MR. GOOD ENOUGH and STEALING GRAN’S BOOTY are both finalists in the single title category of the 2012 Linda Howard Award of Excellence!
Winners will be announced at my home chapter’s conference, Silken Sands, on Pensacola Beach March 17.
Hi
Welcome to my tiny little slice of the internet. New blogs don’t happen frequently around here, so if you want to keep up with me, please find me on Facebook for daily updates on crazy dreams and the adventures of Munchkin and Squeaker.
That’s a lot of 1′s in today’s date
It’s like today’s date could almost be written in binary.
You ever feel like day 1 of a new year is going to set the tone for the entire year? I’m really hoping that’s not true, because on my agenda for today is getting over being cranky that the munchkin woke me up too early and baking 20 pounds of potatoes. What does that say about the year to come when you start it in spuds?
The munchkin and I just got back from a 3500-mile road trip through the month of December. Mr. Honey is off saving the world, so it’s just me and the kid for a while, and I wanted an old-fashioned Christmas at my mommy’s house, so I packed the kid up and drove the two of us all over a quarter of the country. Highlight: watching the kid’s vocabulary develop. Over the course of the trip, he learned how to say “Ass,” “Mine,” and “Bite me.” Lowlight: The kid having a meltdown at a gas station because I wouldn’t let him pump gas. And let’s not forget the flooded basement that Santa brought on Christmas Eve…
In any case, I know we’re both glad to be home. I can tell I am because I’m ridiculously happy to be a (temporarily) single mom, since that’s a lot easier than being a (temporarily) single mom on the never-ending road trip with an almost-2-year-old. I can tell the munchkin’s glad to be home because his favorite word the last two days has been “Amen!” which is the two-syllable version of “Hallelujah and praise the Lord! I’m sleeping in my own bed again!”
Here’s hoping your 2010 is happy, healthy, and full of sprinkles!
High Concept Dream
The other night my subconscious did NCIS in the Jossverse.
The whole crew was there. DiNozzo, Mal, Ziva, flesh-eating monsters, a pool table. Of course, I was Buffy. And when the green scaly dude with the crooked fingernail-teeth tried to eat me, I bit his teeth off. It’s what Buffy would’ve done, right?
You know, that doesn’t sound nearly as cool as it was in my dream. Probably a good thing the alarm clock interrupted this one. But doesn’t it make you wonder what Buffy would do to DiNozzo? If there would be chemistry between Ziva and Mal? What an episode of FCIS (Firefly Criminal Investigative Service) would look like? Joss should totally do CSI:Miranda. Except then my brain might overload.
Flying Tiger, Crouching Dream
There’s something totally cool about invincibility in dreams. I love how dreams can turn us into extraordinary superheroes, instead of the normal everyday superheroes we are. Like the night I went all flying feline on the bad guys’ asses.
I was hanging with a friend. The details are a little hazy, but I think we were helping a poor village move when The Bad Guys showed up. They kept doing horrid things, like shoving us all into grain silos and tipping then over into a flood. But of course they were doing all these things with mind control so they didn’t have to face the poor oppressed people.
So my friend and I got everyone out, and then I realized what was going on. I was dreaming. Which meant I could fly up to Bad Guy headquarter and go Bad Ass on them. But I didn’t want to just fly.
I wanted to be a flying tiger.
So the next thing I knew, I was Tigress from Kung Fu Panda. I leapt into the air, my fur acted as wings, and I lifted off.
I’d like to say I saved the villagers and found my true tiger love in my dream, too, but instead I woke up. But hey, I’ll take being a flying tiger any day.
Plaid Nightmare
I had one of those dreams the other night where I’m back in school. Except it wasn’t quite for school. I think I had to pass the math test before I could buy a car. But the math test had all these English questions on it. Not story problems, like the two trains leaving different stations at different speeds at the same time and when will they crash into, er, pass each other, but questions like, “What do you think of Mary Author’s new edict that all nouns must have three adjectives in front of them? Give an example of an author you will never read because of poor style like this.”
I was really sweating it, too, because the elevators broke after a power outage and my cats were running loose in the school, so I didn’t have time to cram for the equations that would be on the test. I about had a heart attack trying to figure out how to work the equations that I couldn’t remember into my confession that I’d never read a Nora Roberts book.
It could’ve been worse though. I could’ve been wearing the catholic school girl uniform.
Double-0 Dreams
I’ve had at least two dreams in the last week about James Bond/Mr. Honey. And I don’t know where in the world the parts about James Bond came from.
In the first one, I was playing a video game against James Bond, who had dressed like Darth Vader. My player was killed almost right away, and then it was James Bond-Vader’s turn. He did some funky move that sent his character soaring into the air and right into the next level. And then I was there, in the game, in the next level. And people were shooting at me. So I ran with Mr. Honey/James Bond to the Bond Car and we all climbed in and it flew away. Then I woke up.
This morning, I had another dream about Mr. Honey-Bond. We were flying somewhere in a blow-up, non-motorized airplane. Think “The Flintstones Fly in a Rubber Boat,” and you’ve pretty much got what I was flying in with Mr. Honey-Bond. As we passed over some military institution, we realized there were people in trouble. So, he jumped out of the plane and left it to me to fly it all around the compound. When I met back up with him, I wasn’t in the plane anymore, and we’d picked up somebody. So, I whipped the deflated plane out of my backpack, and Mr. Honey-Bond groaned. “Dammit, where are the three boards to make it fly?”
So I looked at him and said, “It’s alright. I can make it work with my mind.” So, the three of us climbed into the deflated plane, it blew up into a real inflated plane, and we started moving. Then all the bad guys started shooting at us. Mr. Honey-Bond said, “They’re gonna shoot us down! We’re not gonna make it!” and I said, “Nonsense. I can control the bullets with my mind.” And I did. I got a dart in my arm, but it didn’t hurt so I just pulled it out and we kept going, flying until we were over a whole fleet of military ships. We were almost out of it when I woke up.
My favorite part was that I could make a blow-up plane fly with my mind. I am invincible today.
The Internet Is Really Really Great… For Intergenerational Bonding
The other night, Mr. Honey and the munchkin and I were all hanging out in the living room. Mr. Honey and I were talking about our upcoming trip to London, and the munchkin was proving he was his mommy’s boy by playing all by himself and talking to his imaginary friends in a language only he and they understand.
Then Mr. Honey pulled up The Video.
It doesn’t matter if the munchkin is halfway across the house, eating, sleeping, playing, or doing any of the other things little kids do on a regular basis. If he hears voices coming from the computer, he drops everything, squeals, and darts as fast as he can to launch himself at the MacBook (and thus the person holding it) because He Wants To See.
And did he ever get a show last night. What did Mr. Honey show our very young, very impressionable, very innocent child?
This.
Lord save us all when the munchkin’s old enough for the birds and the bees.
Dreams and Past Lives
I’ve been thinking about my dreams, and I’ve decided I must have been a superhero in a past life. Except I don’t think it was here on Earth. It must’ve been on another planet where they had cooler superpowers. Stuff better than firing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of regular guns. Because seriously, what harm could a peanut butter and jelly sandwich do when fired from a regular gun? Even though they came flying out of the gun whole in my dream the other night, in practical application they’d probably disintegrate in the barrel of the gun, and then you’d have a gunky bread-jelly-peanut butter mess in your weapon.
If you think about it, being a superhero in my last life makes sense. In my dreams, I can control poisonous darts with my mind and fly just by flapping my arms. I can also wake myself up to escape from scary monsters. We won’t talk about the dreams where Mr. Honey does something to piss me off and then when I wake up I’m still mad at him. I think those are a self-destructive anomaly. Or maybe it’s my super-weakness. Every superhero has a weakness, right? Maybe being mad at Mr. Honey for nothing is mine.
But that does make me wonder… Was I a good superhero, or was I a bad supervillain? I think being a supervillain would’ve been more fun, but I’m not a tortured enough soul to have truly been evil in a past life. Unless I’ve already paid for my sins in another subsequent previous life. Maybe in that life I was a cockroach. Maybe I just let my cats kill my cousin over the weekend. Maybe that’s the payback. Or maybe I was a superhero after all and I accidentally killed an innocent while saving three hundred thousand billion million other people, and that’s why I have this big guilt complex. Yeah, that makes sense.
But this cockroach thing has me thinking. If we have past lives, are we still related to the people we were related to in our past lives? Seriously, could Mr. Honey’s uncle’s wife’s brother have been my cousin’s father’s postman’s illigitimate daughter? Well, probably not, unless he was a hermaphrodite, but that’s beside the point. The point is… I need to think less about my dreams and past lives, and go find a SuperSuit in order to rid the current world of evil.
Would you like some corn with that ketchup?
The munchkin is a fruit kid. He’ll take blueberries over oreos. Peaches over ice cream. Oranges over marshmallows. But he’s not so big on the vegetables. Some days I think he’d eat cat food before he’d eat his vegetables.
So the other night, we were sitting at dinner, and he wasn’t eating his hamburger. His plain, no cheese, no tomato, no bacon, no bun even, hamburger. Given that Mr. Honey and I lived in Minnesota for a while a long, long time ago, it wasn’t a big stretch to try and spice up the hamburger with some ketchup (which is, of course, the state spice of Minnesota). (It’s also a vegetable in this household.)
As soon as the red bottle came out, the chorus of screechy baby babble started. He held his hand out to feel the cold, thick substance run through his fingers and then licked them clean. And then he happily ate his ketchup-coated hamburger, but he wouldn’t touch his corn. And I desperately wanted him to eat his corn.
I looked at Mr. Honey. Mr. Honey looked back at me. And then I squirted a giant glob of ketchup right over the top of the munchkin’s corn and mixed it all in.
And then he ate every. last. bite. (All the while Mr. Honey and I sat there trying not to watch but unable to tear our eyes away. This is the stuff of train wrecks, I’m telling you. Mr. Honey and I both gagged once or twice, but he ate his vegetables!)
Next up, I’ll try putting ketchup on his tomatoes.
