Internets, I’ve Missed You Terribly

29 August 2007 by

So I’m happy to report that both of my lungs are still present and accounted for despite my best efforts to vacate them from the premises. I’m much better now, thankyouverymuch, although I seem to have passed on my affliction to my husband, who is now trying to cough up one of his lungs as well. In fact, there’s been so much congestion and whatnot in our house over the last two weeks that I will forever think of this particular time of our lives as HackFest ’07. We’re thinking of making t-shirts.

But aside from a disproportionate amount of coughing, things have been pretty normal around here. I went to Panera a couple of days ago to get some writing done (or, I should say: get some “writing” done) but ended up doing little more than attempting to plow my way through my inbox. And then a sweet lady asked me to help her get her laptop connected to the internet, and when I said, “You know, I think you have a firewall setting that we need to disconnect,” I realized that at some point aliens have overtaken my brain and infused it with mysterious bits and pieces of computer-related knowledge.

Because there’s really no other explanation for the fact that I have become a person who is capable of offering some light technical support to a stranger who is attempting to connect to a WiFi network in a local coffee shop.

(However, the aliens still haven’t taught me how to make a DVD play on the television in our living room. Baby steps, I guess.)

Also: thank you so much for all of your funny, encouraging comments about the podcast that Big Mama and I did. I can’t even tell you how much it means to us that you took the time to listen and to give us some feedback.

Because here’s the thing: I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous blog-wise than when I finally put up that podcast link. It’s one thing to put your crazy in writing, but there’s something that feels infinitely more vulnerable about letting people hear your crazy – not to mention your voice and your accent (not that I actually have an accent, mind you – that was a purely hypothetical example).

So all that to say: your sweet comments are appreciated more than you’ll ever know, and if I could play a clip of “More Than You’ll Ever Know” by my pretend-BFF Christy Nockels right here, I absolutely would.

(But I think doing that without permission might result in some sort of fine and perhaps even a brush with legal action.)

(Which really isn’t the best way to win over your pretend-BFF.)

Anyway, we’re going to try the podcast thing again in the next couple of days, and I can promise you that it will contain the same level of deep, philosophical conversation that you heard in the first one.

Specifically, we will be analyzing the proposed foreign trade policy of every presidential candidate as well as taking a thorough exegetical look at the book of Leviticus.

Oh, who am I kidding?

We’re totally talking about lip gloss. Along with other issues of critical international importance.

And we do hope you’ll join us again.

Filed Under: Rambling

The Bestest Link Of All

28 August 2007 by

For several years my daddy has maintained a webpage of his own. It’s a password protected deal where he posts pictures of grandkids, fourth cousins eight times removed, and basically every possible morsel of genealogical minutiae that you could ever want to know about our family.

A couple of weeks ago D decided to see if Daddy had posted anything recently, and later that day when we were in the car, he said, “Hey, your daddy linked to you.”

“He did what I’m sorry huh?”

“Your daddy linked to you. He mentioned something about your blog on his webpage.”

Now if it’s hard for you to understand why I was a little shocked by this information, it’s because it’s only been in the last six weeks or so that I’ve known that Mama and Daddy are active readers of my blog. Daddy says that he has to “log on” and then pass the computer to Mama, and in fact just this last week Daddy wrote me a sweet email that congratulated me on my “recent blog awards” and went on to suggest that maybe I should “back up all of your blog posts into some sort of database, as Mother and I think that maybe one day you could compile them all into a book.”

I couldn’t help but picture me standing at a copier, painstakingly running off copies of each and every blog post, then putting the pages through a three-hole punch, placing them in a vinyl binder, and then asking Alex to put one of those title stickers he just made with some markers in the center of the binder cover. It’s sure to be a best-seller!

(I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: why would anyone in his or her right mind pay good money for something you can get for free? And since I have no imagination, a work of fiction is nowhere in my future. So blogging is as far up the writing food chain as I’m going, people. That’s just the cold hard truth of it all.)

Anyway, I logged onto Daddy’s webpage, and after a little bit of clicking around, here is what I found:

daddyjpg.jpg

Where do I even start?

First of all, one of my favorite parts of Daddy’s blurb is that I’m “a blogger at boomama.net,” mainly because the word “a” implies that I am but one blogger on a staff of many here at BooMama, where we toil furiously in the blogging trenches to bring you some of the very best mediocre writing you’ll ever find on the interweb.

Second, the part about him not wanting to brag? Totally sweet. I don’t care how old I am.

Third, I love it when he says that I have “a large reading audience, nationwide.” I’m not so sure about the “large” part, but when I read it I thought, “DON’T TELL MAMA THAT SOME CANADIANS READ, TOO! IT’LL BLOW HER MIND!” And then she’d call me and say, “You mean they can see your blog IN CANADA? Well I had no idea. HOW IN THE WORLD do they do that?”

I also giggled when I saw, “it is different than most of what you read,” because it’s just a little bit ambiguous about whether it’s different in a bad way or different in a good way. However, I have to admit that it definitely is different if your normal reading material is a newspaper or magazine. I mean, consider the sheer volume of CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation points! They don’t allow those SOPHISTICATED WRITING SKILLS in those fancy printed publications!

OH NO MA’AM THEY DON’T!

Finally, I thought it was very gracious of Daddy to point out that my writings are done “mostly on the spur of the moment” because I don’t “have a lot of spare time.”

In other words: don’t expect too much, people. She’s frazzled and crazed. SHE’S FRAZZLED AND CRAZED!

All in all, I thought Daddy’s post was delightful. Being in your 30’s doesn’t mean you stop enjoying some parental encouragement. And while I’m sure that some of my distant relatives were a wee bit horrified by what constitutes “writing” in my little corner of the blogosphere, I’m glad that a few of them might know where to find me now.

(Sidenote: if you ask my mama anything about my “website,” she tell you that I have “a blog on Google.”)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to return to “backing up my database.”

Or, you know, watching “Little Bear.”

We’re busy as bees, people.

And on behalf of all of the writing staff here at BooMama, I want you to know that we’re going to continue to crank out as much writing product “on the spur of the moment” as we possibly can. That is what we do.

All one of us.

This post was originally published on February 22, 2007. And I’ll be back with something new tomorrow.

Filed Under: Family Fun

I Haven’t Even Told My Husband This Story Yet

27 August 2007 by

A few days ago Alex and I had to get out of the house in a hurry because some people were coming by with a realtor. I had been cleaning and scrubbing and vacuuming since about 7:30 that morning, so by the time we made our hasty exit at 11, I was a mess. My hair wasn’t fixed, I hadn’t taken a shower, I was wearing zero make-up, and I had on these gaucho-ish workout pants that are not attractive in the least but are as comfortable as all get out when you’re spending a morning up to your elbows in Pine Sol.

I didn’t have time to change clothes or, you know, bathe before we left, but I was so frazzled by that point that I really didn’t care. I figured I’d run through the McDonald’s drive-thru, grab some lunch, and then Alex and I would head to the park and commence with the killing of time. Plus, given the condition of my appearance, at least if we were at the park people might think that I’d been hoofing it on the walking trail just moments before I sat down at a picnic table to systematically demolish an order of McValue fries. And a cheeseburger.

As soon as we got to the park Alex noticed a lady who happens to work at his Mother’s Day Out, and all I could think was, “WELL, THAT FIGURES” because it never fails that I run into someone I know when I look my absolute worst. We made small talk for a few minutes, and in an attempt to explain why I looked like death warmed over, I offhandedly mentioned that oh, someone was looking at our house, we were in a hurry when we left as she could probably tell, ha ha ha ha ha, all the while hoping that she wouldn’t think I was some deranged mama who was unfamiliar with Why Good Hygiene Is Important.

In the meantime, a little girl who was probably one and a half kept running over to me, lifting up her arms, and trying to crawl into my lap. Alex was infinitely entertained by the fact that “the girl baby” wanted to play with his mama, and since the girl baby’s parents didn’t seem to object, I picked her up and let her play with the toy from Alex’s Happy Meal. She’d sit in my lap for a little bit, then jump down and run to her mama, then climb back in my lap, and so it went for about the next ten minutes.

When the little girl climbed down for about the twelfth time, I mentioned to her mama, who looked to be about my age, that I was flattered that her daughter seemed to like me so much.

And here is what her mama said to me:

“Well, you do look like her grandmother!”

OH YES SHE DID.

OH YES SHE DID.

I just sat there, stunned, trying not to feel offended, reminding myself that I’m not in fact getting any younger and that being a grandmother is one of life’s greatest blessings. Grandmothers are loving, they’re wise, they’re treasured – they’re the apples of their grandbabies’ eyes.

However, grandmothers are not, as a general rule, IN THEIR THIRTIES.

So in my head I tried to put a spin what she said, tried to remember that I didn’t exactly leave the house with a youthful glow that morning, tried to justify that maybe she meant the grandmother and I have a similar body type, or maybe the grandmother and I have a similar-sounding voice.

But at the same time, I couldn’t help but channel a little bit of Suzanne Sugarbaker and think, “Well, if I’d wanted to be insulted, I’d have stayed at home and waited for a crank call!”

And please don’t misunderstand. I have high hopes of being a Sassy Grandmama, as I know several of you are. But I’ve sort of envisioned my late 50’s / early 60’s as being the Sassy Grandmama years. Not, you know, NOW.

I mean, y’all. I can’t help but feel like I may need a touch of the Botox.

Perhaps the plastic surgeon will give me some form of senior citizens’ discount!

And just FYI: I’m considering changing the name of the blog to BooMamaw.

Consider yourself warned.

This post was originally published on October 12, 2006.

Filed Under: Rambling

I’m Only Posting To Further The Kingdom

27 August 2007 by

Hey.

So.

Short break, huh?

But really – this is more of an announcement, and afterwards I plan to go right back to my ongoing attempts to dislodge my lung from my person.

Anyhoo.

One of our sweet bloggy sistas, Jenn, emailed me today to say that she’s not going to be able to use her ticket for the Deeper Still conference in Nashville on September 7-8. Her ticket is for the (sold-out) main arena – not the satellite venue – and Jenn will be glad to FedEx the ticket to the buyer. The ticket cost $70 when Jenn bought it.

If you’re interested, you can contact Jenn at this email address, and y’all can work out all the details. First come, first served.

And I’ll get back to the business of coughing now.

Have a lovely evening.

Filed Under: Rambling

I Shoot, I Score!

26 August 2007 by

I’m going to take a couple of days off from the blog so that I can devote my full attention to coughing up a lung and then hopefully jump on the road to chest cold recovery. Since a lot of you are fairly new to my little neck of the bloggy woods, I’ve set some stuff in the archives to auto-post.

Here is one of my klassiest posts ever.

The words “quiet dignity” come to mind.

While Alex seems to have mastered the, um, liquid aspect of potty training, the, um, other aspect is proving a bit more challenging. And of course by “challenging” I mean “I could pull out every single increasingly gray hair in my head from frustration.”

As I nearly did yesterday afternoon.

And since A. generally gets terribly upset when he has an accident – resulting in your basic teeth-gnashing and garden-variety wailing – I usually have to calm him down a bit before I can inspect the, well, severity of the accident “site,” as it were.

Which I will not be describing in detail. Because I care about you.

So after yesterday’s sobbing subsided, I told A. to stand right. where. he. was. I was fearful that if he started to walk, the contents would, er, dislodge, and I’d have an entirely different kind of mess on my hands (not to mention my floors). I managed to move A. over to a towel I’d spread out while I gently – gently! – pulled off his underwear.

Underwear safely removed, I gently – gently! – made my way toward the bathroom. To, you know, dispose of some stuff. I was cradling those underoos like I was carrying fine china on a silver tray, and I can say in all honesty that I’ve never been so intent on not touching “china” in my life.

But it probably won’t surprise you, given my long history of grace and poise, that I tripped about two feet away the commode.

It never ceases to amaze me that, in times of duress, seconds seem to stretch on for hours, and the human brain can process several – lo, many – pieces of information in a very short span of time.

My brain, as it turned out, honed in on three critical facts:

1) Oh sweet lordy, I tripped.
2) Oh sweet lordy, I’m carrying poo.
3) Oh sweet lordy, WHAT IF I DROP IT? WHAT IF I DROP THE POO?

And in a moment that would certainly be featured on SportsCenter if cameras had been in place and if I hadn’t been juggling, you know, DOO-DOO, I recovered in such a way that I in fact propelled the substance in question straight into the commode.

Like a lay-up. Or something.

You would probably feel really sorry for me if I told you that the flushing sounded like wild applause, so I won’t tell you that part. But I think you would’ve clapped if you had seen my mad skillz in action.

By the way, as I was “taking it to the hoop,” the underwear never left my hands and protected me from the poo like a shield, which probably had something to do with the fact that Batman’s picture was all over them. Poo-repelling is one of Batman’s lesser-known powers, apparently.

And thus concludes Episode #3,293 of Things I Never Experienced Before Motherhood.

The joy, it would seem, is unending.

This post was originally published on August 18, 2006.

Filed Under: Family Fun, Oh Howard

Bible Study (And A Giveaway, Too)

26 August 2007 by

Myrna is organizing a bloggy Bible study (A Woman’s Heart: God’s Dwelling Place by Beth Moore) for this fall. If you’re interested in participating, you can find all the details here.

Myrna’s also giving away five copies of the workbook that will be used in this study, and you can find information about the giveaway here. The drawing for the workbooks closes Thursday, August 30th, so you still have plenty of time to sign up.

Have a great Sunday afternoon, everybody!

Filed Under: Bloggity Fun
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