I’M A WINNER!! Well, a little higher up on the loser list. Another of my plays has been included in a festival, and this one is in New York!! Um…state, not city. And it’s still a ten-minute play. I am not downplaying this success, for any writing success at this stage in my life, what with the three kids under the age of seven and the multiple personalities (okay, they call it bi-polar, but if you ask my husband he has a different diagnosis) I should be ecstatic, grateful or at least utterly shocked. And I am. And I have serious designs on full-length plays, just not serious time or energy, not necessarily in that order.

SUMMER LESSON #1. Have you ever re-filled a water gun four-hundred-fifty times while trying your damndest to carry on with other things like, oh, say, EVERYTHING ELSE?!?!?!?! (This is before you figure out to leave a bucket of water out for the “submerge and fill” method.) After the four-hundred-fifty-first time when your two year old says “It’s empty,” you explain that is because he insists on squirting the gun and using up his precious ammunition. You further explain that if he will take a lesson from our esteemed military spin doctors, he should simply fill his squirt gun up to the hilt, wave it around the front yard and point out to his siblings that he has the ultimate power to squirt them, if necessary, as a defensive move, and that he clearly has the superior water power to wipe them off the face of the grass. This will stop all incoming attacks as well as the undesireable side effect of “empty squirt gun.”

SUMMER LESSON #2. Don’t buy squirt guns (or “water squirters” as we so desperately referred to them until our kids entered the outside world). However…it is really, really satisfying to squirt your kids, and sometimes the hose is just too aggressive, especially if you have one of those gardening hose attachments with different choices of water sprays such as “soaker” (boring!), “center spray” (raining!) or “jet” (take that, you PBJ-on-my-barkcloth-curtains-shithead!!).

kim

SUMMERTIME, AND THE LIVIN’ IS…JUST LIKE THE REST OF THE YEAR. Yes, I’m still here. No, I haven’t jumped ship and fled to LJ or some other blogging universe. I’m just here in my 850 square feet of squalor, faced with three children (usually plus an extra niece, nephew and my step-daughter) in the throes of summer vacation and wondering how to make it fun for them and bearable for me (you know, trying to come out at the end of August with the same number of living family members we started with in June). In my dreamy-time-fantasy world, summer with my kids would be a relaxing lemonade and sunscreen picnic with swimming and bonfires and lazy days filled with whatever captured our butterfly fancies, maybe reading on lounge chairs in screened-in porches by a lake, perhaps road trips with stops to taste/converse with local oddities and specialties. Instead their boredom and frustration is amped up, my childcare and patience is dialed down, and my workload has remained unnervingly steady. In other words, we are all horrifically askew, with sunburns. (and strep throat, on a rotating basis.)

I LIKE GRILLS. (or I KISSED A GRILL.) We made the jump and bought an LP grill, the kind that can be turned on with the turn of a wrist. The kind with a burner on the side for what, maybe heating your sauces? (I’ll keep you posted on that one.) It has a cover. It has essentially taken grilling food out of Mike’s realm (fire! coals! tending!) and into mine. (on! off! done!) I knew this was an issue when he wanted to place it on the front porch (see my fire! burning fire!) and I wanted it outside the kitchen door (um…I’m coooking). He had fought the purchase for quite some time and I wasn’t sure why, but at dinner last night three husbands discussed the release of power that comes with buying a grill of this type. No more poking fires with sticks. I am sure this is why the grill manufacturers make them out of stainless steel and otherwise attempt to have them resemble tools or garage paraphenelia. Personally, I, like many women, would like it to match my tangerine Kitchenaid mixer, but that might cause many husbands’ testicles to fall clean off. Hehe. Men. Gotta love them, at least in theory, right? They’d make such great fictional characters and we get to watch them so close up.

oxoxoxox
Kim