Seinfeldian

I've got nothing to tell you about to buy, support, donate to, or anything related.


In fact, I have nothing at all to say today. I just wanted to prove to myself that I could do a blog post that required none of the preceding things.


Also, you should know, Chuck E. Cheese sucks.


Four-year-olds are hilarious.


Shoe obsessions can manifest as young as 20-months-old.


I can do hard things.


Like walk away from a loaded buffet table with a sensible plate. Or clean. Or fast. I proved it to myself this week.


Up All Night makes my husband laugh until he cries.


I am beta reading my friend Becca's book and I really like it.


Taking a shower when your heater's busted = NOT FUN.


I married such a good man.


Nothing beats a slow cooker roast on a Sunday.


Yep, I can still blog about nothing.

Help a brother out

Want a shot at winning a $50 Amazon gift certificate today AND help out a really good guy? Robison Wells wrote a great book called Variant, just out from Harper Teen. Kenny, James and I all read it last week and had a great time discussing it. Well, Robison's had some amazingly crudtastic things happen to him lately and a friend of his came up with the idea to "Book Bomb" him, organizing a one day effort to buy copies on Amazon and drive his sales up to get the book some well-deserved exposure.


The awesome Luisa at Kashkawan is offering you a chance to win a $50 Amazon gift certificate. She explains the whole story about Rob, his disorder, the fall out, and how you can help. It's easy: buy a book. If you have anyone in the 10+ range, this would a great gift and TODAY is the perfect time to buy it.


To enter the contest, check it out here.


To just straight up buy the book because it was a well-done, fast-paced read, just click right over here. Publisher's Weekly named it one of their Books of the Year. I don't make this stuff up, you know.


And I promise to be back soon with tales of ridiculousness. Seriously. It's just that lately there have been lots of good causes.

All the single ladies!

Have I mentioned I spent seven years as a single mother?

No? Or maybe only a couple of times?

I don't really talk about that part of my life. Because it was super hard. But I have this thing about helping other single moms because of it. See my nifty new widget in the sidebar over there?------->

You can help fund a scholarship for single moms called the Horizons of Hope scholarship. And actually, if you go check out DeNae's blog, donating even just five dollars will be enough to enter you to win the Greatest Blog Prize of All, of which I am an honored recipient: she will write your family Christmas letter for you. Check out the one she did for us last year. It's the best family Christmas letter EVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.

I'm donating because I have been where these women are and I already had an education and a career and it was hard. I know how much it will make a difference. 

Also, I want DeNae to do my Christmas letter again.

So CLICK RIGHT HERE to get the details, cough up the green stuff (money! Not phlegm. Ew.) and you might WIN. Yay!

Bringing the dead to life.

November 12 is a death/birth anniversary. Five years ago my dad died. Four years ago my little boy was born on the very same day.


He doesn't know, of course. I don't think I'll tell him the story until he's much older. I say that like there's all these other stories I tell him about his grandad instead. I don't. I don't tell him much about my mom either, even though she died only two months later.


Kenny does. My little guy can pick my parents out of pictures. He knows they live in Heaven. He knows their ears were broken so they used sign language. And that might be it.


It's pretty sad. He's nearly four. He should probably know a lot more than that. But I don't know what to say. Somewhere in the back of my mind is this idea that I'll write it all down for him. And for my daughter. So they'll know that my mom was an incredibly talented artist and that my dad defied more odds than most people ever face in a lifetime. I tell myself I'll write down how my mom used to Indian leg wrestle us to see who had to take out the garbage or how my dad had an insanely green thumb and grew vegetables none of us would eat.


I tell myself that. I should be able to, right? I'm an author, for the love of Pete. This is my thang, isn't it?


But  . . . I can't. 


I don't know how. How do you take something as huge as the sixty years each of them lived and distill it into a story that your children can hold and read and somehow know them? I can't. 


I'm pretty good at knowing my limits. When I know that something is beyond me, I drop it in favor of doing something I can rock. I like to be productive. But this need to tell their stories . . . it doesn't go away. I'm the only way my kids will ever know my mom and dad. I truly don't believe my husband would fully understand me if he hadn't met my parents before they died. And my kids will be missing a key to understand a part of themselves, the part that they get from me, and that I got from my parents.


When the Casual Blogger Conference rolled around last time, I passed. I know my voice, I'm not trying to make money, and I don't care about growing my audience. But I kicked myself later. I missed out on meeting and hugging a lot of cool people I would never otherwise see. I swore to myself that the next time it rolled around, I'd be all over it.


Enter the Story at Home conference in SLC and its blogging track. I thought, "Ah! NOW I can meet and hang out with my blogging friends." But then stuff started coming up, logistical stuff, and I was like, "Not this time either."


But I changed my mind again. Because I'm not doing the blogging track. I'm going to learn about how to write a family history. Specifically, my dad's history, to start. I'm going to learn how to make him come alive again for my two littlest ones in a way that they can maybe feel like they know him, so that they can see him in themselves, and love him even in his absence.


You should come. Whether it's a family story or your own personal one you need to figure out how to tell, whether it's just so you and I can finally meet and hug, or whatever your reason, you should come. It's the cheapest conference I've heard of: $79. Seriously . . . come.


(Here's the info: This super cool conference for blogging / storytelling / personal and family history /writing is happening March 8-10, 2012 in Salt Lake City.  It's called The Power of Story @ Home, and it's sponsored by Cherish Bound, Family Search, and the Casual Bloggers Community.  This is a link to their website.)

When upon life's billows

I've decided that I must the kind of person whose moods fluctuate so wildly that I don't even know what normal is. As in, maybe I don't even know that I'm crazy. Or better yet, wildly fluctuating moods IS (my) normal, therefore, I will endeavor to embrace it. I'm just going to hug the good times so I'm near about squeezing the life out of them, doing barbaric yawp-ish carpe diem type stuff, and then when those moods sneak up on me where I'm like, "I have no talent, I have no friends, BUT I DO HAVE zits," then (and please avert your eyes if you are above vulgarity but sometimes there is only one way to explain things), I will kick that mood in the nuts.


Let me be clear here: I am not prone to depression. Anxiety, yes. Depression . . . not so much. These are fleeting moods that annoy me only because they're also recurring. When I have these little talks with myself and then I realize, "OH, YEAH! I HAVE LOTS OF BLESSINGS!" I am generally fine within a very short period of time. It's just annoying that I even need to remind myself sometimes that my life is pretty awesome.


The cure (for me, because remember we're not discussing anything clinical-grade here), is free, fast, and instantaneous: counting blessings. Trite but TRIED and TRUE.


So I am going to count some now. 


1. My good moods outweigh my self-pitiful ones by a lot. Think mountains and molehills. I have lots of big, sparkly mountainy days. I'd say . . . 90/10 split. But I'll ask Kenny. He's better at math.


2. I am living every dream I've ever had for myself. This should probably be a dramatic #10, the clincher, the ooh-la-la. But it's what I thought of next and I don't want to edit.


3. My kids love to hug me. Even my twelve-year-old will accidentally say he loves me sometimes.


4. My husband adores me and I know it. 


5. I have really fast Internet access and I can connect to amazing people who have made my life richer and better because of it.


6. Books that make my soul happy deep down. Finishing up Peace Like a River again. I love that book so hard.


7. Bathrobe and hot chocolate days. I declared one this morning. I feel like a genius right now, because nothing goes better with a rainy morning. And for dinner: gumbo. A perfectly bookended day.


8. Old things. I love stuff that's been around. At least in small doses. I love our old piano and our old books.


9. Roses. I didn't used to love them. I still don't want them in a bouquet (bring on the tulips or daisies). But we inherited a ton of them in our yard and there is something pretty perfect about waking up to a testimony of Heavenly Father every morning because that's what those bright, gorgeous things remind me of every time I glimpse them outside my window. (Wow. I know that paragraph just made you wonder if you accidentally started reading someone else's blog in the middle of my post. Nope. Still me. Roses are pretty. Just saying.)


10. Kenny. Oh, look at that. I really did save the best for last.


And now, unrelated to anything, totally unprompted by me, Mary at The Sweet Bookshelf is giving away a prize pack of both of my books on Kindle. It's super easy to win and you can check it out here. If you already have my books, (clearly you love me and also) you might like to gift them to some Kindle-owning friend if you win.