That's not an EarWorm...It's my Writing Partner

Recently, a California college student hosted a tapeworm in his brain.  A live tapeworm!  I think this could be the breakthrough to combat maladaptive self-talk. Bye-bye buzzkill voice that wrecks my personal writing party! Adios overachieving psycho inner editor- you've just been eaten.



 

 

Winter Solstice

Today is a crisp and blue December morning. I want my writing to be just like this: boundless and open and crystal clear. Winter solstice is my birthday, and this year I am celebrating the joy of words. I love to draw and paint, but now recognize that words are the medium I have always chosen first. Words are in my old diaries, journals and sketchbooks. Words have always been integral parts of my various jobs and words made up the poem first published when I was 9. Words float around me at all times and I think of them as prized possessions. Words flow out of my mouth, I gulp them down to eat and I watch them twinkle a little longer until they are defined. When I listen I am always gifted with as many words as I can snatch out of the air.  Today I paint with a fully loaded palette wherever I am whenever I want and with as many colors as I choose.

It Goes to Eleven

The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a tour-de-force of a song when played by three middle school violin players, but boy, add one out of tune cello and, well, it's really rockin! This is why the middle school member of my family chose to play last Saturday in a Festival. (That, and the extra credit points towards the second trimester report card.) So with happy thoughts and in cleaner clothes than usual, we trucked across a county line for his premier performance. We pulled in to the parking lot and wound up in a space next to another late-arriving member of the ensemble. Imagine our surprise when he got out of the car sans instrument.

 "I don't have it" was all he said.  Nigel Tufnel could not have done any better.  Fortunately, the kid bartered his lunch for a week and was able to secure a violin from a superb and imminently annoyed classmate, so the show was on.  But I came away with an epiphany of sorts.  I realize that there is a secret coded message in the movie This is Spinal Tap. "It goes to eleven" does not refer to a Marshall amp, oh no.  It refers to critical thinking skills maxing out at the middle school age of eleven!

Can you wrap my hot dog in a clorox wipe instead of a bun?

I think the little league snack shack is the headwaters of all aggressive and dysfunctional parent behaviors in kid baseball.  Could the cause be the somewhat noxious hotdog rotisserie fumes?  Something evil lurks under the nacho cheese crock-pot-warmer, because I have seen it oozing it's nasty self out from between the cracks and have become frozen in terror awaiting it's molten trajectory.

 The combination of salmonellaphobia and e-col-itis really brings up some personal and previously overlooked feelings in me, but I am still able to read a volunteer shift schedule.  My everyday face may appear a little checked out, but this is due to attempting to calculate the number of germs multiplied by years in snack shack.  This must be why the Team Mom always assumes I will not do my assigned shifts.  And assigns me her shift to work in addition to my already scheduled shifts.

But I'm getting Nacho-cheese-krafty.  I did not tell her I had my super-model friend covering for me last Saturday.  So now that she has reply-alled about my supposed miscreant lack of responsibility, I forwarded-all to my friend who did work my shift.  Let the lies be exposed!!  Bwa-ha-ha!

Germs x Snack Shack =  Attitude!!!!!!!

2 Friday the 13ths = 26 visits to Kaiser

What can I say. Yes, I made a mistake. So what? I say encouraging health and fitness to your family is a good thing. "Modeling behavior" right? The do as I do parental cheese?

I mean, clearly, had I not been looking over my shoulder at the cyclist dashing into the bushes behind me, I might have avoided the crash and my local ER on Friday the 13th. In my defense, I heard "leak" when he said he was going to get a "leaf", but that's just trivial. This was the January Friday the 13th. So I've been pretty celebratory lately what with the release from physical therapy and my leg not looking so elephant-y. Enough to ride my bike again, and suggest more fun exercise to hubby.

Did I not look at the calendar??? Last Friday was the April Friday the 13th. Yup. I encouraged him to fool around with our 9 & 11-year-old. The good news is, when the Sector 9 skateboard (longboard, actually) broke the land-speed record shooting out from under him, it looked like an excellent science fair experiment for next year--

The bad news is, he wasn't so interested in exercise the rest of the day, and his hand looked a little elephant-y. Credit to him, he still helped me lift the lawnmower out of the shed several hours later, but I fear this is what actually broke the wrist.

So only 12 more visits and we'll complete the Everyday Math Kaiser Hospital computation!

Stupid Cow

So wrong on so many levels. There are cows wandering all over Highway One between Jenner and Stewarts Point in Sonoma County. They wander on the roadway, and because they are so mesmerized by the stunning view of the Pacific, simply don't notice or don't care that people like me have a death grip on the steering wheel while avoiding them AND avoiding the plunge off of the cliffs into the ocean. Happily, though, people like my kids are generally resuscitated from certain vomitous death by their appearance, which greatly benefits people like me.

Except one of the cows fell off the cliff and splatted fatally on the road recently. This cow, according to the owner, had a history. When she was young, she fell into a crevasse and got stuck. Mr. Owner got her out, but this time, Bossy wasn't so lucky. Mr. Owner described her as thus: "I should have figured it out when she was a heifer. She was just a stupid cow."

WHAT?

So how about klutzy kow, or accident-prone cow, or how 'bout highway cut into a cliff as rangeland, not so much? And let's not go into the drumroll feminist take: COW is a bad, bad, bad choice...

Occupy Novel

I can't blog and write at the same time.

178 pages of first-time novel have been my own Occupy Tract House. Actually, Occupy waistline, Occupy bank account, Occupy spouse.

Of course it's a children's book! I've been writing, silly! For months! Blogging, not so much.