Truly, Christmas sweaters are an abomination.  If you don’t believe me, you should check out the local buffet restaurants.

Also, I’m not crazy about The Waitresses but Bowie and Lenon are spot on.

And I really love the old fashioned ones.  Anything with Bing Crosby or Nat King Cole makes me very happy.  Or, and I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this, Johnny Mathis is always good too.

And who doesn’t love the Muppets rendition of The 12 Days of Christmas?

In the spirit of dragging you along on all the highs and lows of my budding career, let me tell you about the latest email from MY AGENT.  Oh my word, do I love this woman. 

I’m having some trouble with the current publisher of my novellas, so I emailed her my contracts so she can look them over and give some advice, but that’s a story for another blog, a rather epic blog.  But I’m not here to talk trash.  Not today.

The email exchange today was wonderfully motivating.  She’d finally heard from the editor of one of my dream publishers.  Her opinion of my book?  “LOVED IT!”  The all caps were hers. 

How awesome is that?  This editor is a bit junior so she’ll have to sell her editorial board on it, but MY AGENT says I have the right to be “THRILLED”.  Again, the caps are hers. 

Understandably, the euphoria I’m feeling is overwhelming.  And motivating.  I want to call in sick every day for the rest of the year and immerse myself in the writing of book 2. 

And more exciting than that, is that there is still a Sr. Editor for another HUGE publisher that still has my manuscript.

Cross your crossables – there is still every opportunity for a bidding war!

I love hockey.  It’s my deep dark secret.  I love everything about it.   I love the speed of the game and the intensity of the sport.  I love the way it’s divided into three periods instead of two.  I especially love the fights.  I don’t know why, it’s brutal.  Perhaps that’s the draw – it’s rough, physical and intense.  It’s the only sport I watch on tv. 

I couldn’t even conduct a proper text conversation with Kelli this evening because the new HBO special on the Philadelphia Penguins/Washington Capitals was on.  When she found out it was because of hockey she was appalled.  And Ava just found out about my infatuation with the sport this year as well.  You can blame it all on Kurt.  He’s the one who taught me the game in high school.  We still talk about hockey and it’s been more than 20 years.  Back then he made me follow the Minnesota North Stars.  Now days I root for the Coyotes because they’re the home team, but I’m a closet Blackhawks fan.

At this very moment, I’m watching a rerun of the Phoenix Coyotes vs New Jersey Devils at 11:45 on a Wednesday night.  My whole house is asleep except me and the boys on the ice.

And speaking of boys.  That could be another reason I love hockey.  Holy moley.  Have you seen some of these guys?  There has long been a stereotype of the hockey player as a toothless thug.  Of course, there are some missing teeth among the guys, but I assure not all of them fit that image.  But they are all big, big men (mercy!).  Let me give you a few example

Lauri Korpikoski

 Look at this pretty boy.  Granted he’s a baby, but still, he’s officially legal.

Or another member of the Coyotes:

Taylor Pyatt

He’s also just a baby, but this guy has the bluest eyes in the NHL today.

And last but not least, take a look at this one.  He’s a grown man and dear lord it gives me just one more reason why I should visit Sweden.

Heinrick Lundqvist

Would you like one more look?  Heinrick again, deep sigh.

Heinrick again, deep sigh.

If you need a quick dose of testosterone, watch my favorite fight video.

I have so much going on in my head, that it’s damn near impossible to concentrate on a topic for the blog tonight.   There’s a lot of crap going on, but lets just zero on in something funny, shall we?

The Bandit is, well, he’s the Bandit.  We’ve been having trouble with him in kindergarten: he’s too social (in kindergarten? clearly he’s my child), he’s stubborn (that’s his father’s influence), and most frustrating, he’s not doing his work in class which means we have to do it for homework with the other assigned homework.  Yesterday, the very first thing said to me when I walked in the door was that he’d done all his work in class that day.  I was ecstatic.  I must have told him a gazillion times how proud I was of him.  His daddy had bought him a special treat on the way home from school as a reward. 

I bounded in to kindergarten this morning, jubulient about it. 

“So, he did all his work in class yesterday!” His teacher and I have a running dialogue on his “issues” and I considered this a huge breakthrough.

“Ummmmm,” she hesitated and my heart dropped.  It turns out he didn’t do his work in class.  It seems he’d hidden it.  My darling son, The Bandit, has come up with very complicated ways to avoid doing his work.  These schemes of his take way more time and energy than he would expend if he just did the damn work.  He really reminds me of his uncle.  My father would send my brother out to clean up the dog poop and instead of doing the assigned task in a half an hour, he’d spend 2 hours covering up each little dog poop pile with a pile of dirt.  As if my father wasn’t going to notice 20 little piles of dirt in the yard exactly where the poop was a mere two hours before. 

And the little shit let me gush over him with praise.  And he let his daddy buy him a special treat on the way home.

Deep sigh.

On an different note, I am really charmed by how Sassy’s sense of humor is developing.  She’s finally beginning to pick up on the subtleties of sarcasm.  Thank goodness, since it is my first language.  I’m also fluent in back talk and huffing loudly to express my displeasure.  Sassy’s sense of humor is subtly rising to a more sophisticated level.  Unfortunately, that is not to say she doesn’t enjoy a good knock knock joke.  Or even a bad knock knock joke.  Sadly, she’s not very discerning about her knock knock jokes.

“Knock knock.”

“Oh, not again.”  Please God, not again.

“Come on, knock knock.”

I slump in my chair, resigned.  “Who’s there?”

“Dwayne.”

I roll my eyes.  “Dwayne who?”  I sigh.

“Dwayne the tub, I’m dwowning.” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

I’ve heard this joke 4,847,473,749 times since last Tuesday. 

But I’m also happy to report, she is getting more sophisticated.  Thank heaven, because I don’t know how much more of the knock knock jokes her father and I can take.

When we were Christmas shopping this weekend, we went to Michael’s to

It even has a sale rack!

 look for something and found the Christmas village pieces were on sale – 50% off. 

Oh what a coup! I found a bookstore.  I’d have paid a million dollars for it.

I absolutely love it!

From my daily Calendar: 

Jackson busy at what he did best

1942, Peggy Guggenheim offered to support Jackson Pollock while he painted exclusively for her gallery and completed a mural for her apartment.  When his first show opened a year later, it attracted significant attention.  But he still had to complete the mural.  At nightfall the day before the deadline, Pollock started painting and worked for fifteen hours straight.  As soon as the paint was dry, he rolled up the canvas and hauled it to Guggenheim’s apartment, where he realized in horror that it was too long!  Guggenheim sent Marcel Duchamp to help.  Duchamp calmly suggested they cut eight inches from the painting.  By then Pollock had found Guggenheim’s liquor stash, so the canvas was trimmed at one end and tacked to the wall.  The artist then stormed into the middle of Peggy’s party, staggered to the marble fireplace, unzipped his pants, and urinated. 

This is the mural from Guggenheim’s apartment.  Can you see Jackson’s name in side the design?  Maybe it was in the eight inches Duchamp cut off.

You know, sometimes there are moments when you look at your children and you have a flash of recognition.  It’s a moment of clarity that your child shares all the DNA before them.  My brother looks just like our father and my nephew – well, it’s really amazing how much that boy looks like his grandfather and great grandfather.  The four of them have the same face – long and strong boned.  I got the cleft in the chin – yea for me.

I had a really powerful moment like that right after Sassy was born.  She was very early – 7 1/2 weeks early and thus was very tiny at 3lb 9oz.  She spent the first month of her life in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, the NICU for the uninitiated.  Yes she was beautiful, but she was so tiny and so thin – she didn’t look like anyone I knew.  Don’t all new parents look down into tiny faces and think, “You have your father’s eyes” or “She has her mother’s nose”.  I didn’t see that.  Not then, and I thought I was missing out on something.

Holding Daddy's Hand. This is one of my favorite pictures of all time

But after Sassy was about ten days old, I had an epiphany.  I was in the bathroom washing my hands, preparing to head off to a day at the NICU when it hit like a ton of bricks.  Her tiny, tiny hands were just exactly like mine.  The shape, the large knuckles, everything.  It was a really extraordinary moment for me as a brand new Mommy.  She was really and truly mine and all of her family before her.

I’m going somewhere with this, I promise you. 

We had so much to do today: grocery shopping and a ton of christmas shopping.  Sassy was ready early.  She was wearing a beautiful sun dress.  It’s 80 degrees out here in the desert so, ridiculously, a sundress is entirely appropriate.  But no one had seen The Bandit for a while.  We kept hollaring for him to come out so we could go.

This is a Project Runway task gone horribly awry

The minute he did, My Honey nailed it.  “Oh dear God, he looks exactly like his Poppa.”

Here is his look. 

He came up with it all on his own.  Believe me, no one else is willing to claim any part of it.  But I’ll tell you, he worked this look all day.

We call it “Lumberjack Surfer”.  We did insist he lose the tie.

“I see London, I see France,” the singing was high pitched and punctuated with giggles.  “I see Daddy’s underpants.”  The Bandit was jumping up and down on the bed while his daddy was changing out of his work clothes.

Daddy was tired and hot and he really wanted to be crabby.  It’s awfully hard when The Bandit is this silly.

“Yeah, well, you’re probably not even wearing underpants,” My Honey replied, yanking up a pair of shorts over his offending underpants.

The jumping ceased and the boy spread his arms out wide, taking the stance of a PT Barnum style showman. 

“Prepare to be amazed!” he shouted.

His wee little tushy was modestly covered by Spiderman jockey shorts.

And we were amazed.  Amen.

I was not selected for jury duty.  In fact, I was never even selected to go to a court room for prospective selection.  All of which was fine with me.  I took my lap top as I told you I would, and I got so much done.  I wrote 7 pages on the new chapter.  It was the first real writing I’ve done in weeks.  It got me back on track , out of my head, and onto paper.

Paper good.  Head bad.

One thing I was disappointed with during my tenure of civic duty was the total lack of weird people.  Seriously.  When one goes downtown, a person has certain expectations.  I expect to see weird people and lawyers.  Maybe some lazy and rude government workers.  I realize I’m working with cliches and generalizations but history has proven the rules, not me. 

I saw not one single crazy person arguing with themselves or an inanimate object.  This is unusual.  It’s winter.  That’s when the best crazies come out.  I may sound mean, but think of the desert as the south and under-medicated crazies as the birds that fly there.  Every winter they flock here to the warmth – pun intended.

The only person I had any problem with whatsoever was an old man who wore his Know-it-all Hat.  And he wore the hell out of it.  All day.  He lectured all who would listen on every single topic and after lunch he took the opposing stand on several of his most vehement opinions.  It was almost unbearably annoying for someone who was trying to concentrate on the voices in her own head. 

At one point, I must have huffed louder than I thought because I caught his attention. 

He swelled all up like  an ancient rooster and said, “What?” as if he was a 17 year old ruffian and not a septuagenarian with a walker.

I chuckled, shook my head and replied, “I’m just exhaling.”

My Honey has said for years my exasperated huffing and puffing was going to get me in a fight.

I had to read it twice before I got it.  Of course, I read it wrong the first time….