The Bandit came home from school and was angry because he was the last kid to be picked for Red Rover.

“What do you mean you were the last one picked?” I asked. This is one of my nightmares – trying to make my kids OK about not always fitting in.

by www.demotivationalblog.com

“Last one, Mom.”

“You mean for teams or what?”

“No,” he said, as exasperated as ever with my constant questions. “The didn’t call me over until very last.”

I reviewed the rules of Red Rover that I remembered from elementary school. In case you’ve forgotten, there are two teams who line up across from each other on a field and link arms. They call names opposing team members one at a time by saying “Red Rover, Red Rover send Bandit on over.” Then Bandit has to run at the other team, looking for a weak link in the human chain. If he’s able to break through the linked hands, he gets to take a member of that team back to his own team. If he fails, the opposing team gets to keep him. the winning team ultimately absorbs the losing team.

Oh! I felt better. “That means they’re scared of you doing too well.” I get that look that informs me I have no idea what I’m talking about. “No really. They didn’t call you over because they knew you’d bust through and steal a person back.”

“OK, Mom, if you say so.”

I do do say so. I’m the Mom. I know this stuff.

Of course this conversation made me think of lots of weird games we played when we were kids. Dodge Ball is a particularly violent game when you think about it. I remember coming home with welts from those damn red rubber balls. Those boys were vicious. Now that I think of it, I wonder how many of those mean boys have gone to prison.

Ava had an eye appointment today. I suspect hers was less traumatic than mine was the other day or I would have heard about it already. That made me consider…

I’m not sure if it’s all the meat Ava and I are eating these days on our low-carb diet, or if it’s from continued exposure to Bank of No Forks, or if it’s just our generally piss poor attitudes, but we seem to be scaring people.

I really think it’s the meat. All that chewing and chewing and endless chewing. Our red blood is all feverish from it.

The reason I bring this up is that if you’re our waitperson at a restaurant, I suggest you get Ava what she asks for as quickly as possible. On Friday, she

pic from TheRoadToLessCake.com

was down right vicious. If I hadn’t thought the idiot waiter deserved it, I would have endeavored to calm her down. As it was, sadly that waiter deserved every bit of grief she could give him. The man was an idiot.

This coming week doesn’t bode well, either. Not only will we still be masticating meat (and masticating and masticating and masticating – it’s true, one can get sick of bacon) but I have just had to come to grips with the fact that I’m old.

O. L. D.

I went to get my eyes checked and learned I need reading glasses. Oh the horror. I absolutely refused to get bifocals.

So now – just to recap – I’m dangerously mean, hungry for cake, and old. I’d steer clear if I were you.

Boy, getting Amylynn to concentrate on anything these day’s is a struggle. What she’d really like is to hole herself up in a hotel somewhere to get all her immediate writing done, but that’s not in the cards. Not only will her family and Sisters not allow her to hide out like that, she can’t focus since her novella, The Sea Rose, went up for sale on Amazon this week. Her first novel goes up next week and we’ll have to keep a close eye on her or she’s liable to wander off in a daze into traffic or something. If you find her roaming loose and babbling excitedly, point her in the direction of home. And for Zeus’s sake, don’t let her have any cake no matter how nicely she asks. She is NOT allowed cake. NOT. It’s a good thing Ava is a stalwart

He looks a bit worried.

dieter …hahahahaha – we can’t even finish that sentence. Here’s some funny stuff.

1. Prince Charles on public transportation. Prince Charles and Camilla took the London ‘tube’ on Wednesday for the first time in twenty-five years. The best part was they only rode the length of one stop. What was that – nineteen seconds? We wonder how that went. Did he touch the handrails? Do you supposed he sat on the bench seat with the rest of the rabble or did he hang on to the pole? Did Camilla wear one of those ridiculous hats? If so, we hope it had ostrich feathers because nothing screams I Ride the Tube like a Commoner like ostrich feathers. 

2. Zimbabwe. The African country is in serious financial jeopardy. Do you remember a while back we were considering buying Greece? We never managed to get around to that because we’re very busy planning animal smuggling and trying to get Hillary Clinton on the phone. It’s probably good because now there’s Zimbabwe. The country has $216.00 in the bank. If we have 217.00 in hard cash, we’ll bet we could own that place by noon tomorrow. Amylynn is a notary and everything. We’ll put Ed in as the Minister of Finance and he’ll have that

place whipped into shape in no time. My Honey will be in charge of air conditioning because we suspect we’re
going to need a LOT of that over in Africa. When we have the coronation, we’re going to invite China and strongly suggest if they want good foreign relations they ought to bring a panda or six with him.

3. Si’s Wife. We’ve talked quite a bit about Duck Dynasty and our crushes on Jase – the middle brother. We haven’t mentioned Si before. We love Si – NOT in the same way we love Jase. That’s simply not happening. Si is an old, skinny guy with a streak of buffoonery and a truly hysterical sense of humor. The stuff that comes out of his mouth is outrageous, but he is not handsome. At all. We’ve seen photographic proof that he was once quite cute, but not these days. So how surprised were we when we found out he’s married. To a woman. We’re seriously dying to see her. We want to know what kind of a woman puts up with his ridiculousness. She’s probably a saint.

4. Dear Abby. The other day a woman wrote in to ask if it’s OK for your husband to have sex with you when you’re sleeping or if that’s abuse. After we dried the tears from our eyes and were able to talk about this, we came up with quite a litany of things to consider. Just exactly how hard are you sleeping? If you’re sleeping through it, perhaps he’s not doing it right. Or perhaps he’s so small you just don’t notice and in that case, he needs a nice pat on the head and a cookie or something. All we know for sure is that if that happened at the Louis/Bright house it would only happen once.

5. Tiffany. The Tiffany Valentines catalog came out. We found a couple of things we’d like. Ed and My Honey weren’t really receptive to our suggestions. Please go buy Amylynn’s books so we can use the royalties to buy this. We’ll share custody.

You know, insurance companies suck. We were royally screwed by our car insurance company. I know that probably shocks you. I have no idea why it should shock me. I should be immune to horrible customer service, but I’m clearly naive.

Normally, I don’t give the names of the companies I’m frustrated with. As you know, usually I just write a humorous blog about it. This time it cost us a lot of money and I’ll happily tell you it’s Progressive’s fault. I wrote a scathing review on their Facebook page (see below) and plan to Tweet it as well. If this isn’t what social media is for, then it’s as useless as Progressive is.

The jackass adjuster actually had the nerve and balls to talk down to me when I questioned his appraisal and adjustments. FOOL. I am one woman who knows her cars, can give a tutorial about how combustible engines work, and knows appraisals like nobody’s business. I wanted to go through the phone and choke him out. I did use all the big words at my disposal. I know a lot of words.

I’m not funny today. Sorry.

Tomorrow is the Five Things. I’ll be funny then.

For now, fight the man!

The Sea Rose has gone live.  It’s so exciting to see my name and my novella on Amazon. Its a whopping 99 cents so you can get your electronic copy by clicking this picture or the one on the right.

Lady Belling’s Secret will be up next week.

Stay tuned.

I am offering up household hints today.

I have learned things over the years that I am happy to pass along to you dear readers. Important things. Life and death things. Like how to get crayon out of every single piece of clothing in the house. I have this down to a science. I blame cargo pants and restaurants. I know that seems a bit disjointed but it’ll all make sense when I explain. There is no way to effectively check every single pocket in a seven-year old boy’s cargo pants without putting your hand in there which is something I do NOT recommend without chain mail gloves and even then you’re taking your chances. The restaurants are a problem because they insist on giving your child crappy fake crayons upon seating. No matter how many times you tell your children not to take them from the table when you leave, and how carefully you frisk them before you depart the premises, the damn things show up anyway – either covering your clean clothes or melted into the interior handles of your car in the summer heat.

If you need a sure-fire, but tragically time-consuming, way to get the crayon off, give me a shout out. I’ll divulge the secret.

Another thing that crops up around the house that people want to find a fix for is how to quickly defrost a chest freezer. The most effective way I’ve found is to get yourself a mischievous orange kitten and allow him play around cabinets in the laundry room where the appliance is plugged in.  Before you know it, the freezer is completely defrosted and all you have to do is throw away all your meat. No fuss, no muss – no hairdryer or chipping away at frost. Couldn’t be easier. Who wants $250 worth of Costco meat junking up your freezer anyway?

You know, come to think of it, both of these incidents happen in the laundry room. I don’t think I should go back there.

The Bandit and I were snuggling in his bottom bunk. The room was cozy and dark except for the alligator night-light glowing in the corner. The radio was turned on low to an easy listening station. I was just about ready to fall asleep myself and thought he was already gone when the DJ softly gave the call numbers on the radio.

“What’s FM mean?” he asked. He always comes up with these complicated questions when he should be sleeping.

“There two kinds of radio that we listen to – FM and AM.” I wasn’t about to go into satellite and Citizens Band. Jeez I only have a very rudimentary understanding of radio anyway. “You have to have a certain kind of receiver to pick up the radio. Everyone playing music on the radio has a certain channel they are assigned to called a frequency. That’s the number part.”

“OK,” he said in the darkness. “But what does FM mean?”

“That’s just the difference between how the signal is sent. They change up the sound waves in different ways with AM and FM radio.”

I heard a deep sigh. “But what does FM mean?”

What the hell? Am I in science class? Is there at test at the end of this? “Well usually, FM radio is mostly music and AM radio is mostly talk shows. When I was a kid, we only had AM radio.” I resisted the urge to launch into a bunch of other nonsense we didn’t have when we were kids.

“Mom,” he said the words slowly like I was one of those people that can’t understand the most basic English. “What does FM mean?”

“Frog Music.”

He exhaled a satisfied sigh. “Thank you. Was that really that hard?”

I really wish the kid would stop asking me stuff like this. I always sound like I’m making this crap up.

I need to get my second manuscript, Miss Goldsleigh’s Secret, ready to send to the editor. I have Lady Belling’s Secret and The Sea Rose going up VERY SOON. I have a blog tour to organize. People who want my attention. AHHHHHHHH!

You know what’s wrong with the world? We’ll tell you – because we know. The wrongness is that you go to a hamburger joint to get ONLY a delicious carb free hamburger and nothing more – thanks for the fries clueless cash register girl! – but they also sell milk shakes and frozen custard. The selfish non-dieting bastards. Thankfully the world is still a funny place. See….

1. Kids and cellphones. Amylynn’s oldest, Sassy, is nine and is campaigning for her own cell phone. That is really, really not happening. We understand that there are parents (Ava) who will entrust their children with expensive electronics, but Amylynn isn’t one of them. Apparently the Obama’s are less concerned or perhaps their children are more responsible with their belongings than Sassy is, because there were charming pictures of their kids photo bombing at the inauguration ceremonies. We love this photo. Love it. We think it’s even better than Michelle’s Inaugural Ball dress and that’s saying something.

2. Boulders. Wile E. Coyote is alive and well and living in Utah. For the first time in the history of ever, the Coyote got it right. Had Wanda Denhalter been a road runner, she’d have been toast. If you are unaware, Wanda was asleep in her king-sized bed (they’re very clear on that fact in the news accounts – you’ll see why later) when a giant boulder rolled off a cliff and crashed into her house and squished her bed. Had it been a smaller bed it would have squished her, too. As it was, she earned a broken jaw, a broken sternum, and a passel of stitches. The authorities are flummoxed as to what caused the car-sized boulder to break free of the mountain. We suspect Mr. Coyote was up there with an Acme crowbar.

3. Inauguration fare. One would expect more. We certainly would have had our dream come true if Michelle had returned our ardent request for an invitation to the Inaugural Ball. We love a good party. Instead, we got another strongly worded registered letter from the Secret Service. We’re having the whole collection laminated for posterity. We would have expected shrimp and pretty little hors ‘douvers along with our champagne. Sadly, that is not what the guests had. According to reliable sources, the guests were actually fed stale pretzels, salted nuts and Cheez-its. Three was no confirmation on the Kool-aid. Can you freaking believe that? We suppose with the economy the way it is, that’s reasonable. Still, when we sat outside with the rest of the hoi polloi, shivering in the freezing weather, we had lovely no-carb beef on a stick.

4. Subway. Can you believe that Subway has been cheating us out of an inch of bread? We can’t. If you can’t trust Subway to get a ruler out every time they put a loaf of bread in the oven, then we don’t know what is true and what is not anymore. We went in and demanded our missing inches but they showed us the door. If there’s a class action lawsuit over this, we’re totally in.

5. Big tips – huge! We went out for Chinese food yesterday. We had a hankering for delicious carb-free Chinese BBQ spare ribs. Our waitress was very non-Chinese.  She was also extraordinarily loud. That’s possibly because no one else in the restaurant was under the age of 80.  We sat in our lovely booth – last decorated in 1983 – and tried not to giggle when she bellowed HELLO, I’M YOUR WAITRESS. All was redeemed when she told Ava she didn’t look a day over 35. In the spirit of full disclosure, Ava is 48. It is true that she doesn’t look her age but 35 is pushing it (That’s not true, I don’t look a day over 21 – AVA). We did give her a gargantuan tip so she should continue to fling the bullshit for as long as she is able.