I was reading about a haunted house here in Texas the other day. Its just a regular old ranch house (I always think of haunted houses as being Victorian), but the inhabitants swear it is haunted. They say things disappear all the time, or are moved.

Really? Haunted? Then my house must be haunted. I think it is haunted by a laundry elf with a kitchen accomplice. Seriously, in the last two weeks, we have searched high and low for Jack London’s favorite golf shirt. It is nowhere to be found. It’s not in any closet, or trash can, or stuck in between folded towels or sheets. I remember it from the laundry, I remember hanging it up (why can’t I have a clothes elf to hang stuff up?). But we cannot find it.

Privately, I thought Jack had lost his mind (again), but the next thing to disappear was a pair of really expensive running socks that some store clerk with a quota talked me into buying.  I just wore them last week!  I put them in the laundry, I can remember putting them in the laundry.  Now I cannot find those ridiculously expensive socks anywhere. Anywhere!

And again, yesterday, the DVD remote turned up missing, just as we were settling in to watch the first season of the Sopranos.  You would think we’d lost a million dollars.  Couch cushions were tossed, furniture moved, baskets and trucks filled with legos thoroughly searched, and we could not find it.  Moreover, Jack London and I discovered that we cannot operate a DVD player without a remote.  We are really that stupid.  A lot of things were said about that remote that cannot be repeated here, and lots of fingers pointed at different house inhabitants, including old Hugo, the dog.  But seriously, what could happen to a perfectly good remote?

Lest you be thinking these things are buried under mountains of stuff, let me assure you that my house is properly picked up and orderly. We don’t have mounds of stuff. Unless you count dog hair.  We have looked everywhere and cannot find these items.  We have spent countless fifteen minute segments tossing out the theory du jour of what happened.  But they are gone.

What in your house has grown legs and walked off?  Have you ever found a remote in your freezer (I did once)?  What is the most bizarre thing you’ve ever lost?

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 Last week I found another interesting article in Parade Magazine entitled “Advice to the Young Me,” which asked celebrities what they would tell younger versions of themselves if they could go back in time and share what they’d learned over the years. Perhaps with their public images and good PR in mind, most of the respondents gave replies that were sugary sweet, such as “be all you can be.”

I can think of a lot of sappy advice I could give myself, but since I’m not feeling sappy just now, I decided to offer the Young Me some slick wisdom I could actually put to good use.  Here are some of the top things I would tell my younger self:

- The “last house” you buy won’t actually be the last house you buy. You can save a lot of time and expense if you know you’ll have at least three last houses.

- For your first computer, buy an IBM compatible instead of Apple so all of your early electronic manuscripts would still be readable now.

- Never trust your local auto services to know anything about how to install an electrical system in your SUV to pull a horse trailer.

- Don’t always save your nice clothes for nice occasions. By the time you get a chance to wear your fancy outfits, you’ll have outgrown them.

- Be nicer to your bro and sis when you’re a kid, so you’ll be closer to them when you’re an adult and you can play with their grown-up toys.

- Discover the joys of Comet Bathroom Cleaner and Dawn Power Dissolver sooner. It’ll save you lots of hours scrubbing bathtub rings and fish grills.

- Switch to expanded cable with Showtime a year earlier, so you don’t miss Season 5 of Stargate SG-1.

- Like Goddess Donna said in a blog comment the other day, be sure to buy LOTS of Microsoft stock. And do NOT buy some of the stocks that proved to be dogs.

- And finally… find a good hair stylist twenty years sooner, so you won’t look so much like Mom as you get older.

Too bad we can’t really go back in time. If we could, we’d probably be rich – or at least we’d have saved ourselves a lot of grief!

Knowing what you know now, what would you tell your younger self, whether it’s sappy or slick?

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For Refreshment Only Sunday brings you a bit of a treat today . . . one worth saluting, however you chose to do it!

Ladies, SAAAA-LUTE!

Happy FROS!

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I considered titling this blog “An Ode to Melons”, but after my previous “winkie” blog, I was worried that you goddesses might start thinking I have some sort of naughty anatomical parts fixation. And this blog is about food.

Summer food. Hot dogs. Watermelon. Peach pies. Plums. Lemonade. Because while it’s true that with an international supply of foods these days we can pretty much have traditional summer foods at any time of the year, some foods just were meant to be eaten during the summer. They taste better, if not in my mouth, then in my mind.

Today is the first official full day of summer. It’s the time when we fire up the grill and barbecue us some burgers and dogs. We eat outside. Potato chips and potato salad become their own food group. The young ones learn how to spit watermelon seeds, and hear the tale that if you eat a seed, a watermelon will grow in your tummy. (I used to think that about bean sprouts, but that’s another story.)

Do you have a favorite summer food memory? Do you have a favorite summer food or picnic tradition? Do your eating habits change during the summer?

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Fellow Goddesses, may I please take a moment to brag about my “kid?” My young Warmblood mare, Riva, went to her very first horse show last week, exactly on her fourth birthday. I thought she looked so cute and pretty, all gussied up with her braids and polished hooves. And she did justice to her show name (Cloud Nine, after a ski run at my dh’s fave ski resort.) She was ridden in three flat classes (walk, trot, canter as opposed to jumping fences) by her trainer and two different student riders, and she won first, second, and third place ribbons!

I was a very proud mom, let me tell you. But while it was great that she did so well, I was more relieved that she settled in at the strange show grounds as if she’d been going to shows all her life, displaying a calm, sensible, sweet temperament to complement her flashy physical ability. I would have been very happy even if she hadn’t won any ribbons.

Maybe I’m wising up in my more (ahem) mature years. I used to be competitive about a lot of things when I was younger – school test scores, dance, acting, tennis, volleyball, and show jumping in particular. But now I seem to have eased off a bit.

And there were always limits to how aggressive I would ever let myself get. I couldn’t ever see myself in a cat fight with some other woman, for example, or trying to win on Survivor, or hurting someone just so I could win. And nowadays, winning isn’t quite as important as knowing I worked hard and did my best and met whatever goals I set for myself.

And maybe winning isn’t really all that important at all. What was it Woody Allen said? That eighty percent of life is just showing up?

Have you won some ribbons that you’re really proud of? Do have a fierce competitive streak (cat fights or Survivor mentality)? Or is just showing up and playing the game well most important to you? 
 

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My little brother, the adventurous videographer who has traveled round the globe, recently returned from a trip to the inner jungles of Peru. It took him three plane rides and a 5 hour boat ride to reach this tribe that had only been known to the world since 1988. Can you imagine living anywhere that remote?

His first day there, he and his team were served the tribe’s meal du jour. Actually, it was the meal du jour for most of their 4-day stay: monkey with a side of boiled yucca. Yum! When they ran out of monkey, they did switch to, as he described it, “a muskrat-like creature roasted over the fire,” but it wasn’t much better.

But the real surprise came when they presented him with the ceremonial tribal drink. They were kind enough to tell him how it was made. Get this: the tribal women mash the boiled yucca in large bowls, and as they mix it, they dip some into their mouths, and spit it back into the bowl. Repeatedly. Then they set it in the sun to ferment for a few days, to give it that distinctive kick so essential to a drink of ladyspit.

Did he drink it? Yes, he did. A sip of it, anyway. So as not to be rude.

Okay, there’s a lot of things I would drink or eat or even try to be polite, but that is not one of them.

So, have YOU ever felt pressured into trying something that you later regretted? What is the most disgusting food or drink you’ve ever tasted? And would YOU have drunk the ladyspit drink?

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Some of the authors who are up for a Rita this year in Single Title Contemporary made a fun video. I don’t know how to make videos and put them on the internet. I can barely use my computer to type. So I was impressed.

Watch and enjoy and tell me what you think.

Rita Trash Talk

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