I was surprised to see so many humans inside Target. The requirements for admittance are clearly marked.
Around Town
Don’t Even Think About It
So, I was driving in Carnation, WA, when this caught my eye:
I slammed on my brakes and backed up, giggling to an extent that Wanda was worried for me.
Why even put up the hoop? The poor teenage boys in this neighborhood. It’s like lining Wanda’s bed with marshmallows and then telling her that if she eats one, we’ll sell her to the Dursleys.
Not cool Carnation. Totally less than cool.
Reluctant Red
“In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” ~Mr. Darcy
I love Taylor Swift against my will. Love. For a while I pretended I was buying her music for my kids, but when I’m blasting her CDs on shuffle as I drive alone in my car, singing along with every word of even her most obscure songs, I know I need to stop denying what we have together.
When her new album Red dropped this week, I was proud of myself for waiting until the day after release to pick it up because I wasn’t going to be near a Target on release day and didn’t want to go out of my way. I thought that showed great restraint. Why didn’t I just pre-order on Amazon? Good question.
Because the Target version of the CD has several bonus tracks and what’s better than a CD full of emotional songs about teenage break-ups? A LONGER CD full of emotional songs about teenage break-ups. Indeed it is.
I love Taylor Swift because her songs are about raw emotion and angst and drama, whether real or imagined. Essentially, I love her for the same reasons I love writing young adult fiction. The highs are so high. (You flew me to places I’ve never been) The lows are so low. (Now I’m lying on the cold, hard ground.) I could always use a little more passion in my life.
And her songs are danceable. And they’re fun. And when I listen to them, I feel like she stole material from my junior high journal in all its melodramatic glory. It’s the kind of music that makes you stop at your girlfriend’s house on the way home from Target with a swagger wagon full of kids so you can blast your favorite new song and dance together in the front seat, while your exhausted toddler sleeps like a log in the back seat.
Listening to Red last night brought me back to the days of 6th grade Paula Abdul obsession. Forever Your Girl!!1!!!111! How many artists have CDs I’m content to listen to all the way through? Over and over?
I just wish her perfume didn’t smell so freaking good, because I draw the line at trying to smell like a 22-year-old pop/country starlet. Yes, I smelled the perfume. Don’t judge me.
Almost a Rider
Mandy Hubbard spoke a couple of times to our SCBWI chapter today, her evening keynote being playfully titled “Rejection Sucks.” She makes me glad to be part of a community of writers. She was candid and shared the dirty details of what it takes to make it in this industry, even sharing actual text from rejection letters and revision requests she’s received.
What does it take to make it? It takes persistence. Insane, unswerving, willing-to-beat-your-head-against-a-brick-wall-and-beg-for-more persistence.
Sometimes that’s hard to muster. I do not like having a hobby/career that involves pouring my heart out on paper and then sending it around for people to reject or ignore. Suckage? Indeed.
But tonight I was reminded that I’m part of a collective, a sisterhood/brotherhood, a familyhood of people who are passionate about words and ideas and stories and who all experience rejection and who all hate it almost as passionately as they love writing, but they carry on anyway.
And she says it’s worth it. And I choose to believe her.
So far I’ve entered one contest, where I didn’t get past round one. I’ve sent out queries to 15 agents, been flat-out rejected or ignored 10 times, received 5 requests for full or partial manuscripts and had 4 of those rejected so far. Today I participated in a Twitter pitch frenzy and got one and a half requests from that. (One of the requests turned out to be someone who was looking for adult fiction.)
This process all makes me think of Magoo, who yesterday decided that he wanted to ride his bike with no training wheels. So after years of preparation, successes and failures, today he decided to ride and he just rode and now he’s a rider.
Wednesday he was not a rider. Today – rider.
Today I am not a published author. Tomorrow – who knows? I’ll dust off my helmet and get ready for success.
Hypothesis
We were walking past a park near the high school yesterday when Magoo noticed an egg smashed on the sidewalk. His little scientific mind got to work and as we walked past it again on the way home, he came up with a hypothesis.
“I think I know how this egg got here mom.”
“Yeah, I think I know too.”
“A bird, the kind which lays eggs, flew over this spot and the egg sort of fell out as it was flying.”
“That is a great theory buddy.”
My theory involves teenage boys more than the kind of bird which lays eggs.
Little Boys
Magoo started Little League this week. I’ve never seen him this excited about a new sport. It could be all the gear. (The protective cup is certainly blowing his mind.) Maybe it’s the danger of never knowing when one of the other muffin-headed kids will whack you in the face with a metal bat. Whatever it is, there’s just something about baseball that thrills him and it’s so fun to watch.
He wants to wear the batting helmet all the time, running the bases, doing passing drills, standing in the outfield. It gives him the look of an oversized bobble head, made more adorable by the perma-grin on his face.
Of course there were the usual crazy boy shenanigans. They made crude noises which were, of course, followed by raucous laughter. A couple of them walked around with mitts on their faces, pretending to be Darth Vader. None of them, however, did anything illegal. That was left to older boys, later in the week.
We were at the park, where a group of tween Justin Bieber wannabes were tearing up the playground and scaring the kids. These boys travel in a pack and they’re annoying but not usually destructive. Every couple of weeks I a-little-bit tell them off and they a-little-bit stop being annoying.
They’re loud. They run fast. They throw things. They run up the slide when littles are trying to slide down. They wear skinny jeans and those zip-front skeleton face hoodies that make Wanda cry. Personally, I think they should find a skate park somewhere and leave the baby swings to the babies.
Well, after they’d driven all the young families but mine from the park, they ended up in a pow-wow around the slide, whispering and pointing and talking about marking everything with their “gang sign”. They are twelve-year-old preppies who play at a children’s park. Quite the gang.
When I walked toward them, they dispersed and headed for home.
What was on the slide? Chicken scratch written in permanent marker. It dawned on me that I was the adult in this situation.
“Boys!” I called out in most menacing mom-ish voice.
All but one froze in their 12-year-old aviator-glasses-wearing tracks.
“Did you write on this playground equipment?”
In unison, they all pointed at their fleeing friend, already a block away on his scooter. Because that’s literally how he rolls, on a Razor.
“He did it,” one boy piped up sheepishly. None of them moved. They’re old enough to be annoying, still young enough to think I had the power to keep them there.
“Well, you can tell your friend that what he did is illegal. If I see you doing anything like that, I’m calling the police.”
No one vomited but I’d say it was a close call.
“So you’re telling me that none of you wrote on anything on the equipment this park?”
The same boy piped up, all the color draining from his face, “I, I, I just drew it on that boulder over there to show him how and then he, he drew on the slide. It’s not illegal to draw on rocks is it?” His question wasn’t belligerent. It was sheepish. He really wanted to know.
“Everything in this park belongs to the city,” I said, my voice serious as a sledge hammer, “It is definitely illegal to deface public property.”
“But I, I, seriously, I really didn’t know.” He looked like he was about to cry.
“That’s why I’m giving you a warning. Don’t let it happen again.”
They all nodded earnestly and turned to go, their heads hanging slightly. It’s a strange kind of power to be able to terrify a pack of man-children. Hopefully they’ll knock it off. But I will call the police and even more frightening, their mothers, if I see any of that behavior again.
For now, my own little man is a cute mini baseball dude. On the way to the bus stop this morning, he ran up beside me and grabbed my hand, holding it all the way to the top of the hill, even in front of his friends. He’s nearly seven and I know this kind of mamma/baby boy affection can’t last forever but I sure hope he never gets to the point where perfect strangers have to scare the cheese out of him at the park to get him to behave.
Green Drink Recipe – A Smoothie Brought to Me By Target
I buy stuff at Target fairly frequently so I was pleased to see that they were expanding their grocery selection. When they sent me a $25 gift card to try out their new grocery department and blog about it, I figured it would make a good food post.
This recipe is one of my favorites, a green drink smoothie I make to pump my kids and myself full of vegetables. They’ll eagerly drink three handfuls of spinach when it’s pureed into this mixture but ask them to eat four leaves by themselves and they’ll act like their life is over.
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Green Drink
2 heaping handfuls of fruit of your choosing
About one pound of fresh spinach
2 Cups fruit juice
1 Cup water
Throw your fruit in a blender. Stuff in as much spinach as you can. Pour your liquid over top. Blend until creamy and green.
I like to use at least one frozen fruit, my favorite being one banana and a huge handful of strawberries. For fruit juice, I just use whatever I have available. For this recipe I used frozen strawberries, a banana, a bag of spinach and Dole pineapple/peach/mango juice, all purchased with my gift card from the fresh grocery department of Target.
The dry goods selection is surprisingly good at Target, not to the level of a traditional grocery store, but decent and they have a good supply of basic produce if you’re not looking for anything fancy. They have meat, dairy and frozen foods now too. I found the prices to be really low on some things and high on others.
Tillamook cheese, for example, was $8.99 for a baby loaf, way more than I’m willing to pay. Their bagged spinach, however, cost less than I find it on sale at the grocery store.
Overall, I think it’s a convenient option if you’re going to Target anyway, but I wouldn’t make it my primary grocery source.
Blueberries for Wanda
The school year started and my two oldest are both gone all day. I wasn’t happy to see them go. I felt sort of mad, like the school was kidnapping them or something. And then suddenly we had the house to ourselves, me and Wanda.
I had a church meeting. I put Wanda down for an early meltdown-induced nap. I made corn bread and thawed meat for our chili tonight. I baked bread and picked a few pounds of blueberries at a farm a few miles down the road and then I took Wanda for a walk. I played the songs I wanted on the stereo and nobody used the toilet and forgot to flush.
If the school’s going to kidnap my kids and educate them, at least I was able to distract myself with a surge of domestical energy. It was one of those days you just want to repeat over and over again.
My favorite part of the day was picking berries. Wanda and I wandered up and down the rows of fruit, each with our own bucket. She’d venture off and circle around to find me again, plopping berries into her mouth from the trees, the ground and my bucket. Unlike Little Sal, she never accidentally started following a mama bear around the field and she was not wearing overalls.
Anaconda Opportunity
This is by far the best road sign between our house and Billings. It’s possibly the best road sign anywhere ever. Who wouldn’t pull over at an exit that promises an Anaconda Opportunity? No one. That’s who.
Today I’m offering some travel tips for road-tripping with kids over at Parenting.com. Come over and share some of yours.
A Moment of Silence
Please take a moment and shed a tear for the thousands who gave their lives on our windshield as we drove accross the country these past two weeks.
