Uh-oh

You guys . . .


I think TAMN is in my ward. 


And I think she has five-year-old boy she's never told anyone about.


And guys .  . . he's the WORST one in his CTR class.


Oh, my heck.

Randomness

Here's the rest of the story to yesterday's post, courtesy of Kenny the Husband in the comment trail:


Ah, see my wife is being very kind to my reputation by leaving out the best part:

Our 10-year-old: I want to go inside now.

Me: That's fine. But I'm not tucking you in. I want to watch the rest of the meteor shower.

Our 10-year-old: Fine.

Me: Oh, you know...you can just ask Ulysses to tuck you in. I think he went into the house about 2 minutes ago since someone, as in a "ten-year-old someone", failed to close the screen door behind him. If you don't see him in your room, check your closet or under the bed. That's where he likes to hang out.


Now you know.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Dear Brandon Sanderson:

Is it really so hard to use vowels? I mean, is it wrong? Here, it's like this. Kaladin =  good name. Tvlakv = aargh! I understand that these imaginary people don't speak English . . . but I do, and I'm the one who bought your book. Help a girl out, mkay?

~A huge fan, despite the vowel lapse thing

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

The winner of Mockingjay of the fantastic people who donated to Eliza's marathon craziness is . . . Becca Wilhite! Yay! And if you have this, or don't want it, I'm a good book picker outer, so you can try me and I'll think of a different great book to send you. 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The above giveaway reminded me that there was another giveaway I offered and then never announced a winner for. It was for naming the two colors in this post. There was an excess of superfantastic answers but the winner is: NIKOL, who won me over with wordplay. She suggested In the LIME of Fire and Electric Raspberry Slurpee. But it was the lime joke that done got me. (Btw, she and I both have sons with the middle name Atticus. Cool club, party of 2, anyone?)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

We got a housekeeper. I can't decide if I'm lame or smart.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

All right. One more confession and I'm gone. I totally watch Bachelor Pad. Do think I should get vaccinated? I'm pretty sure the skankiness is bad enough that I can catch something through the TV.

Peace out, homies. (I'm on a mission to bring back lame 90s slang. Yo.)

Imaginary friends

My husband is a very smart man. And kind. Like when he spent a half hour wrangling this little guy out of the house this morning:

Do you see him sitting there, up at the top of the dated chandelier? Don't worry, no finches were smacked by any brooms during the liberation of this bird. It took the old laundry-basket-over-the-birdie trick, the trail of bread crumbs trick, and several open doors, but ultimately the little finch found his way outside.


Anyway, Kenny's a nice guy. But every now and then  . . . wait, no, make that for the first time ever, he was possessed by mischief, which is why when he's not shooing out finches, he sometimes has to shoo out imaginary homeless guys named Ulysses.


It all happened here:

This is my backyard. And I didn't bother cleaning it up before photographing it because I'm keeping it real. Anyway, our yard is small but cute and best of all, it backs up against a green belt so we have no neighbors right behind us. This is the view from the kitchen window:

This used to be a little slice of nirvana until Kenny lost his mind two weeks ago. The patch of grass right outside the window above was the scene of the crime.


Kenny, James and I were outside about 11:00 at night waiting for the Pleiades meteor shower. It's nice and dark at our end of the cul-de-sac with no light pollution to interfere with our stargazing. We all lay together snuggled under a blanket watching for shooting stars when a rustling began in the bushes on the other side of the back fence. 


It was a cat, okay? I know it was a cat. KNOW it. NEED to believe it with every fiber in my being. But Kenny decided it was a homeless man named Ulysses living in our bushes. He had James convinced in five minutes flat, but  me? It took, like, seven. Even though I knew it was a cat there was that part of me that thought, "Maybe it IS a homeless man named Ulysses," anyway.


And so James and I ditched Kenny and ran inside.


Hahaha, Kenny. You're SO funny. But guess what? The joke's on him because guess who has to get up to check for Ulysses every time I hear something creaking in the house at 3 a.m.?

Maybe . . .

Four people came. Four cool people! (I have a whole post marinating on how I define "cool." Wait for it . . .) To my girls' night. You know, the one where I thought no one would come? But they did and I had fun. Instead of Date Night we watched the documentary Babies which was perfect because it was fun to watch and yet you could talk through the whole thing without annoying anyone.


Also, I'm closing in on a winner of the copy of Mockingjay for donating to Eliza's marathon team which is raising money to fight blood cancers. Click here to donate and you'll be entered to win the book. Actually, if you already have or don't want Mockingjay, I'll pick a different book for you. I'm good at matching books to people. So go on . . . click.


I don't have much more to say because I'm just past the halfway point in Mockingjay and hey, I have my priorities. My children are scavenging in the pantry for shriveled potatoes and grains of uncooked rice, but I'll be done with my book by morning.


However, I wanted to point out this little news article in case you missed it. To sum up: a newly discovered microbe is eating the oil up much faster than expected in the Gulf, helping the dispersal significantly without depriving the area of much oxygen (thus, no dead zones). The microbes are a new strain related to the one that has long lived at the bottom of Gulf that eats the natural oil seepage that occurs on the sea floor. They're related, but they're not the same. It's a never before seen strain.


At first, I was kinda freaked out and I thought, "Oh, no. This is how we ended up with an unchecked rooster problem in Hawaii." My imagination started going wild with creature feature screenplays where the microbes overrun the ocean and suddenly we have much bigger problems than an oil spill.


But I thought about it a little more and I changed my mind. I grew up in Louisiana. Many people in my home stake make their living from industry in the Gulf. I have prayed for them, like many of you have. And I thought, "Maybe Heavenly Father has answered a prayer." And you know what? I think he has. I think maybe this is Him sending the seagulls (microbes) after the crickets (oil). He's pretty great. 


God loves and blesses His children. Those people struggling in the Gulf are His children. And they deserve those blessings. I'd like to believe I guessed right on this. . . 

Wanna come over?

I did it. I did something I absolutely hate to do, and now it's done. I invited people for a girl's night at my house.


I hate it because inevitably, no one will come. This happens every time. Book club at my house? Tiny turn out. Birthday party for my kids? Ha. But every couple of years I manage to convince myself that this time if I throw a little thing, people will show up.


Don't get me wrong, I like entertaining. I just don't enjoy feeling rejected. (The exception is dinner. Everyone always says yes to dinner. Huh.) So I decided I'd give myself a million outs by inviting people with less than 24 hours notice so that if no one comes, I can blame it on that. Kenny and James will be gone on a Scout camp out, and I'm going to hang out with the 1.5 out of 12 people that have accepted so far.


But you'd want to come over, right? To hang in your comfy clothes, share chocolate and watch Tina Fey in Date Night. Right? Right? (I don't sound needy. Right?)


Let me show me house. I think I kind of owe these pictures since we've been here for two months now. If you don't want a tour of my house, I'll never know that this is where you clicked away. (No rejection. See how I did that?)


All right. We're just doing the living room today because um, doing every room in my house would be boring.


Here we go:

I took this today. Not every where in Southern California is smoggy. Actually, Orange County is mostly all right.


Also, Kenny is fighting the good fight against the brown patches. It's epic.


This is what you see as soon as you walk in:

I'm going to go ahead an offend a large chunk of you by saying I don't care for oak. At all. It has to do with the looming walls/furniture/bookshelves of my childhood. I especially don't care for golden oak. Next week I'll show what we're going to do with the oak banisters, but for now, it be what it be. To the left is the temple we were married in (Redlands) and a bromeliad, purchased Tuesday because the tag says it's "hearty." Better be. I have the Brown Thumb of Death. Sleep with one eye open, Bromeliad. (To the left of that doomed plant is a closet that runs under the stairs and makes a great toy room for Grant. I love this house.)

This is the front door. I don't know what to do with that niche. I bought two things and brought them home so Kenny could help me choose and he liked them both in there together. Something about yin and yang. I don't know. Anyway, now they're both there and will probably stay that was for a lonnnnng time. But the light will eventually get swapped out for something cooler.


We didn't touch the carpet in the living room because um . . . we have kids. It looked pretty new two months ago. Now it doesn't. I feel smart every day for not getting new carpet.

We didn't do any painting in the front rooms because it's got big old vaulted ceilings and it would have been a pain. The existing paint was in good shape anyway. This was the furniture that came over from our condo and then I found the cool pillows at Target and the interesting drapes at Pier 1. The shelves display bowls Kenny turned on his lathe and as he turns more, we'll add more. (No pressure, honey.) We'll get to those books in the bottom picture in a minute.


If you're sittiing on the comfy sofa, this is what you see:

Our friends GAVE us that piano because they inherited a baby grand. It was ours for the price of the moving. I paid $200 to move and tune it and let me tell you  . . . Leo, a short potbellied man with a baby parrot named Tikki on his shoulder showed up to do it and I KNEW it would be worth every penny. He kept that parrot on his shoulder the whole time and he asked me for a bowl of water for his dog Bingo (I forgot the name, okay?) in the truck. The pictures on top of the piano are still searching for a home.


The top shadow box holds an original edition of Huckleberry Finn, a gift from Kenny on our first Christmas together. And I mean original as in over a hundred years old. It's awesome. The bottom book is signed copy of the 40th anniversary edition of To Kill a Mockingbird. That's right. Signed by Harper Lee. My oldest son's middle name is Atticus. I love that book.


This is the other thing you'll see when you sit on the comfy sofa:

 Fine. You'll really see this:

These are the first half of the shelves my awesome father-in-law built for us. They'll continue down that right wall when Kenny finishes designing them. (No pressure, honey.) Those boxes are all full of books. We have two bookshelves upstairs full of books. And we have this still sitting in the garage waiting to be unpacked:

So, yeah. We have a lot of books. A lot, a lot. A lot.


But Kenny and I have always wanted a library so I'm going to be so excited when this is done. We have to swap out the chandelier and throw in a couple of bean bags and it's going to be perfect. The shelf under the window is even with the sill so we can find some cool cushions and make it into a window seat.


And that's the tour. 


You'd come over for girl's night, right?

Because it's the right thing to do . . .

By the time my dad was my age, he'd escaped death a few times. That's not poetic license; it's cold, hard, amazing truth. He was diagnosed just past thirty and it went something like this: "You have cancer. It's rare, it's incurable, it's metastasized, and the best we can do is cut all of it out that we can find and blast you with a bunch of radiation. But it probably won't work. You've got six weeks. Sorry."


He hung on, though. For a few years, he endured brutal, barbaric treatments until his doctors decided to try this newfangled treatment called "chemotherapy." It made all the brutal stuff before seem like roasting marshmallows and singing "Kumbaya" around the campfire. It required days in the hospital, he lost weight he didn't have to spare, his hair fell out. I was really little. It was horrifying to watch him rattle up the sidewalk after a chemo treatment, skeletal and frail but with a big, tired smile on his face to reassure me.


But he survived. And although the cancer specter loomed for years, it didn't come back. For TWENTY-FIVE years, he was clear. That's pretty much as close to cured as it gets. It was a miracle.


But those brutal treatments he endured exacted an extremely high price on his body. He suffered side effects that resulted in heart damage, nerve damage, and a combination of other problems that would make an endocrinologist weep. Yes, chemo saved his life, but it was a new protocol and he paid that price his whole life.


In November of 2005, he sat us down, now grown adults, and informed us calmly that a node in his throat had been biopsied and tested positive for cancer. It wasn't the same cancer as the one from years before. This was altogether different. It was non-Hodgkins lymphoma and his prognosis was good. Normally a slow growing cancer that isn't caught until it's in its advanced stages, his had been caught because he was screened so regularly for EVERYTHING due to his history. He was only Stage 1, maybe Stage 2. 


Heck, that was practically grounds for throwing a party at our house.


Except, he had to go through chemo again. And things got grim real quick at the dining room table.


I remembered the hell of his treatments when I was a kid and my brother and sister remembered the stories.


But we cowboyed up like we were taught, and when he came home from his first chemo treatment, we were waiting, braced for the worst. And yet, the day was already different. He'd driven himself for an outpatient treatment where he sat in a cushy chair and took it easy for a little while. And he drove himself home. And he walked in with a smile on his face. And he felt fine. And he ate regularly. And over the next few days he continued to feel fine. And his hair never fell out.


And we all began to relax. For him, with this cancer and this treatment, chemotherapy in the grand scheme of his health history, had become No Big Deal.


Know why? Faith, yes. Prayer, yes. Blessings, yes. And MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY. 


I often contribute to cancer research causes because I've seen what a difference 25 years of research can make. I figure with my family history, it's only a matter of time before I catch The Big C, so I do what I can to bank against that almost-certain future: I get the screenings my insurance will cover (2 moles removed last week, thankyouverymuch) and I donate to researchers who may one day make chemo obsolete or in the case of my dad, totally tolerable. AND effective. He got to end his sessions EARLY.


My editor at Covenant, Eliza, is one of these crazy people who looks at a mountain and says, "I'd like to climb that." Or in this case, looks at a 26.2 mile ribbon of road and says, "I'd like to run that." Why? I don't know why. I see a mountain and say, "That looks pretty" or a winding stretch of road and say, "I should keep that in mind for a Sunday drive."


But that crazy Eliza is going to run a marathon to help raise funds for cancer research. NO. They're trying TO STOP BLOOD CANCERS, like the one my dad had and beat. Because there was RESEARCH that led to an effective cure and a treatment that left him with some dignity. 


If you could, hop over to her fundraising site and throw a few bucks her way to help sponsor her and STOP STUPID CANCER. Please CLICK HERE and make a donation. Do it for me. Do it for anyone you know who has ever been affected by lymphoma, Hodgkins, or leukemia. Because those things suck and there will come a time when the research will outsmart the cancer and we won't even need a cure because we'll have the vaccine. So go ahead, click and donate. I did it.


Just as an added incentive, anyone who donates this week will be entered in a drawing for a copy Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (book #3 in the Hunger Games trilogy), courtesy of moi, because that book will be tres awesome and an awesome donor deserves an awesome book. I think Eliza will be able to tell who entered and I'll let you know who wins.


You can get more information here and here.


*My dad did pass away a few years ago, but it wasn't because of stupid cancer, so THERE, cancer. You didn't win.

Stuff I need to know

Anyone got some answers for these questions:


My  husband needs a jogging stroller. He mostly runs on pavement but does go on off-road trails often. Two questions: fixed wheel or swivel? Also, what about tire size?


And is the BOB worth it? Because I really don't want to pay for one, even at the Craigslist price.


Anyone got a great waffle recipe? Want to share it?


Anyone played Ticket to Ride? Should I get it?


Have you tried Dreyer's Take the Cake light ice cream? If you haven't, you MUST. Super delicious.


Does Tanner sound like a hot guy name? Trying to name a character.


Imagine you're trapped in a twisted alternative version of Iron Chef where you're stranded on a desert island and every dish you eat for the rest of your life must feature the same ingredient in some form. What do you pick? I think I go with potatoes. So versatile . . .although, bacon is tempting. Very tempting.


That is all!