Directions to Where I am (the re-run)

[Originally posted June 20, 2007]

Start in Salt Lake City on the very day that Nixon proclaims to the world, "I am not a crook." Have an older brother who keeps waiting for you to go back where you came from. Be adored by your Grandpa and have him set aside special gifts just for you. Find yourself the princess of quite a lot until that red-headed brother is born and steals your thunder. Love him in spite of this. Be immersed through your Mama in classic Broadway shows such as "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" and "Cats". Learn at an early age that you cannot sing. Sing anyway. Be the only girl in a family of four boys. Realize you can run just as fast as the boys can. Embrace your tomboyishness.

Go to kindergarten proudly with a plaid lobster on the front of your jumper. Love your bearded kindergarten teacher who makes his own banjos and guitars. Laugh a lot. Talk so much that they stick you in a special class to help less "social" kids acclimate. Fly from the swings on the playground into salty, coarse gravel. Feel the freeing wind in your hair as you run. Fall off a skateboard and scratch up your face. Run through the sprinklers in your front yard. Try not to cry when your dad goes hunting and comes home with a deer. Go camping with your family at Trial Lake. Be given a box of chocolates in fourth grade by a boy. Have sleepovers with girlfriends and spend hours whispering and giggling. Grow tall early on, and find (to your dismay), that you are taller than all the boys most of your life.

Fall down while roller skating and severely break your arm. Have the first of six surgeries on this arm. Discover how grueling physical pain can be. Spend hours climbing the tree in your Grandma's front yard, collecting the "witch nose" pods that grow there. Pick fresh vegetables from her garden and listen to her Jazz Singer record over and over. Cry the first time you hear this record after your Grandpa dies. Sleep over at the cabin with all your cousins. Dance your heart out to the Footloose soundtrack. Savor the juicy sweetness of ripe peaches. Eat hamburgers at Hires. Go home and cry when boys begin flipping back bra straps and you are caught without one. Feel very womanly the next day when you arrive at school wearing your first bra. Be a little disappointed that no one ever tries to flip yours again. Never really make peace with your many freckles. Discover your love of literature.

Go through the awful stage where your body gets ahead of the rest of you. Be called ugly and fat by mean boys, and believe it for many years. Stuff your bra. Kiss a few very awkward boys. Fight with your parents. A LOT. Slam doors. Cry more than you want to. Pour your feelings into a journal. Feel so unsure of yourself that you wonder how you'll survive. Get on an airplane for the first time right after high school. Go to Chicago and win nationals in FHA. Go to college. Like a lot of boys. Learn to begin liking yourself. Send several boys off on missions, proclaiming your devoted and undying love for each one. Live with six girls and be glad you never had any sisters. Discover that you are a runner.

Meet a smart, cute gymnast quite by accident. Date him for only six weeks before getting engaged. Find that no one around you is shocked or even surprised at the shortness of time - because it just feels so right. Marry this man early one morning, surrounded by all your friends and family. Decide you are finally old enough to no longer pretend to like roller coasters. Move for the first time in your life to Minneapolis so your husband can attend graduate school. Make new friends.

Wonder if it will ever be your turn to be a mother, and blink your eyes to find that you are one. Cherish your babies, each in their turn. Sing each one to sleep with show tunes and John Denver songs. Make chocolate chip cookies and lots of peanut butter sandwiches. Kiss them every night before you go to bed. Wish it wasn't going so fast.

Move from Minneapolis to Seattle to Boston to San Diego. Be thankful for good friends all over the country. Be preparing to move to Missouri for the man you love. Look around and realize that you lead a charmed life. Spend as many days as you can at the beach. Re-learn the painful lesson of what happens when you don't wear sunscreen. Relish the sound of your kids playing so well with each other. Know that you are loved. Take a sip of diet coke. Over the phone, tell your husband just how great your day was. Miss him a lot. Blog. Write this. Wait anxiously to read other posts like this one. You're here.

This post was inspired by my friend, Annie, and her own life roadmap. I was fortunate enough to meet Annie while we lived in Boston, and my life has been richer ever since. Now it's your turn - how do we get to you?

I know, I hate re-runs, too

I'm taking a much-needed blog break. Life has not been on my side lately, and it's time to regroup and find my center.

But I'm not leaving you empty-worded here at Stie's Thoughts. I'm going to pull a few oldies (but goodies) out of the archives and re-post them.

Never thought I'd be one of THOSE bloggers, but such is life right now.

I'll be back next week to regale you with all the boring details of my life.

I know. Try to contain your excitement.

__________

Today I was strolling up and down the aisles of my local grocery store. I kept meeting the same person in the middle of each aisle. Every time I passed this man, he smiled up and me and said, "Hello, pretty lady."

Which, thanks to my most thoughtful son telling me all that is wrong with my fine self, I was needing today.

With each passing aisle, and each passing compliment, my self-esteem soared. See, McKay, SEE? Strangers tell me I'm pretty. I can't be ALL THAT bad.

But our little game ended when I heard him say the exact same thing to another store patron. Sadly, it was not a trim, cute soccer mom that drew his attentions away from me. It was a balding, elderly man wearing a pink shirt.

Next time our carts passed, I eyed him more carefully.

He is mentally challenged.

And I, unfortunately, am still ugly.

[Originally posted October 3, 2007]

Have a spooktacular weekend...

Sharing my mad skillz

Internets, we are full in the swing of the ONE TIME each year when I go off my rigid, healthy, vegetable-laden diet and indulge in sugar-filled sweeties like these:

What? French fries are a vegetable, are they not?

Oh, shut up.

Well, I do make these gorgeous cookies every year for Halloween, and as part of blog tradition, I share them here with you, too. After all, you really should benefit from the awesomeness that is my dessert recipe book. As should your heinie.

I start with the top-secret family sugar cookie recipe, shown here:

Do not mock. EVERYONE always asks me for the recipe when I show up with a batch of Betty's. They are moist, soft, and just the right amount of sweet. I swear by them and make nothing else anymore. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the extreme laziness of my nature and my inability to wait while dough chills. Ahem.

Mix according to the package directions, and drop by spoonfuls onto cookie sheets. Bake as directed on the bag. (See, you're liking this, aren't you? No rolling out dough. No cookie cutters. No counters covered in flour. Yeah, you're welcome.)

While cookies are baking, combine all ingredients for the glaze and beat well:

2 3/4 cup powdered sugar
2 tsp. shortening
3 Tbsp. water
1 Tbsp. corn syrup
1/4 tsp. vanilla

Glaze should be fairly liquid. You don't want it solid like frosting, but it should be slightly thicker than the white glue the children use at school. Add water or powdered sugar to reach the perfect consistency. (Helpful, aren't I?)

Dye 1/4 of the glaze black and put it in a pastry bag with a small writing tip. Leave the remaining glaze white.

These cookies work best when frosted warm, so I recommend baking and frosting just a pan at a time. When the cookies are a minute or two out of the oven, begin to frost with white glaze.

Pipe a bulls eye onto each cookie with your black glaze:

Taking a toothpick, start at the center, and gently draw lines going toward the outside edge of the cookie. Repeat around the entire bulls eye until your spiderweb is complete.

Top with a plastic spider, and voila! Look who gets to one-up all the other mothers at the school party. (Don't even pretend you don't want to. We ALL want to one-up the other mothers. Shameful, but true.)

I did let the minions help this time, though that generally goes against my inner Martha. It is very hard for me to let go of the control and allow little hands to smudge and smear. But since they were for the primary kids at church, I figured it'd be all right.

[Disclaimer: I never let the minions touch things that will be fed to adults. That's just gross. So, friends who have eaten my creations, rest easy.]

See what I mean? You can't see it, but there is almost as much frosting on the boy's fingers as there are on the cookies. Gross.

Hurry now. There's still time to make these and show off your awesome skills. I promise you, they will help you win friends and influence people.

Monday confessional

In honor of the fact that today is Monday (and Mondays really are the black sheep of the Day family), I feel the need to share some of the dark thoughts that are lurking in my soul.

The soul that is particularly dark and cranky on this Monday. For several reasons.

First, having just spent a small fortune to have all the trees in my yard pruned and trimmed, plus a dead one removed, it is most disheartening to have a large branch break off during a freak thunderstorm yesterday. Because really? I just love spending money on stuff like dead trees. It's way more fun than on, say, furniture and clothes. Both of which could be purchased for the same price of stupid dead trees.

Second, is it just me or does anyone else find it annoying to log onto reader and see that the Pioneer Woman (though my hero she will always be) has written like four posts by eight a.m.? I swear. I can barely crank out two or three a week. That woman writes like eight posts a day. It's driving me batty. And not because I don't enjoy reading them. But because I feel the need to compete with everyone and every thing around me.

Third, I don't know what it is about the last few months, but I CANNOT. STOP. THE. EATING. It's getting way out of control and I need help. Please. Someone at church grab me by the extra-thick arms next week and tell me you are noticing how chubby I am getting and you wish I would stop. This gravy train has bought a one-way ticket to the next size up, and I am not sure how to stop it.

Fourth, I love the fall, but I really hate raking the leaves. And since we live in Del Boca Vista, every single one of our retired neighbors is out there, morning, noon and night. Raking, trimming, weeding, mulching. And, undoubtedly, pointing at our house and cursing. Not that I blame them - the leaves are piling up. But sheesh. How can one get in all the eating if one is supposed to be outside raking?

And, last, but not least, I am sick of my hair and need a hair suicide hotline that I can call. Remember two years ago what happened when I got sick of it? Please. Someone stop me before I do something drastic, like run into the salon, a Twinkee in each hand, and beg to get the Bruce Jenner.

Yeah. It's that bad.

Happy Effing Monday.

Home sweet home

When I saw this post over at the Nester, I knew I had to have one of my very own.

Only, I didn't want to pay big bucks for something I could create myself.

Because I'm crazy and controlling frugal and independent like that.

And since we've moved more times than most people in our 17 years together, this was the perfect accessory for our home. It took some time finding the old street names, but was a nostalgic walk down memory lane in the process.

Oh, the stories each street could tell you about me.

[Yeah. Me and my wild self. NOT.]

I mixed them all up order-wise and the kids had fun trying to assign each street name to its matching city and state.

I also put a photo of our current home behind the text and reduced the opacity, but it doesn't show up very well in the photos. I had the print mounted on a 3/4" standout with black edging, knowing that I wasn't going to put it in a frame. I wanted to hang the print in the basement, and that is a glass-free zone, so it works well as-is. Plus, I like the simplicity of the print all by itself.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

And it seals the deal: We can't ever move again.

There's no room on there for any more street names.