky creatures. You thought werewolves and vampires were creepy? The water horses blow them away...because they are versions of, you know, real horses. The kind that you love and ride on and watch gallop across a pasture. All of that is there in The Scorpio Races, but there's also a good jolt of horror; the water horses drink blood and stalk people and are fully and completely of a kind of magic that we simply haven't seen much in literature. It is old, wild, untouchable magic.

Understand: this isn't a particularly fast read. It doesn't make you feel like you're rushing headlong down a path like some of Stiefvater's other stories have. (Except, maybe, the parts with Puck, who's a rushy little heroine. I love her; she's so tough and real and awkward.) The story develops slowly and takes time to really let you KNOW the characters and UNDERSTAND the folks on the island and their circumstances.

This also isn't the sort of book that you close and say, "Yay! I loved it! Woohoo!" It's the sort of book you put down and say, "Hmmm..."

And then you make a pot of tea and you sip it and say "Hmmm" some more. And then you go put on warm socks because you feel chilly inside. And then you look at the cover (the book is GORGEOUS--Stiefvater's publisher gifts her with beautifully crafted books) and you tap it with your fingers and go outside in the sunshine and ponder myth.

And you realize that the book makes you think of Witch's Daughter and National Velvet and The Secret of Roan Inish and yet it is so totally different from those stories that you love it just for itself.

Yes, I loved this book. I'm glad I read it and I'm glad Stiefvater reached inside herself to write it. Go read it with a cup of tea and a plate of thick, chewy oatmeal cookies.

Jacket Season

2011-10-24T07:03:00.000-04:00

First, yes. It's been a while since I posted, I frecked up NaBloWriMo, et cetera et cetera. To be honest, the way the Fates came together and mixed NaBloWriMo up with the new job and my finally understanding clipping masks and the early football game and a million other things meant that something had to go and that something was additional writing every day. In the spirit of NaBloWriMo, I'm letting that go. I'll write every day from now on and release any residual guilt I might feel for not writing every day. Mkay? Mkay?

The weather has finally taken a turn for the chilly, which means that in addition to Visiting Season, it's also Jacket Season. That sounds all nice and cozy, doesn't it? Like, "Ooh, it's Jacket Season. Time to snuggle up by the firepit with a hot toddy while modeling my jacket."

Don't get comfy, people.

Jacket Season really means, "Oh, crap, it's Jacket Season. Time to catch up on the ironing, because the Filing Cabinet knows we don't have any more room on any hook in this dang house on which the visitors during Visiting Season can hang their outerwear because Will's jackets have taken over the house."

Y'all. My husband has roughly 76,000 jackets. Jackets in every color but yellow, orange, and pink. Plaid jackets. Jackets with hoods. Jackets with liners. Jackets that are actually souped-up sweatshirts. Jackets that serve as rain coats or wind breakers. He has jackets that the school gives the staff, at least ten of them, all in shades of grey or black. He has jackets he won by smoking a metric crapton of cigarettes. He has a jacket given to him by his mother twenty years ago that is a virulent shade of dark teal. He has jackets pocked by too many nights by the bonfire, with zippers that work only two percent of the time and with pocket liners that are in shreds.

And he won't get rid of a dang one of them.

Last year when the warm weather took hold, I piled up all of the jackets on the bed in the hopes that the sheer size of the mound would convince him that he should share the warmth wealth with ninety or so of our less fortunate citizens. My bed looked like the world's largest lost and found pile. I think he culled three out of the mix, not including the duplicate grey fleece school pullovers, one of which has a broken zipper. (These two are two of about six grey fleece school pullovers.)

I wanted to bite my own face off.

Instead, I carefully laid all of our winter wear in a humongous tub (included was my stuff: one winter coat, a lined flannel work shirt, and two fleece jackets for football games) that could be used as a rescue raft in case of flood and asked my dearest to find a place to put it. I figured, since he has a bad back and honestly, we are slap out of storage space, that this would mean that he would get rid of some dang jackets. Nope. He wrestled that tub up into the attic and, sweating and groaning, commented on how that was one spring cleaning chore done.

ARRRRGH.

Now, the cool weather is back, so he wrestled the tub back down the steps with a look of sheer glee. I am not kidding. The boy was excited about getting his jackets out. He has since festooned the makeshift rack he built specifically for his jackets in our bedroom (what woman doesn't want a one by ten resting on two plant hooks jutting out of her boudoir wall?), the pretty walnut disks I spent hours sanding and polishing in order to make interesting coat hooks for our foyer, and the back of every chair in our house with JACKETS. It's as if he considers jackets to be a decorative accent.

I try not to complain, honestly, but I overheard him talking to his mother about a "light jacket" he'd seen in a catalog (I now go so far as to read any LL Bean or J Crew catalog in the bathroom where I can safely toss them away after I've gone through them so he won't see this season's crop of toasty outerwear) and I yelled, "NO MORE JACKETS."

It's sort of a family joke that people give him jackets, but I've lost my sense of humor about it. Much as I love them, my family doesn't have to worry about wading their way through a sea of fleece and broadcloth should the jackets ever become too much for our hooks to handle. Honestly, if you are reading this, family members, I won't, like, physically assault you if you gift my husband with more jackets this giving season, but I will do my best to make you miserable for five months. Or seven, depending on the bulkiness of the jackets.

Jacket.

Jaaaaccckkkeeettt.

Even the word makes me cringe now.

Jacket.

Shudder.

Jacket.

Twitch.

I need some sort of Family Members of Jackets Anonymous meeting to go to.

Admitting there is a problem is the first step to recovery.

Jacket.

There is a problem.

Another OWS Post: It's Not Fair

2011-10-16T23:43:00.000-04:00

Yesterday morning, I read an article of the "Occupy Wall Street has gone GLOBAL" variety. You know the kind: the reporter is all giddy and full of progressive glee that this movement is rocking the planet. Are you sensing a bit of disdain? I'm feeling a bit of disdain. It comes with being a moderate who doesn't approve of anybody going off half-cocked. Let me explain:

In the article, a young man from Toronto (I'm assuming Canada) said something like, "I'm starting off my adulthood in debt. That's not fair."

Not fair. Not fair? Not. Fair.

Hmmm...

Now, I'm assuming this young man was referring to the fact that he was in debt with student loans, as the fact that student loans are one of the big problems some of the OWSs. As a person in massive debt with student loans, I can sympathize. The student loan system is insane, really. The government lends you money then sells your loan to a bank who charges you a nutso amount of interest and you wind up paying double what you borrowed in the first place. The very idea that the government makes money in order to saddle citizens with debt is brain-exploding, as is the fact that an state-provided education in our country costs so much money.

BUT. But.

Unfair? Unfair in what context? If OWS has gone global and we're now looking at it as a world issue, the fact that somebody has a college education is not a basis for any sort of "unfair" argument. "Fair" pretty much means "everybody has an equal amount," and as we're living in a world in which vast swaths of some countries' populations not only don't have access to primary education, they also don't have things like clean water or adequate health care, the "it's not fair that I have to pay for my education" argument falls flat.

Additionally, I deny the idea that education is some sort of right that human beings have. Maybe I'm wrong, but people don't get educated in a vacuum: somebody has to provide them with the knowledge. And while I understand that our education system is overpriced (student fees are RIDICULOUS and you often pay for things that you never partake of, like student parking if you don't have a car or sports facilities if you don't attend any games), the professors, police officers, janitors, cafeteria workers who provide knowledge, safety, cleanliness, and...you know...food have to be paid somehow. And, frankly, our states can't manage to maintain roads with our taxes, much less pay for every citizen to be educated.

And I'm not trying to be an ass here, but I know very well how a lot of those federal student aid funds get spent. I went to a BIG state school where a lot of students received aid. I don't know ANYBODY who spent those funds solely on educational purposes. Sure, we paid tuition and bought our books, but when we were through with that, it wasn't uncommon to throw a party or go on a trip. We spent that money eating out, buying beer, or decorating our roommate's bedroom door because it was her birthday. And this is the norm. It's considered a right that you get to spend your federal financial aid on ways that have nothing to do with your education and everything to do with a lifestyle that includes lots of laughing and yelling and having fun. Which is awesome, but a little priority-skewed.

THAT'S part of the problem: somehow, in America, we have come to believe that as citizens, we should be able to do what we want with money that ISN'T ours. If you can't afford a college education and you want one, you have to borrow money. It's the same as buying a house or a car and thank goodness (maybe) we have a system that allows us to borrow that money. But you have to pay it back. If you buy a shirt at the store, you have to pay for it. It's a product; and so is an education.

I SUPPOSE it could be argued that the system is set up so that only the wealthy can have an education without debt and while I understand the frustration there (it would be NICE not to have so much debt), what is the alternative? Force the wealthy not to be wealthy anymore? Make the state pay for everybody's education? (I can't even imagine what my state government would come up with and the federal government is ear-deep in debt, so let's get real.) If a free education won't work logically and you can't afford a college education, how do you propose to get one without going into debt?

Now, answer to me is fairly simple. First of all, you don't charge interest on student debt. Or, at the very least, you charge less. My interest means that I will be paying for the college education I don't use in my professional life until well after my kids are in college. That strikes me as insane, although I suppose I could look at the interest as the "beer penalty" I'm paying for making my fellow citizens fund my partying.

Second, you require those students who are borrowing money to WORK for it. A few shifts at the library or cafeteria or cleaning up after football games isn't going to kill anybody, nor will it take away from the studying any more than federally-funded fun will. (Not all students party like I did, but I literally didn't know anybody--and continue not to know anybody--who spent financial aid solely on education.) If there aren't enough paying jobs, that's okay. Volunteering in the community lessens the burden on the government, you know.

(Ironically, the same folks who argue against more taxes and being conservative with federal aid also rail against volunteerism in this model. It makes my brain hurt.)

It is at times like these that I really with the OWS folks would get some leadership and a central voice. Not because I want folks like the dude in Toronto silenced, but because bitching about having an education (debt-free or not) makes these guys look ridiculous to me. Yes, I understand: being in debt sucks. And even the most socially conservative among us should be able to agree that the interest charged by big banks on financial aid is wrong (given Jesus' hissy fit with the money lenders.) And it really stinks to have borrowed money for an education that isn't getting you a job, so you're saddled with this debt and interest without being able to pay for it.

BUT

OWSers need to be able to say more than "it isn't fair." Because it isn't that it isn't fair. It's that it's wrong. Or illogical. Or inefficient. OWSers need to be able to offer a solution to fix the problem in a way that IS fair to all involved, not just complain about the system.

Otherwise, it seems like a big waste of time to me. And I don't need a college education that I'm still paying for to see that.

Edited to add: Dear Blogger, please post my blogs when I write them. Mkay. Bye.

Hi. This is a Throwaway Post

2011-10-15T23:48:00.002-04:00

I'm editing and filling orders right now, which is Teh Awesome, BUT it's cramping my bloggy style. So I'm only posting because, you know, I don't want to be a not-poster.

A few thoughts: If UGA could find a happy medium between Bobo's blahness and Grantham's insanity, we might have a great coaching staff.

HOW have I not gotten my lotion yet?

If I thought I was having a girl and painted her room and got all giddy with the pink, I'd lose my mind if I had the baby and it came out with a penis.

I miss Pinterest. I neeeeeed a fix, man. A FIIIIXXXX.

Do you think Jessica Simpson is pregnant? Why do I care about this at all I'm like, DUDE. Jessica. You're totes pregnant. And then I shed a little tear.

Not really.

Mkay.

So...yeah. That's my post.

I rock.

Autumn Musings...

2011-10-14T23:14:00.001-04:00

I just finished up the first draft of my friend's birth announcement. It's weird to think that I've known this girl--loved this girl--for twenty plus years, and weirder to think that the girl that I was when I first knew her is the woman choosing pictures and backgrounds for the birth announcement of her second daughter. How does time go so fast?

For the first time, Autumn is pulling me up sharp and telling me, gently but firmly, that I, too, am growing older and need to start setting some bonfires here and there. You know, in a spiritual way. Get rid of the dead wood, Heather, Autumn is telling me. Burn that mess up.

But also in a physical way. This is a recurring thing for me lately: ugh, I don't feel good. I need to exercise, eat right, get a better moisturizer, blah blah blah. I need to go ahead and burn those calories. Oooh, now THERE'S a metaphor, hunh?

HOWEVER, at the same time, for the first time in a long time, I am enjoying a harvest of my labors. It sounds...I don't know...goofy to be like, "Check me. I'm making birth announcements. With pictures I took. Using skills I taught myself. Woohoo!" But that's how I feel. It's nice to feel accomplished and confident and busy. It's good to know that this thing I decided to do is coming to fruition and leading somewhere. You know?

Of course, this could be the standard change of season/feediddling with my compartments thing I do every season. Does Autumn make you feel this way?

Green is for Iquanas

2011-10-13T23:53:00.001-04:00

As y'all know, I'm all about the recycling and reducing and booting the chemicals out of my life blahblahblah. Sorry, I don't mean to be flippant about the whole saving the planet thing and I look at it as an important part of my life and my spirituality and GLOBAL WARMING

but

my skin can't take it anymore. About six months ago, when it started warming up, I stopped using my Curel. I have used Curel, that paraben-laced, chemical-laden lotion of glory, for years and years and years. I use it because my skin is awful: dry and cracked and itchy and just blech. For years. Since I remember being old enough to slather on lotion by myself and Vaseline Intensive Care just wasn't cutting it. Curel keeps my skin soft. (No, Curel doesn't pay me to tout it, although they should, because I've probably spent a bajillion dollars on it since my adolescence.)

Anyway, six months ago, I decided to take the next step in my green toiletry experience. I had switched to bar soap (locally- or friend-sourced) a long time ago and made the move to a more organic shampoo, but I clung to my Curel. But I figured with the weather warming up, I could make a smoother (ahahaaa) transition and be okay. I found an organic, chemical-free, non-animal-tested, vegan lotion that was fair trade and was made from a recipe handed down for generations.

It smells AWESOME and is very thick

but

it doesn't work.

It takes a ton to get on my skin and it doesn't glide right, but worst of all, I walk around all day long smelling FANTASTIC and feeling like my skin is actually going to crack off and sprinkle out of my shirt sleeves.

(Most tasty image of the day, right?)

I am uncomfortable in my skin. I mean, I know there are worse things to have, but if you have really, really dry skin, it just sucks. It makes you feel dirty and unattractive, for whatever reason, to feel your skin grating inside your close.

(The imagery KEEPS GETTING BETTER.)

Anywho, tomorrow, with a sigh of regret, I'm going to go to the store and buy a bottle of Curel and, like, dump it in my bathtub and roll around in it. I will not feel an ounce of shame about it.

(BTW, the title is supposed to be like, "Oh, look, I'm all green-living, but it's making my skin scaly like an iguana, so in this case, I'm not going to be green." But it's late and I've been around four-year-olds all day and I'm not sure it makes sense at all and I'm too tired to come up with a better title.)

(If you have one, please suggest it.)

(11:56, NaBloWriMo. YOU CAN'T BEAT ME.)

Fwerping Han Solo

2011-10-12T22:52:00.001-04:00

Today has been one of those blah days in which I got stuff done, but I didn't feel accomplished after doing so. The house is clean. Some laundry got done. I weeded the carrots. I picked up Jeffrey's meds. I designed a few cards. Blah.

Blaaaahhhh.

I think, maybe, I'm getting a cold.

Or my system is trying to tell me I should stay away from political conversation.

Or the weather is fwerping with me.

Or I've been possessed by an alien.

Or an alien is fwerping with me.

GROSS, Heather.

Oh, get your mind out of the gutter.

How do you know what fwerping means?

Also, to be clear, Han Solo is, technically, an alien.

I'm just saying.

The "Occupy Wall Street Post" You Had To Have Known Was Coming

2011-10-11T11:07:00.001-04:00

I've been loath to discuss politics online lately. For one thing, I'm trying to build a business, which is hard in this country if you allow your social beliefs to show. (Unless you are a plumber or electrician in the South, in which case the ubiquitous Jesus fish on your trucks and vans means that you are somehow divinely inspired to unclog toilets and rewire attic fans. Ahem.) For another, to be honest, the political discussions were breaking my face. I mean, I can only be patient and intelligent and kind and rational for so long before I get a wrenching desire to shriek, "Because the president isn't a communist and if he WAS a communist, he couldn't be a Nazi, because they hated communists and he couldn't be a Nazi anyway, because he is of mixed blood and some of that blood is black, so pretty much he'd have to torture and kill himself, which I'm sure you'd like, you complete File Cabinet-humping nimrod."

A fricking hem.

I also realized that my burning desire to join the Daughters of the American Revolution (of which I can be a member two times over, given that my earliest relatives fought the British--both times--after arriving here in the 1600s...just saying) was less about wanting to honor my ancestors' heritage and more about me wanting to be a PAGAN honoring my ancestors' heritage, and the truth is that joining up with a Christian organization only to denounce it would be small and petty and spiteful, three things which I'm trying to avoid being. The realization that I was becoming...well...ugly about the whole thing made me take a giant step backwards from political discussion. I don't want to automatically hate a group because it has a different political, religious, or social ideology than me. I certainly don't want to dislike the people who make up the group because they debate poorly online.

But.

Then.

Occupy Wall Street started happening.

And at first, there was a sort of dead media silence. And by "media," I mean ALL media. Then social networks started picking up the pace, with videos of women being maced by police officers and dudes being arrested for playing drums. I waited, with bated breath, for the backlash.

Peter King did not disappoint me. Nor did Allen West. Nor did Eric Cantor. Generally, they don't, when it comes to needing a conservative politician to be an asshat to prove my point.

To wit, Peter King said: “It’s really important for us not to give any legitimacy to these people in the streets. I remember what happened in the 1960s when the left-wing took to the streets, and somehow the media glorified them, and it ended up shaping policy. We can’t allow that to happen.”

Yes, it's awful when we allow tax-paying citizens to shape public policy. WHAT?

Eric Cantor called the protesters a mob and then talked about other folks "pitting Americans against Americans" at the Values Voters Summit, one of which's sponsors is the Heritage Foundation.

Irony much, Eric Cantor?

Allen West said: "I don't see what the point is..." when asked about the movement.

The point is, West, that folks are sick of the heads of corporations influencing our government.

And that, duckies, is what it comes down to: not the end of capitalism, but the end of a government so awash in corporate money that it allows corporations to count as people who can encourage our government to go to war, deny tax-paying citizens equal rights, and continue to finance the lifestyles of those who are not, by the numbers, creating many jobs.

Once Cantor and King and West had spoken up, it was time for the pundits to leap in, with Rush giggling about how protesters were going to have to buy sleeping bags, which must hurt them because they were anti-buying anything.

Not anyTHING, Rush, just any VOTES.

And then of course, Beck had to one up all the crazies and start frothing and say, "They're going to drag us out into the street and kill us."

GAWD.

The floodgates are open now and the leaders of the conservative movement have spoken, so now I'm starting to read on Facebook about how the OWS folks hate capitalism and how the Tea Partiers never got arrested and there are folks talking about how the protesters are too lazy to work and I can't understand how anybody can try to compare the Tea Party (a would-be political party from the beginning) to Occupy Wall Street (a non-political movement aimed at government in general.)

This isn't about conservatives versus liberals, though. Guess what? Occupy Wall Street doesn't love it some President Obama. In the interest of folks who really would prefer for citizens not to start bashing each other over this, I've provided an explanation, abridged and in list form, of Occupy Wall Street.

A LIST FOR EXPLAINING OCCUPY WALL STREET TO AN AMERICAN CITIZEN

Occupy Wall Street (hereafter OWS) is not about you personally.
OWS isn't about what you buy.
It isn't about where you work.
It isn't, in fact, about what the protesters buy or about where THEY work.
It MIGHT be about where some protesters DON'T work, because some protesters believe that corporations are responsible for a stagnant economy in which jobs are shipped overseas and corporations find legal tax loopholes which allow them not to pay taxes. And corporations are giving bonuses while laying off middle class workers all the time, not paying taxes, and accepting government aid.
OWS is not about ending capitalism. It's about ending capitalism's influence on our government. Capitalism is not a form of government; it is an economic model.
OWS doesn't want a corporation to have the same status as you when it comes to campaign contributions. Because our politicians are human, every single one of them is guilty of accepting money to influence policy. This includes the president right now and every president before him.
OWS doesn't believe that the head of a corporation should be able to influence a government to deny rights to any citizen.
OWS doesn't believe that a corporation's influence should be a reason to go to war.
OWS doesn't believe that a corporation should be able to trick you into engaging in commerce which is detrimental to you financially, even if you don't do your research. OWS believes that feeding off your ignorance is morally wrong.
OWS is not a political party. It has no political leanings. It's just as pissed off at President Obama and Nancy Pelosi as it is at John Boehner and Eric Cantor.
OWS isn't a social group. While many of its members are liberals, this is probably because OWS doesn't believe that the government should impose millionaire-backed morality on its tax-payers and government-imposed morality is a standard boogabear for liberals.
OWS isn't interested in socialism. It's interested in a government not influenced by corporations. (Health insurance reform was influenced on both sides by multi-billion dollar corporations.)
OWS isn't interested in being the "anti-Tea Party." Yes, folks are getting arrested. However, they are being arrested for things like refusing to leave a public street. For sitting down in the paths of police officers. For playing drums. Yes, there are anarchists among them. Yes, there are loud screamy people who are obnoxious. There are people who are there for a party or because they have nothing better to do. This does not mean that the OWS isn't important or viable any more than the gun-toting, misspelled-sign-bearing, afraid-of-the-Muslim-communist-Nazi president folks in the Tea Party crowd made that movement unimportant or nonviable.
OWS doesn't want to end corporations. It wants corporations to stop influencing the government that regulates them, taxes them, and bails them out when they mess up.
OWS doesn't want CNN as a sponsor. That would be defeating the purpose. In fact, one of goals of the OWS is to stop the media from being influenced by rich people to influence your vote.
OWS isn't about handouts. While there ARE demands regarding the ridiculous interest rates on student financial aid, this is less about giving people something for nothing and more about not charging middle class folks $50,000 for a $25,000 college education. There is nothing in the OWS original Declaration of Occupation that says anything about people getting anything for free.

I would suggest that everybody read the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City here. I'll be honest and say that OWS puts the blame square on corporations, which is one reason which I cannot fully support the movement. I believe that our governmental leaders have allowed themselves to be swayed by corporations in order to get power.

Don't be swayed, y'all. The difference between you and the government is that you won't be given any power if you allow a corporation to sell you a package of misinformation and legislation.

You won't be given anything. You will have bought a heaping load of nothing.

Decisions, Decisions

2011-10-10T23:53:00.003-04:00

Once again, the confines of mothering and working and yelling at the TV because of the baseball game cramping my Terra Nova style leave me with 29 minutes to get my blog on. In? Whatevs. The only problem is that I can't figure out what I really want to write about.

Here's what I'm thinking:

Sooooo, Herman Cain likens himself to Moses. Moses? Really? Herman Cain's going to lead a group of folks to freedom? Freedom from what? An endless baseball season? Too many silly band varieties? The horrors of a Footloose remake? I'm not trying to be ugly, but I'm not sure that the ills of America, although, you know, ill and stuff, really compare with bringing plagues to Egypt in order to free an entire ethnic group from slavery and then leading said group into the promised land. Plus, what are you going to do for manna, Hermain Cain? Pizza? Bread sticks? (Herman Cain makes my skin crawl.)
Also making my skin crawl? Joe the Plumber running for Congress. Perhaps THIS is what Herman Cain is meant to lead us from. Or, no...wait. Maybe he's supposed to lead all of the eejits who think they are qualified to be representatives of the people into the desert. (Yes, I realize this means that we're going to be missing a gigantic chunk of our government soon. I'm counting on Olympia Snowe to lead us on...)
Speaking of Olympia Snowe, why are my grey hairs curly? I have about six now and they're all, "Hey, let's stand out even more by being all sproingy whereas the rest of your hair is flat as a board." No, grey hairs. Let's not.
I didn't think it was possible, but I've officially reached a point where eating another of V's barbecue sandwiches is enough to make me feel queasy. I think I've had seventeen. All topped with blue-cheese cole slaw.
Why do so many Dutch foods call for cabbage or potatoes or apples? Is it a food storage thing, do you reckon?
I actually only know, like, two recipes that call for this, which makes them the majority of my Dutch recipes. Oma's boterkoek calls for none of these things. It does, however, feature ginger.
I've never made Oma's boterkoek. I have, however, made Romelle's pineapple casserole, which is the bomb dot com. It is now a holiday staple. I probably need to make some boterkoek, just to say that I've done it.
I'd also like to make a cheesecake. I've never made a cheesecake, because it seems pointlessly difficult. Like...there are different kinds of pans and heating woes. Cake should be easy, right?
Cake should be easy.
You know what isn't easy? Writing a blog post every night. But I did it.
Huzzah.

The Standard "I'm CRAFTY" NotHannah Autumn Post

2011-10-09T21:16:00.001-04:00

I don't know what it is about Autumn, but it just touches some spark of creativity and/or workitude in me that means that I'm baking and crocheting and cross-stitching and cleaning and stuffing bits of fabric into straw wreath forms. And redecorating. And looking at Frodo's toenails and wondering how they'd look if I painted them a sparkly blue.

Just kidding.

He'd look better in purple, I think.

Anywho, thought I'd give you a little glimpse at the craftastic awesomeness going around the Manor these days.

First, the mantle. Our library is pretty much everybody's favorite room: it features a wall full of books, dark paneling, and a huge fireplace with matching mantel. The mantel is so long, in fact, that in the past, I've had a hard time decorating it for holidays and seasons because it's just so...expansive. But for whatever reason, I really, really, really wanted to bling my mantel up for Autumn this year. So we gathered up a bunch of stuff around the house and then went to Hobby Lobby (or as I like to call it, "The Crack Den for Crafters") and bought a bunch of stuff on the cheap. (True story, Middle Georgians. I was totally behind Mark Ballard "The Artist" and his wife the last time I went to Teh Lobby. No celebrity sightings this time around, alas.) When we got home, we looked at some pictures at the Crack Pipe for Crafters (Pinterest, y'all) and we came up with this:

In case you were wondering what we gathered versus what we bought, I scribbled incomprehensibly on the picture in Photoshop. The light blue text is old stuff. The light purple text is new stuff. If this makes you go blind or you have any questions, let me know.

What's cool, in my mind, is that when Halloween is over, I can pretty much get rid of the books and raven and what will be dead vines and flowers and replace them with brown crockery pieces I already have and maybe some cotton plants that I'll snag from a nearby field. (With permission, of course.) And even after November, I can probably still use the candle holders, lanterns, and urns. Yay!

After feediddling with the mantle, River and I sat down to work on a University of Georgia wreath to display on our front door for the party. I got the idea on Pinterest, of course, and it was super easy and pretty cheap. I picked up a straw wreath at Hobby Lobby for a couple of bucks. I already had a metric crap-ton of UGA fabric from various tailgates and projects, and it was simple to cut or rip the fabric into three by three inch squares. I got River to lay the fabric pieces on the wreath and push them into it with a Phillip's head screwdriver. It took less than an hour to do it. I bought silver glitter and silver(ish) ribbon and cut the letters out of cardboard from an old photo order. (Next time, I'd probably use pre-cut letters.) Glitter glue and glitter over the letters, spray adhesive and a bit of silver glitter on the ribbon and BOOM! We've got spirit all UP in this house:

In addition to the crafting, I've also been doing a lot of baking, primarily with pumpkin, because of (wait for it) the INSANE amount of pumpkin recipes floating around Pinterest.

Ugh. Just discovered that the pumpkin muffin and cookie and cupcake pictures are on the other computer and I don't feel like getting up to go fetch them, so I think we'll shoving the recipes and their awesomeness over to some other time this week, because the couch (and a barbecue and cole slaw sandwich) is (are?) calling me.

Hope you all had good weekends, my lovies.

I Hate Derek Dooley's Pants

2011-10-08T23:13:00.000-04:00

There are the posts you write when you are sober: conscientious posts, posts with heft and meaning. These are the posts that are meant to enlighten or amuse, to ponder the deeper meanings in life, to reach out to friends in need. They are posts you write with purpose.

Then there are the posts you write after a looooong day of hard cider and barbecue, after the Dawgs have beaten the Vols, after the kids are all in bed, and you realize that there are fifty blue million glow sticks lying around your house and it looks like you've been flash-mobbed by a bunch of club kids and you further realize that you have eaten your weight in Smarties and that you are okay with that. These are the posts where you discover you have a sock in your pocket and that you have no idea where your cell phone is and you're pretty sure that your baked bean recipe could engender world peace. Also, Derek Dooley needs to stop wearing pants altogether if those awful orange things are the best he has to work with.

I'll leave you to decide which sort of post this is.

2011-10-07T11:04:00.000-04:00

I'm snuggled up with the Squish on the couch. For the next few minutes (at least until Wild Kratts) is over, she is happy with me, happy to be in my company. This will not last. You might remember a few years ago when I noted that River had a really strident cry and that I felt like this would be an issue in a few years. Go ahead and consider it an issue, my friends.

To say that River and I have a contentious relationship is like saying Lady Gaga is a bit extroverted. (I don't know...it was the first thing that sprang to mind.) She's stubborn and bossy all the time, but with me, it's as if she is purposefully also an ass a great deal of the time. I know I'm not supposed to say that my four-year-old is an ass and it's hard to say it when she's laying her head on my lap and telling me that I'm the best mommy ever, but it's true.

I can recognize that any child of mine is apt to have not only a stubborn streak, but also a bossy streak. Combine that with my husband's genes and it would not surprise me if my children became despotic leaders of third world countries. Or at least really pissy mayors of large towns.

*Interrupting to point out that Wild Kratts is over and River is hungry and, thus, the fangs are coming out. Yay.*

I've heard it before that kidlets tend to clash with parents whose traits they share, which means that I probably need to go ahead and invest in full body armor and some Xanax, because River is a loooot like me. She likes to dress up in sparkly dresses and shoes and then go dig around in the dirt. She narrates every single moment she plays or works on a project, like she's a mini Martha Stewart. She attaches a personality and meaning to almost every item that passes through her sticky little fingers; scraps of wrapping paper can be the most important items in her possession and woe betide the person who accidentally throws a scrap away.

Guess who is always throwing the scraps away? Or demanding that the magpie nest behind the rocking chair in her room be shoveled out? Or ending the princess' ant burial rites because it's supper time? That...would be me. I am the enforcer of schedules, the squasher of playtime, the ender of glimmering fairytale dreams in the face of teeth being brushed. I don't relish this job, but it's the one I've got.

Lately, it's occurred to me that part of the problem (in addition to River's...strong personality) is that when it comes to leisure time, River and I don't gibe. Jeffrey is perfectly content to wallow on the couch with me and read books. Or play a computer game. Or simply snuggle. River can look at a book for maybe five minutes and then she wants to start doing flips on the couch. Snuggling lasts for about five seconds and then she's giggling over her own poots or wanting to lick my neck. She likes computer games, but the ones Will has turned her onto involve dressing princesses (barf) or designing ponies, which I could dig, but River doesn't take kindly to suggestions, nor does she approve of any color scheme not in the blue/pink/purple family. So it's not real fun for me.

Will says that it's not about what I want to do, a philosophy which I have to be honest and say makes me want to barf. I categorically discard the idea that our lives must revolve around our children. I'm going to pull a Herman Cain here and say that although I don't have the facts to prove this, I believe that the nation's obsession with kids and fulfilling their every whim is some sort of multi-step plan by large corporations (including banks) to take over the country while we're too busy making sure Shmoopy has the newest pants or phone or iPony app to notice that our republic has been replaced by an oligarchy.

Pantpantpant.

What?

Right, River acting the ass.

So, I just finished fixing her hair so she could go to the Fair with her Nana, and guess what she did the entire time? She sang a song about how beautiful her mother was, and how nice and sweet, and how she missed me when I was gone and how sad it was for us to eeevvvvverrr bbeeeeee apaaaaaaaaaaarrrt.

Jeez.

Maybe she's like me because she's somehow cosmically a Gemini instead of an Aquarius.

I was going to write about how mean and defiant and cantankerous she was with me, how neither spanking nor timeouts nor time spent with her doing fun crafty stuff seems to put a dent in our combative relationship, but the sheer force of her preciousness has deflated me.

I'll be ordering that Xanax now.

Another Awful Late-Night Post

2011-10-06T23:36:00.001-04:00

Y'all. Y'ALL.

I am stinking up the interwebs with my awful blogging. Like, really. So I'm posting this tonight just to tell you that tomorrow morning, before I dust or vacuum or anything else in prep for our par-tay, I'm going to write a blog post that doesn't stink.

I can't promise Faulkner, but it will be better than random excuses as to why my blogging is stinking up the place.

Last Post Written This Late, I Promise Myself

2011-10-05T22:42:00.000-04:00

Here's what I've learned from NaBloWriMo so far this year:

Late night + Heather writing a blog post = true love always.

I put it off all day long, sometimes just procrastinating and sometimes being legitimately busy, but when I sit down to write after everybody's in bed and the house is tidied up, my brain sputters and I sort of zone out. What I churn out is NOT good reading.

So. I will take that lesson and start writing my posts when I wake up (or at least before noon every day, depending on the kids and work and the dog.) (I'm not sure why the dog.) (I think this is part of the brain sputtering/zoning out thing.)

Today was a great day of shopping and decorating for Fall and being with the kids, but I'm too tired to write about it and I have to edit some pictures and get them online.

Tomorrow morning, I'll tell you all about it. AND I might even include a pumpkin recipe.

Wooohooo!

Meh With the Writing Thing Tonight

2011-10-04T22:34:00.000-04:00

Have you ever had one of those writing days when you look at the screen and you go, "Meh."

It isn't that I don't have anything to write about.

I could write about how I want to love Glee, but I just can't quite do it because it won't decide if it wants to be a farce or a dramedy or a musical and the fact that it can't makes me nervous.

I could write about how my sweet, precious husband built a fence around the garden so the dog would quit digging up my carrots and beets and sanity.

I could talk about how dang awful Haddie's hair is on Parenthood and also how Max's mainstreaming is a classic example of how NOT to do mainstreaming and WHY are the producers not getting this right?

I could talk about my current obsession with pumpkin recipes. It's a problem. A delicious, fattening problem.

I could write about how my Viking princess can't figure out why she can't be attracted to the Danish prince. This is also a problem, but not one that is fattening. It does, however, make my story not flow very smoothly because I need her not to be attracted to him so that there will be conflict. But he's cute.

I could write about how we're about to have a big barbecue in honor of the Bulldogs incipient defeat of the Volunteers and how G and A and their boys will be there and it will be AWESOME to see them and gab with my girls.

I could write about how my natural lotion is all nice-smelling and free of parabens and chemicals, but it doesn't seem to, you know, moisturize me as much as my chemical-laden favorite lotion of the past. This is a problem. An itchy, irritating problem.

I could talk about all of those things, but they aren't striking me as interesting. More interesting is snuggling with my husband and watching TV.

So I'm going to do that.

Mkay. Bye.

Posting Despite Myself

2011-10-03T22:30:00.000-04:00

I'm writing this under duress.

I'm tired. Jeffrey woke up at dang 4:00 this morning because he wanted to play his DS. And the light was off. And he was scared. And he was hungry. And he needed to sing a little bit about this. And talk to himself about this. And sing AND talk to himself about how mean we were that we didn't support his belief that all nine-year-olds ought to be able to wake up before dawn and have a par-tay.

My nose is filled with the scent of a pet odor removal spray that my husband has doused our couch with because not only does my dang dog dig up every bit of garden he possibly can, he also apparently pees on our furniture while we're not looking.

My kitchen...we must not speak of it. But it's messy.

My car is full of groceries I didn't unload after an impromptu shopping trip because I had to haul out stuff from my freezer to fit the new food and then I had to take care of the kids, so honestly it's amazing that any of the groceries made it out.

I have a toothache.

My socks are irritating my knees, but I'm too busy writing this post to address this sorry situation.

I haven't edited pictures OR made buttons OR done any of the things I was supposed to do this evening after the kids went to bed because I was busy getting sucked into the wonder of "How I Met Your Mother" and the awesomeness of interconnected casting they do there.

But I wrote this post.

BOOYAH, NaBloWriMo. You can't stop me. You can't beat me.

Throw more dog pee at me, October. Pile on the dirty dishes and foul toilets and weirdass kids yelling about their vicious mothers before their vicious mothers are even awake.

Sling at me a husband who is grumpily insistent that I unload the groceries at 10:30. From my car. MY CAR, y'all. Gah.

Whatever, October. I've got this.

If I Could Be Any Heroine In One of My Favorite Books...

2011-10-02T22:38:00.000-04:00

I would be Harry from The Blue Sword.

The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley is my favorite book of all time. Based vaguely (this is a subject of much argumentation and debate and scathing condemnation) of the British colonization of India, the book deals with magic and bravery and horses and swords and all kinds of yummy things revolving around a pretty awkward heroine and a crabby and--I'll be frank--hot hero. I would want to be Harry because A: hi, she's magic. And B: she has a sword that pretty much talks to her. And C: her HORSE. And D: the whole culture of the Damarians is fascinating. I'd like to eat Damarian cheese. I think I've told you this before, but there were a few times in my early adolescence where I would, after a particularly difficult day of being a smart, awkward kid at a very small school, sob and beg the Magic to take me away to Damar.

No.

I'm not kidding.

Teh Dorkiness, it was strong in me.

The truth is that even though it's dorky, there are certain books that I sink into and BECOME the heroine. If she gets scared, I get scared. If she gets angry, I get angry. If she falls in love, I'm ready to start smooching. Those books are the books that become Book Friends, that I recommend to you and random people on the street.

Those are the books I want to write. At some point in time, as Gawd as my witness (please picture me silhouetted against the sunrise, having just barfed up a radish, clenching my fist) (what?), I am going to write a book that will give some dorky little adolescent girl a place to rest and dream in. I will give her somebody else to be when being herself is a gigantic drag.

Those somebody elses will be strong and brave and magical, it's true. But they will also be dorky or awkward or shy, because that's my truth, too. And there are a lot of girls out there for whom it is also the truth.

I'd be Harry, if given the choice. But since I won't be given that choice, I'll do the next best thing and try to create a heroine who will be somebody else's Harry.

And I'll give her somebody hot to smooch, too.

(Come ON. Dorky girls need smooching, too.)

Why Do I Blog?

2011-10-01T07:37:00.001-04:00

This is the first of my NaBloWriMo posts. In case you aren't in the loop, we NaBoWriMoers are writing a post every day for the entire month of October. There's still time to join us if you want to shoot me an email at nothannah@comsouth.net.

Blogging is commonplace nowadays. When I first started, back in 2005, it wasn't as commonplace. There were a few "stars" already (Dooce springs to mind...), but for the most part, it was a fairly new medium. My reasons for blogging then are not what they are now, mainly because I'M not what I was then. Or who. Whatever.

Let's do this in list form:

Heather's Reasons for Blogging

I wanted to become a rich and famous writer. By blogging. I know, I know...that has happened to precisely one blogger as far as I know. BUT I had a dream way back in 2005 that somehow, blogging would project me into the world of interviews with Oprah and book deals and maybe that 1954 black Mustang convertible with red leather seats I've coveted for decades. Uh. Not so much. Of course, in the first year I was a blogger, I think I wrote sixty-two entries. Sixty. Two. Not a good way to become a celebrity blogger, in case you were wondering.
I wanted to vent about Aspergers. Jeffrey was diagnosed in September of 2006, several months after I started. It was...difficult. I felt pretty isolated in Dingleberry and even, to an extent, isolated by my friemily because to put it bluntly, very few folks understood or accepted the diagnosis then. (I don't blame them, I harbor no grudges, everybody's awesome...moving on.) I NEEDED a place to complain and worry and blather and be afraid and this was the place. I blathered, y'all. OH, how I blathered. The blathering was extensive. In the back of my mind, I imagined a little community of Aspie moms coming together and taking over the world. This didn't happen. But I did make it through those awful first years of interventions and meds and meltdowns and fears and tears because of the space I'm Not Hannah gave me to vent.
I wanted to have friends. Oh, my Filing Cabinet, that sounds pitiful. But it's true. Dingleberry has not been a hotbed of social activity for me and while it's getting better (mainly because I'm sucking it up and joining society even though I stand out like a sore thumb), it has been lonely for many years for me. Blogging gives me a whole social network at my fingertips, and by "social network," I mean friends. I've shared pregnancies, deaths, drunken ramblings, financial worries, literary triumphs, new jobs, lost jobs--everything you share with "real life" friends--with my blogging buddies. Many of them I connected with via NaBloWriMo. And I love them. I'm not kidding. I used to feel kind of dumb about saying it, but I've been friends with these women (and a few men) for YEARS now, and I love them. Luff. Love them. There have been times in my life, to be honest, when everything else was falling off the rails and just reading their stuff or writing something silly here on I'm Not Hannah has been the only thing that keeps me chugging along. You know who you are. I've mentioned you before. And when I say "I luff you," I mean it in the real, deep, "you are my friend" way. I mean, I'm not trying to get all serious in the pre-dawn hours, but you folks are important to me and if I ever get the chance to hug your necks, I will probably stand in the coffee shop clinging to you like a starfish and sobbing all over you. That really makes you want to hug me, doesn't it? I don't know how I'll arrange this meeting, but if we can ever find a way to make a place the middle point between Washington and Australia and Michigan and Nebraska and India and Oklahoma and West Virginia and Wisconsin and New Jersey and Georgia and Alabama and about eleventy-million other places, let's do it. I promise I won't cling to you for more than, like, an hour. Tops.
I want to be a better writer. THIS is the truth now. This is why I still write, in fits and bursts and random tirades. I've realized that there are two types of writing I really love: fiction and blogging. A few years back, I would have said "creative nonfiction," and I guess that's still true. I mean, it takes some creativity to name this town Dingleberry, y'all. In any case, I know that blogging will never make me rich and famous, but I don't need it to do that any more. I've found a new career path that is bringing me both a paycheck AND a creative outlet and so now, the pressure is off as far as making writing that thing I do to have money. Does that make any sense? The years of trying to find freelance work when I really just want to write a book about a teenage pirate chick or a screenplay about a nutty family at Christmas feel over and now I'm free to write what I want to write when I want to write it.

At the same time (helllllooo, weird Blogger formatting...pretend this is a new paragraph, y'all), I am very aware that I want to make sure I'm turning out good work for my readers. It's weird that at the same time I don't care about monetizing my blog, I'm also moving toward a regimented writing schedule and topics and whathaveyou and considering a Facebook page for readers. I don't really understand how these things are coming together in my head this way, but I'm just going to go with it. I blame it on being a Gemini. We're weird, y'all.

In a nutshell, I blog because blogging lets me be me. It lets me write, it lets me make friends, it lets me vent my frustrations and fears. It connects me with the world. It allows me to show off my mad photography and design skilz.

It lets me be ME. What does blogging do for you? Why, my lovies, do you blog?

An Example of a "No Time for Blogging" Post

2011-09-28T05:47:00.001-04:00

Hi, my sweets. No time for a long post today, just wanted to tell you that I've got all of your entries for NaBloWriMo and I'll be sending out email notifications and/or huzzahs later in the evening. I'm sorry I don't have buttons yet, but I'll get those out as well. Note to self for next year: plan ahead so if awesome stuff falls in your lap, you don't let NaBloWriMo get shoved aside. Anyway, I'm super, super, super excited about it and can't wait to get started. Please keep spreading the word, y'all. You rock.

You know that, don't you?

A List on Monday (You Knew One Was Coming...)

2011-09-26T07:34:00.001-04:00

So, how awesome am I? I'm all like, "Oooh, join NaBloWriMo" and "Check out my new header" and "I planted a garden because I'm all philosophical." And then I didn't post at all for two weeks. I AM AWESOME.

But I've had a few things going on. For one thing, I started training for my new job.

YES! I got a job, y'all. Woohoo! Alright! Break it down!

Plus, it's another Magic Job, the kind where you look at yourself and say, "How am I so lucky to get this?" My days at work consist of...wait for it...taking pictures of newborns at the local hospital. I know, right? Are you kidding me? Anyway, with the training and trying to get my house in order for the days I won't be here (it's only a part-time job), I haven't had a lot of time to blog. Or anything else. Shall we have a list? Yes. Yes, we shall.

I got a job! Yay! But also "Gulp!" And "Snnniffff!" The "gulp" because while the picture-taking and baby-schnoodling are awesome, the rest of the job requires me to sell pictures to make money, and that worries me. I am not a particularly forceful salesperson, and in this case, it wouldn't suit my needs, anyway. But I will have to push gently for sales and that's nerve-wracking. The "snnnifff" comes because I'm missing days with my family and that's tough when you've been doing the SAHM thing for almost a decade. I'm missing a soccer game AND a birthday party AND another soccer game this weekend. And while I know that there are moms in Afghanistan missing...uh...EVERYTHING and thus in retrospect, this is a tiny, itty bitty thing, my daughter is a tiny, itty bitty thing, too. And she looks cute in her soccer uniform and I'll miss that.
The garden is doing GREAT. Everything is up and flourishing with the exception of the cabbage. WTF, cabbage? Why you tease me? (Sorry. It's early.) Also flourishing is the nut grass, which I think I've written about somewhere before, but in case you missed it, it is grass that, oddly, grows from a little nut-looking thingamabob. And it's Satan's favorite plant. When you till up a patch of it, every single fiber of the plant can create new nuts and fibers and, really, I can't even imagine why this plant exists. I hate it. Haaaaate it.
Entries to NaBloWriMo are low thus far, probably because I said, "Let's do it!" and then disappeared. Because, as mentioned before, I am awesome. Please join us. You know you want to. There'll be prizes like soap-making e-books, art, bloggy redesigns...woohoo! (More on this tomorrow when I'm at home and able to write without thinking about whether I need to change my white balance. I do, in case you were wondering.)
For a week prior to the Equinox, the weather was cool and lovely. On Friday, temperatures spiked up again and now it's hot and sweaty. I'm not complaining. Really.
Okay, yes, I am. GAH. Go away, hot weather.
Right now, I have less than an hour to get ready to go to work. I am not feeling it. Do you think they'd mind if I showed up in my robe? I'd put the belt back on and everything.
Speaking of work, I have to wear makeup at work. I mean...I don't HAVE to wear makeup, but in this area, wearing makeup means "professional," so that's what I'm doing. As a Southern woman, I know how to do all kinds of things that I don't do regularly, like saying "The Lord's Prayer" or balancing a plate of chicken salad and strawberry tarts on my knee at a bridal shower, but that doesn't mean I'm leaping around for joy at doing it. Plus, my GAWD, I can never get all the mascara and foundation off. Has makeup become more permanent since I've last worn it regularly? What is it made of now? Rubber cement and Sharpies? Seriously.
It's now Monday and I have exactly thirty minutes to make lunches, get dressed, and get the kids to school. Do you think they'd mind if I did this in my robe? (I luff my robe. Heather + robe = true love always.)
I made--wait for it--FIVE sales over the weekend. This is great for me and means I only have to make two more equal sales in order for my goal for October to be met. I needed this affirmation (and I think Will did, too) financially, but more than that, I love being able to contribute to the family doing something I enjoy doing. Yay!
I made pumpkin caramel cookies, then decided they'd be better as mini cupcakes and I was SO RIGHT. I'll be sharing the recipe in a few days. So go ahead and start fasting now, because these things are crazy good. Ca. Razy.
No, really, the kids have to go to school. Dang it. Why must my children be educated and well-fed. It's so haaaarrrrdddd being a middle-class American.
I kid.
To all of those folks who've sent me emails about NaBloWriMo, thanks and I'll be emailing you later today. If you haven't sent me an email saying you're signing up, well, why not? Come oooonnnnnnn. (You know you want to.)

Have good days, mah peeps. Luff you.

Gardening in the Post 9/11 World

2011-09-12T10:38:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, we spent most of the day outside, removing the old box beds and tilling up the garden and planting broccoli and cauliflower and lettuce and spinach and soybeans and cabbage for the Fall and Winter. (Yes, I know I'm not supposed to capitalize those words. Bite me, Grammar Police. Fall and Winter NEED to be capitalized after this summer. See what I did there?)

Occasionally, during breaks, I would check on Facebook, where I read (over and over again) about tears and prayers and mourning. I also read a few posts about how religion caused the attacks on September 11, 2001, and one, inexplicably, about how if you didn't like that America was "one nation under God," you should leave. Sigh.

Let me go ahead and say that you should follow your bliss (or sadness, as it were) and mourn or reflect or remember any way you want to and that these next few paragraphs are not in any way telling you that you are wrong for feeling or expressing your feelings any way you want to. Unless you do something crazy and, like, make a bonfire with a pile of Girl Scout Thin Mints. I mean, that's just wrong.

That said, it seems to me that if the best that Americans can do is think of 9/11 as a day when it all went wrong, or focus on all of the dead people, or even focus only on the actions of the heroic men and women who died that day being heroes...well...that sort of seems wrong, to me. (ONLY TO ME. IF YOU DO ANY OF THE ABOVE, ROCK ON.) Here's why:

America didn't end that day. It didn't really even change that much. I got up the next day and went to work. Millions of other Americans did, too. The markets rebounded, the crops came in, the language stayed the same. We have religious freedom. We have Facebook and iPods and clean water. The one thing that did change, maybe, was that for a week or two, we were a united nation. We understood, for a ridiculously short time, that we were all Americans and--on a global scale--all humans and for Pete's sake, life is damn precious, no matter what nationality or religion you claim.

NOW we've changed drastically. We are such a changed country right now that I'll admit I'm much more fearful than I ever was on September 11. But I'm afraid not of foreign men in hijacked airplanes. I'm afraid of men in snazzy suits who hold gigantic prayer fests while fire fighters in his state buy their own fuel and gear. I'm afraid of women who want to lower minimum wage to that of our "competition" in third world countries. I'm afraid of my fellow citizens who go on and on about how repressed they are by our president even as they want to remove anybody who isn't Christian from public office--or, you know, from the country. Those folks scare the shit out of me, y'all.

So, yesterday, I wasn't watching any memorials or changing my FB picture to an American flag, or scanning in the pictures I took of the Manhattan skyline from the Statue of Liberty while on a show choir trip in high school. I wasn't finding quotes about freedom or heroism or liberty or justice. I wasn't crying and/or reminiscing. I was planting.

Crouched over the dirt, tugging River away from the delicate seedlings or whatever roly poly she was stalking, I made preparations for the winter. I pulled weeds and tucked seeds into the dry soil, adding a little prayer to every wish. That's what seeds are, you know. Wishes for the future. And as I sweated under the late afternoon sun, I started thinking about the seeds I scattered and the young plants I stuffed into rows.

Autumn crops are all the same here in the south: strong smelling greens and vibrant roots. Their seeds are similar: tiny little spears or earth-colored balls, impossible to find if you lose track over the rows. They grow in adverse conditions, fighting through the last gasping days of summer to flourish in the cool, wind-tossed Autumn. They'll keep going, some of them, even in the frigid days of late January and early February, before giving way to sweet peas and potatoes.

It wasn't a difficult metaphor to find, really. And on a cosmic scale, I'm not sure it IS a metaphor. We're all little seeds. We contain within our bodies the capability to grow and change and produce. We are planted where we are planted for a purpose. Each of us has a place and responsibility. We are Something's hope for the future.

But we're more than that. We aren't just mindless collards squatting in the garden. We have hearts and minds and souls that we all too often use for hurting our fellow ~~collards~~ people instead of helping the others around us grow to their full potential.

This morning, two woman pretty much attacked my mother on FB for having the audacity to point out that the president read a Bible verse at a memorial service and that perhaps we ought to come together as Americans. One woman pointed out that Satan quoted Bible verses, too. ("Satan's in Washington." Give yourself a high five if you remember Marlena writhing around in her silky pajamas and panty hose.) The other called my mother "repressive," and unloaded a wad of nastiness on her that brought out the North Georgia hill girl in me. I was HET UP, y'all.

Because my mama, she is a planter of seeds. She is Little Mary Sunshine. She is a laugher and dancer and smiler. In the face of a year that would CRUSH most folks, she still smiles and encourages and tries, every day, to believe that things are going to be okay. To be honest, it drives me nuts sometimes. But in a garden full of pricklies and bitter herbs, she just keeps flourishing and providing sustenance.

And it occurred to me, with dirt under my fingernails and anger in my heart at that stupid woman who was mean to my mama, that we need more folks like my mother. We need more hope and less bitterness. More strength and less despair. More sunshine and less tears.

I'm working in my garden again today: carrots and beets and turnips and radishes. I'll be planting things that are less showy, that hide their goodness until it's most needed. They have their place in the garden, too.

What will YOU plant today? And, maybe more importantly, how will you grow?

Pssstt....Wanna Write a Blog Post a Day for a Month?

2011-09-07T14:40:00.000-04:00

You might have guessed by the color scheme that I am ALL ABOUT FALL these days. It's sixty-eight degrees outside right now, which makes me want to rip off all my clothes and go skipping down the street.

But this post isn't about a potentially middle-aged lady limping around frightening the neighbors (although maybe THAT would get their attention.) Nope, this is a heads up, my loves, because National Blog-Writing Month is right around the corner.

What's this NaBloWriMo, you say? (Except for those of you who have been hanging around the NaBloWriMo water cooler with me for a few years now...y'all go ahead and file your fingernails or organize your CDs or bake a lime chiffon pie for a second.) Well, a few years ago, the incomparable Miz Amy decided that NaNoWriMo shouldn't have all the fun and she started this here festival of bloggy goodness. The idea is simple: every day, for a month, you write a blog post. Any blog post. You can blog about anything you want: your hubs, your kids, that weird lady who smells the bananas in Hell-Mart...really, the possibilities are endless. The only catch is that, for the entire month of October, you write an entry every single day.

Is this challenging? Why, yes. Yes, it is. A couple of times last year, my entries were pretty much: "I'm tired. The kids are driving me crazy. I can't find my tea mug." It was inspiring, I tell you. And, in fact, there have been years when I DIDN'T write every day. The whole point of NaBloWriMo is to increase your posting, but we don't exactly come out with sticks and beat you with them if you miss a day or two.

Now, I say the whole point of NaBloWriMo is to increase posting, and that's true enough. But can I tell you a secret? The BEST part of it, for me, is meeting new folks and catching up with old friends. I don't visit blogs like I used to, but I try to make it a point, in October, to visit all of the blogs I can every day. In fact, one thing I realized while I was writing this is that, somehow, NaBloWriMo has come to mean Autumn to me and has settled itself in snuggly as a part of Visiting Season.

I'M SO EXCITED!!!!!

Ahem.

I've been chatting with a few of y'all about changing things up a little for this year. Here's what I've got so far:

We'll be offering the option to categorize yourself this year. I'll be coming up with the categories based on who signs up. You WON'T be forced to enter a category. If you don't want to be pigeon-holed, we are all about you following your bliss, man.
We'll be putting up a prompt every day. This was a sporadic feature last year, but THIS year, I'm gonna look to you guys for some suggestions. So start sending them in, yo!
We're considering doing some prizes this year. Of course, the prizes will come from...uh...US, so if you're craftily inclined or you have some great talent or product you'd like to share with us, let me know. For example, I might offer up a header redesign with matching background for your blog. Or I'll edit some of your snapshots. Or crochet you a groovy scarf. The prizes might be random and they might be specifically for things like: funniest post, most thought-provoking post, et cetera.

Okay, so are you ready? Are you set? Here's what you do:

Shoot me an email at nothannah@comsouth.net with the subject line NaBloWriMo Entry. In the body of your email, tell me your name, the name of your blog, and the category you feel best describes your blog. (If you so choose, man.) If the spirit moves you, include a prompt or two. If you feel like you might be able to contribute a prize, let me know. (BTW, vendors who contribute will be able to put up a button on the NaBloWriMo site.) The deadline for entries is Friday, September 30th.

In a couple of days, I'll have some buttons you can use on your blog to announce your participation and hopefully spread the news. We grew by leaps and bounds last year, and I'm hoping to break a hundred participants this year. Well, not break them.

I've already told y'all, this is a violence-free event.

I mean, we'd like to have a hundred participants.

You knew that, didn't you?

Yay!

Tomes On Tuesday: A Veritable Slew of Books to Review

2011-09-06T10:02:00.001-04:00

Some of you have noted that I seem to be in a reading slump and I've mentioned before that I keep trying to find the next series, the next book, the next STORY that will hold my attention and not make me want to give up and run sobbing across the room, tearing at my clothes and hair.

What?

Oh, sorry. I was just having a flashback to the one book I've read recently that made me do that. Let's go ahead and get that one over with:

Swamplandia by Karen Russell ~ I read this one based on the blurb read to me by my beloved Miz Mary, who rarely steers me wrong in terms of the Arts. The blurb she read made this book sound like a modern hero's quest, featuring a plucky young protagonist, a weirdo family, and theme parks based around alligators and Hell. I mean, come ON. The front cover was nice, too, so I picked it up. I sort of wish I hadn't. As I started reading it, I thought, "And it's even magical realism. Huzzah!" because that's what I thought it was. A few pages in, I was starting to have my doubts. I was also starting to be exhausted by the florid language. I know, right? Me? Exhausted by florid language?? Yes, children. Every other word seemed to be an adjective or metaphor, and that would be okay IF the magical realism thing had held up. But a few chapters in, I knew that the magical realism thing was most certainly not going to hold up. I kept waiting for the magic to kick in--there NEEDED to be myth in this story. But it never showed up completely and the climax of the book--which I had called depressingly several pages beforehand--pretty much just burned every bit of myth out of that sucker. The headlong sprint toward the resolution further stomped all over the mythological elements so that by the end of the book, in which everything got tied up in a boring brown bow, I tossed the book across the room and called Miz Mary. "It's like Karen Russell wrote this huge, Southern, magical hero's quest and some editor got ahold of it and made her rip all of the mythy bits out," I complained. Miz Mary agreed and added the rejoinder that it seemed to go even farther and underline the fact that believing in magic or something that might not be a tangible or normal part of this world will get you killed or ruin your life. In the end, I came as close to hating a book as I have in a long time, and while I guess there's something to be said for a book that makes you feel such strong emotion, there's also something to be said for not shredding the hero quest archetype to ribbons, thankyouverymuch.

So, yeah, that one didn't do it for me. BUT then I managed to get my paws on a veritable treasure chest of lovely stories that made me sigh happily and not want to leave the library. Not all of these are new books (and one is pretty old), but every single one of them has found a place amongst my book friends. I mean this in a metaphorical sense, because I don't have any more room on my shelves. Sigh.

Forever by Maggie Stiefvater ~ Y'all know how I feel about this series, right? If it was technically possible to tongue-kiss a series, I would totally bend this one over backwards and plant a big one right on its face. This has a lot to do with how well Mags writes her some teenage boys. Teenage boys, as I'm sure you'll remember from high school, can be complete and utter asshats. The good ones, therefore, are golden and Stiefvater has gotten herself a couple in this book who are simply perfect. Not perfect as in, "So good you kind of want to barf on them" but perfect as in "prickly and sarcastic and flawed and morose and sweet and precious and...wait...do I have a crush on a werewolf in a teen novel? Greeaaat." way. Ahem. This finale was told in Stiefvater's switch-up-the-narrator style, which she does well. I sometimes find this voice disconcerting, but here, because the story is rocketing along AND stopping and starting, it works. I adore Sam, the "main" boy, but Cole, the "bad" boy, gets a lot of play here, too--in fact, the dudes kind of take center stage. The female protagonist, Grace, who spends the first part of the book as a wolf, seems almost a ghost of herself here, but again, it works, because there is the very real sense that Grace is disappearing, losing all of her that is girl and capable of being with Sam. The final few chapters laid WASTE to me, in a good, cathartic, tear-snorting way--but also in a DAMN, life isn't fair way. In the end, there isn't really an end, and while this usually bugs the crap out of me, I liked the open-endedness of it, and the fact that, in spite everything, maybe true love does win. Maybe. At least there's hope for it. Um. How many of y'all cry when you write a book review? (Read this book and series and then eat a cookie. It worked for me.)

Green Angel and Green Witch by Alice Hoffman ~ Let me break this down for you, okay? Teen literature, magical realism, gardening, AND post-Armaggedonish. WHAT? Oh, oh...and these two books were written by Alice Hoffman, famous for Practical Magic and first beloved by me for Here on Earth, which retold Wuthering Heights in such a way that, really, there's no way to pretend that Heathcliff wasn't a gigantic, awful person. Anyway, I read these two slim novels as one normal-sized novel, and encourage you to do the same, with maybe a break in between to bathe or something. Here's the deal: Green is a quiet, normal kind of girl who knows the secrets of gardening. She is left behind when her family goes to town, and is utterly destroyed when her family dies in a cataclysm. I know, it sounds like I just spoiled the book for you, but that cataclysm is really only a tiny, itsy part in Green's story. Well, I mean, it's CENTRAL to her story, but what is important about her story is not how she is destroyed, but how she rebuilds. THIS is a hero's quest dripping and stinging and burning with magic. There is so much pain and dirt and sadness that it seems sometimes as if you are being dragged behind Green as she sifts through the ashes, but there is never the sense that the dragging will go on forever. The imagery in this story is beautiful, as it always is with Hoffman, and the magic is perfectly mixed with the reality of strong emotions. I will caution you that Green Witch veers fairly sharply into straight-up fantasy, which was okay with me, of course, but might be a little jarring for some readers. If you've ever read Lois Lowery's The Giver series, you'll understand when I say that Hoffman makes the transition from genre to genre much more smoothly than Lowry did. (However, if you didn't read The Giver series, I have to ask you "Why?" and "Have you lost your head?" and "Why aren't you running out to get this series right now?") This is a beautifully told, hopeful, and sweet story that will stay with me for a long time.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury ~ I'm pretty sure that it's some sort of sin for me as a former literature teacher and a lover of all things fantasy not to have read this book of short stories until now. I adored Fahrenheit 451 and when I taught "There Will Come Soft Rains" (which is in the book) one year, I had to go back to my desk so I could put my head down and cry for a few moments. (My students were ALWAYS entertained.) But, somehow, I never got around to reading the entire thing. I could kick myself at the deliciousness I've been missing. Let me tell you something about "literature": it sucks, sometimes. I'm thinking specifically of Thomas Hardy as I write this. I know there are some people who ADORE Thomas Hardy's novels (my husband comes to mind), but for me, reading them is like wading through cold bogs of groats, suffering from a sore throat and a propensity for making bad choices. Blech. I like Hardy's poems, which are generally no more cheery than his novels, but at least the misery is condensed into a few lines which can be read in one sitting followed by a few Vitamin D tablets and maybe a shot of spiced rum. God, where was I going with this? Oh, right, the short story as a delivery system for literature: it rocks. You get all of the literary conventions in one tidy package, entire stories laid out and rolled up for you in one sitting. I'm trying to figure out how to combine packages and apparently rugs and how awesome these stories are into a metaphor that doesn't involve you all feasting on packages, but I can't seem to do it, so let me just say, read this collection. I shivered and cringed and laughed and sighed and sniffled and despaired and did some fist pumps the entire time I read. I honestly don't think I can say that there were any stories here that didn't engender a visceral reaction in me. Bradbury's dialogue occasionally reads a little bit like a 1940's movie script, but that's okay with me. (It drives Will crazy, but he likes Faulkner's novels, so I don't even listen to him when he goes there.) It suits the stories just fine. What's particularly remarkable about this collection is that it traces a timeline: the founding of an Earth colony on Mars all the way up to the defining moment of Earth history that makes Mars permanently home. Every story is a step toward the end. I don't know if I'd call the last story "happy," but it is hopeful, and that really seems to be the theme of my reading this summer. Love this book. Love.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman ~ I've seen this novel in the bookstore and been told that I simply must read it and thought about reading it and never actually gotten around to reading it until this summer, and GAH what a mistake I made in buying that first book and not this one. Oh, Neil Gaiman. What a story this is. I mean...really. Nutshell: baby's family is murdered, baby escapes to graveyard, baby is raised by ghosts. What? Yes, ghosts. They name him Nobody and raise him up as best as a bunch of long-dead people can. He turns out great, by the way. If that was the whole story, honestly, it would be enough for me. But it's NOT the whole story. Underlying Nobody's life is an interconnected web of stories and characters and archetypes, all of whom are invested in this boy's survival--or his death. I love when character archetypes are turned on their ear (which Gaiman does with vampires, werewolves, and witches here), but I also love when they are reinforced, and Gaiman reinforces the hell out of ghosts and mothers here. This book won about seventy bajillion awards, including the Newbery Medal, which it deserved in a way I'm not sure a lot of Medal winners have recently. I loved this book. Loved it. I loved this book so much that when I heard the movie version had stalled, I breathed a little sigh of relief. (I still haven't gotten over them casting Lenny Kravitz in The Hunger Games. I'm not sure I ever will.) My goodness, it's so good.

Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan ~ I know, I know. It's taken me a while to get to this series, probably because so many people called it the next Harry Potter and I was all, "Oh, no, they DI-INT." There will be no next Harry Potter, y'all. Okay? Just saying. Anyway, I stayed away, which is weird for me, because young hero on a quest with Greek gods thrown in? Yeah. Right up my alley. But it was only until I saw the movie that I decided to read the book. (About the movie. Okay, I'm not sure it was, like, a stunner or anything, but it featured Sean Bean, who I like, as Zeus. It also featured Kevin McKidd as Poseidon, and I'm sure he was great in the role, but I was too busy drooling into my popcorn over his godly self to really notice his performance. Helllloooo, Mr. Poseidon. Rawr.) I'm glad I read it. I mean, I'm not going to say it changed my life or anything, but it's well-written and clever, and a great way to introduce kids to Greek mythology, I think. The deal is: the gods and goddesses fathered (or mothered) children with humans and these demigod kidlets are hunted down by various monsters and baddies. A refuge of sorts has been set up for these demigodlets (I slay myself) so they can learn about their powers and stay safe in the meantime. One really neat-o thing, I thought, was that Percy Jackson had ADHD and behavior problems--which turned out to be manifestations of his god-blood. Talk about a great way to snag kids with these particular challenges. The story is fast-paced, as Percy and his pals set out to find the titular lightning of Zeus, which has been stolen. The catch is that it must be found right quick or there'll be a war between the gods. The Percy of the story is younger than the Percy of the movie, but the story is more intricate than the movie, so in some weird way that is probably entirely in my head, it all works out. Great read-aloud book for the nine- and ten-year-old set, particularly the boys, I think.

What have you been reading?

BTW, the Mabon-inspired reworking of the blog for September was accomplished with digital papers from Sassy Designs. There's a sale on, just for today, if you want to check out some of the beautiful designs. http://www.sassy-designs.net/shop

Mop Dogs, Family Values, and Wanting More OR How My Morning Run Turned Into a Philosophical Awakening

2011-09-02T15:18:00.000-04:00

This morning, I headed out for my morning run, determined to make it a good one, since I haven't been able to get one in this week due to a packed schedule and the soul-crushing humidity. The morning was cool, Frodo was keeping me going as he snuffled out what was obviously some sort of squirrel leopard, and despite the pains brought from lack of exercise this week, everything was right with the world.

As I turned the corner onto the street that's the top of the neighborhood, the doglet started whining and snuffling louder. Given that we'd been run up on by a large Rottweiler mix (that turned out to be a big, friendly puppy), I kept running and ignored him. Then, up ahead, I spotted a mop dog. You know, the kind of dog you could use to clean your floor if only it came with a stick attached? (I'm awful. Whatever.) Anyway, the mop dog started running toward us, which gave me the chance to note that--much like the Rottie--it wasn't wearing tags.

The dogs greeted each other with stiff legs and little growls and jumps and I tugged on Frodo's leash and told the other dog to go away. But the mop dog did NOT go away. It frisked around us and Frodo frisked with it and there was a general jumble of dogs and leashes and me tugging and I turned to tell the mop dog to go home and leave us alone at the same time that Frodo lunged to say the same thing and...I sprained my ankle again.

Crunch. Snap. Me on the ground writhing in pain.

The unfortunate thing is that, you know, instead of being on the library floor within shouting distance of various family members, I was in somebody's front yard. By the street. Hanging on to a leash attached to a dog who'd had quite enough of another dog, thank you kindly. Which, you know, is embarrassing.

I tried to pull my mess together, because the position which felt best was me pressing my head into the grass with my butt up in the air, which...no. I managed to fall on my side and then lurch up to sitting where I swatted at the damned mop dog and made it run away. I might have cried a little, but this was mainly because a truck had approached, slowed, and then KEPT GOING while I rolled around clutching my ankle while the dogs wrestled.

Let me repeat that: lady on the ground, dogs wrestling, KEPT GOING.

Let me also go ahead and note for you right here that I could hear folks in the houses around me: TVs, doors closing, et cetera. I'm willing to suspend disbelief for a moment and say that it's possible, once again--for those of you who don't follow me on Twitter, nobody came when the Rottie came up, either--, that nobody heard me yelling or noticed me wallowing around on a lawn. I mean, I have a GREAT imagination. After a few moments of clutching and sobbing softly, I realized that nobody was going to help me. So. I called my mother-in-law to come and pick me up, because there was no way I could walk all the way back home. I was maybe a mile from home, but there was a hill and, also, I just didn't want to hobble. Call me weak. I can take it.

My mother-in-law said she'd come get me and I somehow managed to pull myself up and start walking, because there was no way I was going to stay there, lying on the ground amongst people who didn't want to help me. I limped. I cried a little. I almost fell over a few times, but I got my ass off that street. Four cars passed me, and another one when I turned onto another street. Nobody stopped.

Finally, I saw my mil's car and I burst into tears. I mean...SOBBING. I'm not going to say that I'm not a crier. I cry. I cry at Alan Jackson songs and Pampers commercials and at the sight of my little girl skipping merrily into the school building on her first day of Pre-K. However, I rarely cry-cry in front of people. Few folks have ever seen the snot-laden, tear-quirting, ugly-face-making extravaganza that is Heather Crying. I think in the almost twenty years my mil has known me, she's seen me cry-cry once before today.

She patted my shoulder and said that she knew I hurt, but that wasn't it. What was IT was that I had been completely ignored by my fellow human beings. I was in pain, in need and there was nobody to help me. What the hell? I mean, I would have taken just a friendly shout out the window, you know? I got no shout.

Anyway, I got back home and iced my ankle down and stopped crying and then I got on the interwebs, because what else was I going to do? And then I came across the story about the Million Mom movement. I'm not going to link to them, because I think they're acting like asshats, but the gist of it is that a bunch of women, backed by the American Family Association, which has been identified as a hate group because they hate Teh Gays, of course, are trying to force Dancing With the Stars to remove Carson Kressly and Chaz Bono from the show because they are Teh Gay. Or Teh Transgendered. (They aren't going to force the show to get rid of David Arquette, the cheating husband, or Kristin Whatsernuts, whose show not only lowered the entire nation's IQ, but also featured lots of Teh Unmarried Sex. And drinking. And assininity.)

To be clear: they want somebody removed from a television show, excluded from public view, locked away from the children because they don't, apparently, have AFA sanctioned sex with the opposite sex. I went on their FB page and found a whole lot of folks talking about forcing the networks only to show Christian-sanctioned shows and how they were changing the world and how maybe if Cher had been a better mother, Chaz would be wearing a skirt and being a mother. DID YOU HEAR THAT, MOM? If you'd been a better mother, I'd be wearing a skirt. Thank the Filing Cabinet you didn't totally suck and I was able to be a mother because of it.

Y'all. Listen. I know they aren't connected in any way at all, but for some reason, my inconsiderate neighbors and the asshatty mothers against Teh Gay dancers on television coalesced into one thing and now I am just STEWING.

I mean, honestly, are these women such distant, crappy mothers that they are relying on television to ensure that the family values they uphold are taught? Are they such controlling people that they want to ensure that their family values are the ones taught to my kids? Do they possess such low muscle tone that they can't turn off the damn television if a non-AFA-sanctioned show comes on?

But even more than that, I'm just pissed that people can't be humans. You know what? We aren't born Pagans. Or Christians. Or Filing Cabinet Followers. We aren't born liberals or conservatives, or Democrats or libertarians or TV watchers. We're born human. And we're so busy trying to prove that we're MORE something besides human--we're more wealthy or more busy or more religious or more smart or more hip or more whatEVER that we let our fellow beings lie on the street in pain. We want to force our fellow human beings to be out of the public eye and hidden from view if they don't match our ideals of how they can best be MORE. We choose, in trying to be more, to be less.

How is that even possible?

I don't know what the answer is. I know that my ankle isn't as bad as it was the last time around. I know that it wasn't a life or death situation that left me hobbling down the street. I know that Carson Kressley will still be gay whether he's allowed to show his face on television or not. Chaz Bono will still be a dude even if he can't put on a glitter-spangled tuxedo.

What I don't know is if my children will grow up in a world in which humanity takes precedence over being or having more. Given today, I'm leaning toward not so much.

Pardon me while I go ice my ankle and my soul.

A Parallel Universe

2011-08-17T13:38:00.001-04:00

Have you noticed that my header is still June's header? Pitiful, I tell you. For some reason, I had this idea that as soon as the kids went back to school, I would be wallowing in a veritable swamp of time, whilst angels with timers and acoustic guitars played in the corners and all of the chores and projects I had would leap through my capable hands and into the world.

Um. No.

Instead, I somehow got sucked into the parallel universe that is my laundry room. Up until the past week, I had no idea that it WAS a parallel universe. I just thought it was a really messy room that, no matter how many times I tried, I simply couldn't keep organized. I've written about it before, I've posted pictures, I've entertained you with the gory awfulness of the clothes rack, but I don't know if I've ever fully articulated how mind-numbingly NASTY my laundry room is on a continual basis. It's crazy. And I decided that, within the confines of my budget and with all the extra time I have lying around, I was going to tackle that beast once and for all. With SHELVES!! And storage bins!!! It was going to be glorious.

The first step was to corral all of my photography equipment. One day when I am self-actualized (I've decided to stop using the term "grown up," because I AM an adult, dang it, even if my career aspirations remain as maddeningly fickle as they do), I hope to have a separate studio with an attached garden and all sorts of shelves and bins and rooms and feediddlepots that will make my compartmentalized heart sing. For now, I scavenged a piece of plywood from the shed and attached it to the wall and to the first shelf that Will and I ever made together and, lo, it was good. Ish. Two cup hooks and a strip of elastic later, and my bean bag was stowed away neatly, as well as my containers of headbands, blankets, and assorted bits of equipment. Tirra lirra lay, I sang. It was all very festive. Of course, there was a big pile of stuff that had been wadded up on the FSTWAIEMT that was now on the floor, but that was okay, because I was soon to be making a trip to the supply store for the second part of the shelving system.

And here's where I hit the first snag (the first of many, many to come.) Because of the placement of the rack where I hang Will's clothes before I iron them and because of the big pile of stuff, measuring the wall for the next shelving unit was going to be difficult. I planned a shallow shelf for book bags and shoes that would fit beside the door into the house. Braced on the sides of the shelf and fitting over the top of the door frame would be a single shelf which would house stuff we don't really use that much, like camping equipment and extra bags. (We have a bizarre amount of extra totes. It's mildly disturbing.) In order to measure for this shelf, I'd have to hang over the side of the clothes rack while balanced on a step stool, which was difficult at best, so I asked Will to help me.

Now, I love my husband. He is awesome and handsome and great and all that mess, but he drives me up a fricking wall when I ask him for help, because there always has to be a DISCUSSION about it. Why do I need to move the couch? Why do I want to paint the living room? Do I REALLY think it's a good idea to expand the garden? You get the drift. If he isn't asking me questions about the logic behind my decision, he's making observations on how the process could be easier, faster, or cheaper. When we got into the laundry room, he helpfully pointed out that it would be easier to measure the wall if the big pile of stuff wasn't there. REALLLLLYYYY? I lovingly didn't bite his face off, although I wanted to, and told him that I'd just do it later, because I needed to do something else, and the kidlets helped me out here by yelling at each other in the living room. I mean...y'all. I know it is not a particularly pleasant side of myself, but sometimes, I just want some dang help MY WAY without having to write a dang dissertation about all aspects of the project with which I need help. Bless my husband's sweet heart.

Anyway, I wound up measuring the wall by taking a piece of the coarsest yarn I have (honestly, it's like a brillo pad....I can't figure out why I ever bought it) and taping sections of it to the wall after I found the tape, which wasn't as easy as it should have been (there's a reason I need more organization in my home) and pretty much balancing on the clothes rack and step stool via my toenails and my left breast. Then I measured the piece of yarn on the floor with a tape measure. I know, right? How very competent and Martha-y of you, Heather. DO NOT BE DECEIVED. Remember that my laundry room is a parallel universe...

More competence ensued at the supply store where I bought all the wood I needed for the project. I briskly picked out three straight boards and one almost straight longer board and assorted screws and brackets, got the boards cut, and headed home. Things went downhill from there.

The first part of the shelf was easy and based on the design of my pantry shelves, which I also built. I made a ladder of sorts out of the 1x6s, making sure the entire time that everything was square and level. This is important when building shelves so crap won't fall off them. The shelf-ladder was a thing of beauty until I put it up against the wall that would be its home. Then, it suddenly became the world's most crooked shelf. It wasn't level. It wasn't straight. Hell, the two legs somehow weren't even the same length. Inside the house: level. Inside the laundry room: shelf that Picasso built. Erm. Okay. I shoved a shim underneath one of the legs and screwed the resulting (in a parallel universe) level shelf into the wall. Then I grabbed the board that would be the shelf over the door and got a splinter. It was a sign of things to come.

The door-shelf board was too long. Like, tragically and horrifically too long. Wanna know when it's a really bad time to discover that a nine-foot board is too long? When it's propped up over your head as you balance on a step stool. Not only was it too long, but it also got stuck several times as I shoved it up and down and all around and tried to figure out what in seven hells had gone wrong with my measuring.

Now, here's where my biggest carpentry flaw comes in: I don't like using saws. I mean, I will use a jig saw, but anything more complicated than that makes my teeth curl. I can measure, level, drill, hammer, and screw (ahahaha) with the best of them, but I think my Daddy messed up way too many of his fingers for me to ever whip out a table saw and cut some mess. So I decided that I would, instead, shave off some of the wood with really rough sandpaper. Because I'm a masochist.

I did this three times. The first time, nothing changed: the wood STILL got stuck. The second time, something changed: I apparently somehow ADDED wood to the board, as it got stuck farther down on the wall and actually threatened to block me inside the laundry room. The third time, the wood moved a little bit higher on the wall on one side, then got caught and stuck on the other side in a new place. ARGH. At this point, I had to go pick up the kids, so I braced the stuck piece of wood on the laundry room door and the door frame, said a prayer to the threshold gods, and left.

When Will got home that night, he was fairly discomfited by the pile of crap on the floor and by the precarious placement of the board, but his comments were confined to pointing out that I must have measured wrong (REEEEAAAALLLLY?) and how he was sure I was frustrated and did I want him to saw the boards for me? No. No, I did not. Instead (because I'm a lunatic masochist), I decided that the really bright thing to do would be to get a hack saw and saw off the end of the board. Outside. In the hundred degree heat.

Sigh.

Y'all, listen...it's all well and good to be strong and capable and whathaveyou, but when that good stuff winds up with you squatting over a piece of wood with a hacksaw as gnats crawl all over you and sweat drips off your nose, take my advice and LET YOUR HUSBAND HELP YOU. Sheesh. Because there I was, squatting, maniacally sawing the end off of the piece of wood while looking, no doubt, like the world's most incompetent Neanderthal at her fire drill. Much grunting and snorting ensued. Finally, I finished sawing off maybe an inch and a half of wood, brought the board back inside and OH MY FILING CABINET--it was exactly the same.

How? How is that possible? Hoooowww? I called the piece of wood a bitch, went back outside, hacked off THREE inches of the board and pretty much slung it up over the ladder shelf and door frame. It fit. Barely.

So then I started trying to get the top shelf attached to the ladder shelf and the sides even. This proved to be difficult, as somehow, putting the board on top of the shelf has skewed the levelesqueness of the ladder shelf. I...I don't even know how to explain it. At some point in time, I realized that I needed to unscrew the ladder shelf and then screw it back in to a different place to get everything square. I did that: while bracing the ladder shelf with my hand, my hip, and my shelf, I screwed it STRAIGHT INTO THE WALL--and it somehow pulled two inches to the left. AND SHRANK THE TOP BOARD by an inch. What? Just...what the hell, y'all?

ARRRRRHGGGGHHHHH!

By this time, I had figured out that the room wasn't square, the floor wasn't level, the walls weren't flush, the boards were possibly possessed by Satan, and I was apparently stuck in one of Douglas Addams' more obscure books. I needed a ladder (which my husband had helpfully taken to his mother's house), a few more arms, and an interdimensional time-traveling space ship. And laudanum. I had none of these things. What I did have was a very heavy basket. The basket is heavy because we use it to store various stone tools and weapons that have been found across the years at my husband's family farm in Mississippi. I decided that it was the PERFECT implement for me to use to hold the top shelf steady while I dealt with the ladder shelf.

Wait.

Read that again.

Yes, children, I put a heavy, laden-with-rocks-and-tools-shaped-by-Native Americans basket on the UNFASTENED SHELF hanging over my head while I pulled and pushed and swore at the ladder shelf below and beat at it with various power tools. I know this was neither safe nor logical, but like most things involved with the laundry room project, I have no excuse or explanation. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Eventually, with rocks and cursing and prayers and 5000 splinters and lots of sweat and a few glares at my husband, we managed (I had to bring him in to deal with bracing the last corner of the top shelf because I was afraid that I would accidentally go insane if I had to do it) to get the shelf up and move some of the crap from the pile to the shelf.

Tomorrow, I'm supposed to go out and get MORE wood to get the next phase of the project built and I have to be honest with you and tell you that I'd rather get my eyeball tattooed than deal with it. I think I'm going to give it another week and let the parallel universe that the laundry room is chug along without me and my power tools and arrowheads and scrapers.

And cursing.

Not Enough

2011-08-03T12:26:00.004-04:00

I just got out of the shower. My hair is still dripping, in fact.

I'm not saying this to be sexy.

I took a shower because I smelled like stale urine and roach spray and, frankly, I felt dirty.

Today I delivered meals to elderly clients. It's the volunteer work that I do every week, my way of "giving back to my community." It was hot and oppressive today, but I felt good: the kidlets are doing well in school, I'll be working with the school's environmental club with a lady I think a lot of--who incidentally works with a performing arts school at which I'll be taking pictures soon. I was so tickled with myself, so pleased to be part of a circle that felt like it was coming together.

Then I got to the home of one of my clients. Her home doesn't have air conditioning, just two fans that circulate the stagnant air. When I got there, she was slumped in her chair, struggling with something.

I went in and she said, "I need some help, baby."

She needed help to get her pants on. Her underwear was twisted and tangled around one leg. Her pants were also twisted. Neither garment was clean. She said, "I just need to pull them up."

I tried for a few moments and then I said, "Let's start all over." And I knelt down and pulled off her underwear and pants and lifted her feet into her clothes and helped her stand up and get everything situated correctly.

Understand: I didn't do this to be charitable. I did it because humans have a need to be clothed and I could fill that need for her. It wasn't kindness. It was humanity.

Back in her chair, she seemed disoriented. "Do you need something else?" I asked. She needed water.

I went into her kitchen, which was crawling with roaches. Her freezer was filled with ice: ice in the broken ice maker, ice in bowls, ice in trays. I got her ice water and brought it back to her. She gulped it down, her hands shaking.

"I'm worried about you," I said. "Are you too hot?"

She struggled to tell me that she was fine, that she could call her daughter if she needed help. So I left her there to deliver another meal.

I delivered the next meal. It was hot outside. It was viciously hot and all I could think about was my other client, slumped in her chair and telling me that she didn't feel hot at all, that she didn't get hot anymore.

I went back. I did not do this to be kind or charitable. I did it because she was a fellow human being who needed help. I called 911 as I did so, because in all honesty, I felt like she might be in dire straits when I got to her house. The operator waiting for me, I went inside the dark, hot, bug-ridden house and called for my client. She was in her bedroom. She needed help with her shirt, because her granddaughter was coming to take her to pay bills.

I got her back to her chair. "You came back to see about me," she said.

"Yes," I said, hanging up with the 911 operator. I rearranged her shirt so that it covered her body. I squatted down by her chair and held her hand, which was so hot in mine that it gave me chills.

"You feel hot to me. Are you sure your granddaughter is coming?"

"Yeah, baby. She's coming. I know what to do if I feel bad. I'll call 911."

She wanted me to leave. I could feel that. And because humans need dignity, I went back to my own house.

And then I took a shower, to wash the stink of her home off of me.

Here's the thing: our politicians can talk all they want about "tar babies" and "terrorists." They can tell us that they want to defeat the president or create jobs or deal with the debt ceiling. Members of organizations with the word "heritage" in the name can release documents that "prove" that the poor in America have homes with televisions and refrigerators, and so how in the world can the government call them poor? Citizens who claim to follow a man who said that his followers would be judged by their treatment of the poor and sick and incarcerated can put money in the offering plate to send teenagers on missions to foreign countries so they can see what real poverty is like and they can do their god's work. Progressives can blather on and on about the New Deal and how the Tea Party is destroying the social contract and blah blah blah.

BLAH BLAH BLAH, y'all.

It is not enough. It is not nearly enough. You want to see poverty? You want to know how people who are poor and sick and alone live? You want to know how those blasted entitlements make people "live like kings?" You come with me. You help a woman pull her dirty panties up so she can go pay her electric bill so that the two fans and refrigerator that provide her the only respite she has from the punishing, cruel, awful heat of a Georgia summer can keep running. Lay off pontificating on Facebook and Google + about all of the injustices you see because of politicians or folks who mooch off the system or who don't understand the system or hypocrites or conservatives or liberals. Get your body so dirty with poverty that you have to wash it off when you get back to your air-conditioned, roach-free home.

You think I'm trying to shame you or that I'm tooting my own horn? I'm not. Because what I'm doing isn't enough, either. How many more millions of people live like my client, within a stone's throw of a church, within a stone's throw of her neighbor? How many people live like me, worried about the economy, but tapping away with righteous indignation on my computer? Many, I'd venture to say.

Too many of us for there to be not enough in our country.

Avoiding Quarterbacks Named Branson Via Crafting

2011-07-26T09:01:00.001-04:00

I'm not THAT kind of mother. You know, the one who makes crafts every day and spends quality time nurturing and exploring and blogging about it and THEN makes a healthy meal for the whole family and then everybody plays shadow puppets on the ceiling at bedtime before journaling? Um, no. I don't do that.

I mean, I'm not KNOCKING that kind of mother. Gah, I wish it was in me to BE that kind of mother. But the truth is, Will is much more that kind of mother than I am. He plays games and romps and schedules.

I get up early in the morning so I can scrape the last of the peanut butter onto my toast and not have to be unselfish and give it to my kids. It's true.

This is not the kind of mother I want to be. I love peanut butter and having time alone, but the reality is that my kidlets are going to school in just a few days and...I don't want them to. I want them to be here, with me.
It's weird, I know, but I would far rather them be here, being loud and messing up my concentration when I'm trying to write a blog entry then being a mile away from me, having fun with the children and learning stuff.

Part of it is that I'm going to MISS having a kidlet around. I haven't been actively alone for five years now. And while I'm excited about having time to devote to getting the photography business really running and writing and gardening and sewing and crocheting and maybe even trying to find a job outside the house, I'm also terrified of being so lonely that I start wearing grey only and lurking in corners and crying.

More than I usually do, I mean.

The other part is that...okay, this is going to sound Crazy McCrazyface, but I worry about my kids turning into Everybody Else and not these kids:

Not Jeffrey, so much. Goodness knows that Jeffrey is immune to most influences. He's gonna be the weirdo that he is, medication and therapies and interventions be damned. But River...whew. That girl.

Here's a story: the other day, Nana came over for a visit. She brought with her the shirts and dresses she had gotten the kids (I have no idea how the woman isn't in the poorhouse yet with the five grandkids...) River took one look at the (adorable) dresses Nana pulled out of the bag and yelled, "Oh, I didn't want thoooooose."

Oh, HELL to the NAW.

I rose up like a Fury (or maybe a Goddess of Not Ass-hatty Children) and yanked her into the bathroom and gave her a talking to the likes of which she had never seen which resulted in her sobbing hysterically and moaning that she wanted the pretty dresses that I told her she couldn't have. In fact, I told her she couldn't have ANY of the dresses Nana brought her ever again until River learned how to be grateful for kindness and a Nana with good taste. (And yes, I used those words. I was...a little out of my head.)

River is smart and strong-willed and cute and winsome and clever with the words--have I said this before? It has occurred to me lately that it is entirely possible that she might wind up being...forgive me...a popular girl. A MEAN popular girl, who makes fun of kids like her brother. Or who doesn't want to hang out with the family and watch Labyrinth for the 700th time.

I know, I know...this is ridiculous kind of thinking. River will be who she is because of who WE are and we are awesomely NOT popular people, so surely she'll just be Queen of the Drama Club and that will be enough for her.

But I'm freaking out enough about the whole nightmare of having to hide all my trolls when River's prom date --Branson, the quarterback who will be groping her drunkenly all night, the little shit...where's my battle axe?-- shows up that I went a little crazy yesterday and DID A CRAFT with my kids. Because that's the kind of people we are going to be, folks.

We are NOT going to be drunkenly groped by dudes named BRANSON, okay?

Over my dead body, Branson. MY DEAD BODY.

Ahem.

So, the craft was one of those "find the hidden object in a jar full of other stuff." (Yes, I got this from Pinterest. See that little red button over to your right? It's the gateway to a world in which your daughter will never be groped by Branson, that little piss-ant.)

First, I found an old, clear plastic peanut jar with a lid. I set River to using Goo Gone to get the sticky stuff from the label off of it and Jeffrey to finding alphabet beads. They were very intent on their work and didn't argue once. Angels sang from the cobwebs in my kitchen.

Then we toodled around the house to find little bits of stuff we could put in the jar: beads, safety pins, coins, a sequin Jeffrey called "The Boss Object." Heh. He plays a lot of video games.

We gathered the stuff

catalogued the stuff

and put the stuff in the jar with a bag of expired sushi rice. (I cleaned out my pantry yesterday. TWELVE cans of expired food, a bag of sushi rice, and a metric crapton of condiment packets went into the trash. The waste made me fall over.)

River loved it.

Look at that FACE (and try to pretend that the focus didn't fall on her collar. She was moving fast, okay?) Taking the time to do a craft with the kidlets was totally worth it.

You do understand that if there's a kid named Branson in her class next Monday, I'm totally homeschooling them, right?

Or sending this guy after the little punk.

Obsessions in the Midst of Busyness

2011-07-24T14:14:00.001-04:00

Y'all. I've been busy. The end of the summer is typically a Crazy McCrazyface time, anyway, and this year, Riv is adding to it by getting sick right before the family reunion. AWESOME.

In addition to the cleaning, planning, shopping, visiting, washing, doing stuff with the kidletsing I've been doing, I've also gotten obsessed with two things.

The first is crocheting. I've tried it before and it didn't take, but now it has and I'm pretty much just a big ol' hooker. (Ha! Just a little crochet humor, my friends.) I've crocheted a pixie hat for River, a newborn pixie hat that will probably be a prop for the photography that has waned over the last few months because I've been so busy, a shawl, a hat for another kid, and I'm about to get to work on a scarf. I understand that crocheting is TOTES not a summer time hobby. (It's so humid in our house that when I got up from the yoga ball I use as an office chair, it stuck to the back of my thighs. Will suggested I put on panties and I fell over on the floor and died laughing. Don't worry, it was vacuumed. The floor, I mean. And I DID have on panties. Why am I even TELLING y'all this?) But I can't seem to stop the madness.

The second is Pinterest, which is a gigantic, time-sucking, inspiring, fun social media introduced to me by the lovely Heather. It's basically a bookmarking site, which is a great design tool, but it also leads to meeting new folks and finding new crafts and I'm so addicted to it, it's silly. I currently have "boards" for crafting, travel, interior design, photography, crocheting, the Bulldogs, food, and snarky takes on pop culture. It's one of those "invite me" type sites, and frankly I'm not sure if you can see my profile if you aren't a member (oooh, snooty), but if you want to try, here's my deal: http://pinterest.com/nothannah/ Hit me with an email if you want an invite. Or need one. It's all very mysterious and complex.

Off to give the feverish one a popsicle, clean out the laundry room adamngain, and bake some cookies. Hope your Sundays rock.

Twitchy McScatterbritches

2011-07-12T11:05:00.002-04:00

Currently, there are THREE blog posts in the holding pen, waiting for me to give them life or at the very least, you know, finish them beyond four sentences. But I can't seem to get my brain pointed in the right direction. And right now there are three little boys in my house who I love with a love that is greater than love, but who are not, as little boys are wont not to be, conducive to writing ONE complete sentence, let alone FIVE. Because I cannot even imagine my Twitchy McScatterbritches self managing to finish any of the blogs any time soon and because the noise level emanating from Jeffrey's room is starting to peel the paint off the walls (and the skin from my ears), I'm gonna do a list and wrap it all up.

Mkay? Mkay

I have decided that I just can't be a crazy coupon lady. A of all, I do not have four hours in my day to which I can devote anything, much less clipping coupons and toodling through the interwebs to find the best deals. I also do not have any desire to stock up on seventy-two bottles of mustard, even if I can buy the lot for twelve cents. I cannot imagine a world in which seventy-two bottles of mustard make it into my shopping cart at one time, nor one in which I stock a closet solely with soda. I mean, I would give up soda for life if I could figure out an appropriate storage solution for my craft avalanche, so the idea of giving up an entirely good closet for soda makes my head explode. Plus, I have a sneaking suspicion that all the crazy coupon ladies are going to totally ruin it for the rest of us sane people who just want to take a few cents off our cereal price. I depend on coupons to allow me to buy my organic stuff (even if I don't have coupons for it, the savings on "regular" food means I don't feel remotely guilty for spending three dollars on frozen organic blueberries.) So don't mess it up for me, crazy coupon ladies, mkay?
On a weirdly related note that kind of makes it seem like I AM a crazy coupon lady, I discovered Recipe.com a few days ago and it kind of rocks. It matches up items you enter into your shopping list not only with recipes, but also with specials in your area (to which, one assumes, you can match your coupons.) I always do a "big buy" at the beginning of every month, but it's nice to be able to see how deals come up in the middle of the month on random items that you might have forgotten, like bread. (I know. How do you forget fricking bread? I blame Dingleberry, of course.)
A couple of days ago, one of the folks I met through the Facebook page I reserve for my spiritual blatherings sent me a Google+ invitation. Now, I'll be honest and say I'd been concentrating so hard on how the intensely awful heat this summer has made my armpits chafe AND how Michelle Bachmann makes every thing else I have chafe that the whole Google+ phenomenon has completely passed me by. Google WHO?, I said. But I gamely joined up and found out what the dealio is, which is basically a new instrument of online social interaction. I don't know that it's going to be any better than Facebook, although I've already realized that it has one thing over Zuckerman (HAH! That's some social media, Charlotte! What a terrific status update! Hello? Anybody else read E.B. White and cry at the end? No? Ahem. Carry on.) ZuckerBERG'S baby: circles. First, you know, I'm all "ooooh, it's symbolic and organic and curvy." Because I'm an idiot. Circles to the unidiotic are the way you organize your acquaintances on Google+. Anyone with whom you connect is placed by you into one or more circles. For example, my friend, Tammy. (Not to be confused with my cousin Tammie or my friends Tammy or Tammie.) Tammy is in the circle for friends, but also for Pagans and ALSO for political convos.) If I share a link about the amazingly asinine pledge that Republicans are trying to decide to sign that first posited that African Americans were better off under the slavery system (DO WHAT?) and includes the removal of women soldiers from the front line and advocates an amendment to the Constitution to define marriage as a solely heterosexual privilege, I can share it with Tammy, because that's the way she rolls. My OTHER friend, Tammy, does not roll this way and is very conservative and would swallow her tongue if some of my more liberal friends started bashing (rightfully) Michelle Bachmann. So she would not be included in the group of folks that would receive the link. Does that make sense? Basically, Google+ gives you a whole lot more power than Facebook does and eliminates the need for folks like me to have two separate accounts in order to have open discussions with folks. If any of y'all would like to try out Google+ and need an invite, hit me up in an email and I'll send you an invitation. (To be honest, I'm not sure how the invitation thing works. It's all very mysterious and I keep reading updates on Facebook like, "Invitations are open again. Let me know if you need one." Like they're Golden Tickets or something. Which is cool, actually.)
So, the other day I was remarking to Will that Americans talk about being free all the time, but in reality we are fricking shackled to grocery stores, electric companies, and our governments for every damn thing we have. (Pardon the language, but I'm reading The Long Winter again with the fams and the Ingalls' definition of "hard times" involves burning hay for heat and eating flour made by grinding seed wheat in a coffee grinder, so it makes my "Wahhhh, I can't buy as many books as I want any more" nonsense seem particularly stupid.) And Will goes, "Yeah, I have three ideas about that."
His first idea was that he's going to rig up a manual pump to our well. We're on city water, but because the neighborhood is so relatively far out of town proper, most houses have wells. I'm pretty sure nobody uses theirs now; it's just not as conveeeeeeeenient. We had somebody out a few years ago to look at the thing, and he said he'd charge us what we considered a ridiculous amount of money to fix the pump so we could draw water from it. We said, "Erm. Thanks. No." And that was that. Turns out Will has been getting on the interwebs and finding out that one can fiddle with one's well and some PVC pipe and make a pump of sorts that would allow you to draw water from your well that you can use in an emergency. Will's idea is to use this pump as a chore for the children: they'll draw the water and carry it in the house for us to drink and to the garden for us to water it.
Speaking of gardens, during this conversation, I also mentioned the Julie versus Oak Park fiasco. In case you haven't heard about this, there's a lady in Oak Park, Michigan who had the audacity to plant a vegetable garden in her front yard. And then the city sued her. It's insanity of the highest level, and you can read about it here from Julie's point of view. Anyway, I talked about how we sit on an acre of land and how it was crazy that we didn't grow as much food as we could on it, because there are folks who have much less than we do and who are being sued because of it. And he said, "I want to redo the garden." The garden this year sucks. I'll be honest. It got abominably hot really early this year and I'm afraid of brown widows and I just didn't get around to doing anything with it. I'm a loser. The only things really producing right now are my herb beds, which are putting forth a multitude of stuff. I made an attempt to weed out the beds last week, and in the course of doing so, uncovered a BLACK widow that had made a web between the side of the bed and the dirt. I killed her (extra points because she had racing stripes down her side!) and went inside and had the shakes. Because it was just one more (potentially lethal) point against boxed beds. Now, I love the tidiness of boxed beds, but to be honest, I have to say that I find them inconvenient and in many cases, inefficient. Unless you use pressure-treated wood (which risks chemical leaching) or stone (which would be cost prohibitive and labor-intense), you're going to risk termite infestation (check--luckily our termite protection covers the house, and our termite guy said we were safe) AND the need to redo the beds every few years. Our boards are now rotted and need to be replaced. Plus, the width of the beds made it hard for me to harvest things in the middle of the beds. PLUS, watering a boxed bed garden requires either inefficient overhead watering or a (cost and time-prohibitive) tube system. I DID have a tube system, but Frodo chewed it up. Sigh.
This isn't actually a new list item, but MAH GAWDESS, that was getting to be a longggg paragraph. Anyway, I figured Will would be all, "We need to gut the garden and plant grass." But nooooo. Instead, he said, "We need to dismantle the boxes and put a fence around it and get some compost and add some space to it and plant it and lay down some irrigation for it and use it as a chore for the kids." Blink. Blink blink. Y'all, this man does not LIKE vegetables. He has hated the garden this year because of the weeds and untidiness, so I can't imagine why all of a sudden he's all, "Let's plant some shit, yo." But he IS. Far be it for me to deny him his veggies and the kids their chores. We're making plans and he's going to help me dismantle the boxes soon. (I will be wearing chain mail and carrying a can of spider spray, because I can't help but think that we'll find more spiders. Like the one we killed yesterday hanging from our dining room window. I'd show you pictures, but I have not the energy to load it from my camera.)
Now here's where things get truly bizarre. Will goes, "My third thing is...I want to build a chicken coop. And get chickens. Two of them." Um. WHAT? I mean, yay, chickens! But also...WHAT? I don't know when the spirit of Wendell Berry possessed my husband (and, no, Berry isn't dead, but work with me here), but all I have to say is, it's hot. Like, come over here and talk tomato varieties, big boy. Pump that well, baby. PUMP IT.
Ahahahahahahaa!
Sorry.
I couldn't help myself.
(But seriously, isn't it weird that Will's all Greeny O'Homesteadface? AND--he's started coupon shopping for me occasionally.) Bi to the zarre.
Sexy, but bizarre.
I think it's best I stop here, don't you?

Have Dog, Will Travel

2011-07-05T10:13:00.000-04:00

Right now, I'm watching River doing an interpretive dance with the ancient plastic riding toy that my mother got for visiting grandchildren. It's all very dramatic, watching as she lifts the seat, collapses to the ground, and rolls around artistically in the fur embedded in my mother's living room rug.

*PAUSE TO SAY: YES, MAMA, I KNOW YOU CLEANED THE FLOOR YESTERDAY. IT WAS A THING OF BEAUTY AND LIGHT. IT'S ALL THE FAULT OF THE DOGS, WHO HAVE SHED ENOUGH IN THE PAST TWELVE HOURS FOR US TO CREATE A COTTAGE INDUSTRY BASED AROUND YARN WOVEN OF DOG FUR.*

Frodo made his first trip to Cowtown yesterday. Let me just go ahead and say that in the past, the NotHannah family has not been a family that travels with dogs. I mean, I understand that there are folks who go everywhere with their pets and who have separate bags for them and passports and special collapsible dog bowls and feedoodles for them and I think that's spiffy, but we have never been that type of family. However, it occurred to us after we paid the bill for boarding the pupple and our heads exploded that perhaps we needed to rethink the whole "we travel with dogs" thing.

Now, usually when there's a gathering at the 'rents' home in C-town, Heath and Kelly bring their two dogs, who are large and lovely. BUT my parents' yard isn't fenced and everybody generally wigs out over the dogs going outside, so the dogs are inside all the time and since Mama adopted Carlie, the ginormous and awesome Lab mix and H and K got another lab, well, that's just a whole lot of dog for Frodo to deal with on his first overnight travel trip. It's a whole lot of dog for anybody to deal with, let alone a beagle who might most delicately be referred to as "highstrung" and who is used to being outside a good bit of the time. But, both disappointingly and encouragingly, Heath and Kelly couldn't make it this weekend, so we were only going to be visiting with Carlie. Accordingly, the CRV was loaded up, the pup installed, and we headed north.

First was a stop in Nearest Largesh City to pick up a backdrop stand and kiss the world's cutest new nephew. Frodo romped around and whined at the dog next door. But he was okay with getting back into the car and the interstate. About ten minutes down the road, Jeffrey looked a little peaked and I asked him if he was going to barf. Jeffrey isn't always awesome about telling me how he feels, and he really didn't want to stop playing his DS. A fairly aggravating conversation followed in which I dragged from him finally that perhaps he was a bit hot in the backseat with the sunshine pouring down on him. So we pulled over so I could could rig up a shade with his blanket and we got back on the road.

About ten minutes later, I looked in the backseat and noticed that Frodo was looking a little peaked. (Hang on. You DO know that this is pronounced "PEEK-id" with a thick Southern accent and it means "ill," right? Mkay.) I don't know if you're familiar with beagles, but I'm pretty sure there is no dog who can look quite so peaked as a peaked beagle. I think the only way he could have made himself look more miserable was if he had painted himself a delicate shade of green. Roughly fourteen seconds after I said something like, "Frodo looks awful," he backed me up by barfing all over the floor of the backseat. Loverly. We pulled over AGAIN and Will ran inside for paper towels while I let Frodo walk around the side of a shady-in-a-country way store and explore all of the various piles of waste. I think there was a gopher skeleton back there. Shudder.

Back on the interstate! Huzzah! Ten minutes later, the kids had to pee. Holy deity in a delicatessen. We pulled over for roughly the 90th time and I took the kidlets in to pee so Will could probably eat a pack of cigarettes. The potty place was a combo truck stop/restaurant/convenience store with aisles and aisles of candy, chips, CB radio parts, and wolf-emblazoned dream catchers. Jeffrey commented that it was like the Lotus Casino from Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief movie. I muttered, "Without the pretty ladies and the nice, narcotic pink flowers..." I might have been a little bitter at this point in time.

Of course, there was a traffic jam around Jonesboro, because that's one of the Laws of Physics, but eventually we arrived on the little country road on which I grew up and I let Frodo stand on my lap and flap his ears in the wind out the open window. I sang "Born Free." He seemed to enjoy it.

At the rents' house, he sniffed around at Carlie with a bristly back and whined until I took him outside to walk around poolside. It was all very decorous until he puked again. Have I mentioned I don't like puke? I hosed it off the patio and gagged.

Let me remind you that Frodolicious is used to roaming an acre lot AND he's a beagle, which means he's pretty much all nose. He's also used to being the only animal in a house and coming and going out the back door as he pleases. I'm reminding you of this so that when I tell you that I left him with the folks who were also watching the kids in the pool (and were thus a little, you know, busy) so I could gather some towels, you are not shocked when I then tell you that Frodo saw the opening in the gate and took off (literally) for greener pastures.

A little background: my mother spent our entire childhood living in fear of "the road." It was a gentle, beautiful, curving road everywhere else except the area in front of our house, where it became the Screaming Stretch of Stinking Asphalt Death. I mean that pretty literally: numerous cats and a couple of dogs from my childhood met their maker there. My brother rode his bicycle smack into a van there. I can't tell you how many times we've heard the particular squeal of a car going to fast hitting the curve, going into a series of doughnuts, and ending up in the ditch or straddling the fence. My mother has probably done irrevocable damage to her vocal cords shrieking at us and various animals to stay away from the road or to warn drivers backing out that another car is coming, a trait she passed on to her children. So pretty much the entire family lost their minds when we realized Frodo was missing.

Aunt Kitty took off for the garden, Daddy wandered into the side yard, I looked out in the side pasture, Hayden and Uncle Dan went across the road to check the other pasture. Mama did laps around the house. Will stayed in the pool with the kids, probably wondering if it was too early to toss back a couple of shots. Hayden eventually tracked the dog down across the road, eying some cows in a predatory fashion. Jeffrey likes to remind me that beagles are VERY close to being wolves. Maybe Frodo thought he was White Fang or something.

The next day we had a Fourth of July picnic. One of my cousins brought some folks who had no idea that a dog wasn't supposed to go outside, so when my dog politely asked to leave the house, they let him right on out. And he set off for...I don't know...Paris? Timbuktu? Who knows? All I know is that the situation ended with my husband running down the road following the Pupster, me walking up the driveway clutching my temples in aggravation, my mother interpreting this as the dog being injured or dead and bellowing, "What HAPPENED? WHAT HAAPPPPPEEENNNNNNEEEEEEDDDDDD?" and then threatening to disown me when I told her to chill out because--although in her defense, she had no way of knowing this was happening--my brain was about to leap out of my head and beat me about the ears with its stem. A good dang time was had by nobody but Frodo who had tasted FREEEDDDOOOMMM and set out to find a way to paint his face blue and fashion a kilt from the covering of Carlie's bed.

I am sure it is a coincidence that I drank my way through half a bottle of citrus rum over the course of the weekend.

Now we're getting ready to head back home after a long weekend of sun and eating and swimming and getting the river recharge that seems to keep me going when I'm slogging through bad days in Dingleberry. I have not fed the dog, which might seem cruel, but it's only because I don't relish the idea of him barfing in the car again.

Before the next Frodo visit (if there is one, OMFC), I've assembled a list of items we might need:

Doggy nausea medicine
A roll of industrial strength paper towels
Doggy Valium
People Valium
A much longer leash
An industrial strength vacuum because, seriously, the fur was INSANE. All fur, all the time people. River's wearing a dog fur stole right now.
A collapsible dog bowl.
Technically, I don't NEED a collapsible dog bowl. The unmatched fake Tupperware bowl we brought along did just fine. However, if we're going to be some of those "have dog, will travel" people, we're going to have to step up our accessory game.

Hope you all had fun, doggy-drama free Fourths!

A Motherly Sacrifice Gone Painfully Awry

2011-06-27T09:56:00.000-04:00

For my birthday last week, Jeffrey got me a pair of black rubber drugstore shape-up type shoes. You know, the ones with the big, curving soles that will apparently tone your butt while you walk around picking up dirty socks and wiping noses? Yeah, those. I didn't ASK for a pair of those, since I believe that they are fundamentally ugly (I'm not a big soled type of gal, which ruins me for espadrilles, which apparently means I can't be fashionable this summer, which honestly is not that big of a shockeroodle), but when I saw these at the drugstore when we were shopping for our vacation, they looked like a combination of Crocs (those awful rubber shoes with holes that are good for gardening and beaching) and Mary Janes, so I thought they were cute. And Will remembered and Jeffrey insisted on getting me a pair of them.

I was pleased that Will had remembered I liked them, although both of us were unpleasantly surprised about the largeness of the soles. So I wore them around the house the night before vacation and then pretty much ignored them the entire time we were on the island, mainly because...well, I'm a clumsy person. It's true. How I managed to be a dancer in high school is beyond me, because honestly, I have a hard time walking across a room without tripping or banging into something large and multi-cornered. The idea of walking in the sand on those large rocking chair soles was laughable. I wore my flipflops, y'all. It was glorious.

We got back on Saturday night, an evening spent hazily unpacking and trying to get used to not living on island time. I wonder why that feeling of relaxation and well-being disappears after vacation? I am apt to blame it all solely on Dingleberry. I blame most things on Dingleberry, just on principle. The kids drank lemonade that night for supper, because I couldn't face a drive to the store to buy milk. They had milk at breakfast and I gave them yogurt cups for dessert, so come ON, people. They had calcium. I promise.

Sunday morning, I woke up early to go to the store and get some milk and the Sunday paper. I put on the shoes Jeffrey got me because I wanted him to think I liked them. The sacrifices we make for the kidlets, y'all. They will earn us sainthood, I'm pretty sure. When I got back the kids were up, but Will wasn't, which was probably the reason why I didn't take my shoes off when I walked in the door as I usually did: I hit the ground parenting. This would come back to haunt me fairly quickly, when I hit the ground in actuality. As I walked into the kitchen to get some cereal going, the treacherous birthday shoes decided to take advantage of my innate clumsiness and settled themselves into a groove in the Slippery Ice Rink of Hell (otherwise known as my kitchen floor) while my body went forward. What happened next seemed to happen in a bubble of silent and perfect pain: my ankle turned so violently that things inside it crunched and crackled and all of my weight came down on it and I fell like a stone, banging my elbow on the cabinet as I did and luckily landing mostly on the carpet of my dining room floor. And then I commenced to screaming.

Y'all. I have a fairly high tolerance for pain. I laugh at paper cuts. I refuse medication for all but the worst of headaches. I made it through River's birth without an epidural--which is why I can tell you that in the four years since her birth, I have not felt pain such as I did in my ankle. It was the kind of pain that makes you feel nauseated, that makes you cry even if you don't want to, that makes you, as I did, bite the (fairly hairy--my GAWD, did I not vacuum before I went on vacation?) carpet in your dining room and SCREAM at the children to get their father. And then you keep screaming because it HURTS SO BAD (and you have dog fur in your teeth) and then your husband gets there (and your dog, who is not happy about the screaming) and your kids are trying to comfort you (by patting your head, which is beside the point) and you are literally rolling around on the ground trying to crawl away from the pain and perhaps bury yourself in your husband's ribcage and thinking weird thoughts about Biblical origin myths and then your husband tries to take off your shoe and you scream some more and contemplate divorce.

What? You haven't ever felt that kind of pain? Well, lucky fricking you, because it Teh Sucks.

Anyway, Will got me to the couch and immediately got an ice pack out. The ice pack was left over from one of his more asinine injuries wherein he sprained his ankle VERY badly during a school retreat. Don't ask. I prefer not to think about it. He slapped an ice pack on me and wrapped it expertly with a leftover wrap and I groaned and moaned and acted basically like a giant, ankle-injured infant. Seriously, ice on an injured ankle is, I think, maybe the second ring of hell. Ow. Wee.

I realized that I needed to go to the hospital, which meant finding a place to stow the kidlets and saying a few prayers, chanting, and lighting various candles for protection against the horrors of the Dingleberry hospital, which is centrally located on the seventh ring of hell. Shudder. Children stowed and me installed on Will's old crutches, we headed off to the hospital. (Yes, I know that I had vowed never to return...several times. But that's big talk when the crisis is over. When the crisis is happening, I want--in this order--my mom, a shot or six of vodka, Fluffy--my childhood and current pillow, bless her heart--, and a medical professional to hold my shit together. Call me weak. I dare you.)

The Dingleberry hospital was surprisingly not horrible. There was nobody else in the waiting room, which did not smell like homeless people. Huzzah. The triage nurse was cheerful and actually, you know, there. I was ushered back immediately into my own little curtained area, which was CLEAN. The doctor came quickly to examine me and exchange sardonic comments with Will and I about the three sixes of ankle injury care (I forget them and invite you to look them up...they got tedious after a while, kwim?) and shoes. The x-rays happened right after that and were given by a technician who was so funny and who looked so much like my cousin Michelle that I wanted to leap up and give her a big hug. Very shortly after that, the doc came back and told me that the ankle wasn't broken (which shocked me, frankly), but it WAS sprained and that I'd need to take medicine and wrap it and ice it and Will nodded sagely as if his medical experience with ankle injuries came from Johns Hopkins and not falling from another dude's shoulders whilst attempting to crawl onto a balcony. Ahem. The longest wait was for my simply FAAAAABBBUUULLOUS nurse dude to come and wrap my ankle and strap me into some sort of medieval torture device to stabilize the joint. He was awesome, seriously.

The rest of yesterday I spent in a gigantic grump of large grumpitude. Sitting on the couch with an iced ankle sounds like a lot of fun, but it totally isn't. It's annoying, especially as the world turns without you and the kidlets sort seashells without you and your poor husband has to do Mommy AND Daddy duty. AT THE SAME TIME. I watched a great deal of Phineas and Ferb yesterday, which was fine and dandy, really. And I worked on my crocheting skills (having given up on knitting, which makes me want to eat my own face.) And I ate coconut shrimp brought over by Silly and read the newspaper and...uh. THAT'S ALL. It was horrendous. I hated it.

Today, my ankle feels a bit better, although it is still throbbing snarkily at me. I have washed a load of clothes and am slowly emptying the dishwasher and dealing with my sordid refrigerator. Later, I will weed my garden spot and think about actually planting something in it.

And then I'm going to go burn those damn shoes and stare moodily into the fire, thinking about how not all sacrifices for our children turn out well.

Lesson learned, people. Lesson learned.

Parenting by the Skin of My Teeth

2011-06-17T12:52:00.001-04:00

On Wednesday, River asked Will and I if people had bumps in their ears.

"Do what, honey?" I asked.

"Bumps. Do people have bumps in veir ears?"

Thinking about Will's weird earlobes and the bumpiness of ears in general, we affirmed that people do, in fact, have bumps in their ears. And then our family went tra-la-laing down the road. (This would come back to haunt us. Or me, specifically.)

Later in the day, I thought I was getting a migraine. If you have migraines, you know that any change in vision, weird pain in your head, or general "off" feeling can trigger a flight or fight response in which you take massive amounts of caffeine and ibuprofen and cry softly while lying on the couch waiting for the doom to descend upon you. Will took care of the kids: fed and bathed Jeffrey and dealt with a damp and tired River when she came back from Vacation Bible School. I lay on the couch, watching So You Think You Can Dance and closing different eyes at intervals to check for any auras.

After River was in bed, I wandered into the kitchen to refill my tea mug and flipped on the patio light. I was doing so because I had noticed a suspect spider web hanging over the patio door and wanted to check it out and OH. MY. FILING CABINET. Y'ALL. There, cold chilling in her web, was a huMONGous brown widow.

Mother humper.

After scooping myself off of the kitchen floor upon which I had fallen and swallowed my own tongue, I went in search of Will to deal with the dang thing because A: she was hanging over an exit through which I was not exiting, which meant that B: I'd have to go through the gate, which is attached to the fence, which was ALSO sporting some suspect webs. I totally am fine with playing the damsel in distress when it comes to brown widows at night hanging over my patio door, y'all. Mkay? Mkay.

Will armed himself with the can of spider spray and manfully applied it to the door and surrounding areas, while I chattered and gesticulated and gagged and screamed on the other side of the glass. I tell you, being married to me is one giant party.

After the spiders were dealt with, Will came inside and I told him that since no migraine was forthcoming, he ought to head over to Coach's house and play some video games. I'd be fine and if I needed him I'd call. I'm an awesome wife, right? RIGHT.

Okay, so he left and I looked out the window and shuddered a little more and then several things happened.

It started thundering. Which was AWESOME, because we haven't had any good rain since February, really, and if the thunder meant rain, bring it fricking ON.
Jeffrey woke up and started zizzing around the room, alternating between making this gasping/laughing/tryingtokillmewithnoise sound and bellowing that he was starving.
It started raining. I yelled, "Woohoo! Rain!" Which of course meant that Jeffrey ratcheted up his noise a few notches and River boinged out of bed and they started racing around the library like cracked-out hyenas.
It started HAILING, at which point in time, I said, "Oh. Uh. Well. This is interesting." And Jeffrey wigged the frick out AND started demanding food again.
I took a deep breath, sent River back to bed, looked out the window, sent Jeffrey back to bed with a cup of crackers, looked at the radar, noted no warnings of any kind, and collapsed onto the couch in a daze.
River came into the library. The bump that was going to haunt me proceeded to do just that.

Her eyes the size of baseballs, her voice quavering, my poor little princess said, "Mommy, ve bump moved." And she burst into tears.

Gathering her onto my lap, I tried to make sense of what she was telling me: something about the bump hurting and her trying to touch it and then it moved.

I suddenly put two and two together and realized that Will and I were TOTALLY in the running for Parents of the Year because the "bump" was actually--wait for it--a tick that had nestled in my sweetling's ear for an entire day, depriving her of blood while Will and I blithely told her that, "Suuurrreee, everybody has bumps in their ears."

"Baby, I think you have a tick in your ear," I said, and she wrenched herself out of my lap, slapping her hands over her mouth, backing away and shaking her head. It was like she was possessed by Marlena from Days of Our Lives.

"Let me see, sweetie," I said, reaching for her, and...y'all. She went nuts.

She fell to the floor, screaming and writhing and shrieking about not HURTING her and not TOUCHING her and then Jeffrey of course got up and started bouncing off the library walls, scattering crumbs thither and yon while the dog, who thought this was all great fun, barked and tried to insinuate himself into the fray.

Hay seuss.

I finally convinced her to let me look at her ear at which time I confirmed that she was a parasite host. Shudder. She lost her mind some more, and so did Jeffrey, until I told him to MAN UP and hold his sister's hand while I applied some hand sanitizing gel to the inside of her ear.

Hand sanitizer? Look, people, I was freaking out. Back in my day, parents would apply hot needles, matches, nail polish, oil...they did everything but chant and burn sage to get ticks out. One remedy was alcohol, but I couldn't find ours, so the alcohol-containing hand sanitizer was the way to go. I managed to get some squirts in and then I left her on the library floor so I could go haul Jeffrey back to his dang bed. On the way, I picked up some tweezers.

When River saw the tweezers when I got back to the library, she flipped even more out and ran away from me, which was all it took to send me into that Mama Rage place because with the spiders and shrieking and hail and Jeffrey insanity, I just couldn't take it any more. I chased her down into her room, flipped her onto her back, and pretty much sat on her in order to get her head immobilized so that I could get the tweezers into the delicate little curve of her tiny itty ear and wrench out the tick. Every twist of her preternaturally strong body (honestly, she's a miniature person with the strength of Hercules) made me angrier and angrier until finally she managed to gasp out, "I'm AFRAID."

Damn, y'all. Parenting is so HARD. It always seems as if I'm accomplishing it by the skin of my teeth, barely making it through as I yell at my autistic son or swat my temperamental daughter or break somebody's toy or feed them ice cream for breakfast. I know it's supposed to be hard (I'm making PEOPLE here), but sometimes it just seems an impossibility for me to get them to adulthood without scarring them for life.

I did not get off of my daughter, because I knew she'd just eel away from me and then I'd have another wrestling match, but I did take my hands off her head and I leaned down.

"Baby, look at me," I said.

She did, wild-eyed and panting.

"I'm not going to hurt you. I promise. I need you to be still so I don't hurt you and so I can get off this tick. I know you're afraid and you can tell me that all you want, but I am going to have to hold you down so I can get rid of the tick because when you're afraid you wiggle to much."

"But I can't breave. I'm going to die now, I just know it."

Bless her heart. This child is me made over. "No, baby. You aren't. We're just going to get to get out this yucky tick now, okay?"

And so we did, while she wailed out her fear and I cried with her as the tick refused to let go until he took out some of her skin with him. Then, sweat-covered, we snuggled a bit before depositing the tick in the toilet and having a rousing chorus of "Flushing Away the Nasty Tick" and doing the Tick Removal Dance of Supremacy.

I put her in bed again, sang her a song, rubbed Jeffrey's head, and crawled back into the kitchen to look outside, at which time I saw this:

And for the first time, I actually felt a little sorry for one of these creatures, what with the absent father and the crazy kids and stuff.

Then I did this:

And I stopped feeling sorry for her.

I mean, I'm parenting by the skin of my teeth here, people. I need all the dead creepy crawlies I can get.

Putting the Weiner into Perspective

2011-06-09T11:00:00.000-04:00

Let me give y'all a quick rundown on the awfulness going on around our world lately:

The South is still trying to recover from devastating tornadoes in April and May.
So is Missouri.
So is Massachusetts.
Gigantic wildfires, some the size of large cities, are ravaging Arizona and Texas.
Poverty and hunger are on the rise. Jobs aren't.
Farmers in Georgia are in the unenviable position of praying both for rain so their crops can grow and enough workers to pick the crops, should they grow.
The debt ceiling fight is still hinging on Medicare.
Wisconsin Republicans are going to offer fake Democrats to run in the run-off election, and they aren't even TRYING to be sneaky about it.
The Gulf? Still choked with oil. (New spill near Louisiana! Spiffy.)
Japan? Still dealing with a nuclear crisis and thousands (if not millions) of displaced folks and lives.
Yemen? Syria? Egypt? Struggling for democracy and peace.
Europe? Struggling against a vicious strain of E. coli.
Polar bears? Still wondering when folks are going to wake the frick up.

Sorry, my fuzzy friends. Looks like you are SOL when it comes to that, because here in America (you know, the country that DIDN'T sign the Kyoto Treaty), we're busy speculating about the size of a Congressman's penis. (And, although with less intensity, his pectorals.)

Have I mentioned I'm considering moving out to the woods with just my husband and my kids and the dog and me? Because OH MY FILING CABINET, shut up talking about his penis, everybody on the goldanged planet.

Hi, Republicans and conservatives, who are calling with grave voices and furrowed brows for the representative's resignation. I know that you are practically swallowing your tongues with glee because not only did one of the "bad guys" do something sexually sordid, but this particular bad guy was going after the wife of one of your guys who did something sexually sordid (AnthonyWeiner has been like a rabid terrier on the heels of Clarence Thomas and his Tea Party queen wife, Ginni.) You aren't fooling anybody and I wish that y'all would hush.

Hi, progressives and liberals who are practically falling all over yourselves to say how hypocritical it is for any conservative person to deride Weiner (MEINE GOTT, I HATE HIS NAME), when Republicans who criticize Teh Gays are soliciting gay sex or who hold up the word of God are cheating on their wives, or...well, pretty much anything Rush Limbaugh says or does is fair game here, right? Y'all, I know. It sucks when one of our guys does something slimy, but the truth is, the dude sent out nekkid pictures of himself to multiple women while he was married and that, my friends, is just nasty. So how 'bout, instead of defending him, or trying to scare up proof that Boehner is boning that lobbyist, you just hush. (And stop posting pictures of the man's penis on Facebook, because it creeps me out. People. Seriously.)

And, can I just say, media folks who are bound and damn determined for our politics to be Snookified--HUSH. Seriously, unless you are going to tell me that Anthony Weiner sent those pictures of his penis while he was giving a speech about the importance of impartiality in the Supreme Court in relation to health care reform ON THE CAPITOL GROUNDS, I don't want to hear any more about it. Yes, he's a slimy, potentially sick individual who should probably resign. Is there REALLY anything more to say about it that could make it any worse? (Barring the whole Capitol grounds thing...) No? Then shut up.

I swear, y'all, sometimes I think about what a beautiful, amazing country we have, with every geomass and climate represented. I think about the promise that democracy holds and how lucky we are to have been guided in our early days by such intelligent, insightful men. But can you fricking imagine what would have happened if Facebook and Twitter and the interwebs and damn Fox News had been around back then?

Think about it: Washington might have been a brilliant militarist, but the man had awful false teeth and a fear of public speaking. James Madison was a tiny, itty-bitty little man--if we're worried about Boehner's tan, you think we would have let Jimmy's lack of height gone un-Tweeted? John Adams told the folks in Tripoli that our country wasn't a Christian nation. Franklin liked to run around nekkid and was rumored to have a venereal disease. Thomas Jefferson not only had Teh Sex with one of his slaves, he fathered a child with her, AND took all the magic bits out of the Bible. Alexander Hamilton was a little trigger happy (in addition to enjoying Teh Sex with people who weren't his wife, a fact which Monroe used for the political gain of his buddy, Jefferson.) Holy mackerel, people, we never would have gotten off the damn ground.

You know, I think that if we are a nation of fat, unhappy, worried, debt-laden, argumentative, TV and interweb addicts who are more concerned about a Congressman's penis than the fact that our neighbors don't have jobs or that our food supply is at risk or that our democracy is being pissed on, well...frankly...we don't deserve the largess we have been given. We deserve to be surprised when some other country realizes that we are a nation in crisis and tries to make a land grab. We deserve to have everything our ancestors worked for corrode around us while we frantically program our DVRs not to miss which dude the Bachelorette picked.

I mean, I'm not trying to bring you down, my friends, but, let's put this into perspective:

Weiner's penis versus giant tornadoes.

Weiner's penis versus children sleeping in cars.

Weiner's penis versus massive flooding of the Mississippi River.

Weiner's penis versus hackers breaching bank and technological firms' security.

Weiner's penis versus the summer "surge" planned in Afghanistan.

It looks...well, you know, a little...er...small in comparison, doesn't it?

(No offense, Mr. Weiner. Now put that thing away. Please.)

Tomes on Tuesday: Green Boy by Susan Cooper and Assorted Rantings About Books To Movies

2011-06-07T16:49:00.002-04:00

Okay, I love Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series. Love. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but reading The Dark is Rising (the book, not the series) during a Newbury Award book-reading contest cemented in my head the idea that fantasy had to be smart and grounded in mythology to be good. (I'm not saying this is a Truth, I'm saying that it's MY Truth.) I'm not really down with sword and sorcery unless it's smart sword and sorcery and if you're going to tempt me with fantasy, it needs to have a thick line of well-researched myth for me to be happy with it.

I just started reading Over Sea, Under Stone (the first book in the series) to Jeffrey, and while I love it, it's a bit slow-going. It makes me wonder if I've read too much "Hi, I'm Harry Potter and oooh, look, my hair grows at an enormous rate"-type children's fantasy lately. Or it could be that this story lacks a great deal of the overt magic in the series. Anyway, I'm reading it to the Bug and we're slogging through, because good things happen in this series.

(Pardon me while I make a giant, ungraceful leap over to a newish topic.)

Good things also happen in The Green Boy, by Ms. Cooper, although the story-telling is occasionally heavy-handed and, to be honest, I thought waaaay too much about some plot points that weren't maybe that important. (Please note, this is NOT a new book, but is instead one that I found on the shelf that I hadn't read yet and I thought, Yay! New Cooper!)

In a departure from her usual settings, the story takes place on a fictional Bahamian island, and centers around two Bahamian boys, Trey and Lou. Lou can't speak, but is really in tune with Nature. It's all a bit complicated, but developers are seeking to turn the island into a resort and Trey and Lou are horrified, as is their grandfather. (Mom works in another city and dad is splitsville, although he does show up in an unpleasant way.) The boys discover that their island is actually a portal to another world (or maybe Lou is...) and travel to this world, which has been stripped of wildlife except for some unpleasant areas where the genetic mutations bred by scientists live. Okay. Now, up until this point, the story reminded me heavily of A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle, which is not all bad. I'm down with that. Oooh, look, I thought. A new dystopia. But...no.

Instead, the book took a sharp mythological turn that made Lou synonymous in some way with Lugh, the Indo-European light-bringer. Oh, dear. This might sound small-minded of me, but it was jarring for me to have two native Bahamians become agents of an Indo-European myth, particularly when a disgorging Green Man made an appearance late in the book. (Hang on, I'm about to get nerdly.) The majority of folks (including Trey and Lou) in the Bahamas are the descendents of African slaves, and while I am not knowledgeable enough in African myth to be certain, I assume that there exists in the canon some kind of resurrection or light-bringing or nature-tending that could be utilized here.

Because, ultimately, that is what this book is about: the importance of man's connection to and reverence of Nature. The message is occasionally heavy-handed, but it IS a children's book, where sometimes subtlety can be lost. (This is also probably the reason why the Lugh thing tripped me up--it's actually a decent way to get kids interested in Irish and Celtic mythology, but maybe if you KNOW that stuff already, it feels all wrong.)

I would certainly recommend this as an easy, interesting read for children up to high school age, but if you're an adult fan of Cooper, you might want to skip it (or at least go into it with the knowledge that this is NOT The Dark is Rising.)

In a not very related topic, well...sort of. Sigh. Have I mentioned it's hot? Anyway, the other evening a friend and I were discussing the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games. I have been, for the most part, appalled at the casting (Lenny Kravitz as Cinna. Lenny KRAVITZ as Cinna? Lenny. Kravitz. As. Cinna. I love me some Lenny and I would most definitely go his way should he strut past, BUT CINNA? No.) and am concerned about how in the world Hollywood will take a book that is an intensely personal story of a heroine's inner struggle and turn it into a movie that is in any way in keeping with the book.

Hollywood, by and large, sucks when it comes to adapting my favorite books, particularly the children's books. I don't even want to get into what was done to The Grinch Who Stole Christmas or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (both versions, frankly, although at least the Gene Wilder version didn't feature a fricking dentist daddy issue storyline.) When Hollywood announced it was going to do The Dark is Rising, I wavered between happiness and sheer horror, and it turns out the latter was the correct emotion, because Walden Studios totally removed any bit of subtlety or Arthurian legend or Celtic myth or dark magic and instead turned the movie into a giant wad of crap, filled with explosions and young love and Americanisms that made me want to barf. Susan Cooper requested the script be changed because it was so blech, but apparently, that was a no go. If you go read that link, be sure to read where the writer knew the book had to be changed to adapt to film, because it was "... it was written in this quite lyrical, poetic, kaleidoscopic fashion." Yes, children just HATE that kind of thing. (Bangs head on desk.)

My fear for the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games is that the makers will see it as "ooh, look, there's explosions and death and kissing and mutants! With explosions!" when it's reality is a little more like "teenagers are capable of great emotional depth and the world is a fragile place, so cling to the things that keep you safe while embracing a different way of looking at your environment. Also, dystopias suck."

There is a difference there that is so, you know, subtle (CUE IRONIC SNORT) that I'm not sure if Hollywood understands. And if it doesn't don't...well, I'm not sure Lenny's hotness can save the movie, y'all.

I mean, even hotness of that magnitude has its limits.

I Got Them Mama Needs Five Minutes Without a Kid's Voice LAWSY It's the Summertime Blues

2011-06-06T15:13:00.002-04:00

So...summer vacation. I have DREAMT about this time for months now, pretty much since after the CRCT, the standardized test by which some teachers apparently measure the school year, since once that puppy was over, so was Jeffrey's school year. I couldn't wait for the long drives to end, for sleeping later to start, for the rabid otter nuttiness of the mornings to wind down! And playing outside! And biking to the park! And swimming! Wooohoooo!

Ahem.

The long drives have ended! Yay!
The sleeping late has started...but...um. Yeah, that means that at eleven in the P.M., when Will and I are either passing out on the couch or looking at each other and waggling our eyebrows, Jeffrey is yelling and sprinting down the hallway because he can't sleep because he's hungry or he heard a weird noise or he saw a floating head in his room. (I know, right? I totally shouldn't have watched that My Ghost Stories show, because unlike that eejit with the punk hair who runs around in old mental hospitals getting spooked by moths flying past him, these people are taking pictures of invisible women with glowing eyes reflected in mirrors. Hello? NO, THANK YOU.) Anyway, sleeping late means that Jeffrey also GOES to sleep late, which might be due to the fact that...
OMFC, y'all, it is so. dang. hot. Like, we skipped June and jumped right into late July, which is when somebody opens the Hellmouth in Dingleberry and vents the underworld a little. It is preposterously hot, to the point where going out to water what I facetiously call a garden this year at eight o'clock in the morning means that I break a sweat. (We haven't had any serious rain since...hang on...of COURSE I couldn't find it. I mean, that would be too easy. I estimate that we haven't had any good, extended rain since February. A few showers here and there, but we haven't gotten a single thunderstorm, even. You KNOW it's bad when I'm like, "Bring on the awful weather!!" Sigh.) I not only want to avoid going outside myself, I feel like a bad mom when I send my kids out. Which means that they are stuck inside playing video games or reading or doing crafts and making messes which I have to clean up, which breaks my face. Unfortunately, swimming is out ,because
My swimsuit pretty much looked at me when I tried to put it on a week ago and said, "Honey, please." Because it is four years old and threadbare and sagging and incapable of doing anything but sitting around looking like I pasted a plastic bag over myself. My mother-in-law is buying me a fancy one for my birthday. Woohoo! (Sad when you get excited over fancy bathing suits...or maybe it's good...yes. I'm totally claiming that it's good to get excited about fancy bathing suits, because it means that you are frugal in the meantime and wearing NOT fancy bathing suits, which--let's be honest--are just not as pretty as fancy bathing suits.)
Do I even have to tell you that the idea of biking to the park (omalawsy, and then biking BACK???) makes me fall down and try to strangle myself with all of Frodo's hair on the carpet? (Beagles shed like it's their jobs. Gah.)

Yeah, so all of these total up to me hanging out with the kids all day every day and getting a wee bit sick of it. And sick of them. And, you know, sick of myself because I'm sick of them. And myself. SICKNESS ABOUNDS.

What I reaaaaalllly need is a day when I get alone-time, or a time of day when I feel unguilty for being on the computer (which isn't right now, because River is het UP about having to nap and my kitchen is deplorable) and writing blogs or playing a game. This is the lament of all WAHM or SAHM's every summer time, so nothing I'm saying here is new at all. I'm just adding my voice to the millions of other mommy voices which are crying, "Calgon take me away!"

Ugh, except please not Calgon, because that would mean taking a bath and the thought of taking a bath actually makes me gag a little.

What about, "Apple Cider, take me away?"

No, then you'd think I'm a lush. And honestly, it's one thing to lock yourself in the bathroom with some bubbles while your kids plaster themselves to the Wii. Getting plastered yourself and pointing out that you have a crush on Lego Harry Potter is another.

Not that I DO have a crush on Lego Harry Potter.

The REAL Harry Potter, maybe.

What?

You know he's precious, what with his milk-white skin and red lips.

Like Snow White, only a dude.

And with a nasty scar.

And no singing animals.

You know, I think I'm going to end this while I'm ahead and go soak my head in the sink.

Y'all stay cool.

Friday Blogomore Stew of Stewy Goodness

2011-06-03T10:37:00.004-04:00

Sometimes, I just title my posts random things. Like, this post could EASILY have been titled, "Smagafrastic Smoodledeedoodle of Wampus Glimbitches."

No. Not really.

I don't hang with any glimbitches, wampus or not.

Anywho, can I be honest with y'all?

People wear me out. They just slap EXHAUST me and this week, people have been so exhausting that it is all I can do not to drag my sagging grey carcass out to the woods, prop myself up on the nearest tree, and wait for feral cats to eat me. Or alternately, bring me dead fieldmice to eat. Oooh, and then make me their queen. And I'd sew myself a little suit of fieldmouse skins and learn how to leap nimbly from tree to tree and pee accurately in the woods. And we'd have an EMPIRE and

What?

Right. People wearing me out. No, really, what I want to do is turn off every bit of electronic and/or electric equipment I have and go build a homestead in the woods with just my man and my dogs and my kids and me and we'd have gardens and beehives and, like, checkerboards and when the tax man came we'd pay him, but then we'd say, "Now leave us alone because we're trying to pretend that none of y'all crazy asshats exist."

Do you get arrested for calling the tax man a crazy asshat? Should I say tax person so as to avoid being sexist? Omagodsabove, do I now have to worry about being called a SEXIST on top of everything? WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT FROM ME?

Let me give you a quick rundown of the last ten days or so:

I "liked" (Facebook is honestly the lamest thing ever. I will never make fun of people who snort drugs up their noses, because my drug is a fricking red square that tells me I've gotten a response. FRIEND ME, DANG IT! I NEED A FIX!!!!) a politician from North Carolina who acted in a preposterously rude fashion to Dr. Elizabeth Warren in order to tell him I thought he was preposterously rude. Several (thousand) others joined me and at first it was all sweetness and light and THEN it became a sort of ugly contest to determine who could be the most obnoxious in putting down this very obnoxious man. I politely shot down a few dozen of these folks, because I believe that calling a public official a "douche nozzle" does nothing to further political conversation, nor does it particularly make my side look, you know, not like teenage boys. (No offense to teenage boys, bless your sweet little hearts.) However, when my fellow reproachers started using the politician's rumored closeted homosexuality as a tool against him, I threw up in my mouth a little, because as a person who supports Teh Gays and knows how very hard it is to be Teh Gay in the South and who, frankly, does not see how somebody's decision to say he or she is straight even if he IS gay has anything to do with being rude to Dr. Warren, reading somebody say, "Why don't you go hump your gay lover, you jackass?" makes me WANT to throw up in my mouth a little bit. Way to go, progressives. You really brought your A-game with that one. Bleagh.

The next day, one of my Paganistas mentioned she was excited to be included in a contest for top faith bloggers. And you would have thought that she had spraypainted "666" on her forehead, jumped on the back of a leviathan, and gone riding down Broadway naked, killing babies with well-aimed streams of her acid-laced saliva. Because a Christian blogger who was also in the running lost her dang mind and went on a tidily nasty little spree, deriding my Paganista and ANOTHER Paganista (who has since also become MY Paganista, too), expressing shock that my Paganista went so far as to post pictures of herself holding her newborn child (because pagans aren't supposed to care for their children, apparently) and making some snide comments about witches with perfect teeth and blond hair (interestingly enough, the Christian blogger also had perfect teeth and blond hair. I'm just saying...) and implying that if one practiced paganism, one should not be included in a group of faith blogs.

Now, look. My spirituality is all over the board and I am in the middle of a veritable BOG of soul searching, but one thing I do know is that I am so damn TIRED of Christians acting like the only faith worth mentioning is Christianity (or Judaism, in a pinch, but only because Jesus was a Jew and we need to be nice to the Israelis because the Temple needs to be rebuilt or something involving covenants and possibly a whale swallowing a dude...I get confused...) and that any people who are NOT Christians are either A: operatives of Satan or B: attacking Christianity by expressing a different belief. The last few days have been an eye-opening experience for me, especially in that I went back and read the Gospels again and, seriously, do Christians even READ the Sermon on the Mount anymore? Or, you know, any of Matthew? Or Luke? Because, hey, y'all, those stones you are throwing HURT. Also, when you want to pray in school, I am all for it and I will totes go to the mat for you and argue your case up in front of the Supreme Court if need be (although you'd probably be better off with a lawyer), but I'm not sure that your god would do that, since he said that praying in public was kind of obnoxious and you'd be better off going into your room and doing it in private. I'm just saying. I'm just saying, you know, go read your holy book. Because even PAUL, who argued that you shouldn't braid your hair or wear gold jewelry (one assumes the neon nylon WWJD bracelets are okay) and who mentioned some crazy stuff about marriage and celibacy, EVEN PAUL, while he was decrying witchcraft, also decried strife and discord. Even Paul, who I sincerely wish had bumped his head and gotten amnesia instead of religion when he fell off his donkey, knew that spreading unhappiness and frustration amongst various groups of people was not cool. PAUL, people. GAH.

And now, NOW, ohmygoodness, there are Christian bloggers--Christian MOMMY bloggers--who are declaring this some kind of holy war. No, really. They are calling it "spiritual warfare." Now, I'm not trying to be glib, here, but given that Israel IS, you know, actually at war with guns and mess, and people are starving in this country and around the world and there are tornadoes and drought and all matter of unhappiness and turmoil going on right now, I am not sure that the Master of the Universe (sorry, did anybody else have a flash of Jesus in a furry bikini with a sword?) is worried about what blog wins a damn contest. I mean, I know his eye is on the sparrow and all that, but REALLY? Honey, please. The Crusades were spiritual warfare. Hell, even the Snopes trial was spiritual warfare. This is a popularity contest.

Let me be honest: good has come from this. First of all, several Christian bloggers have come forward and called their sisters out and exhorted others to show the love Christ showed everybody, and I think that is SPIFFY. *Edited to add: Unfortunately, some have have been treated badly because of it. Miss Julie is one of them, and I have to say that I'm not sure I've ever been witness to a woman so loving and humble and strong in her faith. For serious.* Second, I have been reading the Gospels and, seriously, Jesus was so cool. I mean, even if he was simply a crazy man wandering around the Middle East proclaiming himself the son of God, he didn't hole up in a compound with a bunch of guns. Instead, he went around preaching love and faithfulness and basic decency and if we had more people saying EXACTLY what he said today, the world would be a wonderful place in which to live. Third, I am so proud of the community of faith I belong to. For many, paganism conjures (snort....giggle...ahem) up images of evil and darkness and weird people in cloaks and black eyeliner. For me, it means a belief system that flows with the earth and the cosmos, that celebrates individuality and reciprocation and the understanding that one's spirituality is an intensely personal thing, even as it is somehow part of the collective. That and fairies. I mean, come ON. Who can't get behind a faith with fairies? Anyway, the pagan community rallied around the ladies who were attacked and most pagans tried to be respectful in their responses to the women who continued to voice extreme displeasure about sharing a contest with anybody other than Christians. (Some pagans, I'll be honest, were asshats. We can't all be Lady Godiva, my friends.) (Was Lady Godiva a pagan?) (Okay, no she wasn't. She did, however, ride a horse nekkid.) (Which has nothing to do with paganism. Or Christianity, frankly.) (I'm not sure where I'm going with this.)

But then, y'all, my Paganista got death threats. Really? Is THAT what Jesus would do? Let me tell you something about the woman receiving the death threats. Kris heard that my little girl was feeling sad because she didn't ever get any mail. So you know what my friend did? She mailed River a card. Now, how awesome is that? That is SO awesome. You know who else sent my girlie a card? My Christian cousin. The cards arrived on the same day. And I remember thinking how cool it was that River got two cards from such disparate yet equally lovely folks and how beautifully the Universe was teaching us a lesson about how kindness and human decency HAS no spiritual boundary. But the Universe is teaching me another lesson about kindness and human decency this week that is not nearly so beautiful. If you'd like to support my friend, go here: she's one of the good guys. (Honestly, all of the Pagans in the contest are. And most of the Christians are actually fine, too. The one who started this mess? ~~Claimed she dropped out--and then we found out she was actually disqualified because she violated contest rules. Which makes her a liar and a coward. Which, you know, Jesus totally wasn't.~~ Has actually used a fellow Christian's blog to apologize to my Paganistas. Don't know if she did it in person to my Paganistas, but good for her for taking the time to apologize for starting this mess and restating her beliefs in a less incendiary fashion.)

And THEN a couple of days ago, one of my friemily members passed off one of those "this is what conservatives are and this is what liberals are and we love America more because we like guns and the Bible" things that are so popular on Facebook as a joke. But, you know, I just wasn't up to laughing at it. I just wasn't. I was so dang tired of arguing and defending and being polite and struggling for spiritual guidance and reading the Bible and the Constitution and Robert's Rules of Order and getting angrier and angrier and more and more exhausted until when I got to the part about how the conservatives would keep the name "America" and the flag when we divided the country and the liberals could keep Islam and the hippies...I mean...y'all.

Could people just PLEASE for the love of all that is star-spangled and/or holy read the damn documents they claim to build their lives on? And then maybe THINK about what the words say before taking action? Or, you know, you could pray about it. I'm easy like Sunday morning when it comes to this. I don't care what you do as long as you stop wandering around like a certain Sicilian in one of the best movies ever because seriously, I DON'T THINK IT MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS.

Look, it's not like "my" side is frothing over with wholesome goodness all the time. Pagans can be real asshats, too. So can liberals. So can women. So can farmers. So can writers. So can Southerners. So can feral cats. Asshattery abounds on this planet. But, you know, when you come up against roughly nine million attacks on the various parts of yourself over a span of ten days, it is enough to make you want to lie down under a blanket of fieldmouse skins in a ditch and wait for the tax man's truck to drive over you.

Well, no, it's not. But did you SEE how I tied that all together?

I'm a professional writer, yo. Check out my mad skilz.

Oh, do NOT get me started on how "z" has somehow become the hip new way to pluralize stuff.

Then I really WILL get angry.

Random Things That Annoy the Pee-Turkey Out of Me

2011-05-20T21:27:00.001-04:00

When I was in high school, my geometry teacher was the former head football coach and I thought he was one of the most frustrating people I knew. In retrospect, he was a nice guy, but because he liked football and the Lord and various other things I found ridiculous, he drove me right up the wall. Honestly, if it hadn't been for the lunatic who sat behind me in class who would variously sing The Cure songs or pretend to vomit (it was endearing...somehow), I might have gone clinically insane. As it was, I spent a lot of time making poor Coach mad, at which point he would squint his eyes, jut his lower jaw out, and say something disciplinary which would almost always involve the word "pee-turkey." Coach wouldn't curse, you see; he would instead say "pee-turkey." Like, "I don't give a pee-turkey about the fight you had with your boyfriend, Miss YoungNotHannah. You need to dissect this parabola." (Or something. Can you dissect a parabola? Is that geometry?) Sometimes, he would throw in a "pee-dooky" if he was really mad. It was fabulous.

But this blog post isn't about Coach or high school. I was just trying to give you a little history, a little literary base from which to launch yourself into the post below.

Not buying it? Me, neither.

Here's ma list of random things that annoy the pee-turkey out of me:

Having to say "pee-turkey." I curse. I curse with glee and abandon and prefer to feel not the slightest bit guilty that the f-word is one of my favorite all-purpose adjectives, nouns, and verbs. (Pretend that sentence made sense.) However, the other morning, I told River she couldn't have any lemonade yet and she said, "Aw, man. That sucks." In exactly my tone of voice. With my accent. And dramatic rolling of eyes. Whoopsiedoodle. So now I'm trying to use words like "shucks" and "feediddle" and "ay caramba" instead of the words I really want to use. I do not want to say, "What the pee-turkey are you doing?" But I'm going to, so that River isn't kicked out of pre-K. Fiddlesticks.
When people say the word "weary" when they mean "wary" or "leery." Y'all, I saw it on the Entertainment Weekly site today and I almost bit off my own face. If you are "weary" of the big dog at the end of your street, you are tired of him snapping at you every time you jog past. If you are "wary" or "leery" of the big dog at the end of your street, you are afraid he will snap at you when you jog past. Please, for pee-turkey's sake, figure this mess out because I need my face to try to reform my child's vocabulary.
Also, your boss is not "prejudice" unless he is a negative opinion based on a specific characteristic of an object or person. Your baby is not "jaundice" unless she is a problem with the blood related to an elevated bilirubin count. Your boss MIGHT be prejudiced and your baby MIGHT be jaundiced, but for the love of all that is good and holy, BUY A FRICKIN' D, people. Gah.
Any and all end-time prophesies and/or commentary related to them. Thanks to the radio dude who screwed the pooch prophetically back in 1994, there are a whole bunch of people either A: selling everything they own to buy RVs, billboards, and websites proclaiming the end of the world or B: making studiously snarky remarks about looting after the Rapture or C: being Tim LaHaye and saying, "Hey, ain't nobody supposed to talk about end times but me, bitches." And NOW, the Pagans want to get in on the End of the World Panic, by circulating what appears to be a sketchily-documented Hopi prophesy involving a blue star. (Go ahead and google it. You'll find three different versions of it in five seconds, involving everything from a preacher and an old Hopi dude in a car in the 1950s to aliens to the Hale-Bopp comet to the Mayan 2012 thingamabob. Lawsy.) Y'all. I'm not trying to hurt anybody's feelings, but this whole "we'll have to go through something EVEN WORSE than what's happening now and then we'll either be in a perfect place, a hellish place, or a more enlightened place" thing is wearing me down. How about we just do our best to stop making a hell on Earth right now and not worry about how awful it WILL be tomorrow or Thursday or December whatever 2012? Mkay? Thanks.
People who keep bragging about how school is over. School is NOT over, my friends. It is draaaggggiiinnnng on here at a glacial pace, hauling us along behind it helplessly. Three days might not sound like a lot, but for me, it feels like three centuries. (Guess whose kid has done pretty much not a thing for the last month, since testing was over? Go ahead. Did you guess me? You must be, like, psychic.)
Lack of rain. Pretty much all of my interweb friends are all like, "It's rained for days. When will the rain stop? The RAAAIIIINNNNN...." Meanwhile, I'm wondering if I should start collecting my shower water in buckets because it's so fricking dry here. Last weekend, I watched the radar as a line of storms approached our county and then, upon reaching the Dingleberry city limits, split in two, only to reemerge as a line after passing over Dingleberry. NOT COOL, line of storms. I broke down and watered the other day. Oh, how I watered: I accidentally left the sprinkler on for about two hours when I went to the store. My garden was happy. And by "garden" I mean barren wasteland of weeds and herbs that are living despite me. I rock.
The phrase "RINO." This is a cute little acronym conservatives use to derisively call out Republicans who they feel are not Republican-y enough. (Republican In Name Only. Brilliant.) Arnold Schwarzenegger is the latest recipient of the RINO moniker, seemingly because he had the illicit sex with somebody other than his wife. Frankly, if this is the big criteria, I'm gonna have to give the big X to the term, because Newt, Ensign, Thurmond, Sanford, and that dude who solicited a police officer in the potty are all big free market, small government, less taxation folks who just also happen to be giant adulterous whores. (This is only a small list. Please feel free to ask me if you need more examples.) Now, I suppose that Ahnuld could be a RINO because he advocated that more people be given more rights under California law, thumbing his nose at federal law--wait. THAT can't be right, can it? Maybe he was a RINO because the people being given more rights are Teh Gays, and we all know that Republicans are not supposed to think being Teh Gay means you deserve equal protection under law. I mean, it says so on the card, right? Hint: No. No, it doesn't. I think that what folks mean when they say "RINO" is actually Republican Who Refused to Jump in the Very Lucrative Christian and/or Traditional Energy Industry Pocket And Thus, Are Running Counterwise to Current Republican Thinking . I recognize that RWRJVLCa/oTEIPTRCCRT does not have the same ring to it as RINO. And please don't think I'm defending Ahnuld, because I am fairly done with politicians being whores. BUT Schwarzenegger's governorship doesn't look a whole lot different than that Brown fool from Wisconsin that conservatives are fainting in ecstasy over. (Schwarzenegger tried to cut state services to the poor, lower state worker pay and consolidate state departments, privatize prisons, block union influence, and vetoed an "easy way to citizenship" bill several times.) My point is, does being a Republican now mean that you have to deny Teh Gays equal protection under law and give oil companies huge tax breaks? Because then, and only then, will I agree that Ahnuld is a RINO. (I will, however, still think that the term is dumb. Sorry.) Honestly, I think that lots of folks who call themselves Republicans need to start calling themselves BOWELs (Bible Owners Wanting to Engender Legislation.) Ahahahhaahhaa! Sorry. I couldn't help it. You know I love you BOWELs, right?
Me. I'm getting on my own dang nerves now. Great.

Tune in tomorrow when I'll try to make a list of Random Things That Don't Annoy the Pee-Turkey Out of Me.

Television on Tuesday: Once Upon a Time

2011-05-17T23:26:00.002-04:00

I know, I know, this is supposed to be "Tomes On Tuesday," and I am happy to say that I discovered a new Susan Cooper that I'd somehow overlooked on my bookshelf, so I was all set to review that, BUT then I got an email inviting me to look at a clip that previews this show and share my thoughts about it. And I decided that since, as a former PROFESSIONAL TV WATCHER, I am just as qualified to review TV shows as I am to review books, I would go check out the clip.

Oh. My. Filing Cabinet. Y'all.

Although I am not a big fan of wishing my life away, I have to say that I can't WAIT for Fall and this show. I'm so tickled about it, I'm wrote a list about it. Wanna read it? Here it go:

It's from the writers of Lost. Do I need to tell you how bereft I have been without the weird, awful, awesome, magical, twistiness of Lost? I didn't think so. I loved that show, my friends, and while I occasionally screamed at the television ("TURN AWAY FROM THE DARK, SAYID!!") while watching it, it was never because the writing sucked. In fact, it's possible that I screamed at the television BECAUSE the writing didn't suck. I only moan or throw things at the television when the writing sucks. Screaming is reserved for nonsuckage. See here: http://www.imnothannah.com/2006/04/give-me-little-push.html
Helllooooo...it's based around a fairy tale. My love for fairy tales is one of the reasons I love Robin McKinley so much (also, good writing...do you sense a pattern, here?) Dark and Grimm-y or Disneyfied with talking animals, I don't really care. Granted, I prefer some darkness to my fairy tales, but I'm not gonna complain about a singing chipmunk, people. This show does not look to have singing chipmunks (alas), but it does look to have a princess and a prince and an Evil Queen, complete with perfectly arched eyebrows. Yes, ma'am.
Ginnifer Goodwin as Snow White? You bet your sweet bippy. I totally buy it (and totally love her pixie cut, thankyouverymuch.) Also, I am a HUGE fan of Jennifer Morrison, who played Ted Mosby's kids' not-mother this year on How I Met Your Mother. I liked her on House, and I think she has a good face for skepticism. I adore Robert Carlyle (The Full Monty). And can we talk about Josh Dallas, who plays Prince Charming? I assure you, we most certainly can. We would have a great deal to talk about, honeys. Here's the IMDB cast thingamabob: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1843230/fullcredits#cast
Quaint little town with secrets = my favorite spacial archetype. Heh. Prrriiidddy sure I just invented a term. But I came from a quaint little town with secrets, and it would surprise me not in the least to discover that a few citizens were actually denizens of a magical kingdom. (My debate coach, for example? Totally some sort of queen/goddess/magic lady.) There's something so...homey about watching shows set in quaint small towns with secrets. Throw in seven dwarves and COME ON.
I miss magic on TV. I mean, y'all...I've been watching a lot of Wizards of Waverly Place lately. Please do not think I'm kidding. Today I realized that Ted Mosby's son is actually Justin from that show and then I watched the preview I'm about to show you and I lost mah mind, because do you THINK it's a coincidence that Zoey Not-Mosby is going to be starring as Perhaps A Princess on this apparently awesome new show? I THINK NOT.
Ahem.
I mean, I really miss magic on TV. I do not require that this show have smoke monsters, weird Egyptian connections, trippy afterlife experiences, or sexy men with exotic accents (although checking out the preview, I'm pretty sure I'm getting at least ONE of those things...wooohoooo!), but I need something a little more woowoo than, you know, figuring out who killed some dude in a ditch based on the fibers on his tennis shoes.
Why don't you just watch the preview and tell me what you think, my peeps?

Yay!

Tomes on Tuesday (Wednesday edition): The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen and Shadowfever by Karen Moning

2011-05-11T09:21:00.000-04:00

A little caveat here: I have a problem when reading books in my favorite genres. This also applies to watching movies. For example, I hated the movie Never Let Me Go, a dystopian alternate reality mess that featured lifeless characters (or maybe it was just the acting) and tried to be all profound. Bleagh. If my dystopias don't feature some HOPE of a utopia (or just less awfulness), I'm not gonna love them. THAT'S the problem: if the worlds an author creates don't gibe with my ideas of how the worlds should work, I can't get into the book. And that's unfortunate for me, because I just read two such books.

I'll start with Shadowfever by Karen Moning. Up until last year (or maybe the year before...it gets confusing), I'd never really heard about the vampire sex books. Or fairy sex books. Or werewolf sex books. Or the anythingthatdoesn'treallyexistonthisplane sex books. Turns out that there's a whole subgenre of books floating around the speculative fiction universe which features hot action between the sheets with various fanged, winged, furry, magic-wielding creatures. Who knew?

It miffs people who love these books (and there are a lot of them) when I condense it down to this, but in my mind, this is what Moning (and the other authors) do best: write good sex. It's hard to capture that connection, in my opinion, and plenty of romance novelists can write about swelling body parts, but not every one can make your pulse race. Moning does. The sexual attraction between her characters is strong and provocative and titillating. Yay, the sex!

However, everything else bugs the crap out of me. This book, which is the fifth in the series, is confusing, convoluted, and could have stood to be about a hundred pages shorter. The goal for the author, I think, was to wrap up the main character's story. Mackayla Lane went to Dublin in the first book to solve her sister's murder, only to find herself plopped down in the middle of a Faerie war. This is a HUGE simplification, but at the end of the day, that's what it turns out to be. The series trots along at a fairly fast clip, with hot sex and derelictions from the Faerie canon that made my teeth curl in different and uncomplimentary ways. Mac is a Southern girl, so I feel for her, but she's drawn so shallowly that when she has to be a badass who loves the dirty sex (have I mentioned the sex?) instead of a beach baby who inexplicably seems to have no love life, that transformation has to be outlined in EVERY NOVEL. Including this one, which given the awful mess that Mac's gone through, seems odd. But it keeps being hammered in, mainly by describing Mac's clothes. Apparently, her inner torment is revealed by her predilection to wear a thong and put her hair in a high ponytail. AT THE SAME TIME. That's deep, y'all.

Anywho, all the secrets about Mac and her lover/tormenter/favorite beast Barrons and those crazy Faerie sex folks were supposed to be revealed in this book, and I guess they were. But to be honest, I had to keep skipping giant chunks of book because...I was bored. And confused. And pretty sure that whatever got revealed to Mac was going to be unrevealed in a few pages because it...kept...happening. She'd figure out who she was and then a few chapters later, it would all fall apart. She and Barrons would get straightened out and then he'd get pissed off again, for reasons I never really understood. Mac's identity, when it was all said and done, never was really clear to me, and to be honest, most of this book felt like a set up for another series. With hot sex. And sexual tension. Occasionally with fangs and/or wings.

I can't NOT recommend this series, because--as I think I've said--Moning writes good sex and up until this book, has told a fun story that you can sink into IF you're willing to shunt aside the entire codex of Faerie lore. This would be a good series to read during the summer--just make sure you DON'T drink a pina colada while reading the last one. It would be too confusing.

Moving on to The Peach Keeper. As you may recall, I love Sarah Addison Allen's previous book Garden Spells. It is a book friend. And I really, really, really like The Sugar Queen. This one...eh. Okay, here's the deal: I LOVE magical realism. I WRITE magical realism. So when I read magical realism, I want it to be good. No, I want it to be great. I want the magic to be natural and startling at the same time. I want the realism to be, you know, real. And Allen USUALLY does this well, but, to my regret, this book fell flat for me. This was, I think, for two reasons: a rushed feeling and either stale or underdeveloped characters.

The characters first: we have the rich, good girl who longs to break free. We have the poor girl from the once-rich family who was smart but couldn't get her stuff together. (The rich girl has an overbearing, gossipy mother and a blank father. The poor girl lacks a mom, but has a peach of a dad.) (Aside: the title makes no sense. None. It drives me crazy when that happens.) There's the rich dude who finally escaped the trappings of his former life. There's the bad guy, who is your standard charlatan/charmer who might be the devil, but who's to say? Two old ladies: one feisty, one with dementia. A quirky secondary character with a heart of gold. The ONE character who is interestingly different is also a dentist (which slays me, for some reason) and the weirdness that Allen hints might be Fey or magic or SOMETHING turns out to just be plain old weirdness mixed with a touch of sexual confusion.

The pace and plot were also just...aggravating. Some things are introduced but never fully developed: the peaches from the title SHOULD be pivotal, but wind up being only a vague influence. The charlatan was clearly a magical being, but this was never really explored and was, in fact, basically ignored. And not in a "Well, we live in a realistically magical town, so shit happens" way, but in a "As an author, I'm just not going to explore this" way. We kept getting hints that the aforementioned sexually confused character (or maybe ambiguous--hard to say) was really important to the whole charlatan's history angle, but then that part just sort of faded away. The flocks of black and yellow birds? Never explained. When the lovers all get settled, the story dwindles to a "and then everybody was cozy and looked wryly at each other" thing, which I HATE in a story. When a beloved character from another book shows up, her appearance was a lot less "yay!" than I thought it would be, mainly because it felt like yet another throwaway moment.

And I think that's what really bugs me here: this story didn't feel crafted, to me. It felt thrown together for fans, but not truly realized. The bones of a good story were there, but they were covered up by layers of fluffy smells and noises and characters that seemed MEANT to move the story, but wound up being unnecessary or feeble. The magical realism touches were forced or unexplained or, worse, felt like Alice Hoffman with a Southern accent. So, with regret, I really can't recommend this story. If you want to check Allen out, please go find Garden Spells or The Sugar Queen, both of which feature strong characters, clear stories, and magical elements that make sense or are vital.

Snirf. Here's hoping that I can find something good to read between now and July, when Maggie Stiefvater's Forever comes out.

ANOTHER Standard NotHannah Catchup List

2011-05-09T15:08:00.001-04:00

Honestly, it's starting to feel like maybe I should just post only lists every two or three weeks, because that's how I'm rocking the blog lately. I'm awesome. What can I say?

What I SHOULD say is that I'm sorry I've been out of commission for so long. NOT that you're hanging on by your fingernails, clinging to a shred of hope that some day, some how, I will once again grace you with my bloggeriffic fantasticness. But I have totally ignored my interweb friends for a few weeks now. I haven't visited blogs, I haven't responded to emails, I haven't done anything but peeped up on a few FB posts and that, my friends, is not cool. (If it makes anybody feel better, I've ignored many of my "hey, I can actually give you a hug without flying across the country and/or world" friends, too. Have I mentioned I'm awesome?) Anywho, to all of you whom I've neglected lately, I'm sorry. Things are straightened out now and I am slowly crawling out of my cave of self-interest. DANG. It sure is bright out here.

Let the list commence:

I done made me a photography website. In the professional photographer world, this is theoretically how one drums up business, while also offering clients a place where they can view a gallery of their session. From a NotHannah standpoint, it's a responsibility that takes away from this blog, in that every time I sit down at the computer, I'm editing pictures, tweaking the site, or pining over new equipment. (Okay, I will admit to also being sucked into a new FB game. Gah. Gardens of Time is a wicked, awful, beautiful time-vacuum.) If you are so inclined, head on over to the site. http://www.hrayphotography.com/
I have been alternating between my feelings about the death of Osama bin Laden. In a departure from many progressive friends, who are in a place of "we should all love one another and not be violent," I am genuinely happy that the man is dead. HOWEVER, I do not feel it germane to be bouncing around the streets with glee about it. HOWEVER, I understand the (mostly) young people who are doing it, if only because their entire lives have been spent in the shadow of a bogeyman who has been removed from the collective consciousness, so yay. HOWEVER, I'm not all down with demands to see the body, which seems to be coming primarily from a group of folks I now call deathers. (I'm pretty sure that at some point in time our president is going to have to prove that he is, in fact, alive. Or human.) I'm not down with that mainly because it strikes me as further proof that reality television is rotting our brains.
I received a notice that I could now pull the money from my Teacher Retirement System account. It's a nice chunk of change, and I'll put it to good use, but it's rather weird to be closing that door officially. Part of it is a sense of, "Oh, shozzbot, I have NO retirement." Part of it is a sense of, "I really enjoyed the kid part of teaching." On teacher appreciation day, two of my sweet babies thanked me. It really meant a lot to me and made me thankful for the technology that allows me to keep up with former students.
This weekend, while walking with the family out on The Land, my brother Heath found a muddy, crumpled piece of what appeared to be a hymnal. One of the hymns was "Were You There?" It dawned on us that it was refuse left behind by the killing winds that swept through the South the week before. We found bits of roofing paper, a shredded California map. At a friend's house, I found the top of a doll's head. My friend's contractor found a high school yearbook page. Finding these pieces of life, snatched up and flung far away, is sobering and awful and freaky...and, of course, maddeningly interesting to a writer. There's a story racing around my head that I think will have to be let out soon.
I took up running again, which has apparently tickled the humidity gods PINK, because it has gotten hotter and more humid than May has a right to be. It's hard to do ANYTHING, much less run for forty-five minutes every day, but I'm trying to force myself to do it, because while I've lost five pounds, I need to lose more and I don't feel very healthy lately.
It could be all the chocolate chip cookies I've eaten today. Possibly.
I finished the bathroom! (Actually, I finished it months ago, but I don't think I've shown you yet.) Ther are still touch ups I want to do, but it looks MUCH better.

Yes, I know this should be "8." But honestly, Blogger is on such crack that I can't figure out what the hell it wants me to do in order to insert a picture. It makes me insane.
My garden is shot all the way to hell and back. I have planted very, very little and what I DO have is fairly crispy. I'm hoping to get some stuff in this week, though. Really.
On top of...
Y'all, this disjointed list is breaking my face.
Okay, on top of all of this stuff, I'm also facing some kind of spiritual crisis. Because, you know, it would be too easy NOT to have a spiritual crisis right now. I mean, it's not like I have anything else going on. Sigh. I'll probably talk about it on Divining Women soon.
We had our IEP meeting for next year. Jeffrey's IQ was 143. 1.4.3. Good heavens. And while that's all great and everything, the boy still can't write legibly. Last week was field day, during which I talked to another mother who had had virtually the same experience with her little boy this year. Neither of us were very excited to find this connection. Whheeee! (When is school over, please? Seriously. I want it over NOW.)
I have replaced the sad, worn out office chair with my big exercise ball. I don't know where I got this idea, but can I just say "Yay!??" It is forcing me to have good posture, my legs and back aren't as sore from all the editing and writing, and I can even get a little exercise in. RIGHT NOW I'm bouncing on the ball. Exercising. AND typing. Yahooooooo!
Ahem.
I made cookies today. Lime and white chocolate chip and regular chocolate chip. I realize these are not healthy, per se. Or any se, really. Especially when you forgo lunch and eat cookies instead. Cooookkkiiiieees.

Hope all of you are well. Miss you. Mean it.

Springtime in the House of Aspie

2011-04-18T15:39:00.001-04:00

Just for giggles, y'all, I took a little trip down memory lane in the "Asperger's" category to see if I was somehow deluding myself. (I delude myself on a fairly regular basis.) But, no, I found it there in black and white: Springtime makes my boy crazy. Cra. Zy. I think it's a few things:

His allergies make him want to claw his own nose off. He walks around in a sort of daze of itching and you can tell he's miserable and distracted all the time.
His winter haircut has grown out and the little hairs are tickling his ears and making him want to claw his own ears off.
Not only has the angle of light changed, but the hours of sunlight have, too. I think they should give Aspie families a Daylight Savings Time exemption. Or an island. OMFC, an Aspie Island. With, like, lots of bounce houses and bubble wrap and books about insects. I totally need to buy an island.
He is so sick of school that he wants to barf on it. (And, with the exception of last year, I am totally right there with him.)
His birthday comes with cool presents and candy. And CAKE!! And BALLOONS!! And...MORE PRESENTS!!!

Anyway, suffice to say that I am gritting my teeth and groping my way through tantrum-choked mornings and loud car rides and a child so vague and spacey that the other day he honestly forgotten that I had put his medicine in his mouth THIRTY SECONDS beforehand. Whew.

Also, can I just say that this school year is just over? Honestly, just stick a fork in the NotHannah family, because we are done. Doooone. I fantasize every day about pulling Jeffrey out of school early and all of us spending our mornings peacefully toodling around in the yard or going on errands and NOT going back to the place where the legally binding interventions keep getting pushed aside, ignored, or modified without rhyme or reason. I could go on and on about it, just fill up blogs with the asinine, careless, illegal mess that keeps happening, but I just...don't want to.

Like...when a teacher emails me and tells me that Jeffrey said something inappropriate in class and I ask him what it was and he says they were doing a Word Scramble (in Math/Science/Social Studies...but it's testing week, so whatever) of "April Showers" and there was a clue to "find the dirty word" (I'm assuming "showers," but seriously, isn't that inane?) and he found "ass" and said it out loud--I mean, I know it's WRONG to laugh my "ass" off over it, but that didn't stop me. Are you seriously going to spend however long it takes you to type up this relation of evilness in my child and on the same day, NOT give him a schedule by which to organize his day? Seriously?

I say this every year this time of year, and it finally occurs to me that I just need to suck it up and bite the bullet and do whatever else I need to do to get it through my skull, but public schools just don't seem to get Aspergers. It's as if they look at my boy (and boys like him) and say, "Well, they SAY he has autism, but he's really smart and he can talk, so let's fling him to the wolves and hope for the best." And then "best" is not really so much "best." It's more like "pitifully not enough." I get that the public schools have in their minds that we want to mainstream these kids and make them like everybody else, but I am finally at the point where I want to say, "WHY?" Why do I want to mainstream my kid? He isn't mainstream. He is beautifully, weirdly, rainbowifically NOT swimming in the mainstream. He did so well last year in his contained classroom, venturing out to do fun stuff with the mainstream kids. He felt secure. In place.

This year? He has no friends. He is constantly confused about what it is he's doing wrong. (He shot a bird the other day at a girl. He had no idea what he was doing. The other kids made a big deal out of it and embarrassed and pleased him at the same time. Where were the teachers? Goodness knows. Perhaps coming up with more phrases for Word Scrambles.) The teachers and parapros and administration seem absolutely clueless as to how to handle him. Shall I tell you about the AP who told Jeffrey he was breaking the law the other day by touching another child?

I'm just sick of it. Sick. Barfingly, tiredly, dragging my feetedly sick of it. (Adverbs are my friends today. Better than chugging vodka straight from the bottle, yes?)

I just did a quick read through again. Every. Year. Every year I've felt this way except for the one year that Jeffrey was in an environment designed to bring out the best in him. Why in the world the system chose to change that for him is beyond me. But...

I almost can't even write this. We're changing schools again. We're pulling the plug on the disorganized, chaotic mess that Jeffrey's school was this year. We're hoping that the school he's zoned for will work. They have new procedures in place, better than when he was there. He and River will be able to go to the same school.

Can I say, "Blahblahblah?" Because I am not only not hopeful anymore, I'm back to the "Keep on messing with my kid" place. The place where I want to homeschool him. Where I want to keep him away from the grudging guidance he gets in the public sector.

And I HATE being here on a beautiful Spring day when the bees are buzzing and the greening is happening and we should be skipping around being hopeful. I'm tired of being here. I want to be happy in the Spring.

And I'm not. Springtime in the House of Aspie is blechy again and it pisses me off.

Addressing The Conservative Dilemma While Worrying About Baby Birds

2011-04-04T23:14:00.004-04:00

My post on Saturday was all "I love R.E.M." and "I love my hubs" and "Ooooooooh, baby birds!" and that was great, right? I mean, who DOESN'T love baby fricking birds and wasn't it nice to read something positive and cheerful and NotHannahInHerRightMindful? I'm still in my right mind (and worried about the baby birds with the awful storms approaching from the west...blech), but I'm not feeling as positive and cheerful, mainly because the freaking conservative RepublicanTeaPartyJerkoid politicians are breaking my face.

It has occurred to me more and more frequently in the last few days that the current crop of Republicans AND Tea Partiers count on their followers to be dumbasses. If you are a follower of the Republicans or Tea Partiers, please do not think that I am assuming you are a dumbass. In fact, I'm willing to bet you AREN'T a dumbass, but you must be pretty fricking uncomfortable as several things come to light and it dawns on you that you and your values (which I respect, my friend...truly) are being used like a two-bit whore.

Ahem.

In list form, because the storms in the west are freaking me out and my brain won't do things like, you know, make paragraphs:

The current governor of Georgia is a dude named Nathan Deal. Sad to say, I supported Nathan Deal during the first election I voted in, primarily because he was a Democrat and that's the way I thought voting should be done back then. Nathan switched parties after the '94 election after it became clear that NOT supporting President Clinton's tough immigration laws would be the right way to go if he wanted to keep the big carpet and agriculture money coming his way. I mean, I'm not saying the two are connected or anything. Anywho, despite some rather wonky money stuff with his family, having to declare bankruptcy mid-election season, AND some ethics investigations, Nathan became the governor because he convinced the God-fearing conservative citizens that he hated Teh Gays and abortion rights even more than Karen Handel. Also, he would lower taxes, which seems to be the thing that really gets conservative voters all excited. No gay rights AND lower taxes? Hells to the yeah. It's a perfect world, people, with the marginalized tax-paying citizens of our state even more marginalized AND more money to spend on the cheap carpet and chicken and strawberries the other marginalized (but non-citizen, so justifiably) folks provide for us. BOOYAH!! Roy Barnes, the Democratic candidate, was anti-gay marriage BUT he was pro-choice, so clearly, he was gonna lose. Which he did, of course. So now, Nathan is all "ooooh, I'm going to lower the tax rate across the board," which is probably all that a lot of conservatives are going to hear and they're gonna be all tickled pink BUT they need to hold the phone, because in addition to lowering the tax rate in a mystical kind of way that means that I will actually pay MORE taxes next year because I make less than $500,000 a year, Nathan and his buddyroes are going to INCREASE taxes on things like cell phone and cable service. You know, the things middle class people like me enjoy because we can't afford to go to the opera in Prague every weekend. Nathan Deal counts on people to believe that he is a moral man because he stands against two things which will in all likelihood NEVER affect him, but in reality, he is a slimy politician who also counts on people not to actually pay attention to his policies. PAY ATTENTION, Y'ALL.
There's this dude named Larry Fincher, a Tea Party darling from Tennessee. He's pro-gun, pro-life, anti-gay marriage, and pro-limited government. Oh, oh, AND...y'all, he's a gospel singer. Yes, ma'am. This guy is pretty much a pin-up for modern conservatives who see that he's a GOSPEL SINGER and he LOVES GUNS and he wants to LIMIT GOVERNMENT, but who somehow don't see that he has been given millions of dollars by the federal government to grow cotton. Blink. MILLIONS. Wikipedia puts the subsidies from the government to the company he owns half of at over eight million. The Environmental Working Group puts it at three million. The man got a grant from the federal government (you know, the one he wants to limit) for $13,000 to buy a tractor or something, because apparently, the other three (or eight) million bucks he received didn't quite cover it. Now, listen. I'm all for helping out farmers. Really. But if you are being made a millionaire by the federal government to grow fracking cotton and can't even buy your own fracking tractor AND you want to talk to me about limiting government while the taxpayers for whom you want to deny equal protection under the Constitution (which you practically rub on your naked body in front of conservative voters) PAY FOR YOUR TRACTOR, well...I'm sorry, Mr. Fincher. But you can just go on back to your county fairs and sing about loving one another or walking in the garden with your deity, because I don't want you in my government. Because you are a slimy, two-faced scum bucket who--again--is counting on people not to pay attention. PAY ATTENTION, Y'ALL. (And you might want to look into Michelle "Crazy Eyes" Bachmann's subsidy history while you're at it.)
Scott Walker, the asshat governor from Wisconsin who thinks that state workers get paid too much and who hates unions and who is an asshat (did I mention that?) just gave a high-paying state job to the non-college graduate, DUI-having son of a donor. An $80,000 state job to a non-college graduate--and he's already received a raise, bless his heart. Are you flipping KIDDING me? Honestly, is ANYBODY paying attention out there?
It's hard for me to articulate this without sounding pretentious. And I HATE sounding pretentious. And I am well aware that the president I elected to Change our Country has not, you know, necessarily changed as much as I would want him to (although to be honest, I blame a lax liberal voting pool, a bunch of money-swilling Republicans, and Emanuel Rahm for a great deal of that) and despite this, I will vote for him because the folks the other parties are trotting out aren't going to cut it. I mean, I WISH I could support the Green Party, but Cynthia McKinney is not who I want as president. Sorry. I digress. Here's what I want to say: conservative citizens in this country want to believe that if you work hard, you can be anything you want to be. They want to believe that the system we have set up here in our country makes that happen. They want to believe that a person who shares (or SAYS he shares) their spiritual values also shares their fiscal values, but that doesn't seem to be true. Because the reality of it is that the conservative politicians today desperately need the deep pockets of the very few people who DO manage to become exactly what they want to be to keep those politicians in power. They need the votes of decent conservative citizens to put them physically in office, but once they are IN office, they don't give a damn about those citizens. They give a damn about (and a lot of money and tax cuts and perks to) the rich folks who paid for their television ads that accused their Democratic opponents of being awful, gay-licking, abortion-forcing hedonists and won them the votes they needed. It is an awful, vicious cycle and it needs to be broken. Social conservatives are going to have to realize that they simply can't vote with their morality any more, because the folks they're voting for don't seem to have the morals they run on.
I actually just erased a long, rambling (I know, it's shocking) diatribe about how we should have two separate elections (with separate representatives) for fiscal and social issues, but realized that those issues have become so entwined in our messed-up political system that it's going to take some brave folks stepping forward and saying "my religion doesn't matter, but here's my voting record on spending) to change anything.
Then I ate a few organic chocolate chips.
And said a prayer for my baby birds.
And dithered around for a while trying to come up with something awesome to say. But...that didn't work out.
So I looked at the radar and freaked out a little bit more.
Then I went to go find a poem for the new National Poetry Month page I put up. And while I totally didn't mean to do this and I was simply just looking for a poem about birds or maybe about being decent, I found another Mary Oliver poem. Mary Oliver rocks. And, clearly, she pays attention.