I found a few more monsters that were hiding out!

This one below is still on the loose, but seems more tame.

I told you monsters lived at Red Rock Canyon!  Now here’s proof!

2-22-12 sunset

Crystalline strands threaded across this sherbet sky.

If I had a big enough spoon,

I think I would eat you up!

Being rich is highly overrated.  Not everyone wants to be a millionaire (Cue music!).  There are a lot of us who are quite content to barely get by and whine.  Wealth is too much responsibility; and personally, I chafe at the stifling confines of a budget.

Here are ten helpful hints to follow if you would like to join the two or three of us who would rather spend more money than we make.

1. Always go grocery shopping when you are hungry, preferably with kids.  If your own kids are unavailable, or have perhaps grown up and left home, borrow the neighbor’s.
2. Buy a treadmill (or any other high-ticket workout item) that you’ll never use.  It works well as a clothes tree; and eventually, if you’re lucky, you can sell it at a loss on Craig’s List.  If by any chance you get murdered by your Craig’s List contact, your spouse can sue the Internet and have even more funds to squander.
3. Plan to give birth only to girls.  That should just about take care of the problem right there.
4. Give birth to kids smart enough and disciplined enough to go to college, but have enough income just so you don’t qualify for aid.
5. In the heat of summer, run the air conditioner cooler than your husband would like with your children’s windows wide open.
6. Go to a pet store that has all those adorable little furry bunny things “just to look.”
7. Never plan meals in advance, and always buy more perishable produce than you could possibly eat in one week.
8. Buy bell peppers in packages of eight at the membership discount store.  The seven that spoil will add color to your compost pile.  Truly a waste!
9. After your compost has rotted, make sure and spread it on the garden plot, but don’t bother to plant.  Besides being too much work, you’ll be in some weird way supporting corporate farmers who form the backbone of this country.  It will almost feel as good as government subsidizing.
10. Never plan a vacation.  Be spontaneous.  Maui is nice this time of year—all on the card.

If you follow these carefully researched guidelines, you should have less than enough to be happy for the rest of your life.  But if at the end of the month the figures still don’t add up, put the kids in braces.

]]> http://apronhead.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/how-to-spend-more-than-you-make/feed/ 7 apronheadlilly http://apronhead.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/how-to-gain-weight-and-keep-it-on/ http://apronhead.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/how-to-gain-weight-and-keep-it-on/#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:49:04 +0000 apronheadlilly http://apronhead.wordpress.com/?p=1606 Continue reading →]]>

Not everyone wants to be lean and lithe dressed in long skinny pencil skirts and shapely tops.  Not everybody wants the stares and admiration of an adoring public – to be drop-dead gorgeous.  Some of us want to be “pleasant” with the comfort and invisibility of moo-moos and bulky blouses.  Besides, a little extra weight smoothes out the spaces between the wrinkles.

The following ten tips should help you counter the thin culture, gain that extra twenty, and keep it on.

1. Never work out with weights or even carry heavy packages.  There is the danger of increasing muscle mass which raises your resting metabolic rate, and then you might burn extra calories while watching TV or reading a book, which could not only cause tremendous guilt but could cause you to lose a few pounds.
2. Walk your socks off.  Walk, walk, walk.  You will have a healthier heart, but you’ll not lose a pound.  The only thing thinner will be the soles of your shoes.
3. Invest your retirement in liquid diet drinks.  Not only will you not lose weight, but if you supplement with a few Snickers bars here and there, you’ll gain substantially.
4. Join a gym.  We all know that muscle weighs more than fat, and also just looking at all those hard bodies in leotards is good to tip the scales a couple of pounds.
5. Speaking of scales, weighing yourself everyday is a guarantee you’ll not lose a gram, and you’ll have the satisfaction of watching that little black arrow creep higher and higher.  Perseverance pays.
6. Have babies—lots of them.  Make sure to watch what you eat and exercise faithfully; that way you’re guaranteed not only to finish your pregnancy with an admirable weight gain, but you’ll also have that lovely bulge of elasticized skin to droop over your belt, should you ever be brave enough to wear one again.
7. Have a mid-life crisis with plenty of whining about the mess you’ve made of things.  A good healthy dose of depression coupled with an extra large bag of chips and soda should not only be good for an appreciable weight gain, but the aluminum in the soda can might just promote enough memory loss so you don’t care.
8.  Recycle all your low-fat cookbooks.  You’ll help the environment and recover the taste of real food.
9. Buy an expensive outfit for that special occasion coming up; and it’s a sure bet that by the time you need to wear it, you’ll have gained enough so it doesn’t fit.
10. Heap bitter insults on your skinny friend who by changing from regular soda to diet soda lost fifteen pounds.  It won’t necessarily help you in your quest, but it will feel really really good.

If all else fails, age gracefully.  You’re guaranteed to pack on at least ten pounds a decade, so just be patient.  I know I’m really looking forward to that one—the culmination of all my dreams.

Reblogged from Writing Sisters:

“Writing is like fishing.  A nibble will always come, but all too often we dismiss the little nudge as not worthy of the great works we vaingloriously imagine we will write.” William Stafford Poet William Stafford claimed never to have experienced writer’s block. His antidote when he felt it coming on was to lower his standards. By accepting the small nibbles and nudges that came to him he was able to keep writing. The idea in my head will never match the words that come out onto my pages!  Perfectionism …

I am kinda thinkin’ that the neighbor’s tree trimmer may have previously cut hair for new army recruits.  Either that or these are Star Wars characters in hiding.  What do you think?

The man at the entrance handed me a bulletin from the top of a large stack.  He gave a vacant smile—a smile saved up all week long for Sunday strangers.  His eyes focused somewhere just above and to the right of my forehead.  It made me wonder if there was a fly caught in my hair.

The music grew louder as I crossed the foyer and entered through one of the sets of heavy double doors to the sanctuary.  Slipping into a back pew, I glanced around.  The church was old with dark mahogany and stained glass, the pulpit a million miles away.

The congregation was in the middle of a song, led by a golden-robed choir with bright faces and sure voices.  At the close of the song, a smile in a suit encouraged the people to spend a few moments greeting those around them.  The lady in front of me, broad and floral, turned from side to side and finally back to me.  She was evangelical with cleavage.  “How are you?  God bless,” and just like that she was gone, apparently seeking out the more familiar.  My words caught on my teeth, then hung there with nowhere to go.

I sat alone.  I listened.  I left alone.

How could I have sat with so many of you and yet felt so alone—so unknown?  How could I have breathed your breath and still felt so apart?  Why so present, yet so separate?

How is it possible week after week to approximate intimacy, and yet week after week to come and go—untouched, unloved. There are those of us who move outside the circle, cosmically alone.

To us, community is a guarded jewel judiciously given out in sparse neat packages.  Fellowship is a hidden mystery that as refugees from the outside, we can only glimpse at with longing.

If we are a community of believers—the body of Christ—then when you touch me, you touch Christ.  When you welcome me, you welcome Christ.  I am no angel, but this morning I visited your church, and you entertained me unaware.

**************************

(The above story is fiction, but not.  It happened to me, though the details are different; and it happens far too often in far too many places.  The stained glass is from the church where I grew up in Ontario, Canada.  No one felt like a Sunday Stranger there mainly because of my hospitable and loving Mom.)

2-'12

I caught the wind today.

It wrestled my hair, trapped in the tangles.

It rushed in my mouth, stealing my words, pressing the back of my dry throat,

then rushed out again on a squeal of joy and a breath of respect.

My coat wrapped tightly,

it snuck in the crannies, coloring cold my prickle skin,

but I hugged a tighter me, trapping it there,

warming it with my pressing.

I caught the wind today,

hair and hand and panting self;

but before I closed the door, I let it go

so to find wind still another day.

8-'11