I took The Bandit to his best friend’s birthday party last weekend.  They have been best friends since infancy, and he and his best friend share the same first name, only with different spellings.  My son immediately began calling the other boy by his surname and that stuck.  It’s really quite charming.  He, his friend, and a couple of other boys have all been together for their entire pre-school careers.  My Honey christened them The Four Toddlers of The Apocolypse.  Unfortunately, they will be split up finally as they head off to different kindergartens – 2 to private schools and the others to charter schools – you see what faith we have in the public school systems?

Anyway, the moms and I were hanging out at the party.  I really like these moms and hopefully I haven’t completely pissed them off and they’ll still invite me to stuff and let me be friends on Facebook.

One of the moms said that she had her baby’s name picked out.  “I didn’t know you were pregnant,” I said.  “Congratulations!” 

“Oh, I’m not pregnant yet, but I have the name picked out,” she told me, laughing.

“All right, I’ll bite.  What’s the name?”

“Damien blah blah.”  I have no idea what the other names were that she said.  I totally stopped listening after Damien.

Why? Why would a parent name their child Damien.  You all know exactly what I’m referring to when I say that name – even if you’re like me and can’t handle even the simplest horror movie.  You’re thinking of The Omen aren’t you? Of course you are.  These children are doomed.

“Yeah, but none of the other kids will know what it means,” she protested.

But every single parent will.  Every single teacher will have a preconceived notion of that child.  I promise you.  There is no one I know broadminded enough to think to themselves after being introduced to a Damien, “Gee, I’ll wipe my brain clean of maniacal children on tricycles throwing their mothers off of balcony’s and assume that this particular Damien is wonderful.”

One of the other moms piped up and said that her ex-husband was a Damien and she named her first child Cain.  She said she deserved everything she got tempting fate like that.  I have to agree.  People won’t name their child “Billy” because they remember some kid in grade school that was named Billy and he ate paste, but they’ll name their child after the Devil’s spawn.  I just don’t get it.  And that goes for Lucifer as well. 

“I also have a girl’s name picked out, too,” she offered.

“Oh yeah?” I said.  “Which one is that? Jezebel?”

And that’s when I think I was crossed off all the future guest lists.

I don’t usually use the blog to this kind of thing, but then I thought to myself, it’s my stupid blog and if I want to, who’s to stop me?

So – Here we go.

To Michelle

Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday Dear Miiiiicheee-eeelle, Happy birthday to you.

And just a little of your favorite eye candy cause I love ya!

Have a great 21st birthday.

The following is a list of reasons why I am having a nervous breakdown.

1. I have about a million e-mails to go out for the 2011 Tucson Festival of Books.  Our committee is way ahead of the curve but, I have a lot of work to do.  We have some reallybig names in romance slated to come: Mary Jo Putney is the latest, but also, Julia London, Kat Martin, Karen Hawkins, Angela Knight, and Jennifer Ashely.  It’s gonna be huge!  But still, I have a lot of work ahead of me.  I am the idiot in charge of publicity.

2. I have about a million submission to read and give my opinion on for Keith Publications.  I’m a moron.

3. I have this new job that is keeping me…..NOT BUSY AT ALL! But I’ve been promised a computer on Thursday.  That will be just short of 3 weeks.  I hope to god it works when it gets here. 

4. My daughter, MY DAUGHTER, the girly girl who lives at my house who made me call her Cinderella for a large part of her 3rd year on this earth, is now asking people to pull her finger.  I swear to you this is true.  I couldn’t possibly make up anything this heinous and absurd.  Pull her finger – good Lord.  I can’t even go into her room half the time due to the stench.

5. My son has a death wish and it will be everything I can do to keep him alive this summer. 

6. I have several interviews to do.  I’ve sent Kelli the interview questions for her to complete and I have to write up some questions for another author’s new publication with www.dinkwell.com (the sister site to Wicked Ink Press).

7.  I have a blog tour coming up the week of June 21st.  For that event, I’ve already been sent three sets of interview questions that I need to come up with witty and intelligent answers for.  It would be nice if I could come up with answers that are slightly different for each event. 

8. Kevan Lyon, one of my top dream-list agents, has asked for my full novel, Seeing Love Clearly.  This is unbelievably exciting.  BUT, it’s not done yet.  I’ve been rewriting it for a year now.  My lap top is broken so my only solution during the day is handwriting – with a pencil so I can constantly erase.  I have no idea how Jane Austen did it.  I’m losing my mind.

I think I can hear a waterfall up ahead.

Kelli’s novella The Duke Of Desperation and  mine, The Sea Rose, are up on the Wickedinkpress.com site.

.

Have I ever told you that I think my husband is one of the funniest people I know?  Well, he is.  He is very dry and quick witted and sarcastic – my three favorite qualities in a humorist. 

My Honey and I were at the grocery store the other day, and as we entered the produce department he commented that he was getting potatoes because he felt creepy every time he walked into the kitchen. 

“Huh?” I asked.   I couldn’t figure out the corrolation between feeling creepy and potatoes in the kitchen. 

“The potatoes, they’re creepy,” he repeated, giving a dramatic shudder.  “They keep looking at me.  Their eyes follow me around the kitchen.”

That gave me a vision directly from the fruit and vegetable bins in my kitchen.  I could see what he was talking about.  There were about nine old potatoes in the bin and each was sprouting “eyes.”  Long, green stalks protruded from each of the spuds, and they may even be waving gently in the draft from the cooler vent giving them a creepy, crawly sense of being alive.

“I keep thinking that they will join forces with the brown bananas and start a coup,” he told me in his best Walter Cronkite “and that’s the way it is” voice.

That did it.  Now I was cackling away in the Fry’s produce department. 

Don’t you think it’s strange how many of my weird, ridiculous stories take place in the produce department of the grocery store.

My last post was about J.R.R. Tolkien.  Well and about learning multiple languages, having initiative, Peter Jackson and Aragorn.  The only thing you ladies remember is Aragorn, right?  Once the picture went up it, you fell right into a Charlie Brown episode, didn’t you?  You know what I mean.  This is what you read after that….

“blah blah blah Aragorn mwa mwa mwa mwaaaaa.”

Want me to do it again?

Let’s do it one more time.  

You know why I’m fun to have around?  I’ve told you this before…it’s because I have no impulse control.

It’s why I have tattoos.  And why so many other people have tattoos.

Anyway, the reason I brought this up was because (besides ARAGORN) was because I found another good quote by Tolkien.

“Being a cult figure in one’s own lifetime, I am afraid, is not at all pleasant.”

Quiet and unassuming.  And obviously a linguistic genius.

I still can’t get over that list.

The only foreign language I’m fluent in is Pig Latin.  However, I don’t think that anyone is looking for a Pig Latin interpreter at the UN.

I don’t have an official desk at my new job yet.  I have a place where I sit every day and it is shaped like a desk and it has cubicle walls around it, but it’s not my desk.  There is no computer on this “desk” and I know that in a couple of weeks I will have to move to a different desk not far away.  Because of all the transition I know is coming, I don’t want to bring all my desk stuff and just have to move it again.  So the only thing on “my” desk is my personal pen.  I have a trunk full of stuff like my desk calendar, my leather pen holder, my note pad/mouse pad, pictures of the family, etc.  So I realized today that I haven’t looked at my daily desk calendar in over two weeks so I went out to the trunk and pulled off the pages I’d missed.

There was some good stuff there.  This one in particular I’d like to share because it’s outstanding.

To date, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy has sold more than one hundred million copies worldwide.  It is the best-selling work of fiction of all time and the third best-selling book, behind the Bible and the quotations of Mao Zedung.  As a child, Tolkiens’s mother taught him Latin, French, and German.  On his own initiative, he picked up Greek, Middle English, Old English, Old Norse, Gothic, modern and medieval Welsh, Finnish, Spanish, and Italian.  He could also get by in Russian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, andLombardic (whatever that is).  When he got bored with existing languages, Tolkien simply invented new ones – fourteen to be precise, with complete alphabets for each.  He even took to writing his one diary using made-up letters.

Holy Moly.  I love the “On his own initiative” part.  I’m there to tell you that my “initiative” and Tolkien’s shouldn’t even be spelled with the same letters.  I’ve not even managed to complete all my Spanish requirements and I live a little more than an hour from the Mexican border.

I love the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  I’ve read them all multiple times

Really - can you blame me?

 including The Hobbit.  I’ve seen the movies 98,647,285 and not just because of Aragorn.  My Honey is starting to get a complex about how many times I’ve seen them (and that is totally because of Aragorn!).  I just can’t help myself.  I really, really love a sweeping story and Tolkien’s are masterful.   Peter Jackson did such a spectacular job bringing the fantasy world to life.

Anyway, the point of this blog was Tolkien’s genius and I’ve devolved into the genius of Peter Jackson’s imagination and the glory that is Aragorn.

Sassy and I went to Peiwei to pick up dinner this evening.  The restaurant wasn’t too crowded when we got there, and we had a bit of time to wait until our order was ready, so we plunked ourselves down on tall stools and waited.  It was only a minute before the door opened and another woman came in to pick up her take out order as well. 

She was really tall – at least six feet, and she wore wedged sandals that made her even taller.  Her hair was done in a teased ponytail and her face was made up.  Besides the cute shoes on her manicured feet, she wore a cute top and short-shorts so her legs were like seven miles long.  And she was skinny.  We’re talking runway-model skinny.  She was maybe 120 lbs soaking wet.  She was so thin that when she walked away to fill up her drink cup, I could actually see where her thigh muscles were attached to her femurs. 

She was quite pretty and, to redeem myself for thinking such uncharitable thoughts, I smiled at her when she sat at the stool next to me.  I tried to convince myself that perhaps she one of those poor unfortunate women who simply can’t gain weight, whose thyroid malfunctions in such a way to make them near anorexic.  Unfortunately, I can’t relate to that in any way so I gave up and just let my pudgy, little self be horrid – dharma be damned.

She had ordered lettuce wraps and I wondered to myself if she would eat any of the protein or just suck on the iceberg lettuce. 

Pretty soon the waiting area began to fill up and soon there were about fifteen of us milling about.  I looked at skinny girl and said, “Wow! We sure got here at the right time.”

“I know,” she told me.  “I work at Merrill Lynch across the street….”

That’s when I stopped listening.  Merrill Lynch.  Really.  I remained skeptical.  Whatever charity I had for her flew out the window.  While I was sitting there feeling fat and unattractive next to this waif/giant oxymoron, I at least had the one up that while she was beautiful and making a ton of money modeling, at least I had brains.  I am a published author, I thought to myself smugly.  If she worked for a stock brokerage then I had no nice thoughts for her at all.  You don’t get to be beautiful, stupidly skinny and smart.  That’s just cruel.  And I don’t give a rat’s ass what mental issues you may have that made you this way.  The Trifecta of Perfection doesn’t lend

That's me - the tiny one on the left

 itself to sympathy.

But then the universe got a little stranger.

At the front of the line stood another Amazon.  This woman was 6’2″, if not more, and she was wearing flip flops so you couldn’t even attribute any of her height to her shoes.  I was dumbfounded.  At least she wasn’t skinny, but rather sort of built like a girl linebacker.  Not fat, but substantial and athletic.  She had an equally tall boyfriend with her. 

The Peiwei was making me feel insignificant.

Our order was finally completed and when Sassy and I walked to the door, another giantess held it open for us.  My mouth just sort of sagged open which I’m sure is less than attractive on my 5’3″ frame.  What the hell?  I have no idea what was going on, but I was beginning to get a complex.

Does Peiwei have growth hormones in their food?

So fine, I took me and my tiny little daughter, who will no doubt inherit my mother’s family’s hips and propensity to spread regardless of her petite nature as a child (I was there, I know how it works), and we’re taking our noodles full of gluten home and we’re going to eat them heartily with all the protein and then several fortune cookies to finish us off.

Stupid tall people.  Not that I have a complex or anything, you understand.

So for the last eight years or so, I’ve been slowly trying to integrate Buddhist principles into my life.  It’s a challenge.  I am not wired like most Buddhists.  For example, I’m very excitable – in both good ways and bad, I have a tendency to be catty – I’m not proud of it but there it is, and I have a quick temper.  These are not characteristics that are normally associated with Buddhist teachings, but tranquility and wisdom are things I aspire to.  As I said, I’m practicing and I find myself stopping and making conscious decisions  based on the dharma teachings more often than I used to.  That’s a huge step for me – seriously.  Any of you that know my family, and especially my father who I take after so much, know that this doesn’t come naturally for me.

So why the introspection today? 

This is Soccer Practice Thursday.  After work I meet My Honey and the kids at the park and I sit on the grass and cheer on my little dude for an hour.  The problem is that spring has sprung and all the pesky little bugs are out.  They are also biting me.  I’m not necessarily talking about the flying ones like bees and mosquitoes.  For what ever reason bees, wasps, etc. do not really alarm me and mosquitoes don’t find me tasty.  It’s the crawly ones that do me in.  Ants and other creepy icky things that crawl into my pant leg and up my arms.  I was riddled with ant bites ten minutes into practice and as I was smooshing the third or forth one I found on my arm, I realized what I’d done.  CRAP!

It sounds stupid, but now I’ve trod right over a priciple Buddhist Dharma. 

I need all the good karma I can get.  I will endeavor to do better and that’s all you can really do in Buddhism. 

Sometimes I think it would just be easier to believe in the whole Hail Mary nonsense and just repent.