Enjoy!

The chaos began about 8:15 last night, with a call from my brother:

“Is Colton still up? Why isn’t he in bed, yet?”

First, I’d like to point out that even on school nights, Colton is never in bed by 8:15. But I played along.

“He’s on spring break this week – burning the midnight oil.”

“Uh… you may want to  double check that.”

What did he meeeaaaan “double check that”?!?!?

It seemed my brother’s wife had been talking to a teacher at one of the district’s other schools, and the subject of spring break had come up.

“Spring break is next week,” he said.

How can that be? I’d planned for spring break to be this week for …. well… weeks, now. I had it in my smart phone calendar and everything. I’d wondered what we’d do all week, because Colton is a.) on crutches and b.) the weather forecast is calling for unseasonably cold temperatures. I’d planned to take him to see Rango today, and the first showing of Hop on Friday.

I’d looked forward to sleeping in. I’d looked forward to no homework, except for reading. I’d looked forward to a well-deserved break from what has been a really tough school year, quite frankly. And a change in spring break plans wasn’t going over well for me. I imagined how well it would go over for Colton.

Phase 2 found me calling Summer. Not that I don’t trust my brother or anything ( ). But this had all the makings of an April Fool’s Day joke coming a few days early. Except that Summer confirmed everything my brother had said: Spring break was still another week away.

This whole fiasco has me wondering what else I’ve mis-scheduled. And whether or not we could actually pull off an extra week of spring break…

-Liz

How much fun are these adjustable denim KitchenKuffs!!

There are several statements that take place in our house over and over again:

• Pick up your dirty clothes
• Chew with your mouth closed
• Throw away your trash

And my all-time least favorite:

• Can someone come push up my sleeves?!?! PLEASE!?!?

Well, Kate, bar the door, those days are gone. May I present:

KitchenKuffs!!!

That’s right, people. It’s time to say goodbye to soggy sleeves!

The brainchild of Barbara Doran, KitchenKuffs mean you’ll never have suds-soaked cuffs (or anything else, for that matter) on your long-sleeved tops EVER AGAIN! I was so impressed when I first saw this product that I contacted Barbara. She gave me a pair of regular and a pair of adjustable KitchenKuffs to review for you guys. I’ve had ample opportunity to try them, and as far as I’m concerned, they are a must-have in every kitchen, bath, basement and garage. I’ve used them while cooking dinner, washing dishes, painting a bookcase and potting flowers. They go on with total ease, and stay right where you put them.

Here’s a video from Barbara showing the myriad of ways she’s put her KitchenKuffs to good use:

To me, this is true American ingenuity – entrepreneurship at its finest! The product has even caught the eye of Martha Stewart’s Dreamers into Doers, where Barbara was recently featured as Doer of the Week.

Shown here are the denim KitchenKuffs (adjustable) and the pepper pattern regular KitchenKuffs

I highly recommend that you pick up a pair and give them a try. They’re machine-washable cotton, made here in the USA, very affordable, and come in a variety of patterns in the regular and adjustable KitchenKuffs. I think these will make great gifts for teachers, gardeners, moms and sisters, dads and brothers – anyone who needs to “Keep their sleeves up!” And at a time when many families are pinching pennies more than ever, KitchenKuffs are a unique and thoughtful gift they’ll use time after time, without having to break the bank!

I love ‘em, Barbara – I know our readers will, too.

-Liz

Visit www.kitchenkuffs.com for a patterns, pricing and sizing.

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As you probably know, hacking is apparently all the rage these days. From Wiki-Leaks to Sony to Mastercard, it would appear no one is safe from the hackers and their misguided quest to create chaos. Not even road signs.

Enter this story, which, much to my chagrin, played out just a few miles from my humble abode:

Then I came across this headline:Police: Man Tries Steal Cop’s Car, Blames ‘Batman’

And there’s the story of the dad who slept in the passenger seat while his 8-year-old cruised at a cool 70 mph down the highway. That’s rich, huh?

Taking the cake, though, was a headline questioning whether or not Hollywood had run out of new ideas, based on the plethora of remakes coming out (think “The Flintstones”, “Red Dawn” and “Footloose”).

Note to Hollywood: It’s a wild, crazy world out there. Ya may want to check it out. Just sayin’.

-Liz Follow @lizrants

As is typical with my daughter, she arrived in North Carolina making quite the grand entrance. I should’ve seen it coming I guess. The first sign that she was off to a rocky start came before she’d gotten out of the county: she’d forgotten the “welcome home” sign that she’d worked on so diligently. So she’d just have to hope Adam could pick her out in a crowd.

The night of Hannah’s arrival in North Carolina, she somehow managed to fall off the hotel room bed and wedge herself between the bed and the wall. Thankfully Lee and Cheryl were there to pull her out of the predicament. How she got there to begin with is anyone’s guess. And quite frankly, we’re probably better off not knowing the details…

All seemed well on Sunday, though. Until my phone rang about 6:30 p.m.

“Whatcha doing, Mother?”

“Um… nothing… what are you doing?”

“Um, well, I just got out of the emergency room.”

I’m sure you all know that in that moment, my head went wild with possible scenarios. Jelly fish? Sting Rays? Shark bite?!?!?! No. She’d been too calm for that one.

“I passed out,” she offered before I could start rattling off my theories.

They’d just left the beach after a day of fun and sun and made it as far as the outside shower area when Cheryl felt Hannah grab her shoulder. As Cheryl turned around, Hannah hit the wooden boards hard and fast, face down and out cold. Heat exhaustion.

Enter the stretcher, a neck brace and joy ride in the ambulance. I’m tellin’ ya, no one knows how to kick off a vacation quite like my daughter, huh?

Now awake and regaining her senses, she felt a tug on her hair, where the EMT was attempting to pull something out of her hair.

“You have a bird feather in your hair,” she told Hannah, who laughed and replied that she’d actually paid someone to put it there. (True story – and just for the record, dear reader and friend Niki says it’s a ring-tail lemur. You be the judge.)

She arrived at the emergency room in her swim suit (as did Cheryl and Lee) leaving enough sand along the trail for a decent castle. Some vital-sign testing, blood drawing and three hours later, she left the ER with orders to drink more water (who knew? right?). A lucky little soul she was that the fall didn’t knock out every tooth in the front of her braces-straightened pearly whites. That would’ve been a real sight for Adam’s homecoming…

Nevertheless, she’d (hopefully) reached No. 3 in the rule of threes. And about 9:15 p.m. Monday night, the moment she, Cheryl and Lee had impatiently waited on for months came, as Marine Lcpl. Adam H. arrived back home on U.S. soil. All was right in the world for my baby girl. Of course, they still have almost a week left in North Carolina, though. Let’s just hope Ms. Entertainment has done enough for one vacation.

-Liz
Follow @lizrants

No more visions of cucumber salads. No more visions of bread and butter and Kosher dill pickles to can. No more sliced cucumbers with salt, vinegar and onions. No more cucumbers. It is a sad day.

Especially considering that this time last year, I was blessed with so many cucumbers that they were served with virtually every meal. Kate was here. Ask her. She’ll remember. Every time she’d say, “I’m starving. What do you have to eat?”, my response was, “have a cucumber, Kate.”

The cucumbers were so successful that the mass production continued well into the early fall, at which point I really didn’t care if I ever saw a cucumber again. Of course, the long cold winter changed all that, and by the time spring arrived, I was more than eager to become the queen of the garden yet again.

Things started off with a bang. Beautiful green leaves were as bountiful as the blossoms that promised another stellar crop. I watered and fertilized and gently placed the stems on their trellis as the plants reached for the sky. Except that the more the plants grew, the uglier they looked, the more I wondered what had gone wrong, and the further away my dreams of cucumbers a-plenty drifted.

Until I was finally forced to do the unthinkable. I pulled up every single plant. Ironically, the main root system was virtually non-existent. I say that because one usually expects a plant to give up a little fight as it’s pulled from the ground – to offer a little bit of resistance to its own murder by the hands of she who planted it. But there was no fight.

The thing that bothers me the most is that I don’t know what went wrong – really I don’t. I should’ve been able to grow the cucumbers with ease – just like the tomatoes. (And they’re not looking as great as I’d like, either.) So now it’s a quest to find out what went wrong. Had I not watered enough? Had I watered too much? Had they succumbed to heat exhaustion, left with no choice than to die on the vine?

Better yet, is it too late to plant new cucumber plants? Heck, that may have been the best idea I’ve had all summer. On that note, I’m off to Southern States.

-Liz

Follow @lizrants

Me either. But apparently, someone with North Carolina plates in a central Kentucky WalMart who didn’t speak a lick of English was faced with just such a scenario this week. According to bystanders, the chickens were left in the car for about 30 minutes before police arrived on the scene and paged the car’s owner:

“Attention WalMart shoppers. Will the customers with the dozen live chickens in their vehicle please come to the customer service desk?”

…

“Paging the chicken car people.”

…

The sounds of crickets chirping was broken only when the store paged the customers in Spanish, to which they responded, only to be greeted by the police. Because the whole chickens-in-the-car fiasco was now the scene of a murder. That’s right. One of the chickens had fried. Who could’ve predicted that outcome?

In the end, police didn’t press charges, choosing instead to leave that to animal control, who confiscated the remaining chickens currently being nursed back to health – assuming they didn’t suffer brain damage from the extreme heat.

Needless to say, this story of a chicken murder in the Bluegrass leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Namely, who drives around with a dozen live (well, they were all alive when they went into WalMart… presumably…) chickens in their car? Had they won them at the Lexington Lions Club Bluegrass Fair?

“Step right up! Try your hand at the spinning table of goldfish! Ring three fish bowls and you could walk away with a Dodge Neon, pre-loaded with 12 live chickens!”

Oh wait. That’s not why the fair comes to mind.

The fair comes to mind because of the Casey Anthony dunking booth. That’s right. Clearly, no standard was too low for fair organizers, who thought it would be cool to make money off a woman who, even though acquitted on charges that she murdered her own child, remains a despicable excuse for a human at best.

Set up just inside the entrance to one of the largest fairs in the Bluegrass, the booth was garnering quite the attention as one might expect.

By Tuesday, fair organizers had received more than enough complaints to warrant a shutdown of the dunking booth. Now there’s a shocker for ya. Not.

The way I see it, fair organizers have but one option if they want to save face at this point. Set up a table of spinning goldfish bowls and offer a Dodge Neon filled with chickens to the lucky winner who rings three bowls in a row. I’m just sayin’.

-Liz

Follow @lizrants

Well, not the real beginning, where you go through everything you’ve owned, closely examining each item and assigning it value a scale of 1-10 – one being something you’ve never used or haven’t used in many years, 10 being something you use daily or attach such sentimental value that you wouldn’t get rid of it even if there was no food on the table (okay, so maybe you would under those circumstances. I’m just saying…). Then you assign the items a monetary value – one acceptable, or at least one that can be bargained with, in the world of all things yard sale. And the real beginning is also the point at which you question your sanity, wondering what ever possessed you to have a yard sale.

Nope, I’m not starting there. I’m starting at Saturday morning, 6:15 a.m. Bert said they’d be here by 6 a.m., Summer said it would be 7, so I split the difference, exiting the back door by 6:30, with the morning’s first cup o’ joe in hand. As it turned out, they’d gone with Bert’s arrival time (and I’m sure it was all his idea) and were already in the garage, working like crazy people. I was still half-asleep.

Our start time was advertised at 8 a.m., but we all know how that goes – 8 a.m.means they show up at 6 – 6 a.m. means they show up at 4, and so forth. I’d have put a high noon start on things, personally. But what do I know? Anywho, in true yard sale fashion, the customers were rolling in well before 8 a.m. One lady in particular already had her barter hat on. Not that she was necessarily offering a win-win deal. Oh, no. She was low-balling, in effort to make a steal as far as I’m concerned.

Summer had two nice wooden bar stools – virtually new, lacking any wear and tear – marked at $5 each.

“I’ll give you $5 for both of them,” the lady said.

“No, sorry. I can’t do that,” Summer responded.

So the lady continued her way around all our junk – er, treasures – as her low-ball tactics continued. But she was convinced she’d talk Summer down on those blasted bar stools. I was walking back into the house at this point – we were gonna need a lot more coffee. I wondered if I could take the sound of one-sided bargaining all day long, and whether or not it was too late to call off the whole thing.

And do you know that lady wouldn’t give up? Again, she made her offer to Summer, acting as if she’d surely be the only customer we’d have all day. Which is about the time Summer’s patience cracked.

“We haven’t even opened yet! In fact, we don’t actually open until 8 a.m.,” she said, although I can guarantee you that wasn’t all Summer was thinking. I think barter lady got the hint, though, by the tone in Summer’s voice. To tell you the truth, I don’t even remember if the lady and her husband bought anything, causing me to wonder if they were really interested in buying.I maintain they were plants, paid for by someone who has nothing better to do than send totally annoying people to other people’s yard sales for the sole purpose of… well… annoying the h-e-double-hockey-sticks out of them. In fact, in many ways, that lady set the tone for the day. As the hours ticked away, though, other customers added to the mayhem, ultimately giving me enough for a list of what not to do next time you grace a yard sale:

Yard Sale Etiquette:

• Do not make absurd offers before the yard sale even begins – even if you’re an antique dealer or flea market booth-holder. Exception: if you can offer a fair deal for everything out there, take it away the same day and pay cash, maybe we can talk. Anything to make the yard sale madness stop…
• Please read the price tags. Oh, I understand that other people may not price their things, but we aren’t other people – and we did a fine job of making sure things were clearly marked.
• Please don’t act like you’re doing us a favor by showing up at our sale. We’re a friendly little bunch, Summer, Bert and I, and the least you can do is answer when we say, “Hi! How are you?” in our friendliest of friendly voices.
• Please don’t try to pay with a hundred dollar bill at 8:15. Nothing like trying to wipe out all the yard sale holder’s small bills first thing in the morning.
• If a book is marked 50 cents, please think twice before asking if we’d take 30 cents. No. 1, we priced everything in quarter multiples. Anything over a dollar was an even amount – i.e. $1 or $5 or whatever, not $4.88. We aren’t WalMart. If you really can’t spare that 20 cents, at least offer a quarter, because we aren’t going to have nickels or dimes to make your change. Moreover, is it really that hard to fork over 50 cents for a book in good condition? Seriously?? And if you say the book is old, doesn’t that make it an antique, meaning we could theoretically charge much, much more?
• If an area is blocked off, as in, if furniture is strategically places so as to restrict your access, chances are good that everything behind said area is not for sale.
• No, we don’t take personal checks.
• No, we don’t have any Beatles albums, and no way are you getting The Monkees vinyls, either.

I’m just sayin…

-Liz

My first hint that something was wrong came a few nights ago, when I came out of Hannah’s room with her basket of 847 bottles of nail polish, to see if somewhere in the mix there might possibly be a bottle of bright red (the perfect color for the 4th of July).

“What are you doing, Mom?”

“I’m going to paint my nails. Do you mind?”

“Yes. Don’t paint your nails. You’re perfect just like you are.”

Oh is that right? I thought.

“So what’s up with that? Why do you have issues with me painting my nails? Hannah paints her nails.”

“Yes, but I’ve known her all my life and she’s always painted her nails.”

“You’ve known me all your life, too, knucklehead.”

“Well that’s different.”

Why we continued this discussion was beyond me – I know better than to reason with the unreasonable . So I dropped it.

Enter yesterday’s trip to the store. Colton was helping me get everything out of the cart and on to the self-checkout, when all of a sudden his whole demeanor changed.

“What is your problem, son?”

“I’ll tell you in the car,” he said, with his face looking like he’d just seen a ghost.

Once we got to the car, he dispensed with his usually helpful attitude and hopped straight in, never saying a word. Until I got in and started the car.

“Is that fingernail polish for Hannah?”

“Nope. It’s mine. Isn’t it pretty?”

“Mom, I told you I didn’t want you to paint your nails.”

Here we go again, I thought.

I spent a  good five minutes trying to figure out what his issue was. Was he attacked by a giant display of nail polish in another life? Had someone with painted nails been mean to him? Is he allergic to the smell of fresh polish? Am a raising a MALE CHAUVINIST PIG?!?!?!

I mentioned all the women we know who paint their nails – especially women in the family.

“Even Nan paints her nails?” he asked looking like he’d just lost his best friend.

“Yes, even Nan. So look here, mister. You’re gonna have to come up with some solid reasoning if you want me to even consider your request.

“Look at it this way, Mom. I don’t mind that you wear earrings.”

“You’re darn right, you don’t mind. And I have half a mind to go buy a pair the size of basketballs, just because I can. You don’t make these decisions.”

Stumped for any  rhyme or reason for his hatred of me with red nails – or any other color, for that matter – I once again dropped the whole discussion, at least where he was concerned. Now, I’m on my own quest to find out what possible reasons he could have for the anti-nail polish stance, and I don’t care who I have to consult.

“Oh, and Mom, don’t tell anyone I said that about you painting your nails, OK?”

“OK, Colton. I wont say a word…”

At least not until this bright red nail polish dries…

-Liz

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How about this novel approach? Try a shotgun. That’s right. Apparently Shaun Murphy of England recently took that route, after, in his mind, all other avenues that point toward relief had been blocked.

According to  a story that appeared in The Telegraph, Murphy found the shotgun in a hedge, and, one would assume, figured, “Hey, I’ll just blast off this wart!”

So he did what any self-inflicting, wart-hating, crazy person would do. He liquored up, took aim and fired. Try to contain your shock as I tell you the gun shot blew off most of his finger. I mean, who could’ve guessed that? Right?

Well, the wart-killer didn’t guess it. In fact, he blamed the fact that he’d taken off more than just the wart on the gun’s recoil. (Of course he did.)

“I didn’t expect to lose my finger as well when I shot it, but the gun recoiled and that was it,’ he said. “The wart was gone and so was most of my finger. There was nothing left of it, so no chance of re-attaching it.”

Oddly enough, Wart Man’s troubles didn’t end there. Illegal possession of a firearm could have landed him 15 years in the slammer. But after pleading guilty to theft of the shotgun by finding, and possessing a firearm without a valid certificate, he got off with a suspended prison term, and was ordered to complete 100 hours of unpaid community service.

Anyway, after the court hearing, the man’s lawyer told The Telegraph that Murphy had been “a victim of his own stupidity when domestic pressures got to him.”

Indeed…

-Liz

Let’s just say I’m currently Enemy No. 1 on my daughter’s list through no fault of my own.

It seems her car has a slight problem (at least that’s how the women among us would likely term it). It’s running super hot and leaking a fluid. Which wasn’t on my daughter’s list of things to take care of last night with a double-header softball game four counties away.

So I took the car for a spin before she left. And when the hot/cold gauge (does it have a real name? Oh, what does it matter) goes to hot after a couple of miles, I feel pretty confident that we’ve got a problem brewing.

“You can’t drive this car,” I’d said.

“What am I supposed to do? I have ball games and if I’m not there, the   whole team will have to forfeit because they won’t have enough players.”

What I really wanted to say was that the lack of players was a planning problem – that the team needed more than the bare minimum of players to begin with. What if someone got the flu or was abducted by aliens or … what if someone’s car broke down on the way? But I didn’t.

Instead I did what I do. I attempted to fix things. In fact, I   outdid myself. What I discovered was that she was out of that radiator cooling stuff.  I think. Because I couldn’t really read through her opaque tank. So I ran to the closest auto parts store with the leaking product from the car on a paper towel.

After explaining the story, I left with 2 bottles of the coolant and directives stating I must NOT open that one little cap if the car was hot or warm or it would explode and I would be sorry. Unfortunately I wasn’t sure exactly which cap they were referring to. Nor was I sure which tank the coolant went into.

But I was taking this one for the team, I figured. Learn something about cars, I told myself. I started making calls, too. To Bert (Summer’s husband), my brother and my dad. They all seemed to concur that there was something wrong. Go figure. Bert and Dad even agreed the problem could be one of three things, from simple to “I don’t really want to know this” problems. Meanwhile Hannah talked someone crazier than I to drive her to her games as her car sits un-drive-able.

There is solace to be found. One day, she’ll have a daughter of her own. And said daughter’s car will overheat. Her daughter will be a little snit and blame Hannah, while Hannah will feverishly look for a way to fix the problem. And then Hannah will call me. And I’ll tell her what my dad told me: “I’m glad that’s not my daughter.”

And the curse will be complete

-Liz

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