Where: church Halloween party pie eating contest.
Who: several men, a few young ladies, and me, the only adult woman playing.
Why: why not? I’m alwaysup for a new experience.
Outcome: I was in the running for second place, most definitely beating out most of the “men” snarfing pie, but not winning.
Lesson Learned: it’s hard to eat when you have banana cream up your nose blocking your airways, and when you are trying so hard not to laugh you’re afraid you’re going to either aspirate pie or vomit.
So there you go.
Posted by Lou on October 29, 2006 @ 12:06 am | 6 Comments
I’ve decided to accept a blog challenge to post every day for the entire month of November. Considering that I’ve been averaging a post a week the past few months, that’s going to be a lot of posting! I am excited about it though, because I’ve been a bit miffed at myself for letting things slip blogwise. I used to have a pretty big reader base, a reader base who left gratifying little comments even on really stupid entries where I knew they were just humoring me because I clearly needed the attention. Now the awesome handful of dedicated Lou Fan’s (Hi Mom!) make me work for my feedback. I accept that. No where in the blogging world are comments expected- but I want to request that during the month of November, while I will be doing my best to regale you with crazy stories and scrappy goodness, you support me by dropping an extra comment or two. For some of you, that will mean de-lurking. For others, it’ll mean three comments a month instead of one, and for a select few, well, you’ll have to start leaving multiple comments on each post - ha- no, just kidding there.
I have been learning about my lurkers lately. When you think about it, the fact that I have people who drop on by, read and leave, it is a little strange. The other day one of my friends informed me that there were people on base who I don’t know who read my blog. They thought I might be a little weirded out by that, but not really. I am what I am, and my ability to put it all out there is just part of who I am. While it can create a sense of vulnerability, it also empowers. I may bitch about subjects that leave others a little ticked off, but at least I’m being honest. I am pretty open with the fact that I’m a less than stellar mother. I never say I don’t try, just that no one is going to give me any Mommy of the Year awards any time soon. I think the fact that I’m willing to say, “Here I am. I am imperfect. I am real.” is why people like me.
I’ve run into a few blogs lately that are all sweetness and sugar. I tend to be suspicious of the people I meet who seem uber together and just thrilled with life at all times. The mothers who you really think never raise their voices and always remember to serve a vegetable with dinner sometimes creep me out. I want to know that Cheerios ground into the carpet and a weedy garden are normal. I want to know that everyone else is growing and learning and progressing, just as I am. So what I’m saying is that by putting only what’s great about me out there on my blog, I’m really not doing anyone any favors. Not my reader, and not myself. I firmly believe that literature ought to humanize. A blog is one of the more modern forms of literature, and if doesn’t broaden your perspective on humanity, if it doesn’t make you delve deeper into your frame of consciousness and create new exceptions for how you define your world- then why bother? I’m not saying that a writer needs to be philosophizing about the dark mysteries of the world to find deeper meaning in our puny little lives. I’m saying that a person should be looking at the everyday and finding the divine. I’m saying that there is purpose in the little things. I think that my purpose in writing is to find that ordinary is obsolete. There is humor and depth in mediocrity and in the mundane, it just needs to be acknowledged, and that is what I do here.
So, now that I’ve let my mind wander, and taken you along for the ride, let me say thanks for being here and sharing this with me. November is going to be wild. If you have any requests, just ask in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.
Posted by Lou on October 20, 2006 @ 6:45 pm | 14 Comments
Flies are gross. I know, you know that, and you didn’t have to drop by my website to find out that little nugget of information, but seriously. Flies are gross.
The past few weeks there has been an increase in fly activity in my home. We used to get the odd fly every now and again, but suddenly we’re playing host to ten or fifteen flies at a time. This irritated me and grossed me out a bit, but it was livable until yesterday. My children left the backdoor open yesterday, and as I was in another part of the house, it went undetected for quite some time. Now our house has about two hundred flies swarming it. While I can be occasionally given to hyperbole, I assure you this is a pretty factual count. And it’s gross.
My ceilings are spotted thickly with flies, reminiscent of the time we lived next to a dairy. That infestation made sense, and we learned to shut the door quickly and to aim true with a flyswatter. Now, we are plagued again. We have no flyswatter. So this morning Chris and I spent about a half an hour smacking various parts of the house with two rolled up copies of Creating Keepsakes. Chris managed to accidentally break the little twisty rod off of the kitchen blinds, and I threw up in my mouth a little as I watched the ugly buzzing things become little smears of guts and blood all over my kitchen. Did I mention the grossness?
I called my neighbor Nicki last night to ask if she was having similar issues, and she is, which leads me to believe that somewhere on our block there is a dead body, or perhaps several dead bodies breeding maggots that morph into flies that think they should move into my living room.
I called my mother to ask her advice, and she suggested that I vacuum them up, particularly the ones in hard to swat places like the drapes. This was fun indeed, and it made my husband laugh at me, but it worked, so I’m not complaining. Unlike flyswatting, fly vacuuming leaves no mess and involves a level of stealth and subtlety that is never enjoyed in ordinary flyswatting. For example, I snuck up on one little bugger as he was picking at one of his dead relatives. For a minute I imagined him shouting, “Why Ralphie! He was so young!” Then I realized that it was a lot more likely that his thoughts were along the lines of, “Hmm, takes just like chicken!” And I sucked him up without remorse.
Now, I really need to get back to the kitchen and wipe up the scores of fly carcasses and fly smears, and bleach everything in sight. But before I do, I’ll leave you with this little haiku for the moment:
flies rarely suspect
death while coitally engaged
wield swatter with love
Posted by Lou on October 17, 2006 @ 4:53 pm | 6 Comments
Wow. Ok. It’s been a weird, overwhelming, and exciting few days. A little background: I decided in September that I was going to enter a few different scrapbook contests, just for some fun, and to hopefully win some free scrapbooking supplies to play with. I hoped to win one. Well, I didn’t win one. I won three, and placed in another. Somebody PINCH me!
Seriously, how cool is this? I was honored to win the 3 Scrappy Boys September Scrap Off. That one was a lot of work, and very fun. They have a very fun site. I won a box stuffed with CHA new releases and it will come some time next week and I am so excited to see what’s inside!
I also won the Scrapbook Goddess September photography contest, which was really out of the blue! I get a little gift certificate to their awesome online store.
Then today, I find out I won the Scrapping Chicks September layout contest! Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I saw it on the website and just sat there and stared at the screen like, “Are you serious?” Apparently they are, and the prize for that is a gift certificate, so I’m excited to do some shopping at their place too! I am physically restraining myself from shopping so I don’t accidentally double buy stuff that’s coming from 3 Scrappy Boys.
So here I am. The girl who has never won one of these things before, suddenly hearing the victorious strains of We Are The Champions, and wondering what I did to deserve this totally awesome winning streak!
Posted by Lou on October 6, 2006 @ 11:22 pm | 7 Comments
Filed in: Me
I think the problem we have with the education system is simply that it is undervalued in our country. We would rather police the world and legislate for minority factions than educate our children. Because of this, the funding that ought to be put into our children goes to things that should be lower priority.
In the part of California that we live, if you want your child to have a good education, you have to either choose a pricey private school (and have to put up with the fact that many of them are religious based- so you may not agree with that portion of the education, or may be discriminated against because you don’t fit the mold) , or petition to have your child sent to one of the few art schools that still offer a basic education in art, music, drama, - and in some cases even creative writing and computer tech! Because the budgets in those schools are also under stress- you will still need to enroll your child in non school sponsored extra curricular activities such as athletics, dance, music lessons, etc. Either way, it is a paperwork nightmare for the parents and financially stressful.
We live in an area where a basic education is just that- basic. Lacking. Individual teachers do their best- but you can only do so much without the support of your district. It’s maddening for me, as a parent, because I grew up in North Dakota, where my school district was third in the nation for both academics and arts. I had an amazing education- despite the fact that my parents were not well to do. When I went to college and took a part time job as a tutor, I was absolutely astounded at how many students enrolled in college didn’t have a basic understanding of grammar and sentence structure. I was supposed to help them write college level papers- when what they stood in need of was a fourth grade teacher!
If we truly mean to give the children of our nation an equal chance at an education and personal betterment, if we want the generation that comes after us to be comprised of better, stronger individuals, we need to put the money into it. We need to get our priorities in better order. If we don’t, we, as a nation will have regressed back into the situation we were in when our country was new. Only the privileged will be able to afford the education required to truly move them forward into the world, and not only the poor will suffer, but so will the bourgeois.
We need to drop the politics, and focus on our families. While any responsible parent can see the issue at hand and want more for their child, even the nation as a whole mustn’t hope to see their country run by idiots as they slip into old age! I’d love to see us pull out of or reduce the numbers of personell in the countries in which we are doing no marked good, and send that money home to our own children. I’m not against humanitarian work in other nations, but you have to take care of your own before you can take care of everyone else, and right now, we are failing our children.
Posted by Lou on October 3, 2006 @ 4:05 am | 5 Comments
You have no idea how happy you made me on the day you told me you liked Farscape. Now I know we can truly be together forever.- Chris 8:32 pm
Posted by Lou on October 1, 2006 @ 3:33 am | 2 Comments
« *
»
Get free blog up and running in minutes with Blogsome | Theme designs available here
RSS .92 | RDF 1.0 | RSS 2.0 |
Comments RSS 2.0
