Was the story of how my parents met and fell in love and got married. Doesn’t every kid want to know those essential details? The details of how I got here? The unspoken wish that it will happen to me someday?

My mom and dad’s love story was so unique and so romantic that I was telling it routinely on the playground during recess. Even other seven year old girls knew it for the Love Story it was. So, here it is, one more time.

My dad was a Marine during WWII and became a paraplegic. It was while he was in the VA hospital in Manhattan that he met my mom. She was a student nurse. The patients and nurses weren’t allowed to fraternize, so they kept their budding romance a secret, which wasn’t easy. One time, my mom took my dad for a walk in his wheelchair through a field of grass. The MPs drove by, so my mom took a nosedive into the tall grass, hiding. If she’d been caught, she would have been kicked out of school. So there’s my dad, sitting in his wheelchair in the middle of this field he in no way could have gotten into by himself.

“What are you doing?” the MP asked, trying not to laugh.

“Just out to get some air,” my dad answered, lighting a cigarette.

“All by yourself?” the MP said.

“Sure. Yeah,” my dad said, taking a casual drag.

By this time the MPs are both laughing out loud, ignoring the sounds of my mother snaking through the grass on her belly. The MPs got my dad out of the field, kept their gaze averted from my mom, and didn’t say a word to anyone. Who says MPs are heartless?

To be honest, my mother’s mother was horrified that her daughter wanted to marry a paraplegic. To be honest, who can blame her? This was 1948. Being disabled was not as mainstreamed as it is now. There was no handicapped parking, no ramps, nothing to make it easier, no sensitivity training. People stared. And, if you’ve done the math, why was my dad in a VA hospital in 1948? The war had been over for three years. He’d been a paraplegic since 1942.

I’ll tell you why. His parents didn’t know what to do with him. He was damaged goods and they basically wrote him off. Their own son. Their first born.

So, here’s my mom, in love with a guy who can’t walk, whose own parents have left him to molder in a VA hospital, a guy whose life expectancy is about ten years and he’s used up six of them. What does she do? She marries him.

She marries him. And they stay married, and he stays alive, for another forty-three years.

My first love story was a great one, wasn’t it?

Is this why I write romance novels? I don’t know, but I know it didn’t hurt.

Shameless plug alert: The Courtesan’s Secret comes out tomorrow. I hope you buy it and have the fun of immersing yourself in another love story from another time and another place, because once upon a time is the best way for a love story to start.

What about your mom and dad? Grandparents? Aunts or uncles? How did they meet and fall in love? What’s their love story?

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I read Gone with the Wind as a teenager while on a trip with my family. I was about 40 pages from the end when Mom called curfew in the motel room we were sharing. I sat on the floor in the bathroom to read the rest, sobbing the whole time. I think you could say it had an impact.

I still love it, both the book and the movie, though I always wish she won him in the end. But Rhett Butler …. yum!

So, did you ever read GWTW or do you just know it as a movie? Did the ending ruin it for you or make it only more poignant? And did any of you read any of the Mitchell-estate-sanctioned sequels?

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I had a dental appointment yesterday. It was wonderful, as usual.

First you have to know that I don’t have any dental problems. My teeth aren’t sensitive, I don’t have gum issues, and I never get cavities.

Hence the wonderful part.

As I was lying back, fully reclined on the oh-so-comfy dental chair, my arms crossed at my waist, my whole body relaxed, my eyes closed and my mouth open, I found myself thinking that this is what it must have been like for an Egyptian pharoah or the Sun King of France. You recline, relax, open your mouth and some shlep cleans your teeth for you.

Talk about being pampered. The dental hygenist scrapes behind my teeth, getting at all that pesky plaque that I try (not too rigorously) to get rid of. Her sole purpose for that fifteen minutes is to clean my teeth to perfection. She cleans under the gumline. She checks my tongue for disease. She flosses, even the back teeth. She sucks out the junk so I don’t have to swallow it.

Bliss.

You have to believe that Louis or Tut had people who did the daily drudge of dental care for them. I only get to experience the luxury of someone cleaning my teeth for me once a year, but how I enjoy that one day of living like a king.

What makes you feel like royalty? What special perk, be it getting your hair styled or your shirts pressed or your toilets scrubbed, makes you feel pampered and petted?

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Yesterday was my birthday.

I have never been a big birthday person. I never had giant parties when I was a kid—just the siblings and a few close friends. No clowns, no rodeo shows, either, although once, my brother and I (whose birthday is very close to mine) got to go the Tugie Tuckness show, and he gave us each a giant Tootsie Roll filled with little Tootsie Rolls. That one still ranks right up there with the best of them.

Frankly, I don’t like to mark the passage of time, because as I have often admitted here, Vanity, thy name is Julia. I would rather live in that pleasant 40-ish stage in my head and leave it at that. Jack London has learned over the years that he doesn’t need to make every birthday a Big Deal.

So we had a great dinner out Sunday night. This morning, my little ward presented me with a beautiful bracelet with celtic charms that symbolize hope and love and eternity. It is really lovely and beautiful. I love it!

Jack London gave me a tank of gas.

Yes, he did, and I cannot tell you how thrilled I am! I drive a car that requires premium gas because I am an idiot, and I have been complaining loudly about the price of gas the last few weeks. My husband knows me well—he knows how cheap I can be about some things and how I can be Miss Gotrocks if I really really want something. I am cheap about stuff like gas, and that birthday tank of gas made me feel like I’d won the dang lottery. I am so happy that I am choosing my drives carefully so I can savor the tank of free gas and make it last a long, long time.

All in all, it was a great birthday. So what sort of birthday person are you?

1. Do you like The Works on your birthday, or could you care less about the day?
2. What’s the strangest birthday gift anyone ever gave you?
3. Does getting older bother you, or is age just a number?
4. What’s the funnest thing you ever did on your birthday?
5. What’s the most pathetic thing you ever did on your birthday?

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So, did any of you drink green beer yesterday? I have to make a confession. I hate beer, green or otherwise, and you wouldn’t catch me dead with a Murphy’s Stout (even a little one like Will’s). Is it okay to have a green margarita on St. Patrick’s Day instead? Or does that make me some sort of freak?

And am I the only one who hates beer?

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I saw this on the web – a woman has made it her job to interpret personality types based on the sort of purse they carry. I am paraphrasing here, but I learned that little clutch purses suggest the carrier has a grip on life. She doesn’t need all the detritus of her day, she only needs the essentials, and she can party with the best of them. I think Rachel has one to match her shoes, and I bet she changes it frequently.

The grab and go purse is one I bet Claudia and Nicole have, all packed and ready to go. It’s got the stuff you need to jet off to Rome at a moment’s notice. But not too much stuff, because you would not want to empty the bag on the counter to find your passport, which is so not classy.

Big stand-up straw bags with lots of pockets suggest the carrier is over-organized. Everything has a place, and the clutter disappears. Apparently you can save a lot of time being this organized—imagine not having to sift through all those receipts in the bottom of your bag to find something! I wouldn’t be surprised if Sabrina or K-Ho had one, either (that’s what we’re calling her, right? K-Ho?). These are people who probably have a lot of baggage, but carry it neatly.

Ah, the Hobo! This is where I get on, and I’m guessing so do Suz and K-Ro. The Hobo, as you know, is a big, deep, shapeless bag with everything thrown in it. It suggests disorganization, chaos, and a rebellion against authority. However, the expert did say that a disorganized mind is a creative mind :-).

These are pictures of my purse. I change purses maybe twice a year. I carry a wallet made fat by receipts and not money. I have a make-up bag that doesn’t hold much makeup, but a lot of allergy medicine. I have an i-Pod, keys, reading glasses, sunglasses, a little notebook, and a tin of those Godiva pearls (if you don’t have a tin of Godiva pearls, you MUST get them!).

I also have a bottle of wine in my purse, for which the expert failed to give props to the Hobo Bag. You cannot carry a bottle of wine in a clutch or a grab and go. I suppose you could carry one in a big straw bag, but I don’t think there is a pocket for it. And lest you worry that Julia is banging as many highballs as computer keys—the wine was on sale and I wanted to save the earth. I told the clerk she could keep the plastic bag and I could slip that puppy in my ginormous, unstructured, chaotic, purse.

What kind of purse do you carry? What’s in it? What are your purse essentials? Do you change them with each outfit, or use one until the handles break?

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I’m a parent. That means that I did all the work for a really long time. Not only did I do the laundry, the shopping, the vacuuming, the dusting, the cooking, the pot scrubbing, the dishwasher loading and unloading, the mowing, the raking, the sweeping, the edging and the blowing, but I had to teach each of my three kids to do these tasks as well.

It wasn’t easy. Every parent knows that it’s easier to do the job yourself, in a quarter of the time, than to encourage, teach, browbeat your kids into doing it. When they’re tiny, they think putting a bowl into the dishwasher is fun. They run to get a rake when they see Daddy raking the leaves. This phase, this sweet phase, passes very quickly. Of course, they aren’t actually much use when it come to raking or washing, but their eagerness is adorable.

By the time they can actually do these mind-numbing, back-breaking tasks, they don’t want to do them anymore. The price of growing up. These are the years when you threaten, scowl, and snarl them into doing the work of maintaining a house.

Then come the years when all the battles are won; the kids both know how to do the chores well and have learned the futility of resistance to doing them. They are spectacular, free labor. Well, not really free; they do get full medical and dental.

That’s when it happens. After all the years of effort, after teaching them how to mow and vacuum and take out the trash, and after getting used to having these icky jobs done with no effort on my part, that’s when it happens.

They move out.

What household job did you hate the most as a kid? What job do you still hate the most?

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Jane gets some competition!

So tell me, should Will continue in his doomed love? Should Jane try to mend his broken heart (if she can find it in that tiny body)? Should Half-Lady ever speak?

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Here, for your enjoyment, is another installment of the comic!

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Here’s the set up: my DH is sick. He’s been sick for six days and is despairing of ever feeling normal again. Of course, he gets sick about once a decade and it normally lasts about eighteen hours (snarl), so he’s a bit spoiled on the Sick Meter. Anyway, he crawls out of bed pre-dawn because he can’t sleep for the coughing and the fever and aches, and he opens the door to the laundry room to feed the cat her juicy breakfast, and with his big bare foot steps–plop–into a pile of wet cat poop. (That’s a picture of the poop perp.)

Okay, that’s funny.

I’m sorry, I know I should feel sorry for the guy, but that’s just truly funny. I laughed until I had tears running down my face. I laughed so hard that he started laughing, too. And he should have laughed, because dang, that was funny.

When have you laughed at something or someone when maybe, just maybe, it might have been a tad insensitive? Although still completely understandable. Because, I’m telling you now, I am not going to feel guilty about laughing at the cat poop oozing between his toes.

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