Pumpkin families

My third pumpkin family--sold!

A couple weeks ago, my friend Tanya sent me a link to some sweater pumpkins she'd found on Pinterest and wrote, "You could totally make these!" Sure. OK!

So, I bought all the orange sweaters at the local thrift store and started sewing pumpkins--lots of them, grouped into families. And every time I post a pic of a pumpkin family on Facebook, my friends want to buy them. Every single pumpkin family member. My guess is that no one wants to break up the family. I don't even get a chance to list them on my Etsy shop. This morning, I shipped my third family--across the country to California--and can't wait to go home and make more.

P.S. That hat box? Found it this weekend at a consignment shop for $3. I love vintage hat boxes, and it's tough to find them in good shape. On the side, someone had written "white petal turban." That sealed the deal.

Shirtless, nbd



Walkin around after school w/ no shirt, nbd



Remember day before yesterday when I said I'd post something every day? Every single day? Oops. The day was full with work and the evening was full of worry. My 16-year-old son had dashed in from football practice at 6:30 p.m. (shirtless), long enough to say he needed to take a quick shower b/c his girlfriend and her mom were parked out front waiting to take him to dinner. Um, OK.

So, I thought he'd be home by, oh, I dunno, 7:30, maybe 8. 

As it got later, I checked his FB wall, just in time to see that one of his buddies had posted a shirtless pic of him (right). That did not make me feel any better. As a rule and a nod to his privacy, I never comment on his FB happenings, but this time I wrote "This is your mom. You need to put a shirt on."

I checked Twitter. No news there. No pictures, either. Good.

Then 9 p.m. passed. I considered showing up in flowered pajamas at the restaurant to round him up. He was past curfew and not answering my texts. My mind wandered, conjuring up lost phones, car wrecks, a restaurant shooting massacre. With each minute, I got more worried but mostly more annoyed.

He strolled in at 9:45 p.m.

Several excuses ensued, including "We were just watching football" and "My phone died" and "I don't even have that much homework." Turns out, the mom had just dropped them off where they met up with several other friends. I responded with a fair amount of drama. My 5-year-old daughter chose that moment to offer up a song about anger. Something cute about taking a deep breath and counting to 4. She kept telling me I was doing it wrong. "No, take the deep breath before you count."

In the middle of my lecture about responsibility and showing respect to one's parents, I remembered a great bit of advice (paraphrased) that my friend Kim, a mom of three wonderful adults, always gave to her kids: "Remember, you're a reflection of God and a reflection of your parents. Behave yourself." So, I threw that in for good measure, pointing my finger and my face skyward since he's a full foot taller than I am. He stomped away to change the cat litter, an afterschool chore neglected since the day before.

After a cooling-after period of about 15 minutes, he came up to my room where I was in bed, fuming (and pathetically watching a documentary called "Happy"). He pulled up a chair and asked if he could talk to me a minute. It was a very grown-up gesture on his part. I listened.

He said he was sorry for the disrespect. Apologized for not calling. ("I could've borrowed my friends' phones even if mine was dead to let you know I was going to be late.") I felt like I was talking to a big ol' grown-up man. There was just one more issue to discuss.

Me: "And why the heck is there a picture of you on Facebook without a shirt?"

Son: "My friend took that when I was coming out of practice. I know, I should be wearing a shirt."

Me: "And you didn't have a shirt on in front of your girlfriend's mom while she drove you home from practice??"

Son: "Yeah. Not sure why I did that."

Me: "OK, well, you need post on Facebook that 'my mom is right and it's inappropriate to go without a shirt'. And make sure you spell 'inappropriate' right."

So, he did. And then we hugged and called it a night. Just a regular ol' Wednesday in our house.

A Resolution

“Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it’s not good any more.”
Andy Warhol


So, I read that quote and Andy got me to thinking about my blog and my, um, quarterly posts. I have always loved Andy, a Pittsburgh boy who made good. Making a commitment to post daily. Maybe I'll take Sundays off. I might not post a lot every day. But I will post something. Better blogging is on my list of things to do. See y'all tomorrow.

You "like" me. You really "like" me.

It's probably the height of narcissism, but I get a small thrill every time I someone clicks "like" on one of my Facebook posts. In fact, I sorta hold my breath each time I post something until someone, anyone--usually my mom--"likes" what I have to say. Even if all I'm offering at the moment is "Had pad thai for lunch. YUMMY!"

So, imagine my thrill when I went to Skirt! magazine's site today. I was rereading their contributor guidelines and then ended up searching my byline to look at some essays I'd written for them a couple years ago.  

"Tobacco and Clay," an essay I'd written (through a lot of tears) about my dad has 10,251 page views. The other one, "Working in a Cathouse," about an abusive relationship I went through has 20,889. Wow. (Even if my mom was the only one reading it, she still had to click more than 20,000 times.) Made me realize that even if people aren't comfortable talking about or commenting on the tough subjects, they're interested in reading about them. And I'm good with that. 

The Friend Who Got Away

I've been reading this book called "The Friend Who Got Away," full of 20 personal essays by women who talk about friendships that blew up or faded away for one reason or another. So, I've been doing a lot of thinking about a particular friendship of mine that fell apart. Most of the time, it's too painful to think about, but I'm trying to write my own essay about it. When I do, I'll share it here.

The Perfect Foundation

Sorry, I know you saw the title of this post and figured it was something about my spiritual bedrock or how my home is built. No, it's about makeup.

In sixth grade when I first started dabbling in foundation (or base, as we call it in Georgia), my aunt took me to the mall for a proper color match at Merle Norman, THE place to buy makeup for women in the 1980s. Well, the beauty consultant said she simply couldn't find a base light enough to match my skin and then slathered some orange shade on my jawline. She then quoted a price for the bottle and began to ring me up. I told her no thank you and walked out. 

As I left the mall with my aunt, I swear I heard Merle Norman whisper, "You will nevuh, evuh find the right base for your face. Mwahahahahahahaha."

I spent the next 25 years buying various shades of porcelain, bisque and ivory from drugstores and grocery stores. Last year, I'd had enough. It was time to buy a foundation without a coupon. Only a store such as Sephora--with its endless inventory of overpriced bottled beauty--could solve this problem. I did my research. Sephora's customers recommended Lancome's Teint Idole above all other bases. I bought the lightest shade (ivoire) and rejoiced in knowing that my troubles were over.

Wrong.

It was heavy. REALLY heavy. I powered through, convinced that "women of a certain age" probably needed a little more coverage, right? After I applied a mask of it, the stuff wouldn't come off my fingertips. Even AFTER soap and water, the Lancome was stuck in the ridges. My fingerprints weren't my own anymore. I pictured CSI detectives saying, "We know Anna committed the crime, but there's no way to pin it on her. The prints don't match. How is that possible?"

The Lancome sat in my bathroom closet. Like the crazy wife in the attic in "Jane Eyre." I couldn't throw it away, but I couldn't look at it, either. 

Then last week I read a magazinze article about how NOBODY even wears foundation anymore. It's all about tinted moisturizer. Wha??? Since I'm turning 40 this year, I've been expecting these sorts of revelations and hard-earned pearls of wisdom to flow my way. But, really, NO MORE FOUNDATION? I hadn't expected this level of change.

So, I went to the Sephora site (again) and ordered Laura Mercier's oil-free tinted moisturizer in the shade of "nude." It came in the mail yesterday in a sleek chocolate tube. This glorious product is gracing my face today for the first time. OH MY WORD. Now I can check "find the perfect foundation" off my "500 Things to do Before I Die" list. Actually, I scribbled it out, because foundation wasn't even what I was looking for. And that glass bottle of Lancome is sitting at the bottom of the trash can.

Moral of the story: Don't search so hard for the foundation that you miss the tinted moisturizer.

Teeth of the Hydra

My best friend Jenny James has always told me I have the teeth of the hydra.* She said that means I give folks a lot of chances before "going all hydra" and putting people in their place.

"I am amazed at the [crap] you will put up with before you just tear someone apart point by point," she said. "And once the teeth of the hydra come out, it's ON."

Jenny makes being a many-headed sea monster sound acceptable, almost like being a ninja.

Admittedly, I do like to store up a laundry list of someone's past transgressions before unleashing via bulleted email. More than once, I've typed a diatribe to someone and then immediately forwarded it to Jenny with the simple subject line of "hydra." No need to read the email. That one word sums up all the paragraphs contained within. "Hydra" is also a shorthand way to describe any occasion in which someone gets a dressing down. As in, "Oh, Momma went ALL hydra on that waitress at Chili's last night. You shoulda seen it!"

Jenny gave me a hydra incense burner for my birthday a few years ago and took great pains to glue extra big teeth on the many-headed monster. When you light the incense, it breathes smoke out of its many mouths. Probably my favorite birthday present ever.  

While I do recognize the need for clearing the air when a situation warrants it, I try not to go all hydra more than once or twice a year. As Jenny says, "Sometimes, all you gotta do is just show a little hydra fang and they back off." 

* The phrase dates back to 1972 (also the year of my birth) in the song "Bang a Gong" by British rock band T Rex. The lyric goes "You got the teeth of the hydra upon you."