random tidbits

Randomly Thinking: The Scarewoman, mouthy first-graders, and creepy Christmas music

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 13 Comments

Welcome to my Randomly Thinking post where I share random thoughts from my week or the past two weeks. Read at your own risk.

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I’m still posting consecutive days on the blog, for now, mainly using posts I already had almost fully written or ideas I’d had for posts for a while. As of yesterday, I had posted 13 days in a row. I have no why idea I’ve decided this is my summer challenge but I want to see how many days in a row I can post, simply for the fun of it. I am guessing I will hit a certain number and do one of three things: decide to stop posting because it’s weird (and possibly annoying to people who follow me to keep receiving notifications of my posts), forget to post, or simply run out of ideas. We will see which comes first.

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My email host has apparently stopped filtering messages into my spam because at least once a week for the past month or so I receive emails from colleges and other places directed to someone named Ismael. Like, Call me Ismael, which is actually Ishmael and I hear was a horrible movie.

Anyhow, I hope Ismael gets a good college education, better virus protection for his computer, and a free trip to Europe, but his emails need to stop coming to me.

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Sunday my dad sent Dorothy the Scarewoman home with us. He’d been storing her in a shed on his property. That sounds creepier than it’s supposed to.

This is Dorothy:

  Dorothy was something my husband was given after a community fundraiser about 17 years ago. She was dressed to look like Dorothy from Wizard of Oz. I don’t know why she was part of this fundraiser or why she was given to him or why she was shoved in our garage and not thrown out.

I’m also trying to figure out why she was loaded up when we moved last year. She’s creepy and weird and we don’t have a purpose for her, or well, we didn’t until Dad suggested we put her in our garden to frighten the deer away, even though we do have a fence installed around it.

I shoved her in our van and brought our home, grateful the neighbors were outside doing yard work so I could warn them that there was a “scarewoman” vs a scarecrow in our garden. I hated the idea they might walk out their back door and have a near heart attack, thinking some woman was standing in our garden.

For the first day, it was me who was frightened, though, jumping every time I looked out the kitchen window and saw her there.

My son hates her with a passion and has asked if he might ax her to pieces soon. He’s really not as violent as he sounds.

I haven’t decided officially yet, but I may let him do it.

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My neighbors have built a small enclosure for their new Shih Tzu puppies and invited my daughter and our dog Zooma over to play with them the same night we warned them about Scary Dorothy. Their puppies haven’t been fixed yet so the one was trying to get to know Zooma a little too well, to put it nicely. I didn’t say anything about it to Little Miss, even when the neighbors scolded her puppies. Later that night, though, Little Miss said to me, “They really need to get their dog spayed.”

She’s watched too many shows about animals, especially that goat show where they openly talk about breeding goats. I did let her know the term is “fixed” for male dogs so I’m hoping she doesn’t march up to our neighbors soon and ask, “Has Louie been fixed yet?”

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Little Miss and I had a couple of tough days this week. She’s a very stubborn child and she knows it but swears it’s not her fault. I had to inform her a few times this week that she needed to watch her attitude.

That attitude especially comes out when I ask for her to give me my phone back while she’s playing Minecraft on it. So, one day this week I took the phone away and told her she needed to start watching herself and stop answering me with such an attitude. She has been responding with, “Just go make me a sandwich” when I ask her for my phone, which isn’t something we say, so I’m not sure where she’s getting it.

She cried a while, telling me I had hurt her heart by yelling at her, refusing to admit she had been very snotty with me.

Finally, she cracked and pulled a line out of my arsenal, “I don’t even know what tone I’m using sometimes. It comes out sharp, but I don’t mean it too.” (I say this sometimes when the kids think I’m mad but I’m not). “I mean I just say something and something in my brain flips this switch and attitude comes out.”

I suggested she work harder to flip the switch back before she opened her mouth. We hugged it out, had some lunch, (she was on a hunger strike for three hours until I apologized to her for scolding her for giving me attitude, which I was not about to do because I am also stubborn.), moved on, and so far she’s doing much better with her “attitude issues.” I feel lucky these little battle of the wills with her are a rare thing.

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Little Miss is in a lot of my stories this week, but, well, she’s a character. We had to go to a doctor’s appointment yesterday for my son (nothing major) and she noticed a spider crawling in a clear holder for papers. She pointed it out, concerned for its safety. She’s been on a love affair with bugs again, randomly picking them up outside and saying, “Well, this is a neat-looking bug. I wonder what it is.”

As for the spider at the doctor’s office, she let the doctor know that she never touches spiders. “I’m never sure which one could be a venomous species.”

She’s 6, going on 16, I swear.

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I have dry skin issues. My back can itch the worst sometimes. Our bathroom has a stucco wall and I find myself scratching my back on the corner of the wall that sticks out next to the tub. It feels amazing, but, yes, it is weird. I feel like a bear in the woods scratching its back on a tree.

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In closing, I’d like to leave you with this creepy Christmas song, because who doesn’t need a creepy Christmas song to perk up your day?

Those are my random thoughts for the week. What are yours?

Randomly Thinking: My Capitalization Issue on Here, Cold Weather, Bob Ross, and The Urban Dictionary

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 9 Comments

Here are a few of my random thoughts from the last couple of weeks. Enter at your own risk.

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Have you noticed from time to time the titles of my blog posts in the WordPress Reader are capitalized weird or not at all? Maybe you haven’t, but I have and it’s driving me nuts. The reason the capitalizations sometimes aren’t right in the reader is because when I write my headlines they are in all caps in my editor (due to theme I have chosen), but when they appear in the reader they are not in all caps. So there are times I try to capitalize a word in my headline within the post editor but it appears as all caps to me so I don’t see the error until I publish it and view it in the reader.

Does that make sense? Does anyone besides me care? No. Probably not, but it really drives me crazy because I look like I’m even more incompetant than usual when that happens.

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You know what else drives me crazy about the new editor on here? I can’t find a spellchecker and the Grammerly app I have installed on my browser doesn’t work in it either. So, yeah! I now have all kinds of typos on my blog posts. I’ve tried copying the posts and putting them into Grammerly or ProWriting Aid but it’s very time consuming, so most of the time I just let the typos ride. It’s not like I’m writing for a major news publication where they never have typos. Ha. Ha. (Who wants to attend the “pubic meeting on Monday night in the high school”?)



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Someone on a MeWe (a social network) asked if my kids and I would be interested in being penpals with her kids as part of a homeschooling project. I agreed and about a week later we received three letters in the mail. I thought only my children would be receiving letters but then I ended up receiving one to me as well, which was really cool. I used to write letters back and forth with my maternal grandmother and I really miss that. The woman who wrote me said she misses the old days of writing real letters and I have to agree with her. We’re so used to instant gratification now we don’t know how to be patient for a letter.

This was further proven by my children asking if her children had Discord screennames or play Minecraft or “Why can’t we just call them instead of write a letter?”

I told them I’m teaching them patience and we all worked on letters to mail out. Of course, thanks to the two feet of snow we received, we had to wait until the end of the week to get the letters mailed out, but we did get them mailed out.

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“We are losing our minds because they aren’t in our heads anymore. They’re in our phones.” Quote by my dad.

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Watching television with my husband is always interesteing becuase he usually looks up all the actors and at some point during the series or movie to tell us what else they’ve been in. Then he tells us who out of the cast has died and sometimes even how they died (it’s usually some tragedy like drug overdose). It’s a lot like riding around our two county area with my dad except he points to houses or empty fields and tells us who use to live there and that they are all dead.

A couple of weeks ago he drove us to pick my son’s friend and during the three mile drive he randomply pointed at houses, or some empty field and said, “So-and-So used to live there. They’re dead now of course.”

By the end of the drive we all felt like we had been to a wake.


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I think it’s sad when you click on the profile of someone yelling at you on Instagram for your political views and all they have listed in their profile is their pronouns, race, and political party. Seriously? Those things are what are important to you in life? If you only identify yourself based on sexual identification, race, and political affiliation I feel seriously sorry for you because you’ve placed your faith in all the wrong things.

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Saturday night everyone’s bedroom doors were open when I sat down to read my daughter her bedtime stories: Sparta: Rise of a Warrior Nation. At least that’s what I loudly announced I was going to read to see if my son heard me.

He did.

“You’re reading her what?!”

I assured him I was actually reading her Paddington but if he wanted I would come in and read him the book on Sparta. He said that wasn’t necessary. Oh well, maybe another night.

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Our two cats occassionally get along now, unless we notice they are getting along. If I point out that the older cat isn’t chasing the baby and reach for my camera to document the moment, the older cat jumps up and slaps the kitten the head and walks off.

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There was a depressing and disgusting news story that broke in our area this week involving a public official. He always gave me the creeps but I had never imagined he’d done what he’s charged with. I just figured he was swarmy politically and ethically. My husband’s co-worker mused how the wife of the man is always quiet and seems to blend into the background. I guessed it’s probably because she’s abused by him and was made to feel she must be submissive and stay behind the scenes.

“Yeah. You’re probably right,” my husand said. ” Of course, we all know that wouldn’t be you. You’d be more likely to just step up and say something. You don’t stand in the background. I mean, let’s face it. We know who wears the pants in this relationship.”

I didn’t know how to take that so I kicked his butt and told him to go cry in the corner like the little baby he is. Then I told him as soon as he’s done wiping his snot we’re going to dinner at whatever restaurant I pick.

That less section is, of course, a total fabrication. I believe what my husband meant is I wouldn’t allow myself to be emotionally, and possibly physically, abused and would have kicked that man’s butt before I let him make me stand in the background with my mouth shut and my head bowed, pretending our family was normal when it was not. At the same time, neither of us are really judging this woman. We have no idea what she went through and she’s as much of a victim as others in this particular case so that was the part of it all we couldn’t laugh at.

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I am very certain that once while watching Bob Ross painting I told my son he had died years ago. Very certain.

However, the other day I ordered a Bob Ross watercolor book for my daughter and while looking at it my son, a fan of Bob Ross Positive Energy Drinks, told me about all the other Bob Ross-related products available.

He said, “He knows how to market himself.”

I said, “Well, no, actually, his family really knows how to make money using his name. Since he’s been dead for years.”

My son looked grief-stricken. “Bob Ross is dead?”

I said, “Uh..yeah. We’ve discussed this. You even showed me that video one time of some animator who had created a scene with Bob Ross and Fred Rogers together in heaven.”

“Well, yeah, but I just thought –”

My son’s face fell.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Is this like when I told you there was no Santa Claus?”

Him, “There’s no Santa Claus?”

(He didn’t really say that last line. What he really said was, “Yes! That’s what this is like!”)

Honestly, I know we talked about Bob Ross being dead because I even showed him a video about what happened to all Bob Ross’s paintings after his death. Sometimes I think The Boy simply plays too many video games and it has melted his memory.

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My son’s friends looked up their names on Urban Dictionary. I’d never heard of it before and a lot of the inforamtion on there features “no-so-nice” language, but I did look up my name for fun and found one clean description, which was a little accurate, but not completely:

“If you’re friends with a Lisa – consider yourself lucky! Lisa’s are intelligent, intuitive, and a true friend. She will always check in on you at just the right moments, and has a way of putting out all of your fires with a few thoughtful phrases of advice. The kind of advice that validates your feelings while still holding you accountable for your own actions. She has high level of patience, but don’t take her kindness for granted; she will put you in your place if you do!! She’s beautiful on the inside and out, witty sense of humor, and an all around genuine person.Lisa will call you out on your crap (Word changed to protect the innocent).”

That last sentence is especially true. *wink*

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So those are a few of my random thoughts for this week. What are some of yours? Share them with me in the comments!

Randomly Thinking: Feeling Like I’m in High School Again, TV Shows stress Me Out, and Ack! Spiders!

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 14 Comments

Welcome to my weekly Randomly Thinking post where I share random thoughts that pop into my head throughout the week. Enter at your own risk. There is a lot of saracasm, teasing and jokes and a little bit of seriousness.

I need to stop getting so emotionally invested in TV shows. I remind myself everytime I start to get upset over how a particular plot line is going, “This is fiction. This is just a TV show. These are not real people. You do not need to feel anxiety about what does or does not happen in the next hour or hour and a half.” I find the fact I have to do this, sad, quite frankly, but I am sure I am not alone.

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I have assigned Lord of the Flies to my 14-year old son for English class. We have assignments that go along with the reading as well. I haven’t read Lord of the Flies since 9th or 10th grade so I am reading it again with him and I’m going to be honest — this feels like high school again.

I don’t want to read Lord of the Flies.

I’m not really interested in it, the same as I wasn’t interested in it in high school. I feel like a teenager again when I realize I haven’t read the assigned chapters. I look at the book, tip my head back and do a little bit of flouncing and then go “Fiiiiiiine. I’ll read it! Stop bugging me.” When no is bugging me to do it, except myself. I was similar when I read Silas Marner with him but I ended up really liking that book.

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While I’ve ditched most of my social media accounts, I can’t quit Instagram just yet, mainly because I can’t quit Grant Gosch who shares an Instagram live ever Saturday night from Ocean Creek, Oregon where he shares stories he’s written, or reads stories he hasn’t written. He talks a lot about whiskey and I don’t drink whiskey but I do like watching him talk about whiskey. I call him the “Bradley Cooper look alike writer of Instagram.”

You can find him here:


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On Tuesday, when other homeschooling mothers were probably cooking dinners from scratch all while teaching their children two languages, every subject, and making oragami swans, I made a Play-Doh bunny with my daughter.

That’s right. I’m nailing the homeschooling Mom thing over here. I did teach her some other things, of course, later, but the Play-Doh bunny was the highlight of our day. We made puppies and bunnies after we created atoms and molecules out of Play-Doh

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I’ve been fighting with the woodstove this week and I’ve won twice. I seem to have the hardest time getting the fire to light, but we’ve needed it throughout the days due to some kind of crazy Polar Vortex moving through, dropping temperatures into the teens. I have been getting the wood from the woodpile behind our garage myself on some days and asking our son to get them on others.

I’m always worried about a spider living in the woodpile and that fear was somewhat recognized this week when I pulled out a log with a dead spider in a web. Or at least I think it was dead. It wasn’t moving and I didn’t stick around to see if it was going to. I flung the piece of wood to the back of the storage area with a quick scream. While I’m worried about the spiders, my husband worries about snakes. Luckily we mainly have non-venamous snakes here and he’d probably only encounter a garter snake, but it would be fun to hear him scream like a — well, like me.

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Standing in the snow, in our quiet backyard one night this week, I looked around at the woods behind our house, at the peaceful town below the hill we live on, at the church on the hill on the other side of town, and I realized what a blessing it is that we were able to move here from our previous house. I love it here. I love the fact we have a little bit of country and a little bit of town around us. I love going outside to gather wood from the wood pile for our woodstove. I love that we wake up many mornings, look out and see deer in our backyard.

(I love that it is winter and the bear are hibernating too).

Our neighbors’ homes are close to us on the sides, but behind us and in front of us and a little bit down the road, and really all around us, there is plenty of country scenery to take in. Moving here really has been one of the best things we ever did for our family.

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We played Yahtzee with our neighbor last week, as I mentioned in last weeks “Random Thoughts.” It further proved I am horrible at math.

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In writing news, I figured out how to set up pre-orders from The Farmer’s Daughter and you can do that here, for Amazon, and here, for Barnes and Noble. I will also be offering a free ebook of the book to my blog readers via Bookfunnel as a thank you for all the support while I was writing it and sharing it here. I’ll provide an update on that when I get closer to the February 23 release date.

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Speaking of books, I am looking forward to the release of the second novel by Robin W. Pearson, ‘Til I Want No More, which releases February 2 and is available for pre-order anywhere you buy books.

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My husband was in a super good mood after work yesterday. It was a shame because I hadn’t had a lot of sleep the night before so he was firing 100 percent and I was batting zero. Or, was he batting 100 and I was firing zero? Well, you get my drift.

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My son stayed with his friend at our house the other day and I told them, “no playing with guns and no lighting anything on fire.” When I got back home, they told me they’d played video games, ate snacks, and laughed for 15 minutes at a funny sounding fart. Apparently, I had given them way too much credit. Two days after the friend left, he texted my son to tell him he had corona symptoms. We’ll see how that turns out. I’ll keep you all updated.

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We subscribed to a weekly trial of Broadway HD last week so we could watch Peter Pan Goes Wrong, a production by the Mischief Theatre Company. The concept behind the “goes wrong” plays are that there is a fictional theater group who presents plays during which everything, yes “goes wrong.” Enjoy this clip from YouTube and if you want to watch more you can either see their show on Amazon or you can subscribe to Broadway HD and cancel the subscription like we did because no one really watches Broadway shows on TV, right? Or, obviously, you can find clips on Youtube.

So those are my random thoughts for the week. What are yours? Let me know in the comments and remember, I have a profanity filter on. *wink*

Randomly Thinking: The Weird Things Children say and Do and other random thoughts

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 20 Comments

Welcome to my weekly Randomly Thinking post where I share random thoughts that pop into my head throughout the week. Enter at your own risk.

Why is it when I buy waffles, the children in my house no longer want them? Then, when said waffles have been eaten, a child invetibly asks “Do we have waffles?” My son does this to me all the time with ice cream as well. Like he’ll say, “I’d like some ice cream.” And I get him ice cream and then he doesn’t eat it so somone else in the family will eat it (not me because I can’t have most of the stuff in most ice creams) then he says, “Where’s my ice cream?”

The ice cream isn’t there for a week when it is eaten either. It’s there for two or three months without him touching it, and finally someone eats it.

The kids, of course, get this from my husband who will let my mom’s left over apple pie sit there for a week before he will touch it and I figure he isn’t going to eat it so I eat it and then he says, “Where is my pie?” Come on! No one leaves my mom’s homemade pie in the refrigerator for a week! Sheesh!

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Our six-month old kitten keeps running outside when we open a door to go anywhere. We usually spend anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes chasing her between properties and under bushes. I get really tired of trying to catch her when I need to be inside teaching children or cooking or loading the dishwasher. I will finally throw up my hands and declare: “That’s it! She’s on her own! I don’t care. Let her get eaten by a bear if that’s what she wants. I’m not messing with her anymore!”

Apparently I’ve said this too much because Monday my 6-year old daughter stomped into the living room and declared: “Scout is gone. I don’t care! She can be eaten by a bear for all I care. I’m done. I’m not messing with her anymore.”

Watching her declare all this with the sincerity of a 6-year old was hilarious and made me glad I hadn’t thrown in any curse words out when I was grumbling about the kitten.

The fact her expressions even looked like mine made it all that much more creepy.

(The kitten came back in on her own ten minutes later, incidentally.)

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One night this week I was reading a book by Charles Martin and part of it deals with the loss of a baby during labor and later their road to adoption. It made me all emotional and feel such gratitude for both my children. It was after midnight but I knew my son would still be awake. I didn’t want to climb out of bed (the dog was curled up at my feet) so I texted my son, telling him I loved him.

This was, apparently, unnerving to him.

Him: Love you too. Did something happen? Did someone die?


Me: Lol. No. Just reading a sappy book and it made me think how lucky I am to have you kids.

Him: You usually don’t text me at 12:34 so I was scared that some kid died a horrible and painful death.

Nice to know that telling my son I love him strikes fear in his heart.

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You know you live in a small area when the most exciting news of the day is that the town 20 minutes from us is gettin’ an Aldis! (I had to pause after writing this to call my mama and tell her!). I kid you not.

The reporter who works with my husband actually called at 9 p.m. to suggest they put it up on the paper’s website as breaking news. They put that story up as breaking news, but did not post that the governor came down with COVID as breaking news. Yes, this is a small, rural area. (Update: my husband says they did post the governor’s diagnosis as breaking news, but I told him I was leaving it that they didn’t because it was funnier for my blog post. He was not amused.).

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I was picking out some Christmas cards onine for my parents. I found one that I liked but I told my mom I didn’t feel the painting on the front could be historically accurate. I said, “It’s Mary on a donkey holding baby Jesus. She wouldn’t be on a donkey with the baby. She was on the donkey before she had Jesus. And by the time they were leaving Bethlehem, Jesus would have been a toddler because the Bible says it took the Wise Men at least two years to find him.”

Mom, as she often does, schooled me on her Biblical knowledge by telling me, “Well, actually she probably would have been on a donkey with the baby because they had to take him to the temple in Jerusalem and that has to be done when they are a newborn and in a certain amount of days.”

I don’t even remember what else she said. I was so dumbfounded on how, once again, she put me in my place when it comes to the Bible, and in such a polite way too.

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I think felines have short memories or almost no memories at all. Every morning my husband lets our older cat outside before he goes to work. Now that the temperature has dropped, by the time I come downstairs (usually a couple hours later because even though I am awake, I don’t want to get out of bed, especially if it is cold out), she wants back in and lets me know by standing on the table on our back porch and looking in the kitchen window.

I let her in, she takes a couple of bites of food and then she goes right back to the back door to be let out again.

I let her out but I tell her “you just came in, you know it’s cold.” And less than a half an hour later when I let the dog out, the cat comes in again after crying desperately at the window. A half an hour later she wants out again, but every time she goes out she looks bewildered, as if she is saying, “It’s so cold out here. Why is it so cold out here?” I always want to say back to her, “We talked about this before. It’s cold. Remember?” It’s our routine all day long. I’m wondering if it will hit her it’s actually winter by January.

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I’m looking at reading challenges to do in 2021 and wondering if I will actually do them. I hope I do. One of the challenges is to read one classic book a month. I definitely want to do this one, because I had already planned to read a couple more classics in 2021, including a couple of Jane Austen books and maybe another George Elliott book (even though my son has written a book report on Silas Marner, which we read last month, and declared her to be a very boring writer. She isn’t. He was simply mad that I made him rewrite the book report because he made too many jokes in the first one.)

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My husband and I recently watched a show about old, famous estates in England. The one episode was about Princess Diana’s family’s estate at Althorp. It was fascinating and though I have seen interviews with the 9th Earl of Spencer before (Charles Spencer) and know he’s very down to earth, it was interesting to see how much work he actually does to keep the estate running and why. His main reason is to keep the history that is there in good shape because there is not only British history there, but American history as well. He liked telling the interviewer that George Washington’s family “were essentially nannies for the Althrop family.” Despite seeming nice and sincere, he couldn’t seem to keep himself from reminding Americans their first president had once been a servant to his family.

“Don’t forget your place,” he seemed to be saying.

I’m kidding, of course. He didn’t say it that way at all, but I joked during it that was what he was trying to say.

Like many from the UK (or from our family), the Earl is quite pale, which led my son to remark, “That looks like a man who would find mayonnaise spicy.”

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Am I the only woman who doesn’t swoon at those movies about a woman falling in love with a man who she later finds out is a prince? With all the drama and attention that follows the British royal family, I can’t imagine having to deal with all that ridiculousness. Now, if that prince decides to give up his rights to the throne for me…. maybe.

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So those are my random thoughts for the week. What are yours? Let me know in the comments.

Randomly Thinking: More crazy book descriptions and premarital handholding

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 10 Comments

Welcome to my weekly Randomly Thinking post where I share random thoughts that pop into my head throughout the week. Enter at your own risk.

I imagine most of you in the US are having some sort of Thanksgiving celebration today. So first, Happy Thanksgiving!

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Nothing like looking up at the clock in the living room and realizing it is 20 minutes fast. Wonder how long it’s been like that? And what did I do very early in the day that I didn’t need to? This same clock was 40 minutes fast the next day even after we changed the battery. We decided it was time for the clock to be retired.

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My son is 14 now so some of his friends are starting to “date”. A sort-of friend of his texted him the other day to tell him he had a GF (girlfriend). My son rolled his eyes. I said “It’s probably one of those girls from the Christian school he goes to.” The Boy says, “Yeah, one of those girls that doesn’t believe in premarital hand holding.”

I snorted out a laugh.

“And they don’t even look each other in the eye because that’s too much too,” The Boy continued. “Like she accidentally looks him in the eye and goes ‘oh my gosh! We’re moving a little fast here, aren’t we?'”

I said, “Well, that’s why a lot of the kids from that school get married immediately after they graduate.”

“Why?” asked The Boy. “So they can finally make eye contact? ‘Oh! I always knew your eyes were hazel!'”

I said, “Um, no not so they can make eye contact.”

The Boy’s response: “Oh.” And he went back to school work because I’m pretty sure he didn’t want to think about that.

Plus, he knew I’d remind him that I don’t believe in premarital handholding either! At least not until he’s 25 or so *wink*

***

An elderly woman at the local little supermarket was the only bright spot of my day one day last week when she offered to let me go in front of her and I told she could go ahead, I was in no rush. She said ‘thank you’ because her husband was waiting for her in the truck outside and he “might get into trouble if she didn’t hurry up.” The way she said it with a little wink just cracked me up.

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Pretty sure a lot of women would kill for a husband like mine who randomly says after dinner, “You just go sit and rest. I’ll wash the dishes.”

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Do you have a family of ad-libers like I do? People who watch movies or shows and occassionally sermons, and ad-lib one-liners, additional quotes, or new plot lines? If you do, you have my sympathy. It can be funny at times but when they are rewriting the entire script as the movie plays it can also be aggravating. I blame Mystery Science 3000, a show known for the way its hosts mock horribly bad movies. After The Boy and The Hubby watch their episodes, they suddenly think they can do the same thing. (Honestly, their ad-libs are funny, so don’t take my suggestion that it is annoying seriously.)

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I wanted to update the tagline for the Kindle book ad I saw and mentioned last week. The actual tag line was “Accidentally wed to a screaming hot stranger.” Again, how do you accidentally marry someone?! My son said maybe they stumbled between the bride and groom right when the pastor said “I now pronounce you man and wife!” Even if that was possible, there is all that marriage license needing to be signed thing.

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Have you ever looked at some of the books on Kindle Unlimited? I’ve found some good ones but I’ve also seen more than I care to of “billionaire romances.” Seriously, how many single, eligible billionaires can there be in the world? To see all these romances you would think there are thousands of them, all men, and all sexy and living alone on their sprawling 200 acre ranch, pining away for a woman. And the women — well, they are always poor and in need of rescuing but they are also always suspicious of the rich man who can rescue them because he couldn’t possibly be rich and good looking, right?

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Our kids were playing Minecraft the other day and Little Miss told her brother she needed him to get the creepers out of the McDonalds she built (which was odd since we never go to McDonalds). He used an ax and Little Miss said, “I don’t want you to use an ax! I want you to use your hands like a real man!” I have no idea where she got such a thing. I’m guessing she’s heard The Boy say it.

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We went to see a light display at a golf course about 30 minutes from us. Lights and light displays were installed all throughout the course, on trees, in the fields, etc. I took some vidoes to show family but forgot about the my family’s tendancy to offer commentary at about every event (see aforementioned ad-libing issue). At one point our daughter said “Is that Santa in an airplane?” My husband said, “Yep.” She responded, “That is so cringe.” She’s six.

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We discovered The Goes Wrong Show a couple of months ago and it’s caused some serious laughing fits in our house. I highly recommend watching their show if you can find it. It is currently streaming on Britbox on Amazon. The premise is that a drama society acts out plays but something always goes wrong. They offered this skit up about a week ago for a charity event for the BBC. This is about the craziness that COVID has brought to us. Their other episodes will help you escape from current events so I have added a couple other clips of those, and one from the Royal Variety Show five years ago at the end of the post.

***

So those are my random thoughts for this week. How about all of you? Any random thoughts? Let me know in the comments.

Randomly Thinking: Pets are trying to kill us and are cats inherhently evil? I say, yes.

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 11 Comments

Welcome to my weekly Randomly Thinking post where I share random thoughts that pop into my head throughout the week. Enter at your own risk

  • You know what’s great about adopting an extra cat? Instead of having two animals who want to kill me, I now have three. Seriously, why do they always walk in front of me while I am trying to walk? On Sunday my son was running with our dog when she took his legs right out from under him. She looked delighted when his face bounced off the leaf-covered ground.
  • In my Sunday Bookends post, which I posted on Monday this week, I wrote George Elliott’s run-on sentences reminded me of George Steinbeck. Of course I know his name is John Steinbeck and I have corrected that in the post. Must be George was on my mind because I’ve been slogging through Silas Marner. Seriously, as I am getting into it, it’s not actually that bad. I feel bad for making fun of it Sunday. It helps that I’ve found an Irish man reading it on Youtube and it’s somehow making it more entertaining for me because he does all the voices and offers inflections that I wouldn’t have added myself while reading it.
  • I have a friend whose dad has been dead for 18 years and she received an application for a ballot for him in the mail. The creepy thing is, she and her mom have moved since he died. I don’t even know how the election office figured out where to mail it. This election is going to be a mess, we all know that. I’m stocking up on extra supplies now. I made my husband buy extra toilet paper the other day because I told him there is going to be a rush on it again. We already can’t find paper plates. He went into Wal-mart the other day to buy some for us and the shelf was completely empty. It looked like the toilet paper shelves in March and April.
  • I picked up a book I had reserved at the library last week, excited to get a book for free to read, then remembered how nervous library books make me because I’m always afraid I’ll get something on the book or damage it somehow. Now I carry the book around in the bag the library gave me, only taking it out to read and then shoving it right back in the bag.
  • I was so glad to hear last week that so many people also mistake random yard displays or other items outside their windows as a person and have a near panic attack. My favorite had to be from Heather Dawn who said she thought her dripping sewer tank was a bear rummaging outside her house and she had to run to her house from her hot tub, without her towel. Her husband was laughing at her while she ran and it sounded so much like something that would happen with my husband and I. At least (hopefully) Heather wasn’t completely naked.
  • Keith Oberman. So. Yeah. He’s lost it.
  • Sean Hannity. So. Yeah. He’s lost it.
  • I’m not a big fan of political commentators in general. Can you tell?
  • Our adult cat likes to be outside — all the time. I don’t mind, except when she runs outside in the rain and one of my children hear her crying an hour later and cry “Oh my gosh! You left her out in the rain?! The poor thing!” I’m pretty sure she knows exactly what she is doing when she ignores me while I try to get her back in the house after she has slipped out while it is raining. She knows that wet fur will later be her key to snatching the attention away from the new kitten as the children fawn over her and dry her off with towels and make sure her food dish is full. After all, their mother cruely left that poor cat out in the rain. Right? Is it any wonder I believe that cats are inherhently evil?
  • One nice thing about homeschooling my son is that I’m learning a lot about subjects I never learned in school. This week we are learning about the Hitittes, which are a group of people mentioned in the Bible and many other historical documents. According to Wikapedia, “The Hitittes are: ere an Anatolian people who played an important role in establishing an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia around 1600 BC. This empire reached its height during the mid-14th century BC under Šuppiluliuma I, when it encompassed an area that included most of Anatolia as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia.”
  • Sometimes I ask my husband to pick me up chocolate at the store and when he brings it in the house we have to conduct an exchange that looks a lot like a drug deal. He smuggles it to me so the children don’t see it, carefully hiding it against his body and sliding it to me when they aren’t in the room or their backs are turned. If we don’t do this, the little vultures will inhale it before I get any. Once it’s safely in my posession, I stash it deep in my purse or in a cupboard, high up where my kids won’t think to look, so that I can savor it over time. The only problem with this is that I have to wait for the kids to leave the vicinity of where I hid the goods so I can sample it. Most recently I hid chocolate on a high shelf in a cupboard in the kitchen. There are two problems with this: 1) my children are always near or in the kitchen and 2) I’m very short and have to use a stool or chair to get to the shelf so I’m always afraid that while I’m climbing up I’m going to fall and break a bone and have to tell a doctor what I was doing when I broke it. I suppose there are worse thingsI could say than “I was climbing to get chocolate.” At least it won’t be “I was climbing to get to my stash of cocoaine.”
  • I am really enjoy Mama’s Empty Nest’s posts about the lighthouses she has visited with her family over the years. This week she wrote about one in Assateague near Chincoteague Island. Every since reading Misty of Chincoteague, I have wanted to visit there and see the wild horses. Maybe someday. My husband’s boss visits there every summer or autumn in his camper. Maybe one year I will smuggle myself in. I’m glad I didn’t go with them this year, however, since while they were there, the remenants of a hurricane hit the island. Luckily they survived the craziness and it provided Dave with a very entertaining column for the following week.

So, those are my random thoughts for the week. I’d love to hear some of yours in the comments.

Randomly Thinking: The school papers are multiplying like rabbits and other random tidbits that spilled out of my head this week

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 18 Comments

Welcome to my weekly Randomly Thinking post where I share random thoughts that pop into my head throughout the week. Enter at your own risk.

  • I looked at the “writers” community in Instagram earlier today. All I can say is I’m glad I never wrote a six stanza poem about my period when I was 20. Good grief and good gravy.
  • There are school papers everywhere in my house and when I pick some up to put away, I turn around and there are even more. I swear they are getting married and making new little school paper babies when I’m not looking and they’ve trained my daughter’s craft supplies to do the same.
  • Sometimes, when I see it out of the corner of my eye, I think the fall display in our side yard, made of corn stalks, is a man and I have a mini-panic attack. Does that make me weird? Sad? I know. Just don’t tell me it does.
  • Funny Bablyon Bee headline: October on Pace to Be Three Years Long. I’m sure this will be true for us Americans, thanks to election season.
  • I have discovered that some modern writers in Christian fiction are good at social media and being “out in the public eye” but they’re really not that great of a writer/author. Ouch. I hope that won’t be me as I continue to try to improve writing. A little smoke and mirrors works for these writers, though. They have a cult following. In some ways it reminds me of Stephen King.
  • After reading some of these authors, I have decided I’m going to start moving away from the strict romance genre because some of the tropes are just ridiculous and make the books predictable. I have a possible trope planned for my latest and now I’m pondering how to change it so it isn’t so Hallmark-movie-predictable-plot-gagfest. I like Hallmark movies, don’t get me wrong, but they do all have about the same plot lines.
  • My dog barks at everything. Every. Thing. A cat in the yard next door, the UPS man, the mail lady, a dog barking across town, a leaf blowing in the wind, a door closing upstairs, a door closing downstairs, a person talking on the neighbor’s porch. She’s so jumpy I’m thinking of giving her some of the CBD oil I’ve been using to calm my nerves.
  • My son is obsessed with Minecraft. I find myself writing my books in my head when he talks to me about it, but I do try very hard to focus so he knows I care about the things he cares about. I am interested. It is just the game is so detailed and has so many components to how you can create with it, it makes my head swim.
  • So many of the sitcoms of the ‘80s had seriously depressing back stories. Abandoned children, dead parents, drug-addicted parents or siblings. Dang. What’s up with that?

I’m seriously looking forward to season two of The Chosen. If you have not yet watched season one, you can find the app on Android or iOS devices under The Chosen or you can visit their site.

  • This week a woman said Trump 2020 on a video I was watching, but I thought she said Psalm 20:20 so I looked up the verse. Even though it hit me later she’d actually said Trump 2020, I thought the verse was fitting for this year.

A psalm of David. May the LORD answer you when you are in distress; may the name of the God of Jacob protect you. May he send you help from the sanctuary and grant you support from Zion. … We will shout for joy when you are victorious and will lift up our banners in the name of our God.

So those are my random thoughts for this week. What are your random thoughts? Let me know in the comments! Last week I asked this and Alicia’s random thought was: “How effective are the masks if I can still smell the old people’s “toots” when I’m cutting their hair at the nursing home?!” So…there’s that.