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.

Just Try

Remember when you were a kid and your mom would tell you to go use the restroom and you would protest? Usually, this nagging preceded a long car trip or a visit to a place without facilities. Usually, if you were like me, you whined something akin to "But I don't have to go."

My mother would end the ordeal by commanding, "Just try." And most times I would. And behold, my mama would be proved right. I did have to go.

And on the occasions that I resisted successfully and made the trip without the old school try, my mama was also proved right. I did have to go. Only, it was too late. 

Failure to learn from natural consequences showed my age. It wasn't until my thirties, when I had children of my own to harangue, that I saw the wisdom in my mother's words, "just try." 

Now, I'm slipping deep into my forties. Per my mother's example, I frequent bathrooms, not because I feel the urge, not because of a pending road trip, but simply because the opportunity presents itself. On advice of my mama, my motto is never miss a chance to make water. 

On a recent visit to my parents' place at the beach, I got a horrifying glimpse into my future, however. I questioned whether I was blindly following my mother's admonitions.

I think it really shows a person's age when she doesn't regard an unnecessary shower chair in the bathroom as an unusual accessory. My parents are robust and spry. The superfluous shower chair resides under a layer of towels. 

Nonetheless, my mother's comfort with its presence is entirely disconcerting. I've acknowledged her indisputable wisdom about just trying and taking the opportunity to go when chance presents it, but I think I'm going to have to whine about the shower chair, if for no other reason than to re-establish boundaries and steadfast resistance. I refuse to "just try" on this one.

School's Out Just in Time

If it's not the locusts, it's a teenage boy. Teenage boys eat voraciously without discrimination. Which makes them grow like Jack's magic seeds. Pants that fit them in the morning are capris by afternoon.

It's a good thing school is out for summer, because this specimen has outgrown his thinking cap.