My mom, when she was a freshman in high school. She’s so pretty!
Author: Karen
Hi! My day job is a CMA in the Precertificiation Department (I work with insurance companies). I'm a mom to two young men. I've been married to the same man for 34 years. I have a lot to say about nothing. Lucky you.
Take it, Before I Change My Mind
Thursday is the day I post a bit o’ fiction.
This was originally published February 27, 2007
This prompt fiction piece was written in a hurry and hasn’t been edited (much). I use prompts to free / speed write – just some warm-up exercises.
You can find a ton of writing prompts at Write Anything. Click over today and write YOUR version!
Here’s one:
Writing prompt: While you are volunteering for your favorite charity, a man walks up to your table and hands you $1,000,000 in large bills. He walks away weeping, but never says a word.
Tell his story.
“I hate to tell you this, husband of mine, but you’re going to hell. And I ain’t burnin’ with you, buster.” Mary leaned against the makeshift bar and scanned the crowd. She continued talking, keeping her voice low and even. “You’re a thief, Stan. You were born a thief, you’ve lived your life as a thief and you’ll die a thief.” She leaned in close to his ear, her lips barely grazing his skin. “If you don’t give that money up right now, right this very minute, I’m walking out that door. And you’ll lose the only good thing that’s ever happened to your sorry life.”
Stan heaved a heavy sigh and silently agreed with her. Mary was a difficult woman, but she was right. He loved her and she was good for him. He could feel his entire life of conning people out of their hard-earned cash weighing down on his shoulders. He wanted to change, he just wasn’t sure how to go about it.
“Okay.”
Mary stiffened beside him and looked at him in surprise. She had issued the ultimatum because she wanted him to change, their lives to change, but she hadn’t really expected him to agree. The truth was, she would never leave him, she loved him too much. She quickly squashed her astonishment and nodded. “Well okay then.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Do? Mary chewed on her lower lip. She hadn’t thought this far ahead. They were at a charity function. Her kid brother was heavily involved with raising money for some such charity (in truth, she wasn’t even sure what the charity function was this week) and she had agreed to stop by to show her support. She glanced around the room and quickly assessed each person’s personal need by what they were wearing and their body language.
“There.” She nodded toward three women sitting around a table. Two women, both blonde, were leaning toward each other and chatting under their breath. They were drinking what looked like margaritas. The third woman, a small-framed person with hair the color of copper, was quietly watching the auctioneer. She lifted the bottle of water to her unpainted lips every few seconds as if to give her something to do.
“Give the money to that red-headed woman over there.”
Stan stared at her. “Are you crazy? Do you know the hoops I had to jump through to get this stash?”
Mary simply stared at him. Though she hadn’t expected him to go along with her request, now that it was happening, it suddenly became very important to her that he go through with it.
Stan issued another gut-wrenching sigh and nodded. “Fine.” He picked up the briefcase and walked over to the woman. He ignored her shocked look as he placed the case on the table, snapped it open, and began placing $1,000,000 in cash before her. He felt the tears rolling down his face and continued counting.
When he was done, he nodded to the woman (he noted she had one of those sexy beauty marks just to the right of her mouth), and walked away. He did it. He felt strangely … free. He smiled at Mary when he reached her. He leaned in and whispered softly into her ear. “Tonight better be my lucky night after this.”
Mary simply smiled in return.
A New Book to Mooch
I just added another book to my Bookmooch collection:
I Am No One You Know by Joyce Carol Oates
Book blurb:
I Am No One You Know contains nineteen startling stories that bear witness to the remarkably varied lives of Americans of our time. In “Fire,” a troubled young wife discovers a rare, radiant happiness in an adulterous relationship. In “Curly Red,” a girl makes a decision to reveal a family secret, and changes her life irrevocably. In “The Girl with the Blackened Eye,” selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2001, a girl pushed to an even greater extreme of courage and desperation manages to survive her abduction by a serial killer. And in “Three Girls,” two adventuresome NYU undergraduates seal their secret love by following, and protecting, Marilyn Monroe in disguise at Strand Used Books on a snowy evening in 1956.
These vividly rendered portraits of women, men, and children testify to Oates’s compassion for the mysterious and luminous resources of the human spirit.
If you want it, then mooch it from me. 🙂 Bookmooch, that is. I’m a member of Bookmooch which is an online forum to swap books with other bookworms. Here’s a brief explanation:
Give & receive: Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you’ve read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish.
No cost: there is no cost to join or use this web site: your only cost is mailing your books to others.
If you would like to join Bookmooch (or if you’re already a member, look me up!) and mooch books off of me, you can find my inventory and my account information here. My Bookmooch ID is: take2max – in case the link doesn’t work and you want to find me. 🙂
Sorry, I’m only shipping to the U.S at this time. International shipping just isn’t in the budget right now. 😦
I’ve got some bookmooch points burning a hole in my pocket. Any bookmoochers out there that want to get rid of some of their books? If so, leave me a link to your inventory in the comment section and I’ll take a look!
Blogging For Charity – My Way
Let’s see a show of hands, how many of you participated in last year’s Blog-a-thon?
*spends a moment to count hands*
And wasn’t it one of the most fun and inspiring 24-hours of your life? Well okay, maybe not your life, but wasn’t it FUN?!
Well, if you haven’t heard, the blog-a-thon is off this year, at least, officially. Life has been beating the administrators down and they simply can’t host it this year. They promise to come back next year but what about this year?? Waah!
I participated in the ‘thon via my writing blog, Write Stuff, which has since been restructured and renamed Write Anything last year. Me, Tammi, Andrea and Dale all took shifts – I started the ‘thon off, then Tammi took over, then Andrea followed suit, Dale ran the graveyard shift and I hopped back on at 4:00 in the morning and finished it off. The ‘thon started the last Saturday of July at 6:00 a.m. and ran until 6:00 a.m. Sunday morning.
You know how challenging it can be to think of something to post once or twice a day? Try posting EVERY THIRTY MINUTES! It was insane trying to stay ahead of the clock, but MAN, it was fun and so INSPIRING! My creative juices were not only flowing, they were OVERflowing.
Our charity was First Book. We feel very strongly that every child deserves a chance to read and exercise his/her imagination. So we blogged to raise money for the program to supply books to underpriviledged children. I believe we raised close to $400.00. So not only was the ‘thon exciting and challenging on a personal level, our efforts went toward a worthy cause, too.
But this year, the blog-a-thon has been cancelled, er, officially. There are a few people trying to run mini-thons (here and here) which I think is great and I may participate in them, but the bottom line is, I really want to continue the tradition in my neck of the woods, er, cyberspace. I’m toying around with the idea of maybe making another small community here at WFK. Just someplace we can gather, exchange links and charities and have a place to call hub.
Are any of you interested in forming our own little mini-thon community for the July 26th 24-hour charity blog-a-thon? Oh silly me, if you don’t know what in the world I’m talking about or what a blog-a-thon is, you can read more about the program at the official website.
Anyway, if you’re interested, just let me know in the comment section (or contact me – my email is in the sidebar), and we’ll go from there.
But for me? I’m totally doing the ‘thon this year. On my WFK blog – I might take a shift at Write Anything if the other writers are interested in participating this year (I haven’t talked to them yet). And then I’m taking a vacation from blogging for a week and will be posting … well, that’s a surprise. You’ll just have to check back (or check your feeder) for the details. 😀
Wordless Wednesday – Nuthead
See first comment.
(And to erase this goofy picture from your brain, here’s a more flattering picture of him).
Weekend Snapshot – Blowing Bubbles
I’m a day late posting this because I’m an idiot and didn’t have my camera with me so I had to use my mom’s camera (WHICH by the way, ROCKS. Twelve mega pixels?! And the size and thickness of a credit card?? I want her camera!) and she didn’t have a chance to post the pictures we took with her camera to her Flickr account until today (my mom works insane hours).
Still with me? Great!
My folks had a BBQ at their house over the weekend so we could meet my sister’s new boyfriend (which by the way, is very nice and I’m not just saying that sis!).
The day started out wet. In fact, the entire weekend ping-ponged back and forth between sunny, cloudy, wet, windy, cold and then back to sunny. (That’s one thing about Missouri, our weather is never boring).
I was a bit worried that my mom would have to move the BBQ inside and what a bummer for her because a BBQ just isn’t the same without swatting a few flies or dropping a few cheetos to watch the ants devour.
But by late afternoon, the weather cleared up once again and though the ground was a bit wet, the temperature was quite pleasant and we had a good time sitting around and chatting.
But in the meantime, the boys, my two boys and my sister’s two boys, all teenagers, needed something to combat their boredom.
Enter super grandma and her wonderful ideas. She disappeared inside the house for a few seconds and before any of the boys could think up excuses to go inside and bury their noses in their video games, she reappeared carrying several bottles of bubble solution.
The boys blinked, looked at each other and fought the urge to snicker. For you see, if anyone BUT grandma had brought those bubbles out, they would have been met with complaints about them being too old for bubbles and then their eyes would roll so far back into their heads they could see their pubescent butts.
However, to humor grandma (because they are all sweet boys and wouldn’t intentionally hurt a fly), they opened the bottles and proceeded to have fun.
Oh yes, you read that correctly. The boys really enjoyed playing with those bubbles. And being boys, they pooled their resources to see just how big they could make their bubbles.
And when they had enough bubbles to build the Leaning Tower of Pisa, they worked together to keep the tower from falling over.
And when that got old, GD used the scary looking wand and started blowing bubbles, which my oldest nephew swatted with a HUGE rubber frisbee.
Even grandma got in on the act.
It was hard not to get caught up in all the laughter and general silliness. It was as if time had simply melted away and we were watching the boys be boys again, instead of the awkward, embarrassed, shy, strange beings they are today.
I begged to play. They said no. I threatened bodily harm if they didn’t allow me just one turn at the silly wand to blow a few bubbles. They shooed me away.
As you can see, I did not pout; I can take rejection.
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See the text box in the upper-right hand corner? That changes every day telling you what’s happening right this very moment in my life. Not enough? Twitter me. 🙂
This is Not a Good Place to Live
Guess what?
If you live in one of these ten places:
- Springfield, Missouri
- Dayton, Ohio
- Corpus Christi, Texas
- Flint, Michigan
- Columbia, South Carolina
- Waco, Texas
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Fayetteville, North Carolina
- Beaumont, Texas
- Clarksville, Tennessee
Then you suck.
I heard this on the morning radio show I listen to and nearly came unglued.
For those that don’t know, I live in Springfield, Missouri. The first one listed.
The list? The 10 Worst Places to Raise a Family (from best to worst). Springfield is #10.
I suppose that’s SOME consolation. *growl*
Seriously, WTH? Just look at our beautiful city!
Look at those happy people! Look at that gorgeous tree in the foreground and that historic building in the background. And that fountain. Everyone likes a pretty fountain! It’s nice, I tell ya!
The article, in Best Life Magazine, actually talks about the top 100 best places to raise a family. Number one being:
Honolulu, Hawaii. The reason? “Schools spend almost $9,000 per pupil, unemployment ranks less than half the national average, and you can play on the island of O’ahu’s 125 beaches.” Okay, I’ll buy the beaches and the fact that it’s paradise on earth, but $9,000 per pupil?? Doesn’t the cost of living dictate parents spend that much per pupil?
And being from Missouri, I was STUNNED to see St. Louis and Kansas City make the list, and yet, Springfield, the city that has a lot less crime, pollution and better living conditions made the WORST list?
I just can’t buy it. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to because the article is woefully skimpy on details. The criteria for making the best place to raise a family?
… good schools with favorable student-teacher ratios, above-average test scores, and respectable budgets. Plenty of museums, parks, and pediatricians also contribute to a good quality of life, whereas multihour commutes, expensive houses, and divorcing friends and neighbors do not. Best Life editors used these categories and data from the U.S. Census Bureau, National Center for Education Statistics, FBI, American Association of Museums, National Center for Health Statistics, and American Bar Association to evaluate 257 cities.
Granted, our student-teacher ratios ARE high – I think the average is 30 students per teacher and we certainly don’t have very many museums and I have no idea what the divorce ratio is down here, but I strongly disagree with education test scores (our schools CONSISTENTLY make the top ten list in the state every year), we have parks coming out of our nostrils, we have a WHOLE MILE devoted to healthcare, our housing is ridiculously inexpensive and we live in the Ozarks – known for it’s beautiful countryside and clean lakes! I think our pros far outweigh the cons they have listed here.
But I can’t dispute details because the article doesn’t give details. I would love to know some statistics for our city because I just can’t buy the fact that we’re in the top ten WORST places to live.
No way. There’s simply some mistake. Show me some proof and I’ll be happy to eat my words, but in the meantime Best Life magazine? Your research is seriously flawed.
What about you? Do you think you’re living in a good place to raise a family?
