Happy holidays.

The season has been marginally festive, here at Casa de dos Quesos.  #1 is back from college, enjoying the large pile of rock, metal and ska music that I got him.  #2 got a robot arm. Because as he told me, when he hinted for it, “Who wouldn’t want a frickin’ robot arm?”

I could not argue with his logic.

I also got him a molecular gastronomy kit.  This is cooking, for food chemists, and will allow him to turn potentially healthy foods into foam, caviar balls, gel spaghetti or pop rocks. 

It flies directly into the face of #1’s liberal, hippy college plan to eat only unprocessed foods.  For home made pop rocks, I am sure he will change his mind.  Are they not a food group?  If not, they should be.

I hit EBay and got the DH a vintage game which was unfortunately missing a few pegs, and an inlayed backgammon board that was not.  The DH got me a stereo system that can dupe tapes and vinyl to a jump drive, for transfer to IPod.

At first, I was dubious about the need for another gadget in our tech laden house.  But this means that, after many years of hoping, I will have access to old music that I have almost given up hope of hearing again.   

I can copy, the Wayne tape.

I have no idea who Wayne was.  I worked with a Wayne, as did the person I copied this tape from.  Lori had in turn copied the tape from Wayne, hence the name.  But she assured me, her Wayne was “Not that Wayne.” 

But whoever Wayne is, where ever he is, I must thank him, for creating a mix tape so powerful that it can fix bad moods and flat tires, breathe life into a dead party, freshen breath, whiten grout, cure cancer, and boost the economy.

I am not actually sure about some of those claims.  But it has been years since I’ve listened to this, and the world is in a mess.  So we don’t really know, do we?   

What I can tell you is that it is 90 minutes long, leads off with Bobby Darin singing Mack the Knife, and segues from Jerry Lee Lewis to the Beatles, to the themes from Peter Gunn and Hawaii Five O.  It hits what, in my opinion is an all time high at the beginning of side 2, with Lorne Greene singing the theme from Bonanza.  But it also has War (god God, ya’ll HUH) It’s My Party, and Aretha Franklin.

It violates a cardinal rule in this house of not pirating intellectual property, and compounds it by being a dupe of a dupe from some guy I never met.  Over here, we try to watch listen and read with sensitivity to the source of the material, and not to filch things that we can locate and purchase legally.  I figure, as a writer who doesn’t want her stuff pirated, it is a case of “Do onto others” and raised my teens to be Napster free.

But The Wayne Tape was made in the era of vinyl, so with a good sound system, you can hear the snap and crackle of the old crappy systems we all used to have, and the sound of the needle drop on the record.  It has historical significance.

It is an ethical conundrum. 

And The Holy Grail of mix tapes.

If global warming suddenly clears up, you can find Wayne and thank him.

Last week, we went to the Y for a quick swim.

It says a lot about the current state of my work outs, that I had forgotten how to go to the Y. When I went searching for my ID card, all I could find was a spare one of #1 son’s. On entering, I turned up my coat collar as I passed the desk, scanned quickly and tried to blend in with the woodwork.

No one noticed.

But in my concentration on sneaking in, I’d forgotten to lock my purse in the car. With no lock for the locker, I was kind of stuck. So I suited up, stuffed it in my gym bag, stuffed the towel on top, and dragged it into the pool with me, throwing it on the bleachers and taking the nearest lane, so I could keep an eye on it, as I dog paddled.

#2 son shared my lane, since neither of us are much for consistent lap swimming. The DH took the lane next to ours and passed us repeatedly, as regular as a Swiss watch. We were there for about so minutes, before things started to get weird.

It is normally pretty quiet there, especially within an hour of closing. But the bleachers started to fill up.

Glasses-less, #2 and I squinted in the direction of the expanding crowd, trying to suss this out. Was it a rental? A birthday, perhaps. There were a lot of kids. But none of them were changed to swimsuits, all still in street clothes. Some still in boots and coats.

And they were surrounding my purse.

I am nothing to see, in a swimming suit. And I do not like to lumber half naked and soaking wet, into a mob of strangers. So I sent #2. He made my lame excuse, grabbed my bag and moved it to a bench.

By the time he got back in the water, and moved down to the deep end, where I was treading water, a fully dressed man had gotten into the pool with us, on the shallow end of our lane. And then, another. We are now both treading water, and casting quick glimpses in the direction of the two interlopers, trying to decide what to do.

“Ma’am?” It is the lifeguard, standing over us. Because there is a baptism going on in our lane. He is as surprised as we are. Pentecostal immersion was not on the pool schedule. He is not sure how to handle it.

He insists we don’t have to move, if we stay on our end of the pool. But maybe it would be better if we switched lanes. The DH has disappeared. We assume he has given up and gone to the lockers, so we slink around the far side of the pool, grab our towels and go to the showers.

Only to find that the Baptism is over, five minutes later. And about the time that we are both dripping wet and totally naked in our respective locker rooms, that the congregation has followed us and is preparing for a post sacrament trip to the waterslide.

I told #2 that the Episcopalian confirmation ceremony is going to be a major let down, after seeing this.

Every morning, my alarm goes off at 5:45.

I lay in bed until 6:30, sleeping and listening to the radio.

I do not particularly like the radio station, but there are a limited number of choices, since reception at our house is not the greatest.  What is there comes in clearly, and I am willing to tolerate it, despite the fact that it switched to an all Christmas, all the time, format in early November.

I am not against Christmas.  I just take a dim view of it in November.  But this is mid December, and well within my personal safe zone.

But I have been dozing to Christmas music for over a month now, sorting songs into categories.

Elvis (an easy one)

Johnny Mathis (or people I have never heard of, but who sound like Johnny Mathis.  This seems to be a rapidly expanding category.)

Perry Como… or is that Mel Torme… but obviously not Dean Martin (Because I can recognize Dean.  I had a crush on him, when I was in grade school.  Before I knew about sex, and why it was a horrible idea for an innocent Catholic girl to lust after members of the rat pack)

Michael Buble/Feinstein (I am convinced these two are the same person.  Although I can see an obvious reason why someone named Feinstein probably doesn’t have a huge Christmas repertory.  Or maybe they are both secretly Harry Connick Jr. In the dark and asleep, it is hard for me to tell the difference)

Jose Feliciano (who only has one song, but they play it a lot)

Women (who, if they are not Eartha Kitt singing Santa Baby, I don’t really care to know)

This morning, I woke up to none of the above.  There was music.  And someone…talking…

And to get the effect, you really have to hear those ellipsis.  Or are they ellipses?  Because there were a lot of them.

And I had heard them before.  Just… never… at… Christmas…

Spaaaaahk!!!!!!  Kahn!!!!!!!!  Good King Wenceslas!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The song stylings of  Willaim Shatner.

Some of you know.  Those of you who don’t?  Well, this isn’t a Christmas song.  But I watched it live on TV, back in 1978, and it warped me for life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lul-Y8vSr0I

It was a tough day for two out of three pets at Casa de Dos Quesos.

Fluffer had a veterinary appointment. Fluffer is a very finicky cat. She hates almost everything. She does not like the other pets. She does not like changes to her routine. She hates car travel. And she especially hates veterinarians.

She is not all that fond of us, either. Except for my husband. Although he never had any desire to be a cat person, she is %100 his cat. So I drove, and he cat wrangled.

This mostly involved holding on for dear life and trying to say soothing things, while Fluffer chanted for seven miles of country driving, quite clearly and in English, “No. No. Nooooooooh. no. No.”

The vet remarked that although she was healthy for a fourteen year old, there was no box on the exam sheet for ‘attitude’ or he’d have had to check, “Royally pissed off.”

Then he gave her a shot, and forced two worm pills into her that made her foam like a science fair volcano. I mopped the drool off my husband with an old towel, and we went home.

The day proceeded uneventfully, with Fluffer avoiding us, and Havoc the labradoodle being a nuisance.

Until I began to hear that funny, angry buzzing sound that a cell phone makes, when it is set to vibrate and forgotten somewhere. I searched the house, but all the phones were accounted for.

And then, I found the source of the noise. Fluffer had arranged herself to fill the bar of sunlight that was falling on the dog’s bed in the kitchen.

The dog had returned to what he thought was his room, only to find a seething rectangle of hairy feline hatred, sleeping in his bed and blocking the way to his food dish.

She was explaining that she did not care that he outweighed her by sixty pounds. She had had enough. And one false move on his part would mean certain death.

He was standing over her with a look that vacillated from confused to worried to frightened, and then looking back to us, trying to decided what he had done to get on her wrong side.

Sometimes, you don’t have to do anything, Havoc. Sometimes, just being there is enough.

My website update is still in progress. But I have a couple of current
e-releases, if anyone out there is interested.

Available now, on eharlequin.com we have my hot, short historical

Seducing a Stranger

http://bit.ly/2W58Oi

And for those of you out there who are wondering what it would be like, if I wrote a contemporary:

I’ve decided to electronically self publish my single title NEED TO KNOW.

Some of you who have been around for a while might have heard me talking about this story. It’s the one with the librarian.

It’s contemporary.
It’s funny.
It’s not a romance.
And since it has no genre, no one can figure out how to sell it.

Unless there is some kind of miracle, it will not be coming out in print, but you can get the full length ebook here:

http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/need-to-know/7765775

or for Amazon Kindle

http://www.amazon.com/Need-to-Know/dp/B002SN9GGQ/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_7

I’ve been busy, lately doing the final adjustments on one of the continuity books. Apparently, I wrote the whole thing using three or four nouns and a long string of conjunctions. My bad.

But as you may know it is my favorite season. And as usual, I made sure to take time to celebrate the Halloween weekend.

We went to a showing of the movie “Paranormal Activity”, which I can strongly recommend. Although personally, I would have retitled it “Don’t Date a Douchebag”. If you’ve been haunted your whole life by a demon that burned down your childhood home, and has returned to make your life miserable, and all you want is for it to go away?

The last thing in the world you need is to be living with a jerk who is not only going out of his way to anger said demon, he is insisting that he has to take video footage of you first thing in the morning, and while you are in bathroom brushing your teeth.

Someone has to die here. Just sayin’.

The best way to see this movie is in a crowd of people, to feed off the energy of the ones who jump and scream. Or in our case, find it impossible to shut up in a movie theater. During an extremely tense scene, when our hero was sticking his head (and camera) into the attic crawl space where anything might be lurking, some Wisconsin wit behind us announced:

“They need more insulation.”

We followed up our movie with another family field trip to a town called appropriately enough, Butte Des Morts. Butte Des Morts is the home of M. Schettl Sales Inc.

M Schettl’s is what you get if you cross a typical Wisconsin farm with a home improvement center. And then add generous doses of flea market. And then transplant the whole thing to Jurassic Park. On the week the circus is in town.

Did I mention there are also lots of sharks?
And cheap, closeout dog treats.

The whole thing is spread out over multiple buildings, sheds, barns, transplanted psuedo-Victorian green houses and rusted circus wagons.

It’s kind of hard to describe. I did not take pictures of the insides of the buildings. It seemed wrong, somehow. But the kitchen and bath building, prompted #2 to announce, “Now I know what’s missing from our kitchen. A life sized statue of Marylin Monroe.”

In the furniture showroom, I was trying to decide what I wanted more: the $398 three foot tall plush moose, the $698 closer to life size resin moose, the moose in between with the bell on its neck (that turned out to be a reindeer), or perhaps a five foot tall Spiderman.

Or a bra.
Why is there a rack of bras here? With baby toys. Around the corner from the $75 leather jackets in my size.

Under a seven foot long tiger.

You get kind of torn between the desire to buy everything, or just back away slowly.

But the real show is outside. This is where they keep the acres of things to large too put inside.

In Wisconsin, we are used to large fiberglass animals. They make them here. So driving past this

is not that unusual.

But we don’t usually see this.

I threatened to give this to #2 as a wedding gift, if he marry’s a girl I don’t like.

And then there were the tableaus.

This is not just a gorilla, climbing the Eiffel tower. this is a gorilla being shaken off the Eiffel tower as it is tipped by a diminutive Hercules.

And the rhino attack.

You can’t see it in this picture, but they are trying to rescue the caged baby rhino in the trailer behind the jeep.

And my personal favorite:

And it was all for sale.
Thank God that we had no money. Because I sure can’t depend on common sense and good taste to rescue me, in moments like this.

I’m assuming that my Mom doesn’t get in here to read the blog, since I have neglected to mention my URL, my blogging alias, and come to think of it, the names of several of my books.

I am sure, if my parents find out that their little girl has just written “Seducing a Stranger”

(on sale at eharlequin and Kindle November 1st!)

Thanksgiving will be even longer and more awkward than it usually is.

And I doubt that, even with the computer turned on access to Google, and someone else doing the typing, she would be able to find me. So I’m counting on you all to keep your mouths shut, should you run into a little old lady who looks kind of like a grey haired question mark wearing a straw hat, and who wants to talk to you about her daughter the author.

Pretend you don’t know me. Please. I beg you.

But it is my Mom’s tendency to ‘look for things’ (other than me, of course) that is causing a problem right now. She thinks she is sorting through her possessions and “Cleaning the house”. But mostly, she is moving the contents of the house from room to room, splitting up things that belong together and bringing things to the surface that should have stayed buried, in the hopes of donating them to a church rummage sale because

“They are still good, yet.” She is convinced, like many children of the depression, that any piece of clothing with two threads hanging together can be used for rags, for quilting, or perhaps as a donation to poor people in Russia.

Mom, the cold war has been over for a long time now. The Russians are our friends. And as far as I know, they are not all legally blind. What did they ever do to you, that you want to give them my olive and purple houndstooth coat from 1967. It’s time has passed. Throw it out.

My mother recently announced that a nice man who got their address off a radio swap and shop program (mom was selling some canning jars) had come into the house, bought all my father’s vintage fishing tackle for $40 and had offered her $10 for Grandma’s pickle crock.

She didn’t take it, thank God. But I am worried. I am an only child, and was under the impression that, if anyone was going to loot the estate, it would be me.

Since the estate consists mostly of stockpiled Ivory soap, store brand cream of mushroom soup and fine dinnerware rewashed and saved after visits to the McDonald’s drive thru, the pickin’s are slim. And when you add to this, the fact that the house is about one step from a Discovery channel special on hoarding, retrieving those slim pickin’s is not a job for the faint of heart.

There is a chance that, sometime, they will have to move out of that house, for health or safety reasons. The easiest way to clean it would be with a bulldozer, or a match. Although first impulse is always to grab everything and cart it away, this is not the easiest way to get around someone who, let us be honest, has been more than half a bubble off true for at least 35 years. If I were to grab the garbage bags and the rubber gloves, and haul 80% of her possessions to the curb (where, trust me, they belong) it would likely send her into full blown psychosis.

So I am making irregular visits to the house, announcing that I would like:

the 2 percolators with no cords, the rusty plant stand with the loose wheels, the pile of papers in the envelope labeled “Mostly junk” (like it is ever a good idea to store paperwork in the “Mostly junk” file)
The bottle sterilizer from 1961…

No. Don’t sell that, Mom. No one sterilizes bottles anymore. They just don’t. Seriously mom. It’s 47 years old. People who love their children would never… NO!

I’ll put it on Ebay for you. OK?
Or Craigslist.
FROM HELL.
Along with your pressure cooker. Dear God in heaven, do not try to sell a pressure cooker. In theory, if the gaskets are all right, they are not dangerous. But coming out of your house, I know it is older than the bottle sterilizer, and I am not so sure.

I could not manage, on the last visit, to talk her out of the deep fat fryer. She insisted she might ‘use it again’.

The image of my mother, hunched over a kettle of hot oil is something that I cannot contemplate until I find that bottle of tranquilizers I was clutching after my last visit home.

Havoc has found his passion.

Perhaps it was because he was old, but our last dog, Kaiju, was a much less complex animal. He was content to divide most of his day between his three favorite activities, eating, sleeping and shedding.

He was content to collapse unconsciousness on the floor where ever we were, never expending so much effort as to jump on the furniture.

He was what Chaucer might have called a hearty trencherman, frequently going for things found in the ditch that were too disgusting to try and take away from him. Things that were, when he could manage it, larger than his own head. He enjoyed a challenge.

And he shed as a sign of love, in big rolling clouds of gold hair that attached to or hid under everything in the house. Combing resulted in tumbleweeds of fur. Baths were a traumatic experience for everyone involved, and given seldom.

Havoc? Is different. I’ve already recorded his favorite sleeping position: head back, spine twisted, feet in the air. And always on a couch. If possible, he will use the arm as a pillow, as though exhausted by the effort of being a family pet.

He eats nothing but people food and a gourmet brand of diet food, and has an annoying tendency to projectile vomit that, without warning, looking slightly baffled at the chucks of science diet that have shot out of his mouth and stuck to your leg, as though he can’t figure out where they’ve come from.

And the amount of hair he drops is, as advertised with labradoodles, hardly enough to count as shedding. He also enjoys going to the groomer. He is pretty, and he knows it. For the groomer he is reported to be “A little angel”. At home, he is neither angelic, nor little.

It’s as if he’s not even trying to be a dog.

Until, that is, you produce a tennis ball.

After a difficult period in puppyhood when all tossed balls bounced off his empty head with no response other than a puzzled and indignant expression, he has figured out the game of catch.

And he thinks that it should be played several hours a day. He will lead any family member he can grab by the hand into the kitchen, to stare significantly up at the place the ball is stored. If there is no response, we will ‘make his own fun’.

This involves stealing anything that can be reached on table or floor, newspapers, shoes, bills, etc, and holding the item hostage, giving occasional destructive chews to it, until someone gets up to stop him.

If he is given the ball, and encouraged to play quietly, by himself?

This is what I think of as the dog yoga period of the day. I have an L shaped desk, which to the canine mind must look like a dog cave, or maybe a fort. Dog and ball disappear under the desk, circling my feet and bumping my knees. Then there is a sudden stop, to signify that the ball has been lost, either under the rolling file cabinet, behind the bookcase, or under the rolling computer cabinet.

I stop work, move chair slowly to avoid rolling over any paws. Move body slowly, because that is how I move. Crawl on the floor, head down to look under the furniture.

The dog stands behind me, staring intently. Breathing on my shoulder. Wagging his tail.

I roll the furniture around, find the ball, and get it back in play. Then I go back to work until the situation is repeated.

Sometimes, he does not allow me enough time to get back into the chair before losing the ball again.

As with regular, non-dog yoga, there are variations on this game, just to keep it exciting. There is the move where I hit my head under the desk. The move where he hits his head. The move where he hides the ball in his cheek and laughs at me, while I search for something that is not lost.

And the move where I get fed up and refuse to play, and he hits the powerstrip with his paw and shuts off the computer. This gives me enough time for several rounds of ball, while the computer reboots and I rescue my unsaved manuscript.

It is all very annoying.

But all in all, it is better, and less destructive than his other favorite game:

spin the cat on the desk chair.

I am just back from dragging #2 to his voice lesson. This is my idea, not his. He needs to work on his range, since his Chariot maybe Sweet, but it is is about two octaves too Low.

Also, now that the “In a world where…” movie trailer guy has died, I figure there is an opening. Sooner or later, #2 will need a career. And since he already sounds like James Earl Jones, he may be in the running to be a voice over announcer.

Or the only understandable person working the McDonald’s drive thru speaker.

“Luke. I am your father. And would you like fries with that?”

But as a treat after, we went out for fast food. And when the seasons start to change and hibernation is a comin’, you are likely to end up in either Taco Bell or KFC.

Since I am a little depressed, and not totally suicidal, we went to KFC. I had the mashed potato bowl. The slogan on that should be “food for when you just don’t care.”

I offered to get #2 a double down.

Disclaimer:
I know this is not good for him. It is two friend chicken breasts, bacon, two types of cheese, and sauce. A bacon sandwich made with chicken instead of bread is not good for anyone.

But #2 is so thin that if it clogged an artery, I would probably see the bump. He would look like a python swallowing an egg. And he has a teenage boy metabolism. If anyone can survive a double down, it is probably him.

The guy in the drive thru had never heard of it.

I ordered, and there was this embarrassing silence. And then he asked me to repeat myself. And then, there was more silence. And then, I tried describing it, which just made me feel stupid. “The thing. With all the meat. And there’s bacon…”

And there was more silence from the speaker. And I am thinking, he is thinking “You’re kidding. Right?” Because that’s pretty much what I thought, when I heard the commercials.

And then he told me he’d never heard of it, and #2 got a chicken strip meal.

Does KFC drive thru guy not have a TV in his house? Does he not read the internet? Surely I did not imagine this sandwich. Has anyone out there had a double down?

And how is your cholesterol level?