A Good Day for Soup

Mother Nature's gourmet menu for the day: Deep-frozen winter berries. Dear hungry diners, sharpen your beaks or bring a blow torch.

Merry Merry Christmas!!!!!

HoHo Binksy

I refuse to impose indignities upon my kitty cat roomie in the name of any holiday. I won't dress him in a dumb little sweater or strap little reindeer antlers to his head for the Christmas card photo.

Nope. He's a family member. An honored resident of this home.
I won't humiliate my prideful kitty by dressing him up like a doll. No glittery vest on the 4th of July. No razzle-dazzle collar on Christmas. Or New Years. No way.





But he hardly ever checks my blog.
What he doesn't know won't bruise his fragile ego.

Oh the weather outside is frightful!!!

Ode to A Fellow Traveler

Dumb ass Dumb ass

In that big SUV

Grinning so smug as you’re speeding past me

Oh and look at the way that you fishtail and swerve

While my sweet little Saturn negotiates the curve

That you missed! Oh my goodness

Is that your muffler I spy???

Pointing toward heaven

As past you I fly

Merrily on my way

To my shopping I go

As you’re buried to your headlights

In a ditch full of snow.

Note to Your Brilliance:

Four-wheel drive is nice

But it don't mean squat on a highway of ice.

Turkey Weekend 08

So I went to California over Thanksgiving. Stayed with my cousins, hadn't seen 'em in ages. The kids have all grown up, in college, have jobs, boyfriends, all that stuff. It was fun. We ate turkey together, drank some margaritas, sipped a little bit of wine.

And spent the day at a spa.
Yeahhhhhh. A spa. Take one pasty-white girl just flown in from the Heartland, smear her up one side and down the other with soft, red clay mud and soak her in a warm pool for half an hour or so and you've got one happy, happy girl. My cousin and I were newbies and never did quite figure out how one guy in the pool managed to be reading the newspaper. And another was snapping digital photos of his group of friends.....all without getting mud all over the paper and the camera. But they did.



Once the mud dries and all of your little pores are squeaky clean, you step into an alcove with lots of shower heads and rinse it off. All of this, I might mention, was in the great outdoors..........another odd experience for me since anyone standing outdoors back home this time of year, even in full snowmobile regalia, is likely to freeze to death, nostrils splayed with every visible nose hair coated with frost. As I stood under the shower enjoying the warm water under the palm fronds, I kept thinking to myself...........sister, this hardly ever happens to you in November in Iowa.

That's when I noticed the white bottom.
Out of the corner of my eye, mind you, but white it was. Like a lily. Like a perfectly appointed Easter lily on the communion table of the Evangelical United Brethren church of my youth. Glaringly white and there it was, standing right next to me at the adjacent shower nozzle. Ahhh-hem!!!!! Mister! I'm thinking! I can see your butt!!!!

I averted my eyes. Of course. And I thought to myself, my goodness but I have much to learn about spas, this bare-bottom thing was not mentioned in the nice brochure the pretty lady at the counter handed us when we paid our money.

I assure you, no weirdness was involved. None. The nice man with the white bottom was actually wearing a rather conservative pair of bright green Hawaiian-print swim shorts but at the time I happened to turn and glance in his direction as I tried to adjust the spigot on my shower head to warm up the water, he happened to.........well, clearly he was simply adjusting things so that he could get a good rinse. We were all covered with mud, remember. He was even cordial enough to reach over and show me how to adjust the water temp on my own shower when he saw me struggling with the technicalities of the nozzle.

What the hell, I thought as I closed my eyes, stepped further into the jets of warm water and tugged at my bathing suit, letting it rinse off the cheeks of my own lily-white behind. We're all just one big, happy, muddy family here, aren't we??

The first thing one notices after a proper mudding is the total sense of relaxation. Once rinsed, I could have taken a long nap on a flat rock. I felt like every ounce of energy had been sucked from my pores and washed down the drain with the shower water. No time for that. Our next stop was the underground grotto where perky young attendants painted our entire bodies with a silky, minty green whipped creme sort of stuff, promised to contain aloe and all manner of things that would moisturize our skin for the next half hour as we sat in the sauna. Again, my first body painting. Hmmm. I can see how someone might get used to this sort of thing.

Notsomuch sweating in the sauna. Not my favorite thing. It's hot in there. Really, really hot. Hot like summer in Iowa. If I closed my eyes I could almost hear the sounds of the Iowa State Fair and smell corn dogs. But NOW I know why they say humidity is good for the skin. Half an hour in that miserably hot sauna, sitting there bathrobed and frosted like a cupcake, my skin was soft as the inside of a bunny's ears. Lovely. Just lovely.



Good news. They sell the stuff. The spa is called Glen Ivy, there are several locations and you can buy all these magic things in neat and tidy little jars. I'm ordering some. I doubt that they will work the exact same magic in my Midwest bathroom. But they'll surely bring back some great memories.

Just like this photo.
These are some of my cousins.

I sat at their family dinner table, laughed with them all weekend, slept in their guest house, enjoyed their kids and unfortunately, wrapped up the holiday by coming down with the flu. In conclusion, all I can say is...........you can really tell how much people love you by how they react to you throwing up all night in their purty little bathroom.

Barf bag aside, it was a great few days.
I had a blast. Thanks for the great memories, guys.
Love you bunches.

True Confessions: It had to happen sooner or later...

I know the commercials on TV say different but I have my doubts about the success rate one might expect at hook-up places like Match.com and EHarmony.com and GitYerselfANewBoyfriend.com or whatever they're called. I base my skepticism not ONLY on a number of nightmarishly weird stories I've been told but also on a couple of personal experiences. Yes, I will admit to God and my children, ONE TIME I posted some basic stats on a local website of similar purpose and within 24 hours had snagged me a real live looney-tune that insisted I was NOT NICE and PEPLE LIKE YOU SHOULDN THINK YOR SO GRATE.

Well now. I'll be honest with you. I don't think I'm any grater than any other peple but I do have my standards and one of them is, I don't meet guys for coffee or anything else when their first email to me mentions A) probation B) living with my mom and C) foot fungus, not necessarily in that order. Call me crazy but in Debbie's Book of Dating Do's and Do Not's that's a lineup that gets you a quick sliding trip right off my dance card. If that makes me not nice, so be it. I'm not nice. I've been single again for a long time now. If I have to run a gauntlet of similar lovely available fellows to MAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYBE run into that special someone...........as my favorite buddy in New York would say.......................ehhhh, fehgitaboutit. I just don't think the internet is a good place to meet men.

I DO however, think it's a GREAT place to meet friends and by the way, did anyone wonder if I was ever going to get to the point? Grab the handrails, people. We have arrived. My point is, I've met some great friends on the internet and one of them sent me this real nice little award today:



Isn't that fun? Becca lives in Alaska. We've never met in person but we read one another's blogs. This little award is special to me because I think of myself as something of an anomaly amongst her long list of favorite blogging buddies, nearly all of which best I can tell, know their way around a needle and thread. They're a crafty group of girls, stitching projects that would simply amaze you and amaze me for sure as I literally do not sew anything beyond a button and then only when forced to by the potential for inappropriately exposed body parts. WHY she reads my blog, I do not know but she does. On my little world map down at the verrrrrry bottom of my blog, if you click on the map, you will see an ever-growing red dot up there in Alaska. Yup, that's my buddy Becca, faithfully reading and every now and then chiming in with a comment to say hello.

I have some confessions to make. I had intended to take these tales to my grave with me but so-honored by Becca on this day, I just feel like I need to cleanse myself perchance she is under the false assumption that I can sew. If she's going to love me, she's got to love me for who I am and for who I'm not. And I'm not good at sewing. Evidence:

8th Grade Homemaking Class, 35 students in an overcrowded room which makes it possible to look busy and get lost in the intense work of a sea of students when Mrs. Peterson walks the room, checking out the progress of each sewing project. We worked on those projects for three weeks, me in a state of total daze and confusion, flying under the radar until the final week when the wandering Mrs. Peterson paused by my sewing machine, adjusted her glasses and all of a sudden in a grand gesture threw her hand to her chest as if that might prevent the heart attack that she was about to have. Yes, I had stitched up the center seam of the culottes (I think you call them "skorts" now...) that I was making so that the only way one could walk would be to keep ones legs tightly together and shuffle along since the legs were sewn tightly together like some kind of fabric binoculars. Mrs. Peterson gasped. I wailed. The principal called my mother. It was ugly. Ugly ugly UGLY with a capital UG.

21 years old. First full-time job. I notice the hem coming out of the skirt I planned to wear. Not owning a needle and thread I stapled the 10-12 inch expanse of unraveling hem, quite proud of myself that the staples barely showed, thanks to a wild, peasant fabric print. Somewhere around noon I swiveled in my desk chair to retrieve something from a file cabinet, dislodged one of the staples into my backside causing me to jump out of my chair, throw a manual that landed on a co-workers desk, dumping her coffee all over her typewriter (yeah this was a hundred years ago) and down the front of her dress. The staple was still lodged in my butt.

I give blankets to all my nieces and nephews. They are tied with knots. Seriously. I can't sew. Even back when I could see the hole in a needle to thread it, that's all the further I could go without getting into serious trouble. God knows I tried but my darts were concave and it only went downhill from there. I'm an artist but I CAN. NOT. SEW.

Thank you for loving me anyway, Becca! Someone might want to know how I found Becca's blog in the first place, since she lives wayyyyy up there in Alaska. Simple. I love turtles. They are my weakness. Visit her blog (listed on the right side of this page) and you'll see what I mean. You'll also find my friend Stacey's blog from her new home in Brora, Scotland and one written by a great guy named Matt who lives in LA. He doesn't even know we're friends, but I check in on he and his little baby girl Maddy every single week and have their names on the little prayer list I keep by the sink in my kitchen.

The internet makes the world a smaller, cozier place.
But I'm still not having coffee with a guy who picked up foot fungus in the pen.

Her Royal Highness

When you truly believe you are a Princess as my granddaughter does, Trick-or-Treat Night presents the perfect opportunity to doll up a bit and introduce the idea to the world so everyone can get used to it.

First stop. A trip to mom's styling chair for an up-do befitting royalty.

A few last minute adjustments to the royal gown.

Special shoes. Of course.

Her name is Victoria.

She has a strong Welsh bloodline and the slightest hint of an accent thanks to her beautiful Nana. She is loved by people all over the world.

Y'know, I think she's right........
.....she IS a princess!

In the absence of obvious answers to
so many questions I have to consider on my own, I can always
count on my favorite coffee shop to provide.....along with the
slow caffeine drip into my system........some decent wisdom
from the side of their cup:

The Way I See It #17

The world bursts at the seams with people ready to tell you
you're not good enough. On occasion, some may be correct.
But do not do their work for them.
Seek any job. Ask anyone out. Pursue any goal.
Don't take it personally when they say "no".
They may not be smart enough to say "yes."

Keith Olbermann
Broadcast Journalist and host
MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann


I try to live my life like that. I taught my kids to do the same.
Less of an instruction at this point, the message on my morning Starbucks
cup is more of a reminder than a lesson:
I sought the job and I got it.
I asked him out and he said yes.
Someone told me it couldn't be done. And I did it.

Thanks to my favorite barista for the gentle reminder:

Always make them tell you no.

'Tis the Season

There is a rattle in the tree tops when the wind blows these days. The leaves are drying, turning crisp. Soon they'll fall. This is the season when all living, breathing things get the feeling the weather is gonna take a quick ride straight downhill very soon and they're looking for places to hide. Mouse traps snap. Squirrels are hoarding walnuts.

Friday at work I crossed paths with an eight-legged critter that had apparently decided it would be nice to spend the winter inside where it is warm. I went down to our employee dining room for a break and there, blocking my path to the coffee was a spider the size of a plate. He was hairy and scary. I didn't get close enough to see fangs, but I know they were there. It was HUGE and frankly, I'm not adequately armed for these kinds of encounters. As he poised to strike, I grabbed for the nearest weapon available and was in the process of drowning him with a spray bottle of window cleaner when a very thoughtful, BRAVE co-worker whose foot was barely bigger than the body of this thing............gallantly squished him with his shoe.
Whew.

The next morning I stepped from the shower and pulled a favorite silky nightshirt from a hook on the back of the bedroom door, slipped it on and buttoned up the front. I was on the last button when I felt a little stab of pain in my.........chestal regions..........and thought to myself.........oh! there must be a pin stuck in here.

I unbutton the top button and pulled at the fabric to find the pin............and looked in there to find a huge wasp staring up at me. A wasp!!!!! Inside my shirt. INSIDE MY SHIRT. And I might be mistaken, but I think he had a little napkin tied around his neck and a knife and a fork in his little front wasp-feet.

I screamed bloody murder and literally ripped every single one of the tiny silk-wrapped buttons off my favorite nightshirt as I tore it off. They went flying all over the room. I looked down at my chest, realizing to my horror that the pin-prick was actually a sting and...........to put it in gently for the most delicate reader.........that wasp had come perilously close to a full frontal assault on my girls. A nasty welt was growing in the valley.

I beat the wasp to death with a 3-pound hand weight which kinda-sorta made me feel a little better. Not nearly better enough, but better.

Aghast!!! Assaulted in my own bedroom.
And not in a fun gee-this-is-one-for-the-diary kinda way either.
What next??? A raccoon in the linen closet?????
I have a feeling it's going to be a tough winter.

The Director wasn't kidding, Camper Girls.



One dozen fresh lemons, ripe and waiting on the kitchen counter on Sunday morning.
What on earth is a girl to do with all these lemons?? Since she came home from the woods with a bad cold, I'll tell you what she does......

Toddy time.
Morning, noon and night.
If we don't chase the sniffles away, at least we'll be happier about the whole thing.

ZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Did I hear Kum-bah-ya in the distance???

To Campers Beth, Becky, Princess Janie, Teri, Rhonda, Gayle, Deanna, Sher, Billie, MareJ, Melody, Kathy and special hugs to Camper Linda for morning coffee and scooping cow pies to make room for our tents..Director Debbie loves you all. See you next year, same time, same place....under the stars.

Camp Debbie 2008
All that remains are the memories....and photographs to come.
But right now, Director Debbie needs a handful of Sudafed and a nice, long nap.

I love my camper girls!!!!!!!

Adventures in Doggie-Sitting

I'm spending this weekend with Charlie and Sammy. They're sweet boys. Big, beautiful golden colored cockers. Last night, after an evening of doggie treats and ear rubs, they both slept snuggled up next to me on the bed. This morning I made them a good breakfast, let them outside for a brisk, morning frolic and a nice, big poop in the grass. At the moment the two of them are lying here at my feet, licking their weiners. Don't wanna brag about my doggie-sitting abilities, but if that doesn't describe a day in the life of a blissfully happy boy, I just don't know what does.

Calling all
CAMPER GIRLS!



CAMP DEBBIE
2008

Saturday, October 4
Watch your mail/email for more info
See you 'round the camp fire!!

(In her continuing efforts to provide her Camper Girls with a stimulating, enriching, fun-filled experience under the stars your Director has gone to great length to assure that this year there will be : NO arrests. No chain saws. And as per usual, plenty of toilet paper in the trees. I'd also like to take this moment to apologize for leading you all astray by telling you that it is warmer if you sleep naked in your sleeping bag. I swear I heard that from a boy scout, however, recent perusals of Arctic survival manuals indicate this to be the pinnacle of MISinformation and, in fact, it is warmer to sleep....just like your mother told you........in layers. It has been suggested to the Director that perhaps the original boy scout that gave her the advice, had less-than-honorable motives at the time of the suggestion. Aghast at the incomprehensible thought this may well be true, Director Debbie sincerely apologies for that cccccold night)

Green Thumbs and Gratitude

Friday morning there was a nice little Ziploc bag full of garden-picked green beans waiting for me at my desk when I got to the office. Can you see how neat and tidy they are, all lined up in the bag? Phyllis picked them from her garden. She's equally as fastidious about her work in our office. If a folder can't be found in it's proper spot in the cabinet, trust me, it's not because Phyllis misfiled it. Her gardens are as neat and tidy as her work in our office. And her co-workers are her grateful beneficiaries.


Look at those beans! It's like she has them trained like little garden soldiers, toe to toe in their rows, no single bean standing out as longer than the other. That's some kinda green thumb to make that happen. But the real magic is in the eating.


A little bit of maple-smoked bacon, a sprinkle of salt, a bit of butter and a nice bottle of wine....


Ohhhh baby. Nummers.
Thank you, Phyllis!!!!!!

Waited all my life to be a Grandma..........

It just gets better and better.

Becca, you're not alone......

Misery loves company (and perhaps a shared vodka bottle) so I want Becca in Alaska to know that I feel her pain. You can read her recent tale of technology woe on her blog Turtletraxtoo.....click on the link over there >>> on the right side of my blog page.

I spent last weekend house doggie sitting for some friends. Keep in mind now, I'm old enough that I remember how annoying it was to stand in front of the black and white console tv set adjusting the vertical hold only to have the picture refuse to quit rolling. For years we turned on the family TV with a pair of needle nose pliers because the plastic on/off switch was stripped.

The first night I stayed at my friends place I just sat in the living room and stared at the entertainment center full of technology I barely recognized, let alone understood how to operate. There was a big ol' tv above the fireplace. DVD player. This box thingie that I think holds one of those IPod thingies, with cords coming out of it and some speaker-like thingies. Speakers. A baby monitor walkie-talkie kind of dealies. A picture frame that has these digital pictures that change all the time. And a teensy little screen thing....have not a clue what it is....it's got a tiny antenna and all sorts of buttons.

There were three remote controls on the fireplace mantle. And this:


I can read, so I know it's a DirecTV box. But I have no clue what it does.

I arrived with a nice little stack of rented DVD's to while away the weekend keeping the pups company, only to find that I could not......after two full hours of button-pushing get them to play.
I punched buttons and lights would flash, then lights would go out. Channels would come on, channels would disappear. No movies. Not even network tv stations.

I admit it. I am technology challenged. I ended up spending the weekend watching a channel that offered non-stop infomercials about odd machines that make gross looking juices out of anything you choose to throw into the hopper with it's big, swirling blades.

It is for times like this that I carry a purse-size bottle of Bailey's with me at all times.

Cool Rocks

My son David brought me this little round rock from Colorado.


Looked like a little stone golf ball, just that size.
A nice little geode, first one we've ever found intact.
They're hollow and we couldn't wait to see what was hiding in side.

A quick tap of a hammer.....




Cool, huh?

Hello Mongolia!!

This is called a Cluster Map.
Specifically of course, it's a map of Europe and Asia and Africa.

You'll find the tiny, active version of this map at the very bottom of this page. It keeps track, by way of fancy red dots of varying sizes, who stops by this blog to take a read.

Looky, looky up there in the upper right hand corner.
How well do you know your geography???
That is a VERY special red dot up there.

This is indeed, an exciting day in the life of Director Debbie. I have my FIRST reader from MONGOLIA!!!!!!!!! Am I serious? You betcharoo I'm serious. Mongolia is at the top of my wish list of places I want to visit. I am a CRAZY PERSON over info on Mongolia. I've been nuts over everything Mongolian for years and years. I Google Mongolia and look for Mongolia web sites. I don't care if I ever get to the Bahamas, don't care if I ever see the Wailing Wall, don't care if I ever get to see the fabulous lights over Rio at night. But I am going to be sorely disappointed if I don't get to Mongolia before I die. Sorely.

Well duh........yes of course I love Mongolian Beef. I strongly suspect Mongolian Beef is not, in fact, Mongolian. One of these days I will come home from my first visit there and I will tell you for sure.

HELLO MONGOLIA!!!!!!!!
Oh how I have been waiting for you.

A B C

Six years ago I bought a new book bag and headed off to school. To celebrate the occasion, my daughter (who was a senior in college at the time) and friend Judy both gave me big, new boxes of crayons. What a shock when I opened the lids and found all sorts of new colors tucked inside. Shocking Pink! Outrageous Orange! The rows looked like a tightly folded congregation of old Grateful Dead t-shirts. My goodness how the exciting world of "The First Day of School" had changed!

My little granddaughter came to my graduation in 2007 and helped me celebrate. It was a real joy to have her there with me to celebrate that day. She's in preschool this year, next fall she'll start Kindergarten and in May of 2010 on the grand occasion of her completion of her very first year of school --- Grandma will have earned her masters degree.



It's decided.
The papers are signed.
I'm going back to school.
Classes start in two weeks.

Silent.
Graceful.




I could stand in front of this tank at the zoo and watch the jellyfish for hours.





Magic.

Does this commercial make you CRAZY???????

I love television commercials.

I like to study them as marketing tools. They are a fascinating aspect of business. Mostly I love when I find a commercial that illustrates some real creative genius. The annual Super Bowl commercials often are great examples. Unfortunately, many commercials are annoyingly absent of even the tiniest hint of creativity. Some of them miss the mark and drive me nuts.

Case in point.

Seriously.
I am soooo embarrassed for the people in this commercial. Have you seen it? I have nothing against A) grey hair B) great classic rock music from wayyy back when or C) having fun. It's just the whole creepy, contrived feeling of this commercial that bugs me. At the end of the spot the beautiful man with the perfect grey hair says, "Never trust anyone over 90".
Ohhh whatever, man.

You can see the commercial here: www.touchofgray.com

Wow, sure looks like a good time to me.
As my friend Bob would say, "Bring on the cake!"

The trees are full this year......


After sunset, deer wander into the yard to take their pick of the fallen pears from the trees
loaded branches. And the kids heard that the elk at a nearby State Park love apples.











Indeed, they do!

Moments in Time

Today she played dress-up.
My animated little granddaughter prances and dances around the back yard,
flirtatious and shy when her Daddy tells
her how pretty his favorite little girl looks.

A fleeting 20-some years from now my son is going to think back to this picture as he's standing next to her in the back of a church and I promise you.......

......it's going to make him cry.