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 I think the title of this post says it all. The hat that I'm wearing on the left is actually a big brown long-necked turkey. The legs are tied under my chin. From head on, the hat looks more like something from a bad porn movie. The hat on the right looks like a giant roasted turkey on Colleen's head. I found these at a thrift shop today. Too fun! Happy New Year's everyone!!!
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The hubs came home for the holidays and forgot to bring his laptop. I'm about to head to Pensacola to visit my family for several days and I'll be taking the one working laptop with me. To understand the significance of this you need to know that we gave up Cable TV with the recession, so any TV watching has to be done via DVDs or the internet on a laptop. And my husband can't stand to be without cable-TV access, especially when there might be college football on.
So with my New Year's Resolution to "go with the flow" in mind, I told the hubs, "Why don't you just drive down to Montgomery and back on Sunday and get your laptop? You can check on stuff while you're there." We're talking a 5-hour roundtrip--about $40 in gas. So the hubs, says "But it's our one day together." Me: "I'll be packing and getting ready to go, so I won't really be available." So that decided it for the hubs. He wanted to drive my car, which was unusual since he loves his Sebring convertible, but again I shrugged and went with the flow. It wasn't like I was going anywhere on Sunday. When the hubs got back last night, he said, "Something's really wrong with your car. It was shaking real bad on the drive. I'll take it in to Mike's [the mechanic] tomorrow morning." Of course, I'm supposed to leave for Pensacola then, but go with the flow, go with the flow. Better to fix the car than have car trouble while making a 5-hour drive by myself to Florida. So the hubs takes the car to Mike's this morning while I'm still snoozing [the hubs is FANTASTIC!] and guess what? The tie rod was on the verge of breaking. And the tie rod controls the steering. Broken tie rod equals no steering. All I could think was: OH. MY. GOD. I just avoided a major, and possibly very nasty, accident traveling by MYSELF to Florida. The hubs leaving his computer at work was a GODSEND, not an annoyance. And you know what? This isn't the first time something like this has happened. But I needed the reminder that blessings are often disguised as annoyances or negatives. I'm still blown away by the Universe stepping in to save me today. I must still have important work to do before I die. In other news: the first fruitcake arrived for my Fruitcake Sanctuary! Yay! And it's a good one, too! Nice and heavy, chock full of candied-fruit goodness. Also, I give my top three reading recommendations for World Weaver Press's website blog: http://worldweaverpress.com/2013/12/27/reading-recommendations-2013-top-book-picks-from-wwps-authors-and-staff/ And once the shock of the near-death experience subsides, I'll be heading down to Pensacola to spend New Year's with my mom, sister, brother-in-law, four nieces, a HUGE pack of dogs, and the Secret Chickens. Happy New Year's, Y'all! PS: Would be burglers: while I'm gone, the hubs will be at home with the two PITBULLS. Breaking and Entering is not advised. Not unless you want to lose vital body parts!  A Choir of Steiff Kangaroos I'll be taking a short holiday hiatus for a couple of days, but I'll leave you all with a choir of kangaroos singing Christmas carols at Casa Sullivan to tide you over in the meantime. Happy Holidays! Happy Hanukkah! Merry Christmas! Jolly Winter Solstice! Fabulous Festivus! And don't forget to set your scales back ten pounds tonight! I had every intention of posting Part 2 of the Crazy in Chicago story, but haven't had internet access for more than 24 hours. Which, of course, has been driving ME crazy because I'm sorta an internet junkie. I find myself getting really anxious when I can't connect and I don't have a Smartphone, so it's laptop or nuthin'.
But the hubs is home and called the cable company and it turned out our modem had died, but then when he picked up a new one (with a built-in router--whoot!), the cable woman transposed some very important numbers and he then spent over an hour with cable support on the phone to figure out why the new modem wasn't working. But now that it finally is, it's time to go run errands before the bank and post office close, etc, etc,. Plus, I think Bo just got out of our yard. Eeeee! So keep tuning in and I hope to have something new about Pepper's story in the near future. When you think of infamy the following things might come to mind: Zumba instructors turned prostitute, a newlywed bride pushing her husband off a cliff, and a man kidnapping three young women and keeping them hostage in his house for ten years. What you normally don't think of is Yuppies keeping a very clean, very quiet, and very smart Vietnamese pot-bellied pig in their suburban home as a pet.
But this very thing is what sparked a huge controversy in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst between 1999-2001 and inflamed a couple of sociopaths who lived next door to us to the point where they started a campaign to have us run out of town on a rail, including putting signs in their windows facing our house with slogans like "Good riddance to bad trash" and videotaping our backyard in an attempt to catch us violating our pig's two-hour maximum time allowed outside in the yard that the city council had decreed. It was Crazy in Chicago for sure and one of the most hellish times in my life as good people stepped up to the plate to help us keep our pet pig and crazies came out of the woodwork to try to slander and terrorize us. We even made the Chicago Tribune as our battle to keep Pepper the pig went to the Elmhurst city hall. Fortunately, the city quickly realized that the cuckoos next door were attempting to persecute us and had zero grounds for their accusations or behavior, but it was an interesting two years in the sense of the Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. More details to follow in future blogs...Stay tuned! You'll be amazed at the lengths people will go to to get their selfish way. Every Christmas Eve Day my family would make what seemed like a tremendously long drive along the back roads from Montgomery, AL to Gadsden, AL to meet up with my dad's large, wacky family for their annual Christmas Eve Party.
We'd review everyone's name in the car and it was like reciting Santa's reindeer with a country twist: Aunt Tootsie, Aunt Dixie, Aunt Fredda, Aunt Emmer, Aunt NeeNee, Aunt Sarah, Aunt Frances, Uncle Ernest, Uncle Frank and Uncle Skeeter. And then all of the cousins: Wayne, Kay, Shannon, Brent, P.D., Larry, Rebecca, and Neil. To the top of the porch, to the top of the wall, now dash away, dash away, dash away all. And like jolly old elves the aunts and uncles were lively and merry and lavished us with food, drink, and gifts. The cousins would run around Aunt NeeNee's house like animals let loose from their cages (one of my mother's favorite phrases) or head out to play with Aunt NeeNee's three-legged dog, Moose. And it was great. Until . . . Someone would give me and my little sister see-through pajamas or a see-through nightie as our Christmas gift. Did they not realize that we were little kids? Oh, the mortification! I'd hold up the embarrassing item; it would always look more like something a grown woman would wear than a little girl. Of course, the aunts were all much older than my dad and he was in his late 30s. But still, how hard is it to pick age-appropriate gifts for children? "Try it on!" the aunts and uncles would holler. "We want to see if it fits." They'd roar with laughter and I'd shake my head no. No way was I trying on see-through stuff in front of everyone. Ick! Triple ick! They were probably all kidding, but still, I just wanted to melt into the area rug. These garments were also always made of flammable material. It said so right on the tag. FLAMMABLE. And considering I set my plastic trash can on fire for kicks once, the last thing I needed was flammable, see-through sleepwear. Ah, the ghosts of Christmas Gifts Past...gotta love 'em. I lost my pet kingsnake in the dash of my husband's Pontiac Sunfire. We were coming home from a vet visit. Steve (short for Stephen Kingsnake) traveled in a pillowcase tied with a ribbon. This is actually a recommended and inexpensive travel container because a pillowcase allows oxygen flow, but keeps the snake calm because they can't see through the fabric. However, after the vet had seen Steve, I didn't tie the ribbon tight enough. And as I was driving home, unbeknownst to me, Steve slithered through the slack and disappeared into the dash of my husband's car. I discovered his escape when I drove into the driveway and picked up an empty pillowcase on the passenger seat. A search of the small Sunfire yielded nada. I spent the next couple of hours lying on my back in the driver's side footwell with my knees bent and my feet on the driver's seat shining a flashlight up into the bowels of the dash. No snake. And it's not exactly like you can call a snake and it'll come to you. Snakes have vestigial ears; they can't hear a thing. Man, what a bitch! I'd just lost one of my three cats to bone marrow cancer a few days before and now my pet snake was LOST, too???? How in the hell was I going to get him out? Could he get out of the car by crawling through the engine? Was I ever going to see him again??? When I told the hubs what had happened, he said, "Um, you're driving MY car from now on. I don't want a snake popping out on me." A week went by with no sign of Stephen Kingsnake. I figured he must have been able to exit the dash via the car's underbelly and had probably slithered off into the neighborhood. Boy, was I ever bummed out. I loved that snake. He and I were buds. After several days of not finding a snake anywhere in the car, I figured he was either gone or had died. So it came as a complete surprise when I was driving home from work and Steve pops out of the dash near my feet as I'm doing 65 mph on the interstate in the CHICAGO area. And when I say popped out, he POPPED out. Exactly like you see in the movies where a snake drops down onto an unsuspecting passerby in the jungle. Except this was from underneath the dash in a Pontiac Sunfire. I had to make a blind grab for him since I was in the middle lane and going way too fast to look away from the road more than a couple of seconds or pull over. But I got lucky and nabbed the five-foot long Houdini way down near my feet. So there I was rocketing along the interstate driving a STICK SHIFT one handed while holding onto a snake with the other hand. Because if I let go, I'd probably never see him again. I had to shift gears with my left hand and steer at the same time, but I managed to veer onto my exit without causing a crash. As I gently tugged on Steve, he began to release his hold on the innards of the dash and I wound him around my right forearm. Because, you see, I had no way to contain him other than holding him. It was just me and him and my purse (too small) and the car. And boy did he ever smell bad! A pungent, sour odor. Snakes don't usually have any odor, but when badly frightened, some snakes will emit a noxious scent to deter predators. I was guessing that Steve had had the week from snake hell. No water, no heat rock or sun lamp, and he'd had to endure the terrifying vibrations of the car as I drove to and from work for a week. Really, I was surprised he was still alive after all that. But he went on to live another twelve years to the ripe old age of twenty, which is pretty old for a kingsnake.  The King (snake) and I To get into the spirit of the holidays, I've composed a little ditty inspired by my Cleo Tidwell paranormal mystery series. (Sung to the tune: "The Twelve Days of Christmas" On the first day of Christmas, Bertram gave to me: a Velvet Elvis with a shopping spree. On the 2nd day of Xmas, Bertram gave to me: two majorettes, and a Velvet Elvis with a shopping spree. On the 3rd day of Xmas, Bertram gave to me: three Krispy Kremes, two majorettes, and a Velvet Elvis with a shopping spree. On the 4th day of Xmas, Bertram gave to me: four crazy kooks, three Krispy Kremes, two majorettes, and a Velvet Elvis with a shopping spree. On the 5th day of Xmas, Bertram gave to me: five...BIG weredogs... four crazy kooks, three Krispy Kremes, two majorettes, and a Velvet Elvis with a shopping spree. On the 6th day of Xmas, Bertram gave to me: six trips to Graceland, five...BIG weredogs...four crazy kooks, three Krispy Kremes, two majorettes, and a Velvet Elvis with a shopping spree. On the 7th day of Xmas, Bertram gave to me: seven weresharks swimming, six trips to Graceland, five...BIG weredogs...four crazy kooks, three Krispy Kremes, two majorettes, and a Velvet Elvis with a shopping spree. On the 8th day of Xmas, Bertram gave to me: eight shades of Elvis, seven weresharks swimming, six trips to Graceland, five...BIG weredogs...four crazy kooks, three Krispy Kremes, two majorettes, and a Velvet Elvis with a shopping spree. On the 9th day of Xmas, Bertram gave to me: nine redneck mermaids, eight shades of Elvis, seven weresharks swimming, six trips to Graceland, five...BIG weredogs...four crazy kooks, three Krispy Kremes, two majorettes, and a Velvet Elvis with a shopping spree. On the 10th day of Xmas, Bertram gave to me: ten vampire hookers, nine redneck mermaids, eight shades of Elvis, seven weresharks swimming, six trips to Graceland, five...BIG weredogs...four crazy kooks, three Krispy Kremes, two majorettes, and a Velvet Elvis with a shopping spree. On the 11th day of Xmas, Bertram gave to me: eleven spaceship rentals, ten vampire hookers, nine redneck mermaids, eight shades of Elvis, seven weresharks swimming, six trips to Graceland, five...BIG weredogs...four crazy kooks, three Krispy Kremes, two majorettes, and a Velvet Elvis with a shopping spree. On the 12th day of Xmas, Bertram gave to me: twelve deep-fried zombies, eleven spaceship rentals, ten vampire hookers, nine redneck mermaids, eight shades of Elvis, seven weresharks swimming, six trips to Graceland, five...BIG weredogs...four crazy kooks, three Krispy Kremes, two majorettes...and a Velvet Elvis with a shopping spree. Happy Holidays, Y'all, from Cleo and Bertram Tidwill of Allister, Alabama!  Enter to win one of two free Advanced Reading Copies of my newest novel The Weredog Whisperer at Goodreads. Click on the link below to enter. Giveway ends in less than fourteen hours. Novel officially released on December 31, 2013. Although Weredog Whisperer is the second book in my Cleo Tidwell paranormal mystery series, the book can be read as a stand alone novel. https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/73565-the-weredog-whisperer Enter now to win a chance at a FREE copy! Childhood trauma can be super dramatic like getting kidnapped by a killer clown for a week (or forever) or it can be doled out in smaller doses of horrifying moments. My earliest memory is one of trauma. The big kids across the street locked me in their laundry room with the lights off and left me there. Even worse, they mashed my little fingers in the door as they were shoving me in and I was trying to get out.
I was only two years old. My dad found me and took me home. How he knew I was across the street and in the laundry room in the back of the Barksdale home, I don't know. I was so shaken, all I could do was sob. Plus my mashed fingers hurt like a son of a bitch. When I was a little older--maybe four or five--the kid next door passed his pet chicken over the fence so that I could hold it. His name was John (the boy, not the chicken) and he was eleven. He seemed like a teenager to me. I'd never held a chicken before and was so excited to have the chance. The chicken was excited, too. Oops! Make that EXCITABLE. It flapped its wings in my face and startled me into dropping it. It hit the ground running. My German Shepherd then became very excited and chased Mr. Chicken down. You can probably guess what happened next. My dog killed that chicken. Ripped it apart. It all happened so fast. One minute I was holding a super cool pet chicken and the next it was nothing but blood, guts, and feathers strewn across the backyard. But you know what the worst part was? I ran inside to tell my mom what had happened. She told me to go clean it up. Didn't come outside. Didn't say anything to the neighbor kid. Didn't console me. Just "Go clean it up." So there I was, four-years old, trying to clean up chicken innards and feeling like the whole thing had been my fault. It was distressing to see a chicken's HEART (I had no idea it would look like a red ping pong ball.) But really, in my defense, the kid next door should never have passed his pet chicken over the fence to a preschooler with a big dog in the yard. I'm sorry, but that's just a no brainer in my book when you're eleven. And to top it off, the rest of the "big kids" on the street badgered me about killing John's chicken for weeks afterward. "Why did you let your dog kill John's chicken," they'd say. My older self would have snarked back, "Hey, how about a little personal responsibility, people?" But my four-year old self just stuttered some lame reply. My next childhood trauma would also involve a bird, but this time it would be a much bigger bird--an ostrich. |
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