I AM the Honey Badger
Monthly Archives: March 2012
Lucky Seven
The lovely Casey Wyatt has tagged me in her “Lucky Seven.”
Here are the rules of the game:
1. Go to page 77 in your current manuscript
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next seven lines as they are – no cheating
4. Tag 7 other authors.
Post the lines on your own blog.
Here are my lucky seven sentences (from the WIP before the current one–I’m currently only on page 68 in that one!).
From Jessie’s War:
I closed my eyes against the image. When I opened them again, I found him regarding me, his expression bland. My eyes stung, and I coughed thick smoke from my lungs. “Don’t let me die in a fire.”
Abruptly, he turned toward me and I gasped, terrified for a moment he intended to honor my last request and do the deed himself. “I’m not going to shoot you, Jess,” he said sourly. He glanced in the direction of the back door, saw the flames and said, “Looks like we’re going to have to go out the front.”
So there you have it, my lucky seven! And, in return, I tag Brooke Moss, Callie Hutton, Ann Montclair, BJ Scott, Jude Bown, Janna Shay, and Char Chaffin.
Go to their blogs and see what they’re up to. I know I will.
Awkward Moments Day
First, my thanks to Jannine Gallant for pointing out that March 18 is actually Awkward Moments Day!
See, I think this is a day meant for me. Named for me. A day in celebration of…me!
See, I am very familiar with awkward moments. That moment when you tell a joke and all you hear is crickets? Yeah, I’ve been there, done that. Many times.
I broke my nose slow dancing at my senior prom. I asked a guy out once and got turned down with the excuse, “I’m gay.” (Super awkward) I stood on my skirt in a shuttle crowded with football players, and the skirt hit the floor, leaving me standing there in nothing but my underwear and my cute boots.
I got stuck in a bounce house at my daughter’s second birthday party and I was eight months pregnant with my son. Getting out was like a bounce house giving birth to a beluga. I accidentally texted my boss with “I love you so much,” which was intended for my husband. The last time I went to the ER, my doctor was a man I went to high school with, and I threw up on him. Later that same night, after the drugs had kicked in, I made an outrageous, suggestive comment I thought was HI-larious that was really just crass. (Okay, I still think the comment was funny, but even I recognize the bad form in saying it to someone I haven’t seen in eighteen years)
That’s not so bad, except that I’ve run into him three times since then (after not seeing him for eighteen years, I run into him three times in six months? WTF, universe?). Each time is another awkward moment, as I pretend I don’t remember precisely what I said to him that night.
Yeah, my life is a series of those kind of awkward moments.
So today, as you nurse your post St. Paddy’s Day hangovers, partake of a little of the hair of the dog, and raise a pint in honor of me. After all, this is my day.
Happy Awkward Moments Day!
MCC and the No Good, Very Bad Day
Okay, so I’m being melodramatic. But seriously.
It all started at 6:00AM. I woke up late, groggy from my foray into the land of NyQuil at 11:30. Discover I have nothing clean that doesn’t need to be ironed, so I set up the iron and the ironing board and got in the shower.
Ahhh, a shower. So nice.
I get all soapy and I hear a crash. The cat has knocked over the ironing board, the iron, and my clothes, and the shirt I was planning on wearing is in heap on the floor, and looks to have a new stain on it that looks suspiciously like cat barf.
Super.
So, I get out of the shower and right everything. Get back in.
Once again, I get all soapy, only to realize that Thing One has stolen my conditioner–you know, the expensive stuff I save for my more advanced tresses. So I have to hop out of the shower and run down hall in nothing but a towel to retrieve my conditioner from her bathroom. During my trek, I discover that my largely incontinent 14-year-old Jack Russell terrier has, uh, left her mark on the top of my stairs.
By stepping in it.
Yowling an angry protest, I get my conditioner and run back to my bathroom, and step in the same puddle of pee on my way back. Super.
I get back out of the shower, and I hear Thing One and Thing Two having a very loud argument downstairs. Whatever. I’m already running late for work, and I desperately need some coffee. It’s Lord of the Flies parenting at its finest. I’ve got hair to dry.
I get dressed in a new outfit that also needs to be ironed, and put on my face (well, most of it. I couldn’t figure out why everyone kept saying I looked so tired until I realized that I put on lipstick and foundation, but forgot blush and mascara. No wonder my contacts felt so much better today). I put on my socks and head downstairs.
And four steps down, I discover that said incontinent dog has left a trail to follow. By stepping in that, too.
Muttering something that must have sounded like, “Goddamn dog,” under my breath, I go upstairs to wash my feet and change my socks. Step in the puddle at the top of the stairs that I had forgotten about.
After getting new socks, I take some DayQuil, pull out the carpet cleaner spray stuff, and try to clean up my dog’s various messes, reminding myself that she’s old. And, probably, doing this just to spite me.
Now suitably hopped up on DayQuil and chemical fumes, I finally make it downstairs. I make the kids lunches, pour myself some coffee (because what’s a decongestant/chemical high without a little caffeine thrown on top of that?), and call the kids over.
Thing Two: Monk pinched me!
Thing One: Yeah, but he was going to pinch me first.
This went on and on until I finally just told everyone to be quiet. I hand both children their lunches, and we walk to the door.
The drive to work was a series of, “MOM! Chewy hurt me!”
“No, I didn’t! Mom, Monk’s being bossy!” (of course she’s being bossy. She’s an older sister)
“Stop pinching!” says the child who is busy pinching her younger brother.
“You stop pinching!” says the child who is busy pinching his older sister.
“MO-OM!”
I was sorely tempted to pull a move that the men in my mother’s family have pulled for generations now: Call M and say, “Honey, I’m going out for a loaf of bread!” and call home four days later from a Mexican prison, spinning an interesting yarn and asking for bail money and a bus ticket home.
What, that’s not a story in everyone’s family? Huh.
Anyway, I digress.
So we get to Thing Two’s preschool, and we find out together that, somewhere in that minute and a half between the time I handed him his lunch box and our getting in the car, he put down his lunch box and didn’t pick it back up.
After the car ride, I literally thought my head might explode.
The director takes a look at me and says, “I think you need a hug.”
True enough. I’m hopped on caffeine, DayQuil, chemical fumes and adrenaline, and I’m late for work. And now I have to go home and get Thing Two’s lunch box for him.
At which point, Thing One starts complaining because she wants to ride the bus to school.
Honestly?
There really are days when I think I would have been better off raising tomato plants. Saner, anyway.
Long story…a little shorter… we handle the lunch deal and I wander in to work. Work goes okay, except for the stomach cramping that occurs because of the caffeine/chemical fumes/adrenaline/DayQuil/ cough drops I had for breakfast.
The day…goes.
Then, while I’m in a meeting, Monk asks if she can go to the bathroom. She’s not even all the way out the door when I hear screaming.
Now, she can be melodramatic (don’t know where that comes from), but this screaming is different.
She comes back into the room, and blood is gushing from her mouth. And it’s everywhere–all over her, all over her shirt, and it’s dripping from her little fingers onto the floor.
Turns out it was just a puncture wound from crashing into a cart, but it took at good 10 minutes to get it to stop bleeding, and I thought I’d have to get her to the ER for stitches. And then there was the clean up. By the time everything was said and done, my favorite white shirt, the second white shirt of the day, had biologic stains on it, and I’m now running late to pick up Thing Two. Awesome.
So now, Monk is holding ice to her face, has a shirt that has bloodstains on it, and looks like she may have lost a bar fight. Great.
We go and get Thing Two, and come home.
Whereupon I discover that the dog–probably the big one–has decided to not only eat a coffee cup, but also knock down the fence, and the little one has left her incontinent trail all over the downstairs. I swear, I am going to get that dog a diaper.
Sweet mother of god, I think I’m going insane.
So when M comes home, he decides to take us out to dinner. I now am wearing a bloody shirt, and peeved because I’m cleaning up pee for the THIRD time today, the kids have been fighting, and everyone is complaining.
We go out to dinner, and it was fine. But gads, I’m exhausted.
I sit down in the booth and promptly sit in something wet.
You know what? I don’t even want to know what it is. I think it’s better for everyone concerned if I don’t.
I need another shower.
The Ultimate Couple, Part Deux
Common interests include:
1. A shared love of the van
2. Fighting crime, one ghost/goblin/ghoul/monster at a time.
3. Being “meddling kids” (though one is actually a canine)
4. Scooby snacks. (And I’m sure there was nothing else baked into those Scooby snacks, too, the way they used to eat them in the back of their hippie-love van… Oh.)
Welcome the second in my series “The Ultimate Couple”….
It’s Shaggy and Scooby (and isn’t it sweet? He’s carrying him over the threshold!).
Have a great day, everybody!
There's a Bee in my Bodice 
