View from My Porch

The English Christmas Tree

2011-12-14T17:25:00.000-08:00

Most people have an idyllic Dickensian mental picture of England at Christmastime. As a young American couple approaching our first Christmas in England’s Midlands area, Scott and I were enchanted by the thatched roofed cottages, the decorations at the local pub, and the brilliance of Harrods department store all decked out for the holiday. We soaked up the English traditions of Christmas pudding, Christmas crackers, and roast goose. For our first Christmas in Bedfordshire, we were looking forward to a real storybook Christmas.

Our American military base was a small “listening” base that had a big antenna, but did not have an airfield. We had a small base exchange and a small grocery store for essentials such as milk and toilet paper, but for any real shopping we had to travel to another American base about 45 minutes away or shop “on the economy” in the nearby village. Because the exchange rate was not friendly to the dollar, and we were young and poor, we avoided shopping off base as much as possible. However, we were determined to get a “real” English Christmas tree from a local garden center.

One cold Saturday in early December, we warmed up our old 1975, pea-green, BMW 535 (which we had bought third or fourth-hand), and headed out to the nearby village of Shefford to find a Christmas tree. Unlike in the US where every store on every corner sells Christmas trees in December, there was only one garden center that had trees for sale, and their merchandising method was a puzzle. Rather than having trees in stands and all fluffed out for inspection, all the trees were still in their net cocoons and leaning against the side of the building.

“How do you tell if it’s a good tree?” we asked the lot attendant. He eyed us as if we had taken leave of our senses, so we asked in a different way “How do you know if it doesn’t have a bare spot on one side?”

“If it does, you turn that side to the wall, you see” was the reply. He followed up with “How tall o’ tree do ya want?”

Evidently, English Christmas trees are not marketed by how pretty or uniform they are in shape, but rather simply by height. We slotted that little piece of cultural information away and stated “Seven feet will give us room for the stand and the angel at the top.”

“Bloody ‘ell! Are you sure? That’s a right big tree!” he said.

We were sure. The ceiling in our apartment was eight feet, so seven feet would give us enough to saw off a bit of the trunk at the bottom, too. Didn’t want it to dry out, you know. English houses tended to have lower ceilings than our American style base housing so we figured he didn’t get many requests for the taller trees.

He pointed to the end of the long line of trees and said, “Only ‘uns we have that are that tall are down there at t’ end.” We then noticed the trees were lined up from shortest to tallest, evidently to help make selection easier for customers and make the attendant’s job easier. “Are you really sure you want a seven-foot tree?” he asked again. We nodded and he led the way to the tallest trees, shaking his head and muttering something about “idiot Yanks” under his breath.

Seven-foot tree selected and strapped to the top of the Beemer like a trussed cow still in its netting, we headed home. We unloaded in the parking lot of the apartment and sawed the end off the trunk (so it wouldn’t dry out), then paused to consider our next move. It would be easier if we attached the tree stand to it while it was outside and still wrapped in the net binding. Then we could take it in without dribbling needles from the front door to the living room.

Anything that saved getting the vacuum out was a good idea because the vacuum caused a disturbance in the Force with our dogs, Clyde and Zoe. Clyde and Zoe were Chihuahuas and many things caused them to flip out – the vacuum, the doorbell, the mail coming through the mail slot, a fire truck going by. If we could avoid the vacuum, it would be a more peaceful evening. Attaching the stand outside seemed smart.

Our living room was small as was the rest of our two-story apartment. Downstairs was the kitchen and the living room/dining room area with a sliding glass door to the small fenced-in back yard. Upstairs had two bedrooms and a bathroom. Small, but still bigger than the semidetached house we had rented in the village off base, and much cheaper – as in free cheaper. It even had a washer and dryer, cable TV, and 110V electrical current!

We decided to put the tree in front of the sliding glass patio doors so all the neighbors could enjoy our Christmas spirit and admire our holiday creation. We took care to get it centered and make sure the trunk was straight in the stand. We decided if it had a bare spot, we could always rotate it to put that spot more out of sight.

Clyde and Zoe, after initially panicking at the sight of a large foreign object entering their domain, had cautiously emerged from behind the couch and were sniffing around the base. You could almost see their little brains thinking “Alright – an indoor bathroom!” Clyde was probably more excited than Zoe, because as the male member of the canine pair, it was his job to baptize anything vertical in the house at least once.

The four of us gathered around the tree and admired our selection. The height was perfect – as it stood in the stand, the top missed the ceiling by about 5 inches, just enough for the angel to sit comfortably on the summit. I had our box of Christmas decorations ready and the dogs had taken positions on the floor cushion to watch the goings on. It was time to cut the netting and decorate our real English Christmas tree.

We debated briefly over whether it would be better to cut the netting sleeve from the top down or from the bottom up before agreeing it probably did not matter. Scott slipped his pocketknife under the bottom edge of the netting tied tightly around the trunk and began to saw at the nylon cords. After a few parted, the rest started to part on their own. In fact, the netting seemed to unzip as it if had a quick release feature. In a split second, the entire cocoon split with a huge ripping sound and the bound branches sprung outward like a rapidly expanding shock wave.

Humans sprang backwards falling over coffee tables and love seats while dogs ran for their lives to hide behind the sofa. The words from Monty Python “Run away! Run away!” echoed in my head as my feet seemed stuck in quicksand. It was like a nightmare! You know you need to run, but you just can’t seem to move fast enough. I was about to be killed by a conifer!

As the netting parted, the tree just seemed to grow bigger and bigger! It was eating our living room! In what seemed like an eternity yet still a split second, the tree reached critical mass and the branches stopped expanding, just short of the center of the room.

“Holy smokes!” I uttered from behind the love seat.

We learned of another element of a British Christmas that afternoon. English Christmas trees are as wide as they are tall. No wonder the lot attendant thought we were nuts! This tree filled most of our living room!

We also learned something else – the inevitable bare spot was irrelevant because you could see directly through the tree. Unlike American Christmas trees that are pruned and bred to be the quintessential “Christmas tree” shape with lots of branch ends for ornaments, English Christmas trees were shaped like toilet bowl brushes. There is a ring of branches that are perfectly perpendicular to the trunk, then the trunk is bare for about 6 inches until another ring of branches grows. In between the branch rings, you can look directly through the tree to someone standing on the other side and have a face-to-face conversation.

Recovering from the shock and awe, we considered our options. We could ditch the tree and go with an artificial one bought from the base exchange, but that required the engineering of getting the tree back out of the house without the benefit of the netting. We were not even sure we could get it out the sliding patio door without some serious work with the handsaw. We were stuck with this tree at least until after the New Year, maybe longer.

That year we started a new Christmas tradition of opening a bottle of wine when we decorate the tree. If we had had whiskey on hand, Jack Daniel would have become a holiday visitor, but we only had chardonnay. The situation definitely called for some holiday cheer of some sort, and even today, we continue our wine-and-tree tradition.

Because of the tree’s size, we had to purchase more lights just to cover it. We cleaned out the stock of tree lights at the little Base Exchange. It took hours to string the lights on the tree because they could not be strung the traditional way (round and round), but rather had to follow the branches, going from the trunk to the tip and back. Every ornament we owned, including the ugly ones given to me by former middle school students, went on that tree.

It was a sight to behold when lit. I am sure our house became a ground navigational aid for air traffic to the nearby air base during heavy English fogs. I know we were the talk of the neighborhood. I was very thankful our electricity bill was included in our housing allowance because I am sure we were pulling the maximum amount of current for that thing.

It was a couple of days before the dogs would come out from behind the couch. Soon, they were stretching out in the light of the tree as if it was a band of sun shining in the window on a cold day. From their little short perspective, the tree must have looked like a Sequoyah. I just know that every year thereafter when the Christmas decorations box came out, the dogs went into hiding.

That English Christmas tree lives on our in family legends as one of those incidents in life that just makes you wonder how you survived it. The next year, we purchased an artificial tree that served us well for several years. We have ventured back to the real tree side now, but we still have a secret fear our selection will try to kill us when we are not looking.

Times Passed Away

2010-08-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

As my teenage son grumbled about my directive to scrub out the toilet in his bathroom, the thought ran through my head “At least you have a toilet. Heck, you have your own bathroom!” My generation may have been the last one to touch the days of no indoor plumbing. I know people up North or in California think people in Tennessee still don’t have indoor plumbing, but reality is we do. In fact, even campgrounds here in Appalachia have bathhouses now – no more using the creek or the woods for such purposes (that would be polluting the environment, you know). It’s kind of sad really, and represents a loss of some kind of perspective. You really appreciate an indoor toilet (with a warm plastic seat) when you have to use an outdoor toilet with a porcelain seat in the middle of a winter night.

Through the romantic spectacles of time, I look back to my grandparents’ house in the country in Montgomery County, TN. The time period was the early 70’s and neither of my paternal grandparents had become symptomatic of the cancer that was lurking in both of them. Typical of memories of early childhood, my recall of those few years are burnished with love and excitement, unaffected by the world events that bordered on tearing our country apart in those turbulent years. Those were good days for a child, especially a child whose regular home environment was a typical post-war suburban tract house. Ma and Pa didn’t live in suburbia. Ma and Pa lived on a farm!

It is from this farm and these few formative years that I attained my self-identity as a “country girl”. When the pace of modern life starts building tension in me, I will return in my mind to those couple of years in rural Tennessee, a time that was slower and of a different era. Thoughts of walking through Ma’s garden on the lookout for snakes, trying to avoid the itchy scratch of okra plants and corn stalks, simply make the stresses of life in the twenty-first century melt away.

How can modern society appreciate conveniences such as garbage disposals if they’ve never scraped plates into a five-gallon bucket to slop the hogs? It still seems a waste to me to flush all those leftover tidbits down the drain. There are hungry pigs in China, right? And no one appreciates air conditioning. Ma and Pa did not have air conditioning. They had a porch. You sat on the porch at night until it was cool enough to go to bed. You got up in the morning before it was too hot to get outside. Mid-afternoon was a time to sit under the oak tree and shell peas, shuck corn or just shoot the breeze while drinking a cold Co-Cola. And it was tolerable! It was normal! AC was something they had in restaurants, not in houses!

Even more interesting, Ma and Pa had an outdoor toilet – an outhouse. It was down the hill in back of the house, next to the trash pile. It was a one-holer so if someone was in there, you had to squeeze your knees and hold it until the occupant was done. That is, if you were a girl like me. My brother, dad, uncle and grandpa could just whiz across the fence into the gully if they needed to. Somehow that never seemed fair. I must admit, however, it was pretty funny when my brother accidentally peed on the electric fence by mistake. That’s not an error a girl could make, at least not sober.

The outhouse was not a pleasant place at any time. First of all, it was dark. The only light available when the door was closed came through the cracks between the boards. Because of that, I tended to use the facility with the door open to the world. That could be why I’m not all that fixated on modesty. I’d rather show my wiley than risk sitting on a snake any day.

There was another hazard of the outhouse. It had been impressed on me that snakes, especially copperheads, liked outhouses. Being biblically afraid of snakes, I took that admonition to heart and always checked under the seat before plopping down. My legs were too short to hover. Another life-long habit was developed – ability to speed-pee. I’m still the fastest in and out of a bathroom stall regardless of venue. I also still check under the seat of all public toilets. Let’s just say I’m cautious rather than paranoid.

For middle-of-the-night calls of nature, my grandma had chamber pots in each of the two bedrooms of the house. As a child of five, it was easy to hit the round, porcelain target of a chamber pot, but to this day I wonder how my extra-large size grandma ever managed to use that thing. As I creep up in years and in waist size, I have real concerns that I could manage to hit a chamber pot these days. I think of that when I stumble into my modern, warm bathroom at night. Ma must have had great balance and extraordinary strength of knees.

As I mentioned before, the outhouse was next to the trash pile. They didn’t have trash pick-up in the country back then. Everyone had a trash barrel or a trash pile away from the house where you dumped what couldn’t be fed to the pigs. Pa would burn the trash pile once a week, creating a distinctive smelling smoke that I can still identify today when wafting on the wind. I guess Pa figured the smell of the burning trash would mask the smell of the outhouse, thus the positioning of the two in the same vicinity.

One day, I was sitting on a nearby stump waiting on the outhouse to free up, while Pa burned the trash pile. Mom was in the outhouse and was taking her own sweet time. She was never a speed-pee-er like me. Suddenly, an AquaNet can overheated in the fire and exploded, shooting like a missile across the yard and whamming into the door of the outhouse like a rocket-propelled grenade. The sound of the explosion and the hollow impact with the outhouse door were deafening. Both were followed immediately by a blood-curdling scream followed by my mother bursting out of the outhouse with her britches around her knees, running full-out for the house with her white fanny shining in the sun. Pa fell out laughing and the scene is etched on the cells of my brain in crystal clarity. Mom might not have been a speed-pee-er but she was definitely a contender for the hundred-yard dash. I thought of telling that story at her funeral a couple years ago but refrained out of fear of supernatural maternal wrath.

Actually, that was the first of two times I saw my Mom make a mad dash screaming from the outhouse. The second time, she had just settled onto the porcelain thrown when a lizard ran from under the seat and up her back under her shirt. I think she broke her own record for the hundred-yard dash. It certainly made an impression on me. I always checked under the seat and left the door open after that!

Ma and Pa’s farm had many things that are pretty much lost to time now. For instance, there was a rain barrel at the corner of the house that had the coolest, clearest water you’ve ever seen. There was a tin dipper that hung on a peg on the wall beside it. The inside of the barrel was covered in green moss which I think must have worked as some kind of filter because the water was always clean. Long before water fountains or bottled water, there were rain barrels. Thirsty? Pop the top off the rain barrel and dip the dipper in for the best drink of water you ever had. No plastic to fill up a landfill!

Ma and Pa also had feather beds. Real feather beds, not the kind you get at Penney’s that lie on top of the mattress. My cousins and I would stand on the foot board of Ma’s big feather bed and do rolling dives into the feather tick. That was much better than bouncing on a spring mattress. Feather ticks envelope you whereas with a regular spring mattress you bounce. There is no bounce in a feather tick. It’s like quicksand – it just sucks you right in and it is a fight to get out.

Whenever we would go visit Ma and Pa, my parents would take the front bedroom and we grand kids would bunk with Ma and Pa in the back bedroom. There were two feather beds in there. My brother and cousin Tony bunked with Pa in one bed and my two girl cousins and I bunked with Ma in the other. Ma was a large lady and she didn’t fluff her feather bed very often. As a result, it was pretty much U-shaped with the head and foot being higher than the middle. Tuck Ma in there with us three girls and you had quite a load. And it was definitely an unbalanced load. No matter where we kids were in the bed, we’d roll toward Ma. You didn’t want to be the one on the inside because you ended up getting squished between a cousin and Ma’s big hind-end. That could be a dangerous position in a feather bed. You could smother!

Bunking with Ma was still better than bunking with Pa. Pa was devious. He would lie in bed with my brother and cousin and read them the funny paper. Just at the good part, Pa would pause and say “Was that a spider I felt on my leg?” Of course, the boys would dive under the covers looking for the spider only to discover that Pa had farted big-time and was leading them into an ambush. With screams of “Woowee!” and “Oh gosh! That’s awful!” they would evacuate the bed and stand there shivering in their pj’s while we females in the other bed giggled. I never could figure out why they couldn’t see it coming because Pa never changed his tactics yet they fell for it every time. The prospect of smothering in the feather bed while squished against Ma was much better than the absolute certainty of getting gassed by Pa in his.

Not only did Ma and Pa’s house no have air conditioning, but the only heat it had was the coal fireplaces in the bedrooms and living room. Pa would stoke the coal high when we went to bed but by morning, it was cold as a well digger’s butt in those rooms. The linoleum floors were always chilly in the winter and the only truly warm room was always the kitchen. In fact, more living was done in Ma’s kitchen than in any other room of the house except maybe the front porch. The kitchen was the warm heart of that tiny four-room house.

Ma’s kitchen is where we would get our Saturday night baths in the winter. Pa would haul in the number three washtub from its peg on the back porch and Ma would fill it with water hauled from the well and heated up on the stove. We took baths in the order of age, oldest to youngest. Being the youngest, I always got the yucky water. It was also the coldest by the time I got to it. No playing with Barbie and her boat in Ma’s tub. You got in, washed, and got out!

Summer baths were better and in a different location – the back porch. Instead of heating water, summer baths were water hauled straight from the well. Because there was no heating involved, the tub could be emptied between bathers. When I watch HGTV now and someone has an outdoor shower constructed that cost them thousands, I always think a number three washtub on the back porch would have been a lot cheaper.

Ma and Pa’s farm was a sharecropper farm. They rented and worked it, but for a time before they got sick, they both also worked at a factory in the nearby town. On the farm, they raised tobacco and Ma had a vegetable garden where she grew all the normal stuff like corn, tomatoes, okra, etc. Pa raised some pigs and goats and kept bees. There was an orchard and grapevines behind the house. Ma always canned stuff and had a pantry stuffed with Ball jars. It was a veritable cornucopia of self-sufficiency.

I wish I had had more years there to learn gardening and canning and how to operate Ma’s treadle sewing machine. Ma and Pa both fell to cancer within just a few months of each other and the farm was left to my memories. Those few years of monthly weekend visits and summer vacations made a huge impression on me. They serve as a dividing line in my mind between “old times” and “modern years”.

Most people would probably have categorized Ma and Pa as poor country folk, but I think they were the richest people on earth. They certainly imparted a mindset to me that is still with me forty years later. Their farm was a virtual play land for a youngster, populated with cows, pigs, goats, beagles and chickens. Memories I treasure were forged there during those few years I remember. And I never take an indoor toilet for granted!

Is There Really Anything New Under the Sun?

2010-05-20T12:40:00.000-07:00

I see in the news today that North Korea is threatening “all-out war” after sinking a South Korean submarine last week. Somalia is still messed up and the Middle East continues its centuries-old slow boil. The US economy is on life-support and shows few solid signs of being able to take the IV of foreign loans out of the vein. Is any of this really new? I don’t think so.

Evil is consistent and always has the same game plan. Yes, I said the e-word because that’s what drives chaos. I believe evil is real just like love is real. Notice I didn’t say “good” as the flip side of evil. Good is a relative term and means different things to different people. For instance, many people thought Hitler’s reign of terror was a “good thing” to “cleanse Europe of the Semitic plague”. What’s good to you may not be good to me. However, love is an absolute and is the opposite of evil. The two forces are very real and they polarized. One is the absence of the other.

Evil has a set play book it uses. Examine great feats of evil over the centuries and you will find similarities. The killing fields of Cambodia/Laos are much like the concentration camps of Poland or the refugee exterminations in Angola. Mass killings like the Oklahoma City bombing and the events of 9/11 look a lot alike. Narrow that down to Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Ft. Hood and you still get the same playbook. The same X’s and O’s are on the whiteboard with the same score and the same defensive responses.

Why do we keep countering evil with the same old responses? Hindsight is 20/20 and you would think in the centuries of mankind, we would be able to recognize the warning signs and shut the door before the boogeyman was able to gain entrance. Part of our problem is we misidentify evil. We attribute evil’s characteristics to neutral things. I think we just don’t pay attention. We choose not to see things. We justify things under the guise of “tolerance” or “equality”.

Both my grandfather and my father were Korean veterans, yet here we are again fifty years later facing the same crap. Why? Because the evil people didn’t change. They were just contained and subdued for awhile. Why do people scream about Darfur when millions of babies are killed in this country every year? Because it’s trendy to scream about Darfur. Somehow, it’s not trendy to scream about China and the infanticide that occurs there. Nothing has changed - we just choose not to see it. It keeps us comfortable here in the richest country in the world. If I don't look at it, it's not real.

Why am I writing this? I guess I’m just sick of the whole thing. My generation has trucked along thinking common sense would eventually right the weird tilt the world has taken over the past thirty years before we all slid off the edge. Surely everyone else can see what we see, right? I’m starting to wonder.

Where is common sense? Who is going to stand up and call evil out for what it is – call a spade a spade? I think it’s up to those of us left who have not been deceived into not recognizing evil anymore. So much evil is lumped under “tolerance” or “open mindedness” or “humanism” when it should really be identified for what it is – evil.

The Hoo Doo Herald - Happenings in Our Town

2009-11-29T15:15:00.000-08:00

By Maye Belle Mitchell

This week was Thanksgiving! I hope you all enjoyed your special holiday meals with kith and kin. I am so thrilled to be writing this new column for our weekly newspaper, The Hoo Doo Herald! It was one of the many things I enumerated during the blessing over our turducken and turnips this year. Praise be to the Lord! The opportunity to put pen to paper and report on the fascinating lives of members of our community is just thrilling and I hope to be a true blessing to our wonderful town!

Speaking of Thanksgiving, did you know a turkey can run 20 miles an hour when spooked? That’s a fast bird! Unfortunately for him, a bullet flies a bit faster and a four-wheeler can do at least twice that. No hope for the turkey when faced with one of our hunters here in Rawlins County, is there! Carter Baker was quoted as saying “Ain’t no bird goin’ to out run my Remington 20 gauge” and he is so right. We have some of the finest hunters in the world here!

The Maye Belle Mitchell School of Etiquette would like to welcome Miss Eugenia Kay Arthur and Miss Bobbi Lee Haskell to our Thursday afternoon class. These two young ladies join the rest of the class of eight students who are learning the fine art of being a Southern Lady. I want to remind everyone of the High Tea on Sunday afternoon sponsored by the Ladies Guild of the First Baptist Church of Hoo Doo. If any ladies out there can contribute sweet meats, tea cakes, or other fine finger food, please bring those dishes to the Fellowship Hall of the church on Saturday afternoon.

Congratulations to the proud new parents Albert and Terri Lynne Rouchet on the early arrival of their bouncing baby girl Antoinette Lucille Rouchet. Little Antoinette, a honeymoon baby, arrived a month early and weighed in at a healthy nine pounds, three ounces. Proud grandparents are Charles and Annette Marie Rouchet and Tom and Shirley Sue Bobo. Shirley Sue Bobo is quoted as saying “I’m not surprised little Antoinette Lucille came eight months after the honeymoon – she was such a big baby she just had to gain some elbow room. All us Bobo’s have big, early babies, you know.”

The insanity of the holidays is upon us and I want to encourage all of you to remember the true reason for the season – the birth of our Lord and Savior. Jesus had a lot in common with little Antoinette Lucille – he was a surprise and his earthly daddy was a little concerned at the beginning. Everything worked out in the end, though! We don’t know how big the baby Jesus was but Mary couldn’t have had a better midwife than the angels of heaven and the Holy Spirit praise God! I do think the Father might have arranged a bit of a better room for them. After all, Mary was a lady and giving birth around those stinky cows and sheep must not have been pleasant. But that was not for me to decide, now, was it!

A community Thanksgiving Service was held at the Hoo Doo Church of Christ last Sunday at 6:00 pm. It was a great time for the community members to get together and fellowship in the name of the Lord. I attended as a member of the press and was pleased at the wonderful array of delicious homemade dishes that were brought by the ladies of the church. Terry Gayle Hampton – I simply MUST get that deviled eggs recipe from you! It was to die for! The punch Bucky Bumpus made up was also exquisite! I could recognize the taste of lemons, Sundrop soda and pineapple juice but there was something else there in the recipe I just couldn’t put my finger on. It was the crowning touch whatever it was!

On Sunday afternoon, after a simply inspiring sermon by Reverend Hezekiah Smoot at the First Baptist Church, my dear husband Porter took me to dinner at the End of the Road restaurant across the river in Caneyville. The food was fabulous and the Christmas décor was simply divine. Porter and I so enjoyed our luncheon. If you haven’t patronized this lovely new, locally-owned eating establishment, I want to truly encourage you. The Divines who run the restaurant are good Christian people of the Lutheran persuasion and have provided a nice eatery for our community. I partook of the lunch special – beans and hamhocks accompanied by turnip greens, fried okra, and Cynthia Divine’s wonderful cornbread muffins.

Speaking of Porter, I want to publicly declare my undying love and devotion to my handsome and virile husband and wish him a fabulous 49th birthday! Happy Birthday Sweetie Pie! One more year before you hit the big 5-0! While I have not quite hit the 4-0 mark myself, I can see it looming on the horizon. I hope you have a supremely happy year and I love you so much Muggle Wumps!

We have our own little actress among us – Miss Carrie Jo Footstone made her acting debut this week at the Dixie Dance Hall and Theater in Viola. She played the role of the light pole in the musical “Singing in the Rain”. She has been taking acting classes for several months at Ted Flower’s Acting School in downtown Hoo Doo. This was her first performance and she did a superb job! She held a straight face the entire performance – something I sure couldn’t do!

The Overcoming Adversity group of Black Creek met last Tuesday for their Thanksgiving meal. Before the meal, the invocation was given by Johnny Mize and then the eating took place. In his prayer, Johnny encouraged us all to be thankful for our blessings. Boner MacIntyre read the minutes of the previous meeting. Door prizes of a gift certificate for a car wash and a cheese board were awarded to ecstatic winners Kathy Jo Martin and Harold Lakey. The next meeting will be in January.

Joe Bob and Jerri Ann Cravens were in town from their home in distant Nashville to visit. They ate at the Hoo Doo Family Restaurant where they dined on fried catfish and chitlins. After their lovely dinner, they attended a movie at the Palace Theater where they enjoyed popcorn, Diet Cokes, Raisinets, and Whoppers as an after-luncheon treat.

I have never seen so many people in our community gathered to see a movie as I saw Wednesday night for the premier of Full Moon. The movie is supposedly a dark flick that revolves around a teenage romance between humans and vampires. As a good Christian, I was horrified to see so many young, impressionable young ladies standing in line to buy tickets. It’s hard to believe parents would allow them to see a movie that promotes demons and evil beings as romantic characters. I am proud to say none of the students of the Maye Belle Mitchell School of Etiquette were in attendance!

The funeral for Glennis Ruth-Ann Webb was held on Friday. The Hoo Doo Funeral Home reported a strong turnout for the service despite the holiday and Mrs. Webb’s history of being a liberal all her life. We extend Christian sympathy to the family.

If you have news you would like to be printed, simply email me or drop by the Maye Belle Mitchell School of Etiquette on Tuesdays or Thursdays! I would dearly love to hear from you! God bless and allow me to leave you with this thought to guard your heart this week “They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world” I John 4:5. Tootle-loo sweet readers!

Insomnia

2009-06-27T22:43:00.000-07:00

It is half past midnight and I cannot sleep. Insomnia is starting to be a more common occurrence for me. I don’t know if it is early menopause rearing its head or simply the fact that life is going along fairly smoothly at the moment. I’ve gotten so accustomed to life being one huge anxiety attack punctuated by different crises that the relative quiet of normalcy is disturbing. I find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Of course, the wakefulness of tonight might also be attributable to Hubby’s being away on a trip. I don’t sleep well when he is not providing that metronomic beat of snores from the other side of the bed. Yes, I snore, too, but I claim it is in self-defense. A join-‘em if you can’t beat ‘em philosophy, if you will.

Whatever the cause, I found myself “writing” in my head while staring at the bedside clock so I knew it was useless to try to chase down the Sandman; I find myself here in front of my dual-screened Dell, pecking away to get these thoughts out of my head. ‘Tis the writer’s curse, this compulsion to “get it out, get it down”. I don’t imagine engineers often find themselves awake at odd hours designing motors, or bridges, or waste water plants.

I’ve spent the last week feeling my way around Facebook at the insistence of my friend Haley. I consider myself fairly technically astute. After all, I make my living on a computer and my audience is mostly web-based for the work I do. Still, I had resisted the whole social networking trend with the logic that I spend all my working day in front of a computer so I don’t want to spend my leisure time there. It seemed more the realm of my son’s world than mine. After a week of surfing, I’m not so sure.

I’ve discovered something disturbing this week. The old friends with whom I went to high school have all gotten old. I am not one to deny my age. In fact, I am proud of every hard-earned gray hair I have. I’m 43 and feel 63 on some days. Unlike a 63-year-old, however, I am blessed/cursed with a memory that is exceptional in terms of trivia recall. I have all sorts of useless crap stored in my head about my childhood and teenage years before Life with a capital L hit. For example, I remember that my good friend Monica’s favorite stuffed animal was named Boo Boo Kitty. I remember that Lisa L., our class valedictorian, took the ACT test three times to score one point higher (a 30) so she would get a scholarship to the college of her choice. I remember that Celina Harris’s mother was French and Celina moved away from our hometown in fourth grade. Why do I have all this junk crammed into my head?

After surfing around Facebook for a week, I’ve found some of the old classmates with whom I went to school but they don’t look like my crystal clear memories anymore. I’m not sure I like that. I think I preferred that we were all still 18 somewhere in my mind and none of us had grown fat, lost our hair, lost a limb, or even lost our lives. I believe I’ve come face-to-face with my own mortality.

I find that odd, because so much of the recent years of my life have been dominated by the death of loved ones or death on the horizon. My parents are dead as are all my grandparents. If you have lost your parents, you know the strange feeling you get when you realize you are now the grown up in the scenario. I have a brother who is quite ill with a genetic disease that I may or may not have. It’s been hard to ignore Life lately. Yet, somehow, I managed to keep those years from 1966 to 1984 encapsulated in a memory bubble and convinced myself that the occupants of that bubble were as frozen in time as the figures inside a snow globe.

I look at my son now and think about how he will look back upon these teenage years of his when he is in his 40’s. I wonder what will stand out to him. By what events will he mark Before and After? What will he say when he says “I can remember when we didn’t have ____”?

My generation was fortunate to grow up during years of great change. I think of my parents’ generation (born in the early 30’s) and they didn’t see a lot of technological change in their youth. They went through the Depression and World War II, the Korean War and the Cold War but those were events, not changes to things that impacted daily lives. Sure, they saw the advent of TV and the Bomb but they were grown and having us by the time the Space Race revved up and the Soviet Union was a menace on our back doorstep. Isn’t it ironic that we now think of those as the “good old days” of knowing your enemy?

One of my earliest memories is of the Lunar Landing in 1969. My father – heck, my entire town – was integrally involved in the space program and I am sure I am not the only toddler who was forced to sit in front of the TV in July of 1969 to watch Neil Armstrong make history. I think that falls into the Event category, though, much like the Cuban Missile Crisis. My thought process is leading to things that are different, things I can say “I remember the first time”.

Here’s a list. Maybe if I get these out, I can find sleep tonight.

I can remember the first:
Time I saw a calculator. It was about the size of a box of checks and did the basic functions (no square roots or exponents).

Time I saw a microwave. It was huge and we were all a bit afraid to stand too close to it. All the convenience stores had big warning signs on the doors that a microwave was in use on the premises.

Time I saw a computer. It was a big mainframe with huge tape drives and lots of toggle switches and lights. I saw one similar in the Smithsonian last year.

Data sheets I ever saw. That same computer spit out reams and reams (and I mean huge feet-stacks) of green and white lined paper. My dad brought it home for me to use to color pictures on the back side.

Car we ever had that had air conditioning. My mom still refused to use it, though, because it made the car overheat.

IBM Wheelwriter typewriter. It was a huge improvement over the IBM Selectric I had learned to type on because it had an auto-correct function, much like the backspace on today’s PCs. Oh the joy of not having to use a typewriter eraser!

Walkman. I saved up and bought one for about $100. It was an AM/FM/Cassette and it was a big advancement over the 8-track tape deck.

Pair of Nike tennis shoes that hit the market. I again saved up my allowance and bought a pair.

Personal computer. My high school had one and it was on a cart that they wheeled around. I never was able to actually touch it, though, because all the math whizzes used it. I think I was a bit afraid of it anyway. At that time, War Games was a hit movie and we had all sorts of illusions about computers.

Time the Space Shuttle flew. Now, over twenty five years later, I am (hopefully) going to get to see my first in-person launch next month.

Camaro with T-tops. Now that was a hot car!

Time the interstate opened. It spelled the death of Hwy. 41 through our town and all the motels and restaurants that were supported by the traffic.

Video on MTV. That was when MTV still showed videos.

Sesame Street Show.

Mobile phone. It was not a cellphone but a CAR phone!

Video game – yes, it was Pong.

There are a lot of things which I saw die, too. Things that my son will never see or experience. Here is a list:

Outhouses and chamber pots. My grandparents lived in a house without plumbing and I experienced peeing in a pot and in a cold shack in the middle of winter

Cold water drunk from a shaded rain barrel at the corner of the house

TV dinners cooked in the oven, not the microwave; ditto for baked potatoes, hot dogs, popcorn…

Water glasses brought to the table by the waitress on her first trip after you sit down

One-screened movie theaters

Sitting on the porch at night because it’s too hot inside to sleep

Volkswagen bugs (the old kind)

TV with only 5 channels – Channel 2, Channel 4, Channel 5, Channel 8 and Channel 17

TV from rabbit ears and in black and white

NASCAR sponsored by Winston or Budweiser or other politically incorrect companies.

Old Timers Day

Home-made Halloween costumes

Everything closed on Sunday

Colored toilet paper

Smallpox vaccine scars

Houses heated by coal

Going to school with the same kids from kindergarten all the way through high school

Filmstrips and 16mm films

Cards in the backs of library books

Chalkdust

Polio victims

Riding in the car with no seat belts

What are the next twenty years going to bring? Looking backward at the last two decades and extrapolating forward, it is unfathomable. Just when we feel like we can say “There is nothing new to be invented”, we prove ourselves wrong. What will our children remember fondly when we are gone and they are looking backward? Gosh, I hope it is something good – like flying cars. They have been promising us flying cars forever!

I'm Lovin' It

2009-06-24T09:14:00.001-07:00

The world is full of wonderful, pithy adages. Phrases like “what goes around, comes around” and “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” are vividly descriptive and often perfectly describe a situation or occurrence. The phrase “teenage boys will eat anything” is one such perfect phrase and it was proven in our house not long ago.

Son is now nearing the age of 16 and has shot up to over six feet in height over the past year and is still growing. His sophomore buddies are all growing too so when they descend on our house, it is akin to a plague of locusts from the Old Testament. Cabinets are stripped bare; freezers are emptied; and refrigerators are decimated. I’ve seen five packages of Oreo Double Stuff cookies disappear overnight.

A few weeks ago, Son’s two best buds – the Apostles (called such because their real names are Peter and Andrew) – came over to spend the night and play Xbox. I had stocked up the refrigerator with food that was easy-to-fix and did not require any skill other than knowing how to set a microwave. My method is to provide sustenance that they can fix themselves and then just get out of the way. I’ve tried cooking “real” meals for them but normal food is not what they crave during all-night Xbox marathons. They want junk food, plain and simple.

This particular weekend, I had thought I was being smart when I purchased a tub of Chi-Chi’s prepared taco meat and some tortillas. The boys would be able to heat up the meat and make their own tacos or burritos or whatever floated their boat. When Son came into my office and asked about supper I told him there was a container of taco meat in the fridge and some tortillas – they could construct their own soft tacos. They were thrilled! I could hear them in the kitchen arguing over the cheese and salsa as they worked to do a “Taco Bell” at home.

An hour or so later, I wandered into the kitchen to assess the damage and pour myself a Friday-night glass of wine. As I was reaching into the back of the fridge for the pinot grigio, my eye caught on the Chi-Chi’s taco meat container, exactly where I had put it under the sour cream when I unloaded groceries. It had obviously not been touched or moved. Huh? I KNEW they had eaten tacos because Son had asked me specifically how long to heat up the container of meat.

I straightened up and scanned the countertops. There was the empty tortilla bag; there was the shredded cheese; there was the salsa jar…and OH NO! There was the dog food container!

We have a very elderly Chihuahua named Clyde who has few teeth and a very picky appetite. He also has the early stages of kidney failure so I prepare special food for him about once a week. The “Clyde Food” contains hamburger meat, dog vitamins, cod liver oil, beef gravy and ground up Science Diet K/D Prescription Diet dry dog food. I prepare it in a week’s supply and store it in a Tupperware container in the fridge. Since he only eats about a tablespoon at a time, the container lasts quite awhile.

Evidently, what pleases Clyde pleases teenage boys, too, because they had eaten every last crumb of his homemade kibble. And they didn’t even know it!
I yelled out to the living room for them to come to the kitchen. They trooped in expecting to get a lecture on dirty dishes left but I casually asked “So, how were the tacos?”

They were enthusiastic – “Oh, they were great!”, “Yummy!”, “Really good!”

So I asked “Anyone feeling queasy or like you have an overwhelming urge to bark?”
I was faced with puzzled looks.

“Guys, you ate the dog food,” I stated. “HERE’S the taco meat.” I held up the unopened tub of Chi-Chi’s.

These three strapping young men turned white as sheets. No one uttered a word. After several moments of stunned silence, they looked at each other and then Peter said “Well, it was good! Clyde’s a lucky dog!”

Adventures in Pain

2009-01-05T09:08:00.001-08:00

Last Wednesday, we as a family purchased a family membership at our local gym. Hubby figured it would be something he and son could do together. Son likes it because he can work out and “get buff” with weights. I tag along in a state of grumpy martyrdom. Okay, I realize I need to do something to get my butt moving. I sit in front of a computer twelve hours a day. I got so stiff at one point I had to have physical therapy. I’m trying to figure out a way to write off massage therapy as a business expense. I’m 42 and I’ve gained thirty pounds in 2008 after having lost 30 pounds in 2007. It sucks.

My individual introductory session last week was conducted by a fellow I would term as a straight Richard Simmons. He was just WAY too bouncy and enthusiastic. He’s giving me high fives for making it two minutes on the treadmill without falling on my ass and I’m rolling my eyes behind his back. Well, I rolled my eyes until I realized the whole place has mirrors so he was actually seeing me roll my eyes behind his back. I decided that since he was “helping me stretch” (actually trying to dislocate my hip like a chicken leg from the carcass), I’d better be nice. I put on my “Oh! I’m so happy to be here!” face after that.

“Dick” took me through several stretches and ran me through the modern torture machines on the floor to give me an idea of what I should be doing to “loosen up my hips”. Yeah right. That’s gym rat code for shrink my butt. As I’m gritting my teeth and hoping I have lots of Advil at home, I’m thinking “You know, someone somewhere actually designs these weird things. Who sits around and thinks of how to mechanically move the human body in every possible direction?” Sicko.

Prior to running the resistance machine gauntlet, Dick (actually, I think his name was David but who cares) did this thing he called “foam rolling” on the large muscles of my legs. Essentially, this was like taking a rolling pin and rolling the muscles like biscuit dough. It was awful! I don’t have biscuit dough muscles and I’m pretty sure they weren’t ever meant to be rolled like that. I silently decided that was for the birds and those foam things would never get near me again. Dick didn’t realize how close he came to being beat about the head with a sweaty towel. Lucky for him I’ve been through natural childbirth and can endure high levels of pain.

One of the problems I’ve always had with gyms is that it feels like there is an “in” crowd at the gym. They wear all the right work out clothes, have the expensive tennis shoes, and are so skinny that you wonder why they are at the gym anyway. Then you realize they actually LIVE here and you feel even more like an out-of-town visitor. The gym rats are also all in their twenties and have perpetual tans. That means they have no kids and fairly stressless jobs (like waiting tables at Hooters) so they can spend lots of time at the tanning booth or by the pool. And at the gym.

I certainly don’t fit in. I’m over 40, 40 pounds overweight and dressed like I just stepped out of Goodwill. My shoes are Payless specials and I have no electronic “gear” such as an Ipod or a cell phone arm band. I’m thinking maybe I should bring my kitchen timer along next time and pretend it’s some sort of new, cutting edge heart rate monitor or something. I could duct tape it to my calf or something. You know – just to blend in with the crowd.

Saturday was my first “real” day at the gym when I could do what I wanted to without Dick following me around counting reps and saying sappy encouraging things like “Feel the burn!” or
“No pain no gain”. I did my stretches I learned in 1983 from my Jane Fonda album and then got on the treadmill. I knew enough not to stand on it directly to start it but beyond that, it was like looking at the dashboard of the space shuttle. Buttons, lights flashing, all kinds of gauges and indicators. I decided to risk it and started going through the preflight – flaps down, trim up, fuel rich, hit the starter…okay, it’s moving. Now to taxi out carefully. I stepped on it and held onto the hand rails for dear life as I watched the dashboard for anomalies.

I finally figured out that one indicator was time that was counting up – that tells me how long it will take for me to drop dead. The next indicator tells me what incline I’m walking out – set that puppy to 0! The next one is speed. And the one on the far right tells number of calories burned. Okay, I’m getting the hang of this so I increase my speed to 3.1 mph. Not bad. I’m a naturally fast walker so this feels okay. I still can’t let go of the handlebars, though, because I get dizzy but I’m feeling less like an idiot. Confidence is building. I chuck the speed up to 3.5 and now we’re truckin’.

I notice there are TVs in front of me hanging from the ceiling. One is on ESPN (of course), one is on a music video channel, and one is on Fox News. The only one I can hear is the music channel and it has some weird group on it so I try to watch the Fox News channel. I can’t hear it but it has subtitles. I then realize I can’t SEE the subtitles without my glasses. I don’t have my glasses on because they would slide off my face with the sweat that is rapidly building. So I decide to try to read lips but soon realize I can check that off as one more thing I can’t do very well, along with biscuit roll muscles.

My breath is coming shorter and I notice my attitude is starting to change. I’m no longer just grumpy. I’m starting to think evil thoughts such as “Whoever invented treadmills should be shot”, “Whoever invented that foam roller thing should be tortured and then shot”, and “Whoever invented small print subtitles should have their eyes poked out”. I realize I’m breathing really hard and I glance down at the dashboard. I’ve only been on the dang thing five minutes, I’ve walked three-tenths of a mile and I’ve only burned 15 calories. WHAT??? This was going to be worse than I expected and I expected really bad.

Slowly I begin to realize there is a guy in front of me on one of the shoulder torture devices who continues to look at me. Now I KNOW it’s not because I’m a hot babe – HA – I’ve not had a shower, no makeup, I’m sweating like a racehorse, and my face probably looks like the hind-end of a baboon. Then it dawns on me why he’s staring at me. In my ignorance of gym etiquette, I had neglected to wear an athletic bra and instead just wore my regular old, stretched out, comfortable Playtex. Newton’s Third Law of Motion – for each action, there is an equal and opposite reaction – was in play under my “I gave blood” t-shirt. Oh brother.

I glanced at the dashboard and saw that I was halfway to my goal of 2 miles so I was darned if I was going to stop ‘cause my boobs were crashing around like ping pong balls in a gallon-size pickle jar. I’d burned a whopping 98 calories, dammit, and I was in the peak of the distance counter. I was going to finish this or die trying.

My only recourse was to give the guy my “evil Teacher Look”. Every teacher and most moms know this look, but former and current middle school teachers are best at it. It’s the look that says “I know what you are thinking and you are going to spend the rest of your life in detention if you don’t straighten up RIGHT NOW.” I leveled my gaze at him and fired away. It worked! Hah! It worked! He suddenly decided that his shoulders were shredded enough and decided to move across the room to the gorilla section.

Now that I was rid of Mr. Pervert, I decided to work on my attitude a bit. After all, I’m in sales and I know that attitude is more than half the battle. I’m also a pretty competitive person, especially with myself, so I decided to challenge myself to think positive thoughts. Positive thoughts. Okay. Think. What is good about this? My mental silence was deafening. It was so quiet that I could actually hear my ears ringing from the residual hangover of that long-ago Bruce Springsteen concert. I was a complete blank.

Suddenly, it was like God heard me and gave me inspiration. Miss Size 4 got on the treadmill directly to my left and started taxiing. I thought “Heh, I’ve got a head start on her! I’m already at a mile and a half!” As she’s tippy-toeing along at a leisurely warm-up speed of 2 mph, I kick it up to 3.7 and increase the incline to .5. I’ll show her! I’ve got this down. I used to be the fastest to complete a mile in my ninth grade gym class and that included the boys so I know I can beat her.

I glance at my dashboard and the heart rate monitor is flashing red. I wonder vaguely in the back of my mind if that is a bad thing. I wipe the sweat off my nose with my towel and keep going. I’m feeling confident then Miss Size 4 starts RUNNING! What is she doing? Isn’t there a rule that you can’t do that for safety reasons? You could get hurt or hurt someone else, right? I kick up the incline on my machine to 1.0. She may be running but I’m climbing Mt. Everest at 3.5 mph. Let’s see her match that!

Out of the corner of my eye, I see her treadmill start to rise at the front. My dashboard starts beeping loudly at me. I glance around for one of those portable defibrillators like they have now at airports because I’m starting to think I may need one. They do train these gym monitors how to do CPR, right? Just don’t let it be Dick that comes to my rescue. I’d rather die, please. Mr. Pervert can stay away, too. Just drag me out to the parking lot and let the Schwann’s truck run over me. That’s the way I want to go.

“Are you going to go into cool down or keep going?” It’s Miss Size 4 talking to me. She can run and talk at the same time? Holy cow! It’s Superwoman in disguise. I glance at her in oxygen-deprived confusion. “Huh?” I puff. “Your timer is going off” she says. I then realize the beeping sound of the dashboard isn’t the warning signal for eminent heart failure but rather that I’ve completed my assigned 2 miles and need to slow down to give my noodle legs a chance to recover before I actually try to walk on dry land.

I drop the incline on my machine so fast my ears pop and start backing off on the speed. I’m almost done, thank goodness. Mentally, I’m rummaging through my medicine cabinet for something more powerful than Advil because I’m pretty sure I’m going to need it. I glance up at the TVs once more and lo and behold – it’s Bon Jovi and their new video “Have a Nice Day”. Ah, Jon Bon Jovi! After all these years, he’s still hot and has great teeth.

Suddenly, I time travel back to 1984 when none of my joints creaked, Levi’s fit, and I could squat down without my feet going to sleep. I smile. I made it. Not only through this first two miles of pain but also through the last 25 years of life. I glance at Miss Size 4 and decide I wouldn’t trade places with her. I’ve learned a lot since I was a size four and endured more pain that this treadmill can dish out. My butt may be the size of a barn but my character is Olympic-class.

Now if I can just remember which locker is mine…

Driving Mrs. Crazy

2008-12-09T16:24:00.000-08:00

Let me preface this post with an explanation (okay, it’s a blatant excuse) of why it has been so long since my last post. Every writer has a muse – some element on the inside that stirs thought and creativity and makes the words flow from the spirit to the page. In my case, my muse has been on strike from sheer overwork and has refused to produce for my personal blog due to the tremendous workload she carries for my normal job. I can understand that but it’s frustrating. As I write this, however, I am sitting in the Palm Beach International Airport awaiting my flight back to the real world. I am departing a weekend in Boca Raton where my muse has been wined and dined, sunned and oiled, massaged and pampered to the nth degree in our annual managers’ retreat. Now my muse is in a better mood and allowing ideas to flow again for this blog.

Transportation seems to play a big role in our family these days. Planes, trains and automobiles seem to be regular elements that touch the three of us. Hubby flies on a fairly regular basis to luxurious places like Boise and Omaha for work. I have the daily schlep to take the kid to school, run errands, etc. For our vacation in July, we tagged along with hubby to DC where we rode the subway daily.

Since September, son has added a new dimension to transportation because he received his learner’s permit. I have been surreptitiously giving him driving lessons for a couple of years on the Civic but now he is actually legal to drive so his territory for travel has expanded from the orchard and our country road to anywhere either hubby or I will let him take the wheel. The learner’s permit is one in several rites of passage ending, in my opinion, with becoming a parent several years down the road. Once you become a parent, you are truly an adult and for some mysterious reason your ability to stay up late, drink lots of alcohol, and see small print starts to disappear.

With the learner’s permit the perpetual “why?” of the three year old is now replaced with the perpetual “Can I drive?” of the fifteen year old. I have to give son credit – he’s a fairly good driver for a raw newbie. Of course, he’s never taken a driving lesson from his dad which I think has a lot to do with it. I’ve considered it MY job since fifth grade to teach this kid how to drive simply to do my level best to make sure he’s around to take care of me in my senile retirement. Allowing hubby to teach him how to drive would result in a minimum of one totaled vehicle within the first six months.

There was actually unspoken consensus that hubby would not be teaching son how to drive. Hubby has no patience and a lead foot. He also makes the monthly car payment when he pays the bills so it scrapes on his nerves when the kid gets behind the wheel of the new vehicle. He’s not worried about son’s life or the life of innocent bystanders but about whether the car will remain unscathed. Well, that might be a bit of an exaggeration but it’s definitely an element of concern.

Truth be told, I’d rather ride with my son behind the wheel than my husband. Son is still petrified of screwing up or putting a scratch on the car so he is extremely careful and follows directions. He acquiesces to the rule of no radio on while driving and doesn’t say a word when I say “Watch your speed”. On the other hand, if I even glance at the speedometer when hubby is driving he gets defensive and starts telling me to chill out. Hubby drives with his knees while dialing his cell phone or eating a burrito. Son cannot even open a bottle of Mountain Dew while driving so he keeps both hands at ten and two on the wheel and only takes a sip while stopped at a red light. I feel much safer riding with son.

Maybe part of my terror of riding with my husband is simply the fact that I’m getting older. I know the older my mother became, the more tense she was riding with someone else. I find myself gripping the door handle with the same white knuckles that she did and bracing my feet against the floorboard when brake lights ahead start coming on. I’ve discovered that I look further down the road than my husband. I can see cars starting to slow down long before he does. He sees nothing wrong with slamming on the brakes and swerving to the right to avoid ramming the car stopped ahead whereas I would have been braking a half mile earlier. His logic is that he’s never hit someone in the rear yet; there’s a fault in that thinking somewhere but I’m usually in such a state of terror that I can’t think of how to counter such a stupid statement.

Mapquest has had a huge impact on our family’s transportation. Usually, if we are going somewhere new, we Mapquest our destination prior to departure. Sometimes, though, we forget to run the search and end up a bit lost en route. In those instances, hubby pulls out the cell phone GPS service. When the cell phone appears, son and I know we are about to go from turned around to completely lost for hours. The cell phone is NEVER accurate in its directions but hubby puts his complete faith in the Phone. It doesn’t matter if the big huge signs all say turn right, if the Phone says turn left, hubby turns left.

Hubby’s undying belief in the Phone has led us to interesting discoveries of the swamps of South Carolina and small forgotten ghost towns in Florida. Son and I secretly call it the “Deliverance Phone” because we swear we hear banjo music in the background behind the voice on the Phone. We’ve discovered that one way signs can be ignored if the Phone says traveling the opposite way is the correct route. It must have some sort of traffic law-suspension powers. We have traversed the same stretch of road in both directions several times over because the Phone gets stuck in a “Recalculating route. Make a u-turn as soon as it is safely possible.” Of course, hubby gets uptight when son or I cautiously point out that we’ve now passed Larry’s Lounge and Bait Shop three times in the last ten minutes. Hubby simply contends that Larry must be franchised to multiple locations.

Hubby always wanted to be a jet pilot but he’s too tall. The Air Force would have required him to cut his legs off at the knees to be able to fly their planes. I think he secretly fantasizes he is flying a jet when he drives. I’m sure he is convinced a Honda Civic can achieve Mach 1 and heavy traffic conditions are just an opportunity to practice close formation flying. Like a Thunderbird pilot, hubby feels traveling 300 mph 7 inches from your wing man is a great accomplishment. I should note that Thunderbird pilots fly without anyone else in the cockpit. If they did, that person would be gripping the door handle and bracing his feet against the floorboard, too. I’m also pretty sure Thunderbirds have better navigation systems than the Deliverance Phone.

If we are going to be traveling far with hubby at the wheel, I’ve learned to double up on my beta blocker for my heart condition and add a dose of my anxiety medication to my normal dosage. I’m thoroughly convinced that if I WERE to start having a panic attack or heart palpitations, it would only cause hubby to drive faster; his logic would be that he sooner we reached our destination, the better.

Planes, trains and automobiles are definitely part of our family theme this year. I’m sure at some point “Throw Momma from the Train” has also arisen in some of the male minds in the household. Quite frankly, I think we are closest to “Crash” part of the time but most of the time it’s just “Driving Mrs. Crazy”.

No Binney and Smith

2008-08-01T16:04:00.000-07:00

‘Tis the season and I’m definitely in the holiday spirit – the spirit of Back to School. As a former teacher, I always get the itch at this time of year when I see the displays of pencils and folders in the stores. I feel like I need to be running off worksheets, writing lesson plans, and filling out my grade book. I think I get more excited about Back to School than I do about Christmas.

As a child, shopping for Back to School was exciting. My dad would take me to TG&Y (this was before Walmart hit town) or to Redford’s Ten Cent Store and buy my tablets, pencils, and best of all – a 64-count box of Crayola crayons with the sharpener on the back. I loved the new book bag, paste, and pencils, but I LOVED that new box of crayons.

I was a prolific colorer as a child. I could plow through a coloring book in no time. Back in the 70’s, every grocery store had a twirly stand by the checkout with comic books and coloring books. I anxiously awaited the newest editions of coloring books, especially ones that featured animals or holiday designs. I would go through crayons like crazy and they always had to be Crayola. Off-brand ones just didn’t color right – they’d smear or not cover well.

This morning, I stole a couple of hours away from work to head to Target to pick up a few things on my son’s high school supply list. I was appalled that crayons aren’t on the list for freshmen. It had to be a mistake. Surely, ninth graders need to color something – maps maybe or something for a science project? What about the periodic table? That would look good done in crayon. You would have to use some colors twice because there are more than 64 elements but you could do the noble gases all one color and then all the radioactive ones one color. Surely, there was a need for crayons in high school.

Alas, no matter how hard I looked, no crayons were listed for high school – not for sophomores, juniors or even seniors. Gelatin, a slinky, latex gloves, and disinfectant were (I don’t even want to know what FOR), but no crayons. The closest things were colored pencils and we still have about 3 sets of those left over from sixth grade.

No, I had no written justification for purchasing the big 64 count box of Crayola crayons. So I decided to sneak a box. I'd shred the receipt so no one would know. Besides, I would just write in a different color every day in my Day-Timer for the next 64 days. Oh the smell! It’s better than chocolate chip cookies! That smell takes away all the stress of being a grown up and catapults me back to the days of knee-high socks, Stretch Armstrong, and bicycle banana seats. One whiff and I’m free of worries about bills, college tuition, the rising price of gas, and the gray hairs that are starting to make me look like a skunk. Some candle company needs to make candles that smell like school supplies – crayons, mimeograph ink, paste, pencil shavings, chalk dust, and the smell of a newly varnished gym floor. They’d make a fortune.

I smuggled my crayons home with all the other stuff I purchased and saved that bag to empty until last. Furtively, I snuck them into my office and opened the flip-top lid (you have to do it just right so it doesn’t tear). I was so excited about my non-toxic purchase! I started looking for my old favorite colors – midnight blue, cornflower, and sienna. As I was pulling colors out, I noticed that some of them were different – they had gray wrappers instead of wrappers that matched the color of the crayon itself. What’s up with this? I pulled out a neon pink one and read the name – “famous”. WHAT? Where did that come from? Famous what? The neon orange one right beside it read “fun in the sun”. These are color names? Whose idiotic idea was this?

I glanced back at the front of the box. Right there in the corner it read “8 New Kids’ Choice Colors – By Kids – About Kids”. I was appalled. They had changed the 64-count box! If they had added 8 colors, that means they had to remove 8 colors. It’s not a 72-count box so something had to be missing! Oh horrors! Threads of panic started to set in and I thought briefly of the nitroglycerine tablets I carry in my purse.

I started reading the names of the new colors. In addition to “famous” and “fun in the sun”, there were “best friends”, “awesome”, “super happy”, “happy ever after”, “giving tree” and “bear hug”. Who in the hell came up with those stupid names? Don’t the people at Crayola know that the only hope for boys to ever understand the difference between the color peach and the color apricot is through the 64-count box of Crayola crayons?? They are handicapping an entire male generation! At some point in the future, some poor woman is going to say “I think we should paint the garage gray” and her husband will say, “Gray? What’s that? Is that like ‘bear hug’?”

To make it an even bigger shock – Crayola is now printing the color names in three languages – English, Spanish, and French. Spanish I tolerate because everything caters to our illegal alien population these days but FRENCH? Now don’t get me wrong. I took two years of French in high school, lived in Europe for three years, minored in Spanish in college, taught beginning Spanish in middle school and have piddled with Russian. Some of the first things you learn in a new language are the names of colors. If we want non-English speaking children to learn our language in our schools, would it not make sense to put the names of the crayon colors in just ENGLISH?

By that time, I’d also discovered that light green is now “granny smith apple” (without capitalization, mind you) and I just couldn’t take it. I needed to write to Binney & Smith and set them straight. I hunted around on the box for the address, noting with relief that they are still made in USA, only to find that Crayola is no longer owned by Binney & Smith but by – get this – Hallmark. The genesis of those sappy color names became crystal clear. Hallmark is in on it and they've made gay colors.

As I was sitting staring despondently at my brand new 64-count box of Crayola crayons, my son walked into the office. He saw my forlorn look and asked me what was wrong. Tearfully, I moan “They’ve changed the colors in the box!” Being the true loving son he is, he came over, gave me a hug and said, “Gee mom, I’m sorry. Growing up is hard, isn’t it. Want me to get you a glass of wine?”

Happy Fourth of July

2008-07-06T18:15:00.000-07:00

I realize it’s been some time since I last posted. Several of you that I saw in person over the holiday weekend reminded me of that so I’m stirring up the pot a bit and see what I can come up with over the next few days. Thank you for the poke in the butt to get going.

I like the Fourth of July. Believe it or not, it was always my favorite holiday as a kid, even better than Christmas, I think. The Fourth was usually a big to-do with my family and any kind of to-do with my family was unusual just because of the rarity of such. We didn’t do a lot of big get-togethers so I usually enjoyed those that actually occurred. Christmas was nice but the Fourth had two things that I really liked – homemade, hand-cranked ice cream and the danger of losing body parts in an explosion.

The ice-cream is self-explanatory only it wasn’t until I grew up that I figured out the physics of how the cranking and the cold actually made ice-cream. I just figured the cranking bit was something to keep us kids busy (which it probably was) and the ice was something to make the cranking harder to do.

See, my dad never bought crushed ice for the ice-cream maker. Shoot, I don’t think they even sold the stuff in our county. No, we had to make it with the regular kind of ice that was the size of rocks from a gravel road. Those things inevitably got stuck under the cylinder thing in the ice-cream maker and required a lot of reversals, banging, and poking with a long, flat-head screwdriver to get unstuck. It made an interminable process even longer.

The result was always worth it. Mom never made regular ice cream with eggs and cream. If it had to be cooked, Mom didn’t make it which was also the reason I spent most of my childhood eating out in restaurants. No, Mom made ice cream with regular milk, vanilla, and sugar. The result was very similar to snow cream and was fantastic. Of course, since we only got it once a year that made it even more special.

My other favorite thing about the Fourth is the threat to life and limb. There were two major ways to hurt yourself on the Fourth. The first was if you went to the Kiwanis fireworks show at the high school stadium and fell down the bleachers. I’ve done that – more than once. The risk of that happening went up if there was a sudden, unexpected lightning storm in the middle of the show that caused the entire population of the county to start running for their cars in a torrential downpour.

One of my most vivid Fourth of July memories is one of seeing my mom running in a torrential downpour in front of me headed for the car holding a program over her beehive hairdo. Lightning was snapping everywhere and Daddy had a death grip on my hand. We had made it to the back of the concession stand and were crossing the grass when Mom tripped headlong, face first into a water-filled ditch. Dad and I forgot the storm and doubled over laughing. Mom didn’t see the humor. I have to give her credit though – she saved the ‘do. The rest of her was a muddy polyester mess but that ‘do made it through. I suspect it was the build-up of Aqua-Net that made the difference.

Thereafter every Fourth, we always talked about the lightning storm when Mom fell in the ditch. It became a family legend. We have many family legends that revolve around the Fourth, mainly because my older brother has a condition that makes for an exciting experience – he loves home fireworks and he’s blind as a bat in the dark.

Brother is thirteen years older than I and has always worn Coke-bottle glasses. He can barely see in the daylight but in any dim light, he’s completely night-blind. He’s never seen a star. He has to be led into and out of the movie theater. When he was in the Navy, he was not allowed on the ship’s deck after twilight for fear he would walk off the side. He is completely and totally blind in the dark. That didn’t stop either him or my dad from putting on a massive fireworks display on our street every year. In fact, it added to the excitement!

The day before the Fourth, Dad, Brother and I would head down to the fireworks stand and load up two large grocery sacks (they were the paper kind back then) with all kinds of fireworks. It was cool because they usually let me pick everything out being the spoiled rotten baby girl I was. Of course, I’d get the girly stuff like sparklers and lady fingers but we’d also get Roman candles, showers-of-sparks, bottle rockets, regular Black Cats, chasers and whistlers. Cherry bombs, smoke bombs, and stink bombs were my brother’s favorites because they could be shot off before dark. M-80’s were Dad’s favorites and he had a stock-pile of them for years after they were made illegal. All total, Dad probably spent a hundred bucks on fireworks every year and that was when you could get a box of sparklers for a quarter and a gross of bottle rockets for two bucks. You can imagine the massive amount of firepower we had.

When I was ten or so, Brother was in on leave from the Navy for the holiday. We were just getting started and the lightning bugs were just starting to come up out of the grass. For those of you who live in the South, you’ll realize that means there was still some light, at least enough to see fuses without flashlights. Or so we thought.

Brother was attempting to light a mortar shot and had just gotten the fuse going when, being blind, he tripped and knocked the mortar over. Dad yelled out “Incoming!” and bolted. Ice tea cups flew and lawn chairs tumbled as family and neighbors evacuated the area. My best friend Laura and I took cover in a ditch. Mom passed us doing about 35 with her cigarette clamped between her lips in an attempt to get around the side of the house to safety. We’d never seen grownups move so fast in our entire lives. Brother stood stock-still while the entire neighborhood made for cover around him. He later said he figured his odds of not getting shot were better than his odds of not running into a tree so he just froze. Turns out the only casualty was the neighbor’s cat who got a singed tail and lost three lives out of sheer terror when the mortar round missed its ass by millimeters. I swear that cat flew like Superman.

Brother always had close calls with fireworks but it didn’t deter him and it made for great entertainment for the rest of us. One year he lit a Roman candle and was holding it out in front of him like all the safety experts tell you not to do. The fact that he was holding it out in front of him turned out not to be the problem. The problem was he had it turned around backwards and shot himself in the stomach. After two shots, he got a clue and dropped it. Burned a hole straight through his shirt and made a big red mark on his belly. When he dropped it, it shot off toward Mom who again passed us doing 30 (she was older that year) trying to get around the corner of the house.

The Fourth before his wedding, Brother had his fiancée Susan to our house for the holiday. Susan, bless her sweet Baptist heart, hates fireworks; she is absolutely terrified of them. But, in her attempt to be a part of the family, she compromised that year and decided to sit in the car in the driveway while we shot off the annual display. She settled herself into her yellow Datsun and felt safe with the windows rolled up and the doors all locked. All was going well and the display was good, if a tad boring. Susan, feeling a bit comforted, not to mention sweaty walled up in an enclosed Datsun in July in Tennessee, decided to crack her window about an inch. Brother lit off a chaser right about then and a legend was made.

That chaser did the absolute impossible and flew a beeline directly through that one-inch gap in that window and got in the car with Susan. I couldn’t see her face but I could see the chaser going round and round inside that car and the screams that emanated from the interior were those of someone in free fall without a parachute. She couldn’t get out because she had locked the doors. She couldn’t get away and she couldn’t hide in a two-door subcompact of the seventies. Those of us watching could just see fire bouncing off walls and windows, and see the Datsun rocking as she tried to fight the thing off.

Of course, none of us were any help. We couldn’t even stand up because we were laughing so hard. When the chaser finally burned out and she was able to unlock the door, that sweet Baptist girl emerged cussing like a sailor. Her denim skirt was burned in multiple places and her perfectly hot-rollered hair was smoking in several quadrants. For twenty years thereafter, Susan spent the Fourth of July locked in the window-less bathroom at our house from 4:00 pm onward.

After he was married and had children of his own, Brother was still fun on the Fourth. I was with him and his kids one year in an undeveloped cul-de-sac of their neighborhood as they were putting on their own homegrown display. Brother had just lit a chaser and was backing away when he disappeared altogether. We all ran over to see what had happened to him to discover he had backed away too far in the dark and had fallen into a six-foot ditch flat of his back. Lucky for him, it was full of muddy water or he could have been hurt.

You know, now that I think about it, the Fourth of July and ditches seem to have some sort of weird connection for our family. I bet Susan wishes she had taken the ditch instead of the Datsun. At least she could have run for her life like Mom did.

The fireworks bug has been genetically passed to my son but unfortunately, due to circumstances, we have yet been able to spend a Fourth with my brother since my son has been old enough to get involved in the annual fireworks display. Maybe next year.

I saw on the news this afternoon that 37 people were hurt nationwide by fireworks this year. Heck, that’s not bad. I don’t see what gets safety people into such a tizzy about fireworks. I survived 42 years of near proximity to a blind man with a punk in his hand surrounded by explosives. If I made it through unscathed, the odds are good that most other people will. Unless of course, you are stuck in a yellow Datsun with the doors locked.

Final Instructions

2008-02-18T06:09:00.000-08:00

I warn you - this post might be considered irreverent by some people, especially if you are unfamiliar with me or my family; however, it's something that I think is rather funny in a weird kind of way so I'm going to share it.

First of all, I have to back up a few years to about 1999 (I think). We were living in Texas and my grandmother passed away. My mother was an only child and she and my grandmother did NOT get along. My grandmother had been taken care of by my brother and I for several years, but my brother took over when we moved to Austin. My mother did not have much involvement with Mommo (what we called my grandma) but when Mommo died, it was up to Mom to take care of the final arrangements because she was the direct next of kin.

My grandmother had always loved a good funeral. We called her a professional funeral-goer. She'd often go to funerals of people she had never met but were friends of friends. She just loved the socializing they offered. When my grandfather died, she made sure that the traditions were followed and she was in high cotton because at that funeral, she was the center of attention. She made the most of it, too. She could be a bit of a drama queen and a good Southern funeral was just the stage she needed.

Needless to say, my mother had little patience with all that. She considered it a waste of time and good money (Mom was cheap). Therefore, when my grandmother died, my mother didn't do the whole funeral thing but rather just had Mommo cremated (because it was cheaper), gave away her few possessions, and was done with it. When the remains (funeral professionals call them "cremains", I've discovered) were returned to Mom, she simply put the box in the trunk of her car. And that is where they stayed until last month. That's nine years, people. For nine years, my mother rode around with my grandmother in the trunk of her car.

Mom's original intention was to take the ashes to Alexander City, Alabama and have them buried next to my granddad but somehow she just never got around to making the trip. So Mommo rode around in the trunk of Mom's car for years. She even got transferred from one trunk to another when Mom bought a NEW car. It got to be a bit of a family joke, really. I always told Mom that if she was ever in an accident she would have a hard time explaining when the police asked her what was in the box - "Uh, well officer, that would be my mother".

In a way, it was rather appropriate (remember, I said you have to know my family) because my grandmother was a big traveler. She was always on the go and moved a LOT. Once she even moved from one side of a duplex to the other side - just because. We kind of figured she was having a good time sitting there next to the spare tire. I told Mom "what goes around, comes around" and that I had every intention of riding her around in the trunk when she died. Mom thought that was pretty funny.

Well, on January 5th Mom passed away. Her written directions were to be cremated. So now I was stuck with both Mommo in a box and Mom in a box. When we went to pick up Mom's "cremains" Scott carried the box out to the car for me. As we were nearing the Honda, he said, "Do you want me to put her in the backseat?" and I said "Nope. She goes in the trunk. I always told her I was going to ride her around like she did Mommo and I'm keeping my promise." And by golly I did - at least for a few hours. I brought her in the house at the end of the day and sat her box on top of Mommo's box on the floor under my desk with strict instructions to the two of them "No fighting, you two. I've had enough of your antics already."

A week after Mom died, we held a memorial service. Cremation is a relatively new thing for Southerners. We are accustomed to the traditional funeral process. You know - the visitation, the open casket, the service at the funeral home, the graveside service, and then the big dinner spread afterwards. People flood the family with casseroles and cakes. Everyone talks about how "good" the dead person looks, discusses the choice of flower blanket and casket, etc. It's a good gossip fest.

All Southern women can put on a funeral with little to no problem because we know the routine. Southern funerals are big occasions to see long-lost family, catch up with friends, eat big, and generally give the deceased a good send-off. When you have someone cremated, you can't really do that. What do you do? Put the box on the table at the front of the church? Remark how "good" it looks? The whole process is odd. I mean, really, I wrote a check for cremation services and they handed me my mother in a box in return. How weird is that?

I wasn't about to hang on to both Mom and Mommo for another nine years with both of them sitting under my desk. In my normal fashion, I was going to take care of disposal of "cremains" as soon as possible and move on. (How can people put their family members in an urn on the mantel? I just don't get it.) The day after the memorial service, my brother, my nephew, my son and I took both boxes and rode up into the Smoky Mountains where I knew of a good mountain stream that was easily accessible from the road. I figured this was as good a place as any to "bury" them both. Mommo could travel all the way to the Gulf of Mexico eventually and Mom had always enjoyed camping in the mountains in her younger days.

It was a very cold January day - clear, with temperatures in the teens. When we got to the spot, I was elected to do the honors. We decided we would start with Mommo first since she had been dead the longest. (We're making this up as we go along because we've never done anything like this before.) When I went to open the cardboard box she was in, I discovered to my dismay that Mom had taped her in. And I mean she had done a REALLY good job - she was being absolutely positive Mommo wasn't getting out. My goodness, she could have passed FedEx standards! I had to get my son's pocket knife to cut through the packing tape and once inside, I discovered she'd done the same to the plastic box on the inside! It took me fifteen minutes of hacking with a Swiss army knife to get in to the "cremains".

Okay, morbid curiosity abounds and I know you are wondering what it looked like. We did too. Basically, it looked like what you would expect it to look like - gray powder. I held the plastic bag out over the river and dumped it in. My son and nephew threw flowers in after. And the cloudy water just sat there. Without thinking about it, we had selected a spot where the current wasn't very strong so when dumped in, a big cloudy area resulted. Ahh, crap.

Learning as we went along on this, we decided it would be best to dump Mom a little further upstream and out a little further in the current. That meant me, the elected one, had to walk out on these slippery rocks over the sub-freezing temp water coming down from the mountains. I was saying a prayer - "please don't let me fall in" and then "please don't let me fall in after I dump Mom because that would just be too icky". Forget anything appropriate like the Lord's Prayer or the 23rd Psalm. I was concerned about myself at this point.

I made it to the appropriate place and opened the box. To our amazement, Mom didn't look like Mommo. Mom looked more like black volcanic sand. I commented "You don't think they gave us the wrong person do you?" but then I decided it was irrelevant at this point. I'm balancing my big ol' butt on a tiny, slippery rock over rushing freezing water and I was anxious to get this done and back to shore safely. We were going to dump SOMEONE even if it wasn't Mom.

I go through the same process and my son and nephew throw in flowers. I make it safely back to the bank and we stand there watching the stream. Now, this entire thing has been surreal from the start but here's where it gets really weird. As "Mom" and "Mommo" start mixing together in the stream, whirlpools start to form and the floating flowers actually start floating UPSTREAM. The three of us look at each other with eyes like saucers and we all exclaim at once "They're fighting again!"

Rapidly we backed up the bank out of the way and watch as the water seems to boil and churn and the flowers are going every which way but downstream. We are afraid we've created an EPA supersite or some sort of space/time wormhole by letting these two mix together.

We stood and watched for about 20 minutes, our noses turning blue and our breath freezing in the air until finally, finally, the flowers move on downstream and the waters smooth out. Not a word has been spoken. My son bends down and with a stick writes in the mud beside the stream "NO SWIMMING". I get the car keys out and say "Anyone up for Sonic? I could use some ice cream."

By the way, in case anyone needs to know, I've left written instructions for my burial. I want to be buried, in a casket, in jeans and a t-shirt, and I want chicken and dumplings served for dinner. And banana pudding. Just want to make that clear.

Plastic People Patrol on the Prowl

2007-12-09T05:53:00.001-08:00

I suppose you've probably figured out by now that we are a bit of an odd family. It might have to do with having been military for so long and moving around so much that we have to make our own fun or at least come up with some innovative ways to entertain ourselves.

The Plastic People Patrol started several years ago when we lived in Texas. We were riding high on the dot-com bubble and were living in a fairly upscale neighborhood like all the other stock-option people in Austin. We had just finished hanging up our Christmas lights and were heading to the pool (Austin was 80 degrees at the time) when we walked past a house and were stopped in our tracks. The lawn (which was the size of a postage stamp in this zero-lot-line development) was absolutely FILLED with "internally illuminated" Christmas decorations - plastic people. How the communist-led neighborhood association had let this one get past their keen radar was beyond me! It was a sight to behold!

This family had the traditional nativity scene with Mary and Joseph and Baby Jesus PLUS the wisemen, their camels, Santa and sleigh and all 9 reindeer (Rudolph included), Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, a full choir, an army of nutcracker soldiers, 3-foot-high candles, a snowman army, candy canes, and a Grinch. It was so red-neck, the ginormous modern house to which the lawn was attached was incongruent. It should have been a single-wide instead of a 5-bedroom, 3-car mortgage broker's dream. Even the Mercedes parked in the driveway now seemed out-of-place situated among the Plastic People population.

We counted up the number of Plastic People in that yard that year and came up with 34. The next year, the group had reproduced somehow (maybe Snow White and one of the dwarves?) and stood at 36. We started riding around the neighborhood and other developments in southwest Austin looking for another house that beat that record of 36 Plastic People. The Plastic People Patrol was born and a family tradition was launched.

That year in Texas, we decided the 36-count Plastic People home deserved a tribute for starting a family tradition so we printed up an award on Christmas paper, tucked a twenty-dollar bill in the envelope with it, and left it anonymously in the mailslot of the front door of that house. The Plastic People Patrol had awarded it's first annual recognition award!

Now, every year we go on Plastic People Patrol looking for the house in the county that has the most Plastic People included in their holiday exterior illumination display. Lighted things like Christmas trees, hanging icicles, and wire figures do not count. Plastic People have to be made out of plastic to qualify. With the advent of the blow-up holiday decorations, we've included them as qualifying Plastic People since they do contain some sort of petroleum-based or synthetic product in their covering and are illuminated internally. No matter the size, though, they only count once. A 14-foot inflatable carousel, while impressive, cannot count twice.

We've seen some interesting decorations in our yearly quest to find the winner of the Plastic People Award. The house that turned it's trampoline on it's side and put lights around the outside edge to make a 12-foot wreath was inventive. The house that just left up the Halloween decorations and added Christmas decorations to the mix was a bit schizophrenic. Some houses rival Clark Griswald's and you have to wonder what the electricity bill runs for the month of December.

It's been several years now that our Plastic People Patrol has been in operation. Families in two states and three counties have earned places in the Plastic People Award Hall of Fame and been awarded certificates placed in their mailboxes. Son has hit his teenage years so we are now making it a team effort among his group of friends. We'll be making our final enumeration tour one night soon. The boys will be piling into the Denali, hyped up on energy drinks while Mom (that's me), hyped up on Prozac to survive 5 teenage boys hyped up on energy drinks crammed into an SUV, drives them by all the houses they have noted as contenders. Head counts of Plastic People will be executed as a group and the contender with the highest population will win the coveted 2007 Plastic People Award and the cash award of $20 that accompanies it. A family tradition survives another year and perhaps will be passed on to future generations.

Are we weird or what?

What Would the Holidays Be without Firearms?

2007-11-26T13:52:00.001-08:00

Ahhh, Thanksgiving Day has passed and the stampede on Wal-mart has passed for the moment. It is time to sit back and enjoy the essence of a Southern Christmas. Living in the bastion for the Second Amendment, firearms and the holidays have always been woven together around here.

For example, the Saturday after Thanksgiving is opening day for duck season. It's a wonderful tradition to be awoken at the lovely hour of 3:00 am as husband and son try to "quietly" gather all their equipment for a day of duck hunting. "Dad, did you get the Beanie Weanies?" and "Where did you put my socks? I laid them right here!" whispered sotto voice are common in Southern households everywhere. Once the dynamic duo are out the door and sleep mercifully returns, the annual recreation of the Battle of Chickamauga launches out on the river with shotguns blasting away at unsuspecting waterfowl. Said unsuspecting waterfowl get wise after losing a few of their comrades and decide to fly to other places less dangerous (like the wildlife refuge a half-mile away), leaving the ghosts of the Confederate Army (now dressed in camo and bright orange) to pretend they see a duck and just shoot to be making noise. The windows of the house rattle and the dogs hide under the bed all day. Yes, it's Christmas-time!

Another good example arose around here this past weekend after football games were over and turkey eaten. As I'm struggling to get the Christmas tree up and the decorations out, dearest son decides he's going to rid the household of that pesky varmint the skunk, affectionately known by me and our dog Buster as The Devil Incarnate after our little dustup a few weeks ago. Son has a complex plan of action. First of all, reconnaissance is required to determine just where the creature is sheltered using the highly developed olfactory sense. In other words, dear son went around the yard sniffing. He narrowed it down to several potential locations, with the two prime spots being the ivy covering the wellhead and the culvert under the road at the bottom of the orchard.

The next step of the battle plan is armament. Son spends some time on expedition inside his closet and emerges with his camo, paintball helmet, 20-gauge shotgun and 12-gauge shotgun. Pockets bulging with shells, he declares he's ready but explosives are needed. What's a good skunk hunt without being able to blow something up, right?

Son pulls the last remnants of his Fourth of July firecrackers from the box under his bed and is heard mumbling "Man, I wish I had some M-80s..." as he rummages through the junk drawer looking for the lighter. The Plan (note the capitalization because now we have form to this endeavor) is to flush the skunk out with the firecrackers and then shoot him with one of the two shotguns as he goes running across the yard. Bottle rockets were considered but rejected because of their unpredictability and proximity to firearms. In other words, mom (being me) said "no".

As dad and I stand at the back door - inside of course - watching the last male member of the family line stomp around the back yard looking like a skinny Rambo, we decided there was the potential here for side-splitting humor. We started wagering on which gun he was going to drop first in his flight from the skunk and which tree he'd run into during his getaway. There was no doubt in our minds that the skunk was going to come out on top if his Tora Bora cave was exposed.

Alas, the depth charges did not serve to flush out Mr. Stinky and son had to return to the house defeated and dejected, having used up all his explosives. However, the shotguns are handy and ready at the backdoor just in case the opportunity arises for battle. You can never be too well-armed, you know. The Battle of the Backyard shall continue another day.

And finally, it just wouldn't be a Southern Christmas without all the flyers arriving in the mail from Cabela's and Bass Pro advertising the latest and greatest in deer rifles, scopes, and intruder-deterrent pistolry. With Sharpies and ads in hand, the males of the species retreat to the "reading rooms" to make out their Christmas lists by circling the weapons of their dreams while taking care of other business. Man, if only I had some M-80s....

Keeping It in Perspective

2007-11-21T05:25:00.000-08:00

Last night after a very long day and few sales (I work on commission), I was lying in bed watching Fox News and thinking about the upcoming holidays. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I've already purchased all the groceries for a traditional meal. Everything is ready to go and I'll start today with the things that can and should be done ahead of time for a good Southern Thanksgiving dinner.

As these fairly random thoughts are running through my head, my subconscious is set on "worry" mode. Day before yesterday, I got word that my aunt had had a stroke. I got a call yesterday from my nephew concerning an issue that my brother is having with his landlord. I realized that my quarterlies are due next month. And I haven't started Christmas shopping. My house is a wreck and I have a mouse that so far only I have seen (my husband and son think I'm hallucinating and who knows - I might be!).

Problems, problems, problems. I started thinking "if only I had a lot of money, most of these problems could be solved". I could hire a housekeeper for my house, not to mention a mouse-hunter (or a psychiatrist if the mouse is truly a figment of my imagination). I could afford to move my brother and mother into nice assisted living facilities where they would both be well-cared-for. I could not worry about a budget on Christmas and how I'm going to afford everything. Taxes - well, if you listen to any liberal Democrat I wouldn't be paying taxes because I'm rich but the reality would be that I would be paying an accountant and financial advisor to find as many tax breaks as possible so I wouldn't be supporting Sierra Leone all on my own. As for my aunt, not much money can do on that except help with expenses if needed.

Being human, I decided I had come up with the perfect solution. Money would solve all my problems. In my mind I said, "God, I need to win the lottery or something. Think you can arrange that?" Then one of those rare moments occurred. I heard God talking back to me. No, not out loud but in my head, very clearly and very distinctly. He said, "Okay. But which blessing do you want to give up for it?" What? What did He mean give up a blessing? He had my attention.

He went on to say "Here are the major blessings which I've given you: a good job, a great house, plenty of food, a great husband and a terrific son, enough income to meet all your bills and then some, two vehicles that operate well and look decent, good health, and good friends and neighbors. I've surrounded you with animals of both the domestic and wild variety which calms your spirit. I've given you the opportunity to pursue hobbies you enjoy. I've brought you home from around the world and settled you in one of my favorite spots. You are warm, clothed, fed, and loved. I can arrange the lottery or the windfall but which of these blessings are you going to give up for it?"

There's nothing more humbling than when God shows you your own lack of faith. I was so embarrassed and it's not a good feeling to be ashamed before the Lord.

So this Thanksgiving, I'm giving thanks for all those blessings AND the problems because God's got it all under control. I just have to remember that and stop thinking that I have all the answers. Thank you God for letting me still have my brother and mother this side of heaven; I know my time with them is limited. Thank you for the income that is high enough that I have to pay quarterlies. Thank you for the mouse because, let's face it - he's cute as a button with those big ears. Thank you for the mess because it is in a wonderful house. But most of all God, thank you for Jesus, without whom we would have nothing for which to give thanks and certainly no Christmas to celebrate.

Red Letter Day

2007-10-13T06:09:00.000-07:00

I love living in the country. While I was raised within the city limits of a small town, our environment was still fairly rural and my grandparents lived on a farm so I have always considered myself a country girl. I am beginning to suspect, however, that the years of city-living I've had over the past twenty years have softened me up too much.

Yesterday at the pre-dawn hour of 5:30, I took my dogs out for their morning potty break and sniff session. Our biggest one, Buster (who has the personality to match his name), took off after something in the dark. Buster is an 8-lb. Chihuahua who thinks he's a pit bull. There was a huge ruckus and I decided to go investigate thinking he'd maybe actually caught one of the wild cats that hangs around our bird feeders. Wrong. It was not a nice kitty. It must have looked kind of like a kitty to bird-brained Buster in the dark, but it was the devil in disguise. It was Pepe LePeue on steroids.

Oh heavens. I got close enough for my nose to tell me the story and I turned tail and beat it back to the house. The other two dogs (who have more than 3 brain cells) followed right along. They didn't want any part of this dust-up. Buster was on his own as far as they were concerned. There's fraternal loyalty and then there's stupidity.

I got them in and finally Buster comes dragging back to the porch looking shocked and appalled. His expression said it all - "What the heck WAS that thing? And how did it arm itself with pepper spray? Cats are supposed to run and then you get a nice chase in but this thing zapped me!" Poor Buster looked like a police academy cadet who had just undergone the pepper spray training exercise. His eyes were red and swollen, his chest and ears were cherry red.

My sympathy was only half-hearted, though, because I knew now I had to clean up this eight-pound mass of stink. Then I committed a cardinal sin - I brought him inside. Big, big mistake. Not only did I then have a contaminated dog but the house was soon an EPA Supersite, too. The husband comes downstairs clutching a wash rag over his face, gagging and saying "what are you doing???"

I guess my old vet-tech mindset had kicked in and I wasn't thinking that skunk smell permeates EVERYTHING. Those molecules are relentless. I had cleaned up enough skunked dogs when working for the vet as a teenager and I wasn't thinking "house" but rather "what was that deskunkifier recipe??" It had been twenty-five years since I'd last made a batch.

The rest of the story is a lesson in hazardous material handling. The house was unlivable for the rest of the day. Lucky for me, I had to drive 200 miles yesterday to pick up my son from grandma's house so I was out until afternoon. I stuck Buster in the basement, turned on the big house fan (1948 a/c) and left. Of course, those molecules were everywhere - in my hair, my clothes, my nose, and my purse. I finally stopped at a McDonalds and transferred the contents of my new leather purse to a Wal-mart bag and tossed the purse in the dumpster. It was a total loss. I rolled down all the windows in the Denali and put the seat heater on so I could see to drive without the fumes tearing my eyes too much. Ever drive 78 mph in 42-degree weather with all the windows down? Not fun.

When we got back to the house yesterday afternoon, it was possible to be in the house but we were all dripping Visine every fifteen minutes like dope heads and burning every candle we can find. Everything made of cloth has to be washed now. I want to kiss whoever decided to put Febreeze in Tide and Downy.

And to top off this lovely Red Letter Day in our household - Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Good God.

Home Work a Hassle?

2007-10-11T03:55:00.000-07:00

I was reading a blog posting this morning in our local large city newspaper concerning homework and how kids these days are bogged down with it. Read it here. A Wall Street Journal article (read it here) and the general consensus of parents seems to be that homework is just a time-consuming hassle. It interferes with life and stresses out kids.

I'm a former middle school teacher and the mother of a 14-year old so I have some exposure to this situation from both sides of the fence. When I taught in the public school system, I taught in a rural middle school where the majority of the students came from impoverished backgrounds. Today that would be called an at-risk school but at the time (twenty years ago) we weren't sweating over test scores so the term never arose. I would say we had a good school. We had dedicated teachers, a great administration, and average students. We had an exceptional program for the gifted and talented and for the "educationally challenged" students, too. Some parents were involved but most weren't (not any different than today).

What we DIDN'T have were students whose lives were scheduled down to the last second. If a student played a sport, it was a school sport. There were no community soccer associations or karate schools or other such things. If a student played an instrument, it was in the band. No violin lessons or trumpet lessons after school. A student went home, did homework, and hung out. Parents came home, fixed supper and hung out. There was no "living in the mini-van" as mom carted kids from one activity to the other all afternoon, every afternoon.

The writer of the WSJ blog probably doesn't realize it but his child has just caught his and his wife's anxiety disease. The parents have communicated that the child must get As and Bs and makes it such a priority that they are constantly in the kid's face with flashcards and lists of spelling words, even in restaurants. The school work isn't stressing the kid out - it's the parents! Give the kid a break! Let him do it on his own. How is he going to learn to study on his own if his parents are constantly there pushing this stuff down his throat? He's not anxious because he's getting Ds - he's anxious because his parents are getting Ds! They need to back off.

Home work has it's place. It provides additional practice for new concepts learned at school that day. It can provide supporting learning opportunities for concepts with which the student struggles. Should a parent be involved in all home work activities? NO! Let the child do the work! A parent should be there if the child has a question but the parent should butt out otherwise. Be encouraging and help when needed but let the kid do the work and shoulder the responsibility. The child isn't going to have the parent there by his or her side when they are away at college and then what will happen?

As to the amount of home work. I suggest the parents cut out all after-school activities and just have the child come home and do homework and see what that does to the pace of their lives. I bet they will discover that the home work wasn't the problem after all - it was the million and one activities they had the child doing after school that was sucking up time and creating stress.

It's a documented fact that American children are over-scheduled. Parents use after-school activities as a baby-sitting service. When people my age (41) and older were in school, most moms didn't work so you came home, ate a Twinkie, did your home work and then got to watch an hour of Gomer Pyle and Bewitched before going outside to play with your friends until it was too dark to see. If you had trouble with your home work, you asked mom but otherwise she was probably busy making supper or doing laundry. If it was a math problem, you waited for dad to come home.

Now, moms work so they have to put the kids somewhere until they get off work so they enroll them in after-school programs that are glorified day cares (or even real day cares). To assuage their guilty feelings, parent put pressure on their children to perform in school so they can prove that the lifestyle they've chosen is not detrimental to the child and that they can produce "super kids". Remember, those test scores are all important and now the fever that has infected our educational professionals has spread to the parents. Johnny has to score high on those tests in the spring or he'll be an outcast, won't get into a good college, blah, blah, blah.

What a load of crap. I'm sorry, but there are some children that should just be left behind. It's a good wake up call that no one uses anymore. It was embarrassing as heck to fail a grade when I was a kid and usually it took just once to wake you up. No one is left behind now. It would be too detrimental to the child's self-esteem. (read heavy sarcasm there)

But that's another soapbox for another day. Back to the home work issue. Did I assign home work as a teacher? Yes, when I thought it was necessary which was often. Many of my students didn't have a home life that was conducive to sitting down and studying (as in their parents were drug addicts, etc) so I kept it to a minimum but I did assign it when I felt it was called for. I often provided opportunities to work on it in class simply because I knew what their home lives were like. We also had study hall (something else that is disappearing from the educational landscape) where the student had a chance to work on home work.

Home work teaches a lot of things, but primarily it teaches responsibility. When a parent takes over the responsibility for homework, one of the main purposes of homework is nullified. Do I welcome homework for my own son? Absolutely. In fact, I don't think he gets enough home work assigned.

Bottom line is parents need to stop blaming teachers for trying to teach something to their children and instead cut out all the extra-curricular activities that they've laid on their children in the effort to produce super-kids. Give the kids a break. Moms - get your butts home by 3:00 so your kid can have a normal life if you are so concerned about the kids' stress level.

Beaver Cleaver didn't seem stressed out much. Wonder why?

Death Penalty Painful? Well, DUH!

2007-09-25T14:28:00.000-07:00

I love being from Tennessee. It's a beautiful state and the people are friendly. Most of all, people in Tennessee are generally sensible and down-to-earth. We are the Volunteer State and that's a well-earned title. If you need help doing something, we're there. I think half the state headed south in the wake of Katrina. We have high numbers of men and women who volunteer for the military. If your car won't start in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in Tennessee, you don't even have to ask someone to jump-start the battery. At that first "click" of the starter, the good 0l' boy in the pick-up next to you is already grabbing the jumper cables out of his truck box. We're just sensible.

Why in the WORLD then has some judge ruled the death penalty as conducted by lethal injection unconstitutional on the basis of "cruel and unusual punishment" but Old Sparky, the electric chair was drug out of the closet and used to zap a killer 'til his eyeballs popped out a couple of weeks ago? Does anyone besides me see the stupidity here as demonstrated by our judicial system?? How about the sheer irony? Does that not just baffle you?

What is the deal with these judges legislating from the bench? Our legislative process is such that it takes a bill through both houses of the state legislature and then in front of the State Supreme Court to "vet it for constitutionality" before the governor signs it into law. This is how all our legislative processes in this country work. The death penalty law has been passed and used for YEARS and now some judge takes it upon his subjective mind to declare it is "unconstitutional".

What's so funny is that he bases that subjective opinion on "cruel and unusual punishment". What can be more humane than lethal injection? Let's get real here - the most cruelty that could be involved would be if the doc doing the IV missed the vein. Shoot, if that's the case, then I should have several viable lawsuits against dingaling nurses in my doctor's office and at the Red Cross for jabbing me full of holes in search of the "disappearing blood vessel". (Honey, I just know it was there. I could feel it! Let me try one more time...)

Hey, I have an idea. Let's do away with lethal injection altogether and just run with Ol' Sparky. He obviously still works after 45 years and he's easy to use. Strap 'em in and flip the switch. Wait a few seconds. Repeat. The ultimate 'taser! Woo hoo! And he's much more entertaining and dramatic. It gives the families of the victims better "closure" to see the murderer of their precious loved ones fried like a green tomato. Fires up the protesters more, too. Nothing gets liberal leftists more riled up than a good zapping.

Alternatively, we could go with one of the various middle eastern methods. Hanging seems common and so is beheading. I personally like Saddam's old method of getting rid of people he didn't like - shredding them starting with the feet. I really wish they'd used that on him. The phrase "hanging is too good for him" was very applicable in his case.

I know the argument against the death penalty in general is that some innocent people get "sent on" by accident. That's probably true, especially in the days before DNA and high tech forensics. That's where Barry Sheck (sp?) and his Innocence Project comes in. I'm all for them going over old cases and funding DNA testing just so we make doubly sure we got the right low-life to zap or hang or shoot or whatever we end up as an alternative to the cruel and unusual lethal injection.

Yeah, right...

A Sobering Read

2007-09-13T17:12:00.000-07:00

I was meandering through the bookstore the other day (one of my favorite pastimes) and noticed a book on one of the center aisle tables entitled "The Widow of the South" by Robert Hicks. Being a Southerner (and darn proud of it), I picked it up and read the back. The book is a fictional tale about real life people and real life events that were birthed by the Battle of Franklin near the end of the Civil War (or as we Southerners prefer to call it - the War of Northern Aggression). It looked interesting so it went in my bag at the checkout counter.

I've now spent the last week reading this book every chance I got. (Take my advice, don't try to read and drive.) It's an odd book. Not a pleasant read so much as a story that grabs you with cold hands and compels you to read further. It is full of mental illness, death, depravity of the human soul, violence, hope, faith, and a steadfastness of character - all good Southern novel traits according to my college Southern Literature professor at Middle Tennessee State University oh so long ago.

Ashamedly, I have to confess that despite having been born and bred about 30 miles from the location of the novel, Franklin, Tennessee, I had never heard of the central character Carrie Winder McGavock. I have heard of McGavock High School and McGavock Pike in Nashville but never wondered where the name originated. Now I know.

I had also never studied up much on the Battle of Franklin. I was quite familiar with the Battle of Stones River that occurred in Murfreesboro where I went to college and lived for several years. I've been to Shiloh and Lookout Mountain, Chickamauga and Stone Mountain. I've visited Andersonville Prison in Georgia, even. But I've never really paid attention to the Battle of Franklin. I am ashamed.

The most deadly day in the entire Civil War occurred in a place that I associate with great malls and a high-income population, big houses and golf courses. I never knew it. How did I miss this? I grew up under the wing of a Civil War enthusiast, my dad, and across the street from a real, live historian. The fact that 9.200 Americans died in one day in Franklin has simply stopped me in my tracks this week as I read this book.

Think about that for a minute. 9,200 Americans DEAD in ONE DAY. That's worse than 9/11 and the Iraq war combined. You could even throw in Pearl Harbor and only approach that number. That's more than died in Normandy on D-Day.

The book is not so much about the Battle of Franklin as how it impacted the lives of people who were there. I recognize some of the common traits of disaster survived in the characters that Hicks has built around these real-life people. I recognize the Southern outlook on faith, death, work, family, and honor these people held.

Over the years, it seems that Carrie McGavock has become a sort of historical heroine who was viewed as better than others with stronger moral fiber than others. I beg to differ. Carrie McGavock sounds like an average Southern woman to me. She was pragmatic and practical. She did what needed to be done because it needed to be done and she happened to be there to do it. She grit her teeth and went to work helping people that needed help. That's what we Southern women do. Sure, we have our blue days just like Carrie. Who doesn't? But we carry on and we are polite about it. The world is too full of unpleasantness without us adding to it.

Next week I will be traveling right by Carnton Plantation on my way back across the state from a trip to west Tennessee. I hope I have time to stop and visit. If not, I'll build in time on my next trip because I need to see Carrie's cemetery and thank all those boys who died in a different war long ago.

Have You Forgotten

2007-09-10T16:20:00.001-07:00

By sheer chance, I was unpacking an old moving box that I had not unpacked since 2003 when we moved from Texas. Inside it were four magazines from the week of September 11, 2001. They were Time (Special Issue), Newsweek (Extra Edition), People, and a photographic special edition of Time.

I opened the one on top - Time, Special Issue - and glanced at the cover title "One Nation, Indivisible". How ironic. I flipped through the to the big main spread with the extra fold-out showing the workers at Ground Zero rescuing (or maybe recovering?) a victim. The article was written by Nancy Gibbs..."So while it was up to the President and his generals to plot the response, for the rest of us who are not soldiers and have no cruise missiles, we had candles, and we lit them on Friday night in an act of mourning, and an act of war.

That is because we are fighting not one enemy but two: one unseen, the other inside. Terror on this scale is meant to wreck the way we live our lives...If we falter, they win, even if they never plant another bomb."

Within the same pages of the same edition were results of a poll taken by Harris Interactive by telephone of 1,082 adult Americans on Sept. 13, 2001. Those poll results said:

78% thought it was very likely that Osama bin Laden was personally involved in the attacks.
44% thought it was "somewhat likely" and 34% thought it was "very likely" that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attacks.
62% thought the US should declare war as a result of the attacks.
66% were in favor of ground invasion of another country as part of retribution.
65% thought that US military strikes against OBL would lead to a broader war between the US and other countries in the Middle East.
85% favored strategic air strikes against isolated military targets.
81% favored assassinations of leaders responsible for terrorism.
55% favored ground invasion with US troops that would result in loss of US lives.
48% favored massive bombings that might kill civilians.

From Newsweek, in the article entitled "The Toll on Our Psyche" by Sharon Begley..."The attacks have broken the illusion, deeply embedded in the American mind, 'that we are more protected, and safer, than other countries,' says trauma specialist Terrence Real of Massachusetts' Family Institute of Cambridge...."We as a country have been living as though the catastrophes in the rest of the world don't apply to us, disaster doesn't happen on our soil. But from now on, we can no longer deny that we are vulnerable."

From People, in the article "America Under Attack: Black Tuesday" the unnamed author states..."But while World War II was a battle for national survival, the conflict against terrorism is something more subtle and limited - a struggle to preserve national values."

From Time, in the article "If You Want to Humble an Empire..."This was the bloodiest day on American soil since our Civil War, a modern Antietam played out in real time, on fast-forward, and not with soldiers but with secretaries, security guards, lawyers, bankers, janitors. It was strange that a day of war was a day we stood still."

So, have we forgotten? I believe a majority of our population has. We are definitely a divided nation. Divided politically and becoming even more divided ideologically every day on not only defense but on issues that make up the very fabric of those national values that were attacked.

Are we only filled with pride and a sense of one purpose when we bleed? Do we have to be under attack to realize we, a nation struck by the peoples of the world, have more points of agreement than points of division? We are disagreeing over troop strength and withdrawal dates, WMDs and funding. But surely, surely, we agree that no one has the right to come to our shores and kill our citizens without provocation or reason. Are we allowing these evil fiends to tear us apart in the hearts of our character and our values?

War is now something fought in a distant land rather than coming to our streets and our cities and our fields. It's inconvenient to political candidates regardless of whether they are "for" the war or "against" the war (or were for it before they were against it). The war is now a beach ball being batted around on the Sunday news shows and from political stumps. Polls, not unlike the one noted above, are taken to see where the best "stance" should be in order to win votes. What would the citizens of our great nation answer to those same questions now? I'm sure there would be different numbers because, for the most part, we have forgotten. The politicians and bureaucrats and talking heads have forgotten. Congressmen and Senators have forgotten. Media pundits have forgotten.

You know who remembers best? Those who lost friends and family that September day six years ago. Those whose friends and family members are in our volunteer military. Those volunteer soldiers who even now are preventing that war from coming back to our shores by taking the fight to the initiators and their doorsteps.

Wake up people. This war is not going to go away if we just take our toys and go home. They will be back. They will be back and they will be even better prepared. They will have bigger catastrophes in store than four jetliners loaded with fuel and 19 nut cases with box cutters. There is a whole population of nut cases out there who are ready and more than willing to bring this war back to our shores. We have to prevent that from happening again. Let their citizens perish as a result of their actions - not ours.

Who can stop it? No, not the President and surely not those wafflers in Congress. Our soldiers on the fronts lines can delay it. Our guys in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan can take them out one by one but they are only removing men, not evil. Our soldiers in the streets of Fallujah and Baghdad can dampen it. Our sailors patrolling the waters where the world's oil supplies are floated out to the nations can forestall it. But only us, WE THE PEOPLE can stop these crazy, evil demons from toppling all that our nation stands for, has worked for, and has died for in the last 231 years. We have to be united when we don't bleed, or else we surely will bleed once again.

God bless America. God bless our President. God bless our soldiers.

Eco-Craziness

2007-09-09T07:57:00.000-07:00

The liberal left has to have a cause. Back in the sixties, they discovered that to have a cause was to identify with some kind of group and perhaps become more important in the grand scheme of things. It wasn't the cause that was important so much as the effort to become immortal or somehow make a lasting impact on the universe that was the goal. For instance, the Sixties Boomers joined anti-war groups, love-ins, sit-ins, draft card burnings, etc. Many of them did all these things just in an effort to belong to some group rather than as a true statement of conviction.

In the seventies, the environment issue first arose and I will admit, we needed to start paying attention. I remember when chucking your hamburger bag out the window was normal. Trying to hit the road sign with your glass Kick soda bottle was a sport. Some of us were pretty good at it, too. Then the "clean environment" movement came along and things like Love Canal were uncovered and suddenly we had Super Sites in our backyards that had been killing us for years without our knowledge. Something needed to be done and I'm grateful for those who had sense to do it.

Then came the cause for the homeless in the eighties. All the Hollywood names jumped on the bandwagon - help the homeless! What everyone forgot to do was ask the homeless if they wanted to be helped. Many did not. They LIKED living the lifestyle. So many were mentally ill and would not accept help regardless. The help the homeless movement got a toe-hold and then faded away among the liberal left as "glamorous" or "fashionable" and the faith-based community picked up the cause and have done wonders with it.

"We are the World" also came about in the eighties in an effort to feed the starving of Africa. As far as I know, the people in Africa are still starving despite all the millions and billions raised for their assistance. Again, it was the faith-based organizations that are still there teaching farming, dealing with the war-torn, and actually helping these people, even on a small scale.

Now, the trendy "cause" is global warming. You are not "in" in the liberal world if you are not paying carbon offsets and griping about carbon dioxide levels as you ride to your 20,000 square foot mansion in your 5 mpg limo after getting off your private jet. These people gripe about cow farts and how the methane is causing the polar ice caps to melt. (Obviously, these people have never been around my brother who can put out more methane than a whole herd of Holsteins. It's an art form with him.)

And as a country girl, I suspect most of them have never even been around cows. Let's face it people, cows smell bad. Their poop smells bad. However, it makes great fertilizer (my God, a natural USE for cow poop! Who-da thunk it!) It makes tomatoes grow and corn and all those "natural, organic" foods the liberal left love! If you want organic food, people, you have to have cow poop. And chicken poop. And goat poop. Bat poop is supposed to be really good but it's hard to find. To have all this poop, you have to have methane! And there go the polar ice caps.

I saw a news segment on Fox and Friends about eco-friendly pets. Some dude was on there touting organic dog food and such. Did he stop to think that that organic dog food has to get to the consumer via big rig truck? Putting out lots of diesel fumes and (gasp) carbon dioxide? What an idiot. I think he was just a savvy marketing consultant (he even had a dog in a cape as a hype point) being paid by the organic dog food company to push their products.

You want an eco-friendly pet? I offer you mine. They poop outside which fertilizes the grass of my orchard. I feed them leftovers from my table so I don't buy dog food that has to be shipped in from somewhere. Concerning my leftovers: I get my beef from my neighbor down the road who has a herd of Black Angus. I get eggs from my neighbor across the street who has a flock of chickens. The horse farm across the way is an endless supply of manure for fertilizer (boy you should be here when they spread it on the hay fields - Phew!) I can buy vegetables from farmers in any direction I go and cheaper than at the store.

Now how is my carbon footprint so far? Oh, I guess I should mention the negatives. I drive a Denali SUV that sucks gas. To balance it out, I also drive a Honda Civic that sips gas. I have an empty pasture and barn that I've been thinking of populating with a couple of shire horses so I can hitch up the Honda to them and ride to town without using ANY gas. But then we have the methane issue again and WOOPS there go the polar ice caps.

Who Cares?

2007-09-07T04:59:00.000-07:00

As I watch the news this morning (Fox) and peruse all my online news portals, it appears to be a slow news day. It makes me wonder what Grand Poobah decides what makes the news. Whoever it is, I'm sure they work at the Associated Press because all the news outlets take their "reporting" from the talking points of the AP feed every day. Doesn't any news channel do independent reporting and research anymore?

I detest that everything now is a "news alert". Does anyone remember when a news alert would stop you in your tracks wherever you were in the house and make you pay attention to the news? It meant something really BIG was happening. Always in the back of your mind, the thought "It's the Russians" would wiggle when you heard the networks break in with "Breaking News". Of course, more than likely it would be a tornado warning or an airplane crash or something. Now, a news alert can be something as inconsequential as Paris Hilton breaking a heel as she comes out of rehab. (Yes, I used "Paris Hilton" and "inconsequential" in the same sentence - imagine that.)

I'm a news junkie - I'll admit it. I just wish there was better smack to feed my brain with than the continuous drivel that the 24/7 newsies pour out.

Position Statement from the Porch

2007-09-06T03:53:00.000-07:00

I am a conservative white American (English-American if you want to trace the genealogy back far enough and be politically correct).
Married. Christian. Middle class female.
I DON'T drive a minivan and don't do soccer - we stick to traditional sports like baseball and football.
I vote Republican or Libertarian or Independent, depending on the views of the candidate on key issues such as national defense, abortion, immigration, and family values. I'd vote for a monkey over a Democrat. I am going to vote for Fred Thompson in 08.
I'm self-employed and a military "dependent". My husband reenlisted in 2003 when Iraqi Freedom started and I supported that decision 100%.
Our son wants to attend the AF Academy for college and is currently in a private Christian school for which we pay (no vouchers here and no tax break either).
I've lived in other countries and seen nationalized health care and don't want to go that route.
I'm a member of the Sandwich Generation in that I have elderly parents and a disabled brother for whom I care.
I plan to use this blog to voice my opinions. I hope you chime in because I LOVE a good debate.