Big ass guns? No worries!

Mr. Wonderful has a new toy. It's some type of huge ass rifle that weighs about a zillion pounds, is a mile long and is louder than a sonic boom when it fires. He's been cleaning it and polishing it and adoring it and making it look all pretty and bragging about it every chance he gets it. It never leaves his side - hell, we sleep with it right next to the bed!

This past weekend, we were at the little house in the woods, the gun was there naturally, and Manchild decided that he could fulfill my wildest dream (according to him) by letting me shoot the beast as I like to call it. Oh joy of joys (cue the harps and angels singing), the clouds in the skies parted, golden beams of sunlight shone down, birds chirped and I fell to my knees - overcome with joy. Meeee? Reeeeealllllyyyyyy? I get to shoot the beast? Was I worthy??? I mean, my manicure was 3 days old and my hair wasn't freshly coiffed. Oh, lucky me.


The first time I shot a rifle during my inaugural days as a part time redneck, it took me many tries before I was brave enough to even pull the trigger. I finally conquered my fears and became a weekend fan of shooting big can beer cans. Part of my joy in shooting is the fact that Mr. Man can strut and postulate, pontificate and preen, lock, load, aim and fire aaaannnnnndddd.......... miss on the first try. I've been fortunate enough to timidly pick up the proffered rifle, struggle to hold it up long enough to aim, fire and nail the target on the FIRST shot. I was never annoying enough to strut and crow because I was superior. I would simply shrug and smile and gently put the gun down.

This particular weekend since Mr. Man decided I was worthy of shooting his newest beloved hunk-o-iron, I figured I'd really bungle the shot since 10 people were watching, I had never fired such a huge cannon and to tell the truth - I was scared. This gun is SO big, is has a bi-pod so it can be rested on a table and the only thing that has to be lifted is the back end. I lifted up the 250 lb. hiney end of the gun, took aim, held my breath and fired.

 The way the target I hit flew up into the air was spectacular! It tumbled gracefully end over end and when it landed, I fired and hit it again, setting off another round of aluminum acrobatics. Hooray for me! No one else who fired the beast (including 2 seasoned law enforcement officers) hit the target on the first try and made it dance the way I did. Just little ole' me. The girl who had never fired the beast before.

As I placed the 250 lb. hiney end of the gun on the table, I shrugged my shoulders, smiled and walked back to the group of ladies I had been sitting with. And when the men walked away to look at the target that I had just annihilated, I got high fives from all of the lady folk. Boo-yah! Big ass guns? No worries!

You show me you love me by drooling on me???

I've told you before about my kitty lover Schwayze who loves to sleep on my head. He's almost full grown and he still does it. I'm sure I'll be having neck surgery before long to replace the cartilage there, too. By the time I die, I'll have a fake spine all together. Manchild begs him to sleep on his head but my kitty boy won't have anything to do with him. He's GOT to sleep on MY head.


When he was younger he was content to simply sleep on my head. As he got older, he started kneading, too. He'll place each paw on either side of my head on my neck and knead away, working his claws deeper and deeper into my flesh, working his way towards my jugular veins so he can kill me. Then in addition to all of that, he started licking my hair and getting it all wet before he can fall asleep (forget me falling asleep with all of that going on!). Now, he shows his love and adoration by drooling on me. I've managed to somehow fall asleep with all of the painful kneading and licking and neck breaking going on but now I have to contend with rivulets of drool on my face! GIVE ME A BREAK SCHWAYZE!!!


I know he loves me and that I'm his Mom. He sticks by me more than anyone else in the house even though my oldest kidlet is the one who brought him home and claimed him as hers. Manchild desperately tries to get him to love him and be his kitty. He pets him and scratches him in all the right places and gently tugs his ears juuuuust right but he doesn't get the drool treatment. Nope, that's reserved just for me. Lucky me. Us Moms are so lucky. We get all of the good stuff. Sick kids want us (so we get vomit and the shits), our cats love us so we get kneaded to death and drool, our husbands love us so we get koozies and lawn mower blades for mothers day. I tell ya - I wouldn't give it up for anything in the world.

Do you drink beer in the shower?

OK, so you know I like/love beer. It's the nectar of the gods. It's what makes my life worth living some days. It makes me happy. It's what gives me my womanly curves. You get my drift. It's pretty much guaranteed that when I'm down at the little house in the woods, most days after 4:00 pm (OK some days by 12 noon) I've got a beer in my hand. I can gather wood for bonfires with one hand and caress a beer with the other like a mo-fo. I can drive the riding mower around the yard and keep a perfectly straight line with a beer in hand. I can plant flowers and kill fire ants with a beer in hand. And when the work is done, I can shower with a beer in hand.

Have you ever taken a shower while drinking a beer? Try it! It's awesome! The water is refreshing and so is the beer. It's the best of both worlds! I like to brush my teeth while showering, too - but this is about beer and showering not oral hygiene and showering. You know what's great about showering while drinking a beer? If you spill on yourself it doesn't matter! You can rinse it right off! How genius is that?????

A long long time ago (in a galaxy far far away) I had some surgery on my bone-head and wound up with nerve damage which caused some numbness around my mouth. Long story short...sometimes when I drink, some of the liquid slips out of my mouth without me knowing it and runs down my chin.

I look super intelligent, laughing at myself, while wiping beer off of my face with my sleeve. Sometimes I don't feel the beer or food or whatever sliding down my chin and the people around me are mean and don't tell me, so I go around for who knows how long with crud on my face. Yep, I'm super cool. Oops, I got off of the subject again.

Anyway, in case you didn't know it, I love beer and it loves me. And I like to sip on one after a hard day of work and while I'm taking a shower. If you haven't tried it - try it. You'll like it. If you don't, I'll buy you a beer. Maybe I'll even let you take a shower with me and we can drink beer while doing so. I'm telling ya - you'll like it!

It started with a drooping foot - nothing too worrisome - more of a hassle really. Then he noticed a stumble here and there. Then some weakness in his legs. Finally he went to the doctor and the doctor noticed something that made alarm bells go off. I got a call from my cousin who is a doctor and he voiced concerns that he was worried his brother might have a serious disease. That made me worry because I knew he wouldn't say something lightly like that if the threat weren't very real.

Later, the diagnosis arrived that my cousin had ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease. I watched him transform from using a cane when walking to using a wheelchair. I watched him being able to feed himself to being unable to do so. His poor body was robbed of the simplest functions even though his mind was sharp.

On his last night alive, his brother called me and told me that I might want to hurry up and come over to say my goodbyes. I made the trip from one side of the city to the other, in rush hour traffic in record time. I don't know how I got over there so quickly - and without a siren or police to clear the way for me! When I arrived at the house I went directly to my cousin and immediately burst into tears. I probably cried for 3 hours straight. He was unresponsive and was barely breathing. I was told that the breathing he was doing was called reflexive breathing. Breaths the body does as it shuts down - not good, deep breaths that keeps everything going.

I tried nudging him to get a response. Nothing. I tried tickling him. Nothing. I tried shouting in his ear, pleading for him to wake up. Nothing. I shook him and pinched him and let my tears fall all over his face and he never responded. So I sat there and cried and held onto his warm hand and watched his head lurch every few minutes when his body made that horrible automatic gasping breath. My cousin the doctor told me that he was already gone and all the body was doing was reacting to electrical currents firing but I didn't want to believe it.

My dying cousin had an oxygen pump blowing oxygen up his nose which was keeping him "alive" or else he would have died sooner. Finally his wife made the decision to turn it off and within minutes he was gone. No more reflexive breaths, just silence. And stillness.

I hate that horrible disease that took my cousin from me. I've never sat with someone and watched them die. It's horrible. But I'm really grateful that I got to be there with him. It reminded me of how fragile and short life is. And how important it is to make the most of every single day. I was - wait, I still am - crazy about my cousin. I still have his phone number in my phone and it's been over a year since he died. I'll probably keep it forever as a reminder to LIVE. He didn't get to. It's my duty to live and live large. You should, too.

Itsy bitsy spider...

Being the city/country girl that I am now, I don’t get freaked out as easily over bugs and spiders and snakes as I used to.  I can see a snake and not run away screaming. I can swat away pesky flying bugs. And I can pretty much ignore spiders with the exception of daddy long legs, black widows, wolf spiders, tarantulas, ugly scary looking spiders…well, I don’t like spiders but I can handle them reasonably well.

This morning I climbed into my car and took off for work only to discover a spider delicately dropping down from the ceiling while I was going 45 mph. I couldn’t jump out of a speeding car in rush hour traffic so I not so delicately swatted it into what I thought was oblivion and continued down the road. I’ll admit, I looked all over the cabin of the car every chance I got to make sure that the spider wasn’t crawling up to my neck so I could give me a fatal bite in the jugular for knocking it senseless. I never could find it.

Later in the day I kept feeling a tickling sensation on my chest and neck but didn’t think too much of it. In Texas, allergies are a common thing and I figured I had gotten a snort of some offending pollen or dust and that was what had caused my tickles. In one particular fit of tickling, I grabbed what I thought was a loose thread that had balled up but I quickly discovered that I wasn’t being tickled by a thread. I was being tickled by the revenge and hate filled spider!!!!! I think that it almost killed me but I crushed it just in the nick of time. I didn’t scream but I made my body move faster than it has in 25 years trying to get away from the newly crushed spider.

There was only one spider and I definitely killed it, so why do I still have the little tickles? Maybe that spider did get a bite in me before I killed it.  Maybe those tickles I feel are a teeny bit of venom coursing through my veins. Maybe that spider got the last laugh. If you never see another post from me, you’ll know that the spider was deadlier than I had thought.

Baby's skeeeeered!

Little baby came to me last night with the admission that she was scared to start college. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I might have seen this kidlet scared maybe 10 times in her 18 years of life. She’s a teeny 5’1, 96 lbs. soaking wet little firecracker. She doesn’t take any shit from anyone and will get right up in someone’s face if they’re giving her grief. So, to see her scared about something really rattled me.

This is the girl who went off to dance camp, had her appendix rupture (unknowingly), called home to tell me she was thinking about throwing in the towel and then decided to stick it out for 2 more days. And performed with a fever of 102 and pus bubbling in her belly! This is the girl who was hospitalized for 7 days afterwards with all kinds of monitors and tubes hooked up to her and she didn’t show one hint of fear.

This is the girl who can get up in front of hundreds of people and dance her little fanny off and not give it a second thought. (I’d be worried about tripping over my big toe and falling and making a fool of myself.) She was a cheerleader for years so she did all kinds of stuff in front of crowds.

This is the girl who had the offer to be taught how to shoot a rifle (that was bigger than her) so she picked it up, aimed and fired without hesitation. It took me about 10 tries before I’d pull the trigger!

I was a C and D student all through high school people, and I went to college hours from home. I lasted two whole semesters before I bombed out and had to return home. I was scared all the time, homesick, without direction, a drunkard…a failure. The entire school experience was a hard row to hoe for me until I went back to school in my 30s.

My baby girl? She’s been a good, hardworking student and has pulled A’s and B’s and made it look easy. This little girl will ace college! And yet, she’s scared that she won’t. Mr. Man and I tried telling her that we sincerely believed that college was easier than high school. In high school, students have to take anywhere from 4-7 classes in one day! And do work for each class! In college, classes are spread out. Yes, there’s homework and stuff but I don’t think it’s as intense. Unless you’re going to medical school or you’re taking 35 hours at once or some such thing. My baby is just starting out. I want her to ease into college classes, maybe take 3 classes and work part time. You know, get her feet wet before jumping into the deep end. The last thing I want her to do is feel like she has to move off to Tim-buk-tu and take 90 hours and become a brain surgeon in 2 years. I tried that and it didn’t work.

I don’t know if I made her feel any better. I sure hope I did. All I could do is stress to her that she was welcome to continue living with me while she went to school, and that I believed in her just as much as I believed that the sun would come up in the morning. I offered to carry her lunch box and hold her hand on the first day of classes and wait outside of her class room to make sure she was OK. I’ll beat up any bullies and attend every parent teacher conference, I’ll brush her hair and remind her to floss, I’ll put love notes in her lunch sack and continue trying to embarrass her in front of her friends and I’ll do that until she’s 47 if need be. Because I know she’ll be absolutely fine and will be a stellar student and after the first few weeks won’t need me any more.



Dig the early 90s frosted hair and those glasses!!! Those are just wrong!!



Holey moley I'm a hot mess!

People, what in the cat-hair is wrong with me? I swear, I think I'm going crazy! I'm not me. When I should be happy, I'm not. When I should be mildly annoyed, I'm filled with rage. I'm talking scary-I-want-to-go-Columbine-postal rage. Some days, I have to try to be nice. I get pissed off at the drop of a hat. For the most part I hate every thing and every one. I'm a negative Nellie.

The normal me loves everyone. I love underdogs. I love outcasts. I love strangers. I'm the girl who wants to invite 365 people to a 3 person happy hour. I make friends with store clerks and delivery guys.

The other day I caught a glimpse of myself as I was walking past a window and I looked like a total bitch!

I purposely ignored my brother's birthday because for the last few years he's been a dick to me about Mr. Wonderful. For 44 years I've worshipped the ground he walked on even though for about 36 of those years he was a dick to me. Now my mindset is simply "screw him". I'm done with that asshole. I think that way even more so now. People who've annoyed me but I tolerated are being erased from my list now that I'm psycho.

I wonder how many people I've pissed off since I've fallen out of the tree? The scary part is that I sort of don't care. I think I need a frontal lobotomy. Are any therapists reading me? Any tips? Please? No worries. I wouldn't ever hurt anyone. Just myself. And no , I wouldn't ever kill myself. I might drink myself to death but I wouldn't do anything rash. I just want the old me back. Now, please.

Quick follow up: About 45 minutes after I ranted and raved the above, I was happy as a clam, burning twigs with Mr. Man. See, I told you I'm crazy.

What's that in the flowerbed?

Putzing around in my usual clueless way the other day, I was startled when Mr. Man jumped and shouted "OH SHIT!!" Mr. Man hardly ever gets startled. That in itself made me even more startled-er. He told me that the snake in the flowerbed startled him just as calmly as if he were telling me what time it was.

Since most of the time I have a camera nearby my first instinct was to grab it and get as close as possible to the snake as I could for a good shot. The scenario went pretty much just like this;

SSSSSHHHHHHHHH, you'll scare it away!!!!
OK, ugh...it's hard getting down (as I get to my knees and lean WAAAAAY in to shoot the picture)
WATCH IT!!!! I'm not exactly sure what kind it is. It might be poisonous. Snakes can strike almost twice their entire body length.
CRAP, SHIT, OUCH, DAMN, here, take the camera, help me UP, shit, HURRY, ohmygodI'mgonnadie!!!!

Awwwww, Manchild cared about my safety & didn't want a possibly deadly poisonous VIPER to sink it's deadly fangs into my jugular. But he also got tickled watching his semi-crippled love goddess wife try to get up and run away in .000007 seconds. Thanks honey.

Once I recovered curiosity got the better of me so I grabbed my camera again and went back to the flowerbed to find the snake. I was trying to lean in for a good shot and Boyo was nudging the snake with a stick in an attempt to get it to pose nicely for me. I suggested the Atlas pose, the Thinker and the Crane as demonstrated by Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid. Dang ol' sourpuss snake just retreated under the house. Maybe he'll run into the skunk that lives under there & he'll get sprayed. That's what he gets for startling Mr. Wonderful and for being unreasonable & refusing to pose for me. Dang ol' diva snake.

Another trip to the woods

I made it down to the little house in the woods in record time this weekend. The skies were crystal clear and it was smooth sailing. My beloved orange juicy mobile purred at 80 mph and everything was right with the world.

As soon as I got to our little house, I flipped on the radio, applied 36 gallons of bug spray and started collecting wood for a bonfire. We have a "pond" that holds water for as long the water table stays up. It's been pretty full for the past 2-3 months but has slowly been receding. During the time it had water in it some sizable branches fell so now that it's practically empty I decided to retrieve them. I did pretty good and managed not to slip and fall in the mud. But I got frustrated because I wasn't strong enough to pull the logs up to the fire pit.

I sprayed on a couple more gallons of bug spray, popped open a beer and went on a quest for fallen branches - one of my favorite things to do by the way. I got some small stuff, but I wasn't willing to venture into the woods because I didn't want to end up being Jo Jo the living chigger bite.
Manchild came to my rescue and drug up some big stuff AND he brought me more beer! Yea!!! Before you could say boo-yeah, I had a nice fire burning. We enjoyed the fire, the tunes and the cold beer for a while then we noticed some ominous lightning starting to flash.

A few branches & beers later, the lightning was starting to become a showoff so we figured we had better take a peek at the weather radar to see what was in store. You see, when you stay at a little house in the woods which you must get to via a dirt road, and you drive a low slung sports car, it's a good idea not to get caught in the rain. Because you might not be able to drive that sports car down the muddy road. For days. Nosirree!

Sure enough, the gay-dar (that's what Manchild calls it) showed a big scary line of storms headed right for us! We jumped in our cars, speedy quick and peeled out to park a mile away on a rock road where we store our 4-wheeler for occasions just like the one we were in.

The ride back to the little house was a real adventure, let me tell ya. The wind was gusting like crazy and bolts of lightning were zapping all over the place and to be honest, we were both a little scared. (does anyone smell burning bacon???) We made it back to the house without getting killed which is always a good thing. After that, we spent the rest of the night sitting on the front porch watching the light show. When the skies lit up we watched the trees whipping back and forth and listened for breaking branches. At one point I heard the wind stop suddenly and shift directions and when the sky lit up that time, everything was a strange greenish yellow color.

The next morning I went for a walk to see if the fallen branches landed where I thought they had. My ears weren't as keen as I had thought they were. I was about 50 feet off. But there were branches blocking the driveway and the pond got some more firewood. Looking outside the day after the storm it looked just as calm and clear as it did on the day I drove down 24 hours earlier.

Mother nature is so amazing. So is lightning. I'm not sure, but I bet if you look closely you just might see some singed hairs on the top of my head. Manchild doesn't have hair per se. He's got prickles but I bet some of those prickles are singed, too. And we had fun making that 4-wheeler do 50 down a dirt road!

Quit dyin' on me, will ya?

I think my house is pretty nice. It's not too old and it's in pretty good shape. Sort of, but there's a developing trend and I'm not liking it one bitty bit.

First I noticed that when it rained, the gutter on my back patio dripped. It wasn't too offensive until, instead of mildly dripping, a torrent of water poured forth from the corner. I tried putting some putty stuff in it which was about as effective as putting a band-aid on a 10 inch gash.

Next I tripped over a ripple in the carpet in my den. I guess that it had stretched over time and my vigorous vacuuming pulled it up into the carpet version of the grand tetons. Even though I know the ripple is there, I always trip over it. Being wobbly on my feet to begin with doesn't help matters any. I'm sure that one of these days I'm going to catapult through my patio window.

The next thing to go wrong was the thermostat. One day it worked, the next day it didn't. I figured that it would be an easy fix. Match red wires with red wires, black ones with black ones, blues ones and so on. Only, the new thermostat had some different wires than the old one and I sort of accidentally hooked the thing up incorrectly and shorted out the A/C system. Lesson learned...don't do electrical stuff on my own.

I know that faucets become leaky over time. Those post thingys in the on and off handles have areas that wear out and need replacing. Since I know I stink at electrical repairs, I figured I had better stay away from plumbing issues, too. Water can do some serious damage. They got replaced but they're already leaking again.

My garage door does this crazy shake rattle and roll act so now sometimes it opens and sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't, someone has to help lift it some to get past the "shimmy zone" and then it will work properly. Mr. Man has worked on it countless times and it always reverts to it's crummy state.

I think that nearly every rubberized sealing product in this house is starting to degrade all at once. The shower seals are all peeling away from the bottom of the doors, the storm door seals are coming off, the weather stripping on the doors are coming off - I mean, come on!!!

I have a wonderful, huge refrigerator and for some reason the ice maker started freezing up. I'm sure there's an easy fix but I sure as heck-fire don't know what it is.

My microwave started freaking out a while back and the other day it finally sputtered and died. That shouldn't be too hard to replace it, but even though I have a brand spankin' new bionic back, I know lifting a heavy ass appliance is a bad idea.

My house knows that my money tree shed all of it's leaves a good while back and they have NOT grown back, so I can't afford to have a handy man spend a week here fixing everything. Mr. Wonderful works 10 hours a day so by the time he gets home, the last thing he wants to do is work on stuff. Most weekends, he's doing work on the little house in the woods so the house in the wicked city is up to me. I'll admit that I've asked him to help me but it hasn't gotten me very far. I'm not sure why. I've tried being nice, bitchy, crying, yelling and so far, the broken stuff is still broken. I'm too embarrased to ask my Dad for help because I don't want him to think badly of Mr. Man. So instead, I'm telling all of yall. Bitching out loud as I like to call it.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do. These things have got to get fixed. I'm not going to hurt myself any more by trying to do it all myself. Do any of you have any ideas?

To the booty doctor...and BEYOND!!!

When I was a super smart teenager I decided to be all adult-like and responsible and I took myself to Planned Parenthood to get on birth control pills. I didn't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies and I sure as heck fire didn't want to find out. A like minded friend went as well and we thought we were the most "adult" teenagers in the whole joint. My friend went first and as she was finishing and I was being led into the exam room, she grabbed me by the arm and loudly whispered "they stick their finger up your ASS!!!" Since I was trying to appear as adult as possible, I was mortified at her outburst and tried my best to appear as if I didn't know her. I got my first experience of the finger in the booty test that day and have experienced it many times since. I hate it as much today as I did way back then.

I had to take kidlet #1 to the booty doctor today, and I didn't want her to have to learn to "enjoy" the finger test at such a tender young age. Actually, she learned about the finger in the booty test about a month ago after a particularly odd medical scare, and that scare resulted in the visit to the booty doctor today only she was going to experience a lot more than a finger in the hiney.

Yesterday was a real treat (NOT) as she had to do the prep work which is much worse than the actual test. Drinking the horrible stuff that makes you go poo for 5 hours was pretty bad. I tasted it -  and even though it smelled pleasantly grape-y, it tasted horrible. That drink had to be followed by 32 oz. of water within an hour. If you aren't used to drinking that much water, it can be a challenge! And my baby doll is a teeny weeny little thing. She's 5'1 and 96 pounds soaking wet. I could almost see her belly bulging with all that water sloshing around.

I had to watch and listen to her all afternoon and evening gripe about being hungry and gripe about how sore her poor old hiney was. I got her wet wipeys to soothe things down there but after a while even those didn't help. The only thing that helped her was some good old Boudreaux's Butt Paste. That stuff will cure any kind of irritation anywhere on your body.

She survived the prep the day before and on the day of the test she/we got to wake up at 4:30 am and start all over again. Drink, poo, rest, drink water, poo, poo, poo. We eventually made our way over to the booty doctor's office and got in line with the rest of the people waiting to have their booties plundered. I think I was more nervous than my little baby was. At one point I was trying to help make her wrist more comfortable where the nurse had put her IV (in an impossible place where movement was impossible and any movement was painful, of course. WHY THE HELL DO THEY DO THAT?????) and I made it even more uncomfortable and she yelped. So what did I do? I cried. Great Mom, cry so you make your kid even more scared......dumb ass. Luckily, I got myself under control pretty fast.



I'm sure she thought that the doctor was going to use a hose about this big to look at her innards.

Kidlet got wheeled off to the booty suite where all the action takes place and I waited on pins and needles for 40 minutes until they let me back in to see her in recovery. Of course I knew she'd be fine, I just felt badly for her. And when I got to see her in recovery, all the badness went away. And the fun began.

Little baby was so punch drunk, I laughed my tail off. There she reclined, daintily tooting away from all the air they put in her when they put the snake in her hiney, asking me repeatedly when they were going to start the test. Once it was time for her to go home I got more laughs. Getting her dressed was like trying to keep warm jello in a strainer. It was like dressing my baby when she was a baby. Of course, I was sensitive to the predicament. I laughed at her. I laughed a lot. And she had a good sense about it. She flipped me off.

As soon as we left the medical facility the first place we went was to the local cafeteria so I could fill up her empty belly. The whole way there she gave me a running list of what she wanted to eat. Chicken fried steak, creamed corn, fried okra, rolls, fish and broccoli, a hamburger, green beans, chicken spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, jello, fruit and fillet Mignon. She then proclaimed that she wanted to gain 400 pounds. It cracks me up because the girl rarely eats beef but she was adamant that she wanted steak AND chicken fried steak. While we were in the drive through line she kept asking me if we were at Luby's (the cafeteria) yet. And each time I answered that we were, she'd launch into her food wish list all over again. Even as I was speaking into the microphone ordering our stuff, she was trying to talk over me and order more food. While we were waiting for it to arrive she kept on telling me what she wanted to eat and asking me if we were at Luby's yet. It was a fun trip home.

Once we got our food and were riding home, kidlet informed me that she wanted us to stop at Taco Bell and get a carload of tacos. It didn't matter that we had lots of food from the cafeteria. That girl was hungry!! Once I got her home she sort of stuffed/sloshed the grub in her mouth just before she passed out for the day. I'm still planning on making her a big dinner but just not as big as the one she came up with on the ride home.

It took about 6 hours for all the dope to wear off and as soon as it did, she immediately started making plans to chill with her pals. That girl doesn't waste any time. Before she left I asked her if she still wanted me to make her a very large pan of chicken spaghetti that she had requested earlier and as I suspected, she was still a little full from her epic lunch. She might be full tomorrow, too. Thankfully, she probably won't remember much of her day with the booty doctor. The booty doctor does his job well and gives great drugs. Oh, and sometimes, he gives "all clear" diagnoses which makes moms like me really happy.

Speed Racer Girls

My oldest gal pal was the first of the two of us to drive. Her parents let her use their Honda Civic and we must have put a zillion miles on that thing. It was so liberating to have wheels.

In the town we lived in, basically the only thing there was to do was to drive up and down over and over and over on the main street through town. Sometimes, we'd pull over in a parking lot and visit with friends. Then we'd drive up and down the main drag again.

Another of our favorite things to do was drive out to the local lake and ride around. The roads around the lake were rock and if enough speed was attained, it was possible to slide around the curves. Of course, being mature teenagers, we opted to do lots of sliding. We never considered the fact that we could flip the car or blow out the tires or anything like that. We just thought it was funny to make that tiny car slide.

It's a good thing that car was a gas miser because we rode around so much. And it was in the days of big land yacht cars, so we were sort of green before it was cool to be green.

I can't look at a Honda Civic without thinking of my bestie and the days when we used to zip all over town and pull some sick slides on the curves of the roads around Lake Halbert. Those were the days let me tell you.