Writer's Workshop: A Parent's Job

The Prompt:
Describe a moment you felt embarrassed by your parents

My dad has always loved embarrassing me. When I was in the 7th grade, I opened up my binder in the middle of math class, only to find that my dad had hidden one of my bras in between the pages. Do you remember 7th grade? Do you remember how awkward you were? Add a crazy dad to that mix, and you have my life.

I’ve told this story before, but this was probably the most embarrassed I’ve ever been by my parents.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I had my first boyfriend. He broke up with me after a month because I wouldn’t kiss him. I had never kissed a boy before and I was afraid of doing it completely wrong. Plus, his lips were really big.

REALLY big.

So, he dumped me, and I wanted to die. Not because I was heartbroken, but because I was so ultimately embarrassed that a guy would break up with me. I didn’t talk to him, I didn’t even look at him. I was shy anyway and not a big talker, and this just made matters worse.

A couple months later, my parents and I were shopping one weekend and we stopped for lunch. It turned out that my exboyfriend was a busboy at the restaurant. Ugh. I pretended not to notice him, and I sunk down in my chair as low as I could.

Of course, my mother saw him. “Oh, look, there’s Lisa’s little boyfriend,” she said to my father, pointing him out.

(Oh, please, shoot me now)

My father squints at him, and then said at the top of his voice,

“I don’t remember the boy’s lips being so big.”

Oh. My. God.

I looked up, and of course the boy is cleaning only two tables away. His face was as red as his lips. He wiped off the table, and all but ran into the kitchen.

He didn’t come back out the rest of the time we were there.

At least I didn’t have to worry about bumping into him in the halls at school after that. The boy made himself super scarce!

DIY Fun and Festive Napkin Rings

(I’m looking to expand my blogroll. If you know of an awesome blog that you think I’ll love, mention it in the comments!)


My girlfriend gave me this idea, I think she got it from Martha Stewart. It it SO easy to do, and will put the finishing touch on your Thanksgiving table.

First, you need some of these:



If you’re not a drinker or don’t save your bottle corks, you could go to your local winery and ask for some, or start up a collection by asking your friends or coworkers to have a bottle of wine with dinner, and then give you the cork.

You also need some thin ribbon in a fall color, a needle with the largest eye you can find (the kind you use for yarn), and some kind of boring device, like a drill or an ice pick.

Go through your cork collection and pick out your favorites. I suggest using the real cork ones, not the new rubber stoppers they’ve been making lately. Real cork just looks cooler for this project, more authentic.

Wylee doesn’t let me use his drill without adult supervision (I am admittedly rather accident prone), so I used an ice pick, which I must say is definitely more dangerous, but I had to use the tools available to me. I took the ice pick to bore a hole through the width of the cork.

Then, I threaded the needle with my ribbon, and fed the ribbon through the hole I made. Now, you should have cork on a ribbon, as shown here by my lovely assistant:



Now, take you nicest cloth napkins (or your blue party paper napkins if you’ve realized that you sold all your cloth napkins at your last garage sale and have not purchased new ones), and tie the ribbon around a rolled up napkin:


Viola! You have festive napkin rings! Continue the theme by filling a dry glass vase with more stoppers and adding in faux flowers in fall colors, and you have your centerpiece!

Couldn’t be easier! What ideas do you have for this holiday season?

Retirement Must be Nice

About a month ago, my dad called me out of the blue. Hello, how are you, I’m fine.

“So, I’m going to start doing your yard work for you,” he said after a few minutes.

What? “Dad, you don’t need to do that. Wylee takes care of it.”

“I know he does. But you have the two kids to take care of, and Wylee works long hours and he has to travel a lot. I’m retired now, I don’t have anything else to do. I’m doing this. Tell Wylee.”

OK. He is the boss of me, there’s not much I can do to argue.

So, my dad’s been doing our yard work for about a month now. And I have to admit, the yard looks better than it has since we’ve moved in. The lawn is cut and edged. The leaves are raked. The bushes are trimmed. We have one of the nicer yards on our street.

Wylee and I are at work all day, so my dad has a key and lets himself in. I’m ok with this. I try to keep the house as clean as possible, and especially when I know he’s coming over the next day. Sometimes I am successful at this, and sometimes not. I like to have a clean house, but he lived with me for the first 18 years of my life. He knows I’m not a neat freak.

But my dad is a little OCD. We have a box of candy bars in our refrigerator. We were supposed to sell them for the AC’s school, but we just kept it for ourselves (hence the reason I can’t lose any weight). Wylee likes the almond, I’m a fan of caramel. God bless World’s Finest Chocolate.

My dad organized all the chocolate. Put all the milk chocolate together, all the waffle crisp together. He made all the labels face the same way. He left equal space between each bar.

I guess you need something to keep you occupied when you’re retired.

I told this story to my friend at work and she said, “Oh my gosh, Lisa! Aren’t you afraid you’re going to come home one day and find that he’s alphabetized your naughty drawer?”

Well, I wasn’t worried until now.

I need to put a lock on my door.

(PS- Dad, if you’re reading this, I don’t really have a naughty drawer. I just made that up. You don’t need to look in the bedroom drawers. Seriously. Don’t look.)

Confession Wednesday: Hotel California

Hotel Confessions....

I know what you all are thinking, you pervs. You want to hear all the juicy stuff we do in the hotel while Wylee and I are on vacation, right? Well, this isn’t that kind of story!

This happened years and years (and years) ago. Back when I was in high school, so some of the details are sketchy. I’ll improvise as needed. I was a freshman, or maybe a sophomore, and I was on the speech and debate team. Part of being on the team meant we had to go to weekend-long invitational tournaments at the state colleges across the state. It was a great way to get away from the parents for a weekend.

So, one weekend, we had an invitational at Chico State. This is an awesome party school, but I really wouldn’t know, this was before my partying days. My friend Anna and I shared a hotel room and they gave us one of those credit card keys. I know this is no big deal now, but 20 years ago, this was super cool and modern.

Yes, I am a million years old.

OK, so my roomy Anna and I shared a room, but it’s not like we spent any time there. We were visiting all our friends in the other rooms, talking and laughing and crank calling and doing freshman stuff.

We left to go back to our room at like 2 in the morning. I had the credit card thing in my hand, but I couldn’t get the lock to work. “Oh my Gawd, it’s like totally not working,” I squealed.

“Just hold the phone, let me try it,” Anna replied. She tried the card the other way. Still not working.

“Oh, gag! You’re totally doing it wrong! Give it back!” I snatched the card back. We stood there arguing for several moments when the door opened.

And there stood a 40-year-old man. In his underwear.

Anna and I were stunned into silence. We stood there staring at the man and then he said, “would you two like to come in?”

Holy crap! Crazy psycho man in his underwear in our room! We ran down the hall, half screaming, half laughing.

We got to the stairwell to catch our breath and to figure out what we should do next. We needed to tell the coach, obviously. What room was she in again? 1204, right? I remembered because we were in 1004, two floors below.

Wait a minute. The tenth floor. I looked at the stairwell.

We were on the 11th floor. I just tried to break into room 1104.

Oops.

Why we don't let her talk to boys

I was doing laundry today, and the AC was paying in her room. She suddenly appeared wearing a dress, sandals, a necklace, a bracelet and a ring. “Look at me, Mommy!” she said as she swirled around the room.

“You look very beautiful,” I replied. “Whatcha doin’?”

“I got married today,” the AC said sweetly.

“Oh, really? What’s your husband’s name?”

“Nicholas.”

Whoa. Hold it right there. I expected her to say “Daddy” or even by his name “Wylee.” Who is this Nicholas character?

Actually, this is not the first I’ve heard of Nicholas (known to everyone else as Nico) . A few weeks ago, the AC kept sticking out her tongue while she was eating. “AC, don’t do that,” I warned. “You’re going to bite your tongue.”

The AC suddenly got serious. “And then I’ll die?”

“No, you won’t die. It will just hurt really bad. Where did you hear about dieing?”

“From Nicholas.”

“Well, you don’t listen to him.”

I’ve been a little wary every since.

But now I got the story out of the AC. Apparently, they’ve been playing “wedding” at school. Nico is the groom, the AC is the bride, and a third person says “'til death do you part,” and they’re married. The AC didn’t know the word “death,” and Nico was quick to explain it.

“When you die, you go away and you never see your mommy or daddy again.”

Nice.

Nicholas is now banned from all conversation.

Linky Love

Help Brad get the girl, or watch him screw up.

Yet another place I can add to the list of locations I don’t need to visit.

Aren’t we all supermoms?

You have to be pretty drunk to do this.

Man, and all I do is fall asleep in mine.

How does she do it? Try and be amazed!

Writer's Workshop: I Can't Sleep

The Prompt:
10 reasons why you can't sleep at night

10. NaNoWriMo. I entered this crazy writing project called NaNoWriMo. The idea is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. That comes out to 5000 words every three days. The longest story I’ve ever written was 21 pages long, and it was only 6500 words. I am not entirely sure what I was thinking when I signed up. You don’t even get anything if you accomplish this next to impossible feat, not even a cookie. And I am now 5 days behind. Nice.

9. My shower. Oh, Lord. My shower is so gross. I spent a good hour scrubbing it the other night, and it is still nasty. I want to just rip the whole thing out and install a new shower. And my fear is that there’s going to be some sort of tragedy or disaster that will cause friends and family to show up at my house. What if they want or need to take a shower? I’ll have to say, “no, sorry, my shower is gross. Go over to the neighbor’s.” (Please note that Wylee says the shower looks fine. He doesn’t know).

8. My job. Ugh. This freaking economy. If I could get some kind of guarantee that I won’t lose my job, that would be really cool. Or if I could be assured that we would never lose the house, that would be awesome.

7. Nintendo DS. Wylee got me a Nintendo DS for our anniversary and I HAVE to play every night. It’s not like there’s even games to play that are that exciting. It’s all Suduko and Brain Age and Scribblenauts. If you have a favorite DS game, please let me know, and I’ll add it to my Christmas list!

6. Christmas lists. Wylee keeps a really tight leash on me when it comes to Christmas shopping. It takes an intense amount of planning on my part. Who makes the cut, what will the budget be, what am I going to get them, what will I make for the people who don’t make the cut, what kind of bonus will give to our “service providers.” Thank goodness I like to bake, the AC’s teacher and Buster’s daycare provider are getting cookies and fudge. Merry Christmas to them.

5. Adam. Sure, I still think of him. I wonder if he’s ok, if he’s happy. Our new social worker also happens to be Adam’s current social worker, so she gives me little updates. She says that he’s ok, but that the birth mother is still causing problems. If you remember, the birth mother convinced her aunt to adopt Adam, presumably so she would still have contact with him. The aunt said she would, but now won’t let the birth mom see him (because she is seriously mentally disturbed. She needs help). I am thankful that at least Adam’s new mother truly appears to be looking out for Adam’s best interests. And I really think that everything happens for a reason, and I know now that Buster is a much better match for us.

4. Bridges. Bridges definitely make my list of top 10 things that freak me out. Not little wimpy bridges, those are no big deal. I’m talking about big bridges. That go over the ocean. That have collapsed during major earthquakes. That had a cable break and fall onto a vehicle just last week. That I have to travel on to get to San Francisco, which I have to do next month. Ugh! I will need to have some form of tranquilizing agent in my system in order to accomplish this.

3. The AC. There’s something not quite right with the AC. She’s brilliant, of course. And she’s so damn cute. But she’s such a loner. She doesn’t really play with any of the other kids. She’s friendly enough, but she would rather do her own thing than waste her time trying to share and play nice and actually interact with a child her own age. I’m thinking about setting up some play dates with some of the other kids from her school, but I don’t know any of the parents. That’s not weird, is it? I was thinking of sending a little card to the mother of the lucky playdate child, asking her to call me to set something up.

2. Buster. We are so close to finalizing the adoption. Our big hearing, the hearing that terminates all parental rights, is at the end of this month. After that, no one can come forward and say that they are a long lost aunt or grandmother or cousin and take him away from us. If we can just get through these last few weeks. After that, everything else will be just paperwork. Hopefully. I f nothing crazy pops up at the last moment.

And the number 1 reason why I can’t sleep at night…

1. Wylee. How can a girl sleep when there’s a coyote mauling her?