Watermelon Worries

It sounds silly when I type it and read it back to my self, but I'm afraid of my watermelon. It's alone in the garden, but its presence strikes an ominous chord all the same.

It taunts me. Maybe it's ripe. Maybe it isn't. Maybe it will just up and rot. 

I'm scared to pick it. 

I'm scared to let it stay on the vine.

One would think that knowing it's the only one of its kind in my garden would give me comfort, but the thought petrifies me.

One Last Adventure

One more adventure survived, I thought. I theorized that if I didn’t acknowledge aloud how the plane skidded askew down the sandy runway, it didn’t. 

Two days later, my husband worked up the audacity to say, “Were you looking out of the cockpit window when we landed? Sideways!” Was it more horrifying that I had a view through the cockpit window or that we nearly tumbled into the Eleuthera International Airport stall belly over back? 

At the Pineapple Air desk in Nassau, I reluctantly surrendered my carry-on bag, then my husband and I and a smattering of additional passengers exited the double doors to the tarmac. An airline employee locked them behind us. As I mend the rips in my recollection, stitching together snatches I deleted, it occurs to me that she anticipated our urge to sprint back and rattle the hinges until someone met our desperate eyes and denied us access anyway. 

Peering around the airfield, I searched for Pineapple Air jet. “Where is our plane?” I muttered, even while ascending the steps of a 12-seat, double-prop, puddle-jumper. Two pilots kneaded themselves into the cockpit. One clicked open his window to accept the flight manifest scribbled on a yellow legal pad page, which he crumpled under the solar-powered calculator balanced between their seats.

 

No stewardess pointed out the exit door or alerted us to life vests under our seats or told us how to use oxygen masks. There were no life vests. There were no oxygen masks.  The exit was obvious.

No one instructed us to fasten our seatbelts or stow our personal items. Five people did. Three didn’t. A woman in front of me played Candy Crush on her phone during takeoff. No one cared. If the plane went down, flying debris, seatbelts and cell phones would be the least of our worries.

Eight backseat drivers watched the cockpit duo manipulate the controls. I braced myself for the pilot on the left to look over his shoulder to reverse the plane.

Aft, I spotted my suitcase piled in the cargo hold. It was carry-on luggage after all. 

Once in the air, white caps boiled in the ocean not far below us.  I nudged my husband and pointed to a duct-taped square on the ceiling. “That’s where someone tried to dig out a life boat,” I yelled over the engines.  “Planes like this float,” my beloved concocted, but he checked his pocket for his passport in case the authorities would need to identify his body. 

I took inventory, too. If we went down in the Caribbean, we could collect rain in my shoes. My inflatable neck pillow would hold my head above water. I rehearsed the junior-lifesaving technique of tying knots in the legs of my pants and filling them with air for flotation. At the bottom of my purse, I found a pen with a flashlight on it. We could signal for help and cross the lost off of the manifest. I had a ration of pretzels saved from the Atlanta to Nassau flight. 

Fifteen minutes later, while I dug for safety pins so we could attach our passports to our underwear, the landing gear connected with earth. I looked through the cockpit window to see blue sky replaced by scrubby landscape. Our plane screeched down the runway crossways, at odds with aerodynamics. 

It righted and decelerated. One of the pilots casually extracted himself from the cockpit, opened the door and reached out to stop the propeller.  The woman in front of me still played Candy Crush. We had survived another adventure that I was content to believe didn’t happen, until my husband forced the issue. (And if you're wondering, YES, I would do it again.)

                               

Come to Me, My Minions

Woohoo! I've received an email with a Secret Video and a Super Spy Decoder Ring! I'm doing the Snoopy happy dance. If I watch the video, I can learn to control women's minds.

If you are a woman, I'm controlling your mind right now (I think).

Imagine the possibilities this opens.  Women will bring their shoes to my closet. Women will move to the side to let me check out in front of them in the grocery store. Women will share their private babysitter lists with me. Women will flock to give me their grandmothers' coveted recipes.

They will be my minions and with them I will take over the world!

Wait. There's a disclaimer at the bottom of the email message:

This video is meant only for designated recipients. It should be used for its intended purpose. If it falls into the wrong hands, it will self-destruct in 60 seconds, disarming your computer and obliterating your data stored therein.

Find the Right Red

I know, I know. I've received the emails and the FaceBook messages, and I wonder where I've been my self. 

It's been a red alarm summer. Catastrophe has befallen my family at every turn in the road. From hydro planing across a busy Interstate in a driving downpour and totaling the car but not ourselves to being faced with the obligation of rescuing an abandoned kitten, our challenges have swelled. To top it off the kitten is a girl and she's very at home with us. Concussions, stitches and bee stings warranted ER visits. 

My minivan caught on fire. What's worse is someone put it out. Worse than that, I'm still driving it.

And my 17 year-old son hit a dear with his car. He field dressed it. I now have road kill in my freezer and I'm wondering if it means I'm a success or failure as a parent.

This is only half of the stuff that happened in July. May and June came with their own worries too stale to mention as excuses now. 

Thursday, I leave for the Bahamas. Friday, my children start school. When I return home, I expect the summer of catastrophe to be officially over and for things to return to our usual ordinary chaos.

Please pardon my long absence. Blogging to resume momentarily. Time for the green light.

Another Way to Doodle Around on the Internet

Today, I discovered Crushpath, which has successfully kept me distracted from the home feature I should be writing. I created my free, one-page profile:



And it will allow me to create more pitch sites for other services I offer. This is so easy to use! Go try it.

Hey Moms! New Mag for Tween Girls

BYOU Magazine: Be Your Own You is a new mag for tween girls roughing it through the late elementary through middle school years. As you can see from the picture below, my 12 year-old daughter got her fingerprints and her eyes all over my review copy. I'm hoping she absorbed the age-appropriate advice about dealing with mean girls, following her dreams, being a better student and taking care of her personal appearance and health.

The mail-bag page reveals what other girls are thinking and saying about what they read in BYOU.

Fun, quick quizzes help girls sort out who they are, what they like and how they can do better at what they're already doing well.

And what girls' magazine would be complete without beauty tips?

In addition to reading the articles and features, girls can get advice from someone their own age!

Plenty of role models, from girls just like BYOU's readers to successful women, are presented, with stories about what they do and how they do it. Crafts, short fiction, puzzles and humor keep the pages interesting from cover to cover. And as a mother of a tween girl, I like that the articles in my review copy didn't push the envelope. There was nothing edgy or morally questionable. In fact, everything I read supported values that the vast majority of families share.

Living the Dream

Since my teenage years, I've wanted to be a morning person. Two reasons: 1) I have a romanticized image of morning people drinking steaming coffee while watching the sunrise and composing great literature and 2) The white-hot disapproval morning people exhibit toward the sleeping habits of night owls makes me squirm.

Morning people, because they know I couldn't possibly know any better, let me go on believing in the morning person dream of relaxation and productivity before the world awakes. And though they claim to not pass judgement on the hours I keep, I can tell they believe only a sloth would lie in bed until 9 a.m.

For decades I have believed that I am a morning person stuck in a night owl's body. I have struggled against my nature, periodically setting my alarm to ring me out of bed at ungodly a.m. hours with the unhappy result of slapping the snooze button until 10 or getting up and crawling through my day like a zombie. These experiments end with me patting my self on the back for giving it a good try and returning to my slovenly ways of waking whenever I please.

But then I remind my self that it took me 40 years to develop the habit of making up my bed every day, a task most people master by the time they are 10. At 10, I had the good sense to know that making up my bed was a huge waste of time since I would be messing it up again that night. At 40, I wanted to quit being sensible.

At age 44, still holding on to the hope that I can successfully transform into the person that I know I am inside, I've had an epiphany. In order to be a morning person, I must give up being a night owl. Staying up until midnight and rising at the cock-a-doodle rooster crow will never produce the results I seek. That's a place of limbo and bleak identity confusion.

Since coming to this realization and changing my ways, I've had another epiphany. The early bird misses the sunrise because she's doing the laundry and making the coffee.