I feel so alone.

When I was a little kid in the 70s, it seemed to me that the world ceasing to exist was a very real problem. I'm sure there were some bright spots in the movies and tv shows released in the day, (Hiya Herbie the Love Bug!), but what stands out most in my mind are the made for tv movies where the earth blows up, aliens mutilate all the cows, we have to eat each other, or all the above. I lived each day as if it were my last, but not in the good way where I was all "Carpe Diem!" It was more a constant looking over my shoulder, peeking through closed drapes, and finding every adult extreeeeemely suspicious. Because very probably, they were just an alien wearing adult skin.

In specific, there was a lovely little film called Where Have All the People Gone? Seems some solar flares made everyone disintegrate and turn to white powder. Well, not everyone. Some people were lucky enough not to be effected by solar flares because they're awesome or because they happened to be in a cave when it happened. So they got to walk around and find piles of white powder in the shape of bodies...still in their clothes. Because everyone knows that solar flares with the power of disintegration do not harm clothes, silly.  I could be imagining this, but I seem to recall someone driving a wood paneled station wagon down a street filled with flat clothes with powder in the them, and then stopping, standing by the open door and screaming, "Where have all the people gone?????"  Also, I'm pretty sure all the dogs were crazy and wanted to eat you.

To this day, I cannot lay out an outfit of clothes flat on a bed without thinking of it.

I bring this up because this morning when I logged into Blogger, I was presented with a similar eerie situation. Every. Single. One. Of. You. was gone.

According to Blogger, I follow no one. Which is sort of bad ass in a Clint Eastwood way, but nuh uh, I do too follow people. But you're all gone.

So, pretty please, keep me from driving my station wagon out into the middle of the freeway and yelling and put a link to your blog in the comments?  And I'll travel around and find everyone else that is connected that I collected over the last five years. After I get done watching the entire movie, which someone has apparently put on youtube.

PS - Huge foreshadowing...in the first two lines of dialog, the mom says, "Doesn't all the quiet make you crazy?"  Dun Dun Dunnnnnnn.

PPS - Huger foreshadowing...the the first five minutes, all the siblings and mom give each other come-hither eyes that kind of creep me out. But could come in handy for the regeneration of the human population.

Labor Day 2011

Since it's labor day weekend, I'm now going to treat you to a minute-by-minute rundown of the two times I was actually in labor.*

Go grab yourself a big frosty Bloody Mary and get comfortable kids, this is going to be goddam riveting.

Not really.  I'm going to go outside with a beer and a bulldog and pretend I have a union job.

Happy three days off in a row.

xoxo,
LGBG

PS - Exactly why do people write about that for the whole internet?  Because, bluck.

Is this heaven? No. It's Iowa.

If you read the post I wrote yesterday - I hope you remember it well, because I've taken it down. Although LGBG is often silly rants about things, I don't want it to be about people. Not cool. So, it was a limited edition collector's item post and it's no longer available. Maybe you can find it on eBay or something.

What I should've been ranting writing about was last weekend! Because it was nearly almostly as fun as I thought it was going to be. Most of the parts anyway.

It began at midnight Thursday.

I drove across town and put the gigantic middle schooler on a bus.

Please note dashboard clock. Midnight thirty. Yawn. I am such a good parent

Buh-bye gigantic middle schooler! Hope that's really your rowing coach and not that creepy guy from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang who tricks kids with candy but they're really getting into a jail cell! On wheels! I hated that guy.

Then I came home and slept for a few minutes then got up and said goodbye to the future politician kid.

I didn't say "stick-em up" so not all together sure why he's doing that. It's a little Nixon-esque. Hmmm.

Then, I got on an airplane.

And I didn't get off that bitch until it landed in Iowa, baby. Then I found a shuttle where a guy who was going to his 55th class reunion completely ignored me because I'm a girl and totally monopolized the conversation of everyone in the van. So when we got off and he looked down his nose at me I made sure that I tipped the driver way more than he did right in front of him. So there, old dude.

And then I checked into a historic hotel in downtown Des Moines called the Savery. Have I told you I really like historic hotels? I do. Most of them aren't that nice room-wise, but the lobbies, lawdy. I highly recommend old hotel lobbies.

Then. I waited. And waited. And waited. Because my kid was still on the bus. And my sista-from-anotha-mista who is my best friend I've never actually met? Was working. Bored. Bored. Bored. Damn, I thought. Iowa sucks.

Then she finally texted me and I felt better. It went something like this:

Tracey: I could sure use a beer right now.
Penne: There's no minibar in my room. I should've had drinks on the plane.

Long wait. I'm bored again. Stupid Iowa. But I find a good movie on TV with that kid in it who used to be on Third Rock from the Sun but in this movie he's all grown up and he's an architect only he writes greeting cards for a living and  I start thinking...hmmm, it's kind of weird that I'm going out for dinner with someone I've never ever met ever, I think I should order room service and finish this very awesome movie with the Third Rock from the Sun kid in it. Only all grown up.

But then I get this text:
Tracey: We're five minutes away! Will pick you up in a white Explorer.
Penne: This feels like eHarmony a little bit.
Tracey: Nope. Match.com!
Penne: I just flashed a white Explorer. Totally wasn't you.

And then she pulled up and I actually met a real life person, not just a blog. She was funny and awesome and if she lived on my block she and Spanxy and I would be a FORCE, I tell you. All through dinner one of us would say "You should know this about me..." and then the other one would say, "OMG, me TOO" and we laughed so much our cheeks hurt. And then we said goodbye, but hopefully not forever. I love Iowa.

Me and the Sista. Lookit how awesomely our hair matches. Separated at birth, I tell you.

I shall report on the kid's regatta at another point - but you should know that Iowa in the morning is pretty lovely.

Photo courtesy of the gigantic middle schooler. I was totally asleep for this part.

Where to begin?

I should start by saying that I've spent a goodly amount of time considering changing the name of my blog to "Adventures in the ER" or "Super Fun Times Bleeding in Public"...but I know how mommy blogs  are kind of popular, and referencing drinking whilst mommying is also big...so maybe it should just be "Mommy's Bleeding - Get her a Cocktail!" Oh ha ha, that'd be rich.

Turns out, I'm just sorta clumsy. Or I go too fast. Or the bulldog wants me dead. One of those things. Or all of those things put together.

I won't go into terrible bloody detail, because if you know me in real life, I've already bored you with the slow-mo reenactment of tidily drilling straight through my thumb with a wood screw and the resulting fleshy hamburger that exited my body through the new hole as the drill bit reversed and returned. I've already relived in exacting detail stepping onto a dog toy, accelerating due to a combination of freshly polished hardwood floors and completely treadless Birkenstocks and slamming forward at Mach-3 stopping only when my already substantial nose broke my fall into the large DVD player I was carrying.

If you know me, I've described to you the five stitches it took on the outside of my nose, the crimson and violet bags drooping underneath my eyes for the week following, the vertical fracture of my proboscis that still throbs daily, the clouds in my brain as the concussion cleared. I've demonstrated the lack of feeling in my thumb by poking at it in front of you. I've shown you the bills from the ER.

What I have not done is post pictures of my temporary disfigurement like I did with my children. Ethical? Perhaps not, but it is afterall, my blog.

I will tell you, however, that after receiving three shots in my face to numb my nose enough for stitches, I will never, ever, even consider Botox.

And, I will tell you that none of it compares to the pain I experienced when my hard drive crashed and the online back-up system I've trusted for years didn't really do everything I thought it was doing.

In short, it's kind of been a mess over here in Little Girl Land.

But the stitches are out, the bruises are gone. I sort of remember most of everything, and I have a big fat shiny new hard drive with almost everything I want on it. Somewhere. And I have a new external harddrive that holds a terabyte of information and is so beautiful I want to have children with it.

Thanks for waiting on me.

PS to Cupcake Murphy: I think "Haiku Laureate" is the nicest thing anyone's ever said regarding the badass bulldog. Thanks for giving me the oomph to dive in again.

Fully deserving of a space on your bookmarks toolbar.

In addition to all the funny peeps I read, thought I'd share with you some of my favorite little diversions.  In case you're interested, and even if you're not, here's what I'm looking at instead of doing whatever it is I told you I was going to be doing.


Missed Connections - painfully adorable illustrations of actual personal ads. Funny, charming, heart-warming and heart-breaking all at once. The artist is Sophie Blackall - and she has an etsy site, too. Go buy her stuff.

Dinosaurs and Robots - They had me at dinosaurs. This one is about all kinds of cool stuff...as in actual stuff. Like Roald Dahl's writing hut or a vacation home made from shipping containers, Ipod amplifiers, vintage advertising or Guinness posters. It's always different, unexpected and cool. As far as I'm concerned, it's why the internet exists.

 

Sketch for the Day - Artist Ira Robbins gives the whole world little glimpses into his everyday life and they're awesome. I love his people on the subway, and there's a dude in a hat that reminds me simultaneously of Walter Mattheau and my bulldog.

 

Forgotten Bookmarks - A guy who works in a used bookstore finds photos, notes, cards, and all matter of flat stuff in the books - and very kindly shares it online. Sometimes it's multi-page letters, others just a photo, but it is always interesting and voyeuristic. And makes you go through your own bookshelves to make sure you haven't stashed anything wacky in there. Recently, there's been a bunch of contests, which aren't all that interesting, but it's worth checking a couple times of week anyway.

 

Happy surfing.

Six degrees of separation. Or more like four. Possibly, three.

There is, in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a lady who blogs under the name The Pioneer Woman. About eleventy-bazillion people visit her website every day. She is cute, charming and funny. Besides running a website with a whole lot of pages that she updates like, gah, every day, she home schools her four kids, helps out on a huge cattle/horse ranch, experiments with photography and remodels a guest lodge. Without cursing in public. And because she was apparently bored last year, she wrote and photographed a cookbook.

That went to the top of the best seller lists.

Obviously then, we have a lot in common.

If you follow PW, you know that she went on a book tour recently. She traveled all over the country, letting us see her hotel rooms and the throngs of readers that showed up to meet her and get their cookbooks signed. Her second or third stop was in Denver - and while I'm not usually a stand-in-line for anything type of gal, I thought, "Hey, I should support a fellow blogger with whom I have so very much in common!"  Then I thought, "Eh, it's on a school night, and it's sort of cold out. Maybe next time."

Then I got an email from my friend Claudia asking if I wanted to go with her to the booksigning.

All the sudden, I was interested again. Not only because Claudia is a sh'load of fun, but also because Claudia is from Pawhuska, Oklahoma. You heard me. Pawhuska. Home of P-Dub. Try to follow along.

Several months prior, Claudia had sent me an email saying,  "Hey check out this blog - it's by a lady from my hometown and today she wrote about my brother's feed store."  To which I answered something to the affect of, "Wha?"

I determined that in all the eleventy-bazillion PW readers in the world, it was likely that only Claudia and I would know about the Denver book signing, and even if a couple other people showed up, we'd totally be in the front of the line and PW's new best friends, because, A) Claudia's from Pawhuska, and B) I was wearing my favorite shoes, which The Pioneer Woman would surely be so enamored with that we'd instantly be new best friends and she'd feature me on her website under the tab "up and coming bloggers:

Patent leather aqua Ferragamo driving moccasins.

I know, right?

Well, I could go on and on about how we waited patiently in line with a bunch of other people, and then we heard her speak and she was funny and sweet and then we had her sign our books and then took our pictures with her and went home.

But that would be a big fat lie.

Because what we did was each buy several cookbooks, head down to the basement where she was signing and go, "Dude, it's hot in here. We should go get a beer."

Now, lucky for us, the swell independent bookstore in Denver just happens to have a swell independent bar in it. Besides 362 days of sunshine a year, that's one of the main things they put in the Chamber of Commerce brochures. Claudia and I decided we'd just run up real quick for one cool frosty beverage and then head back to the basement for the signing.

I may not have mentioned before, but Claudia and I used to be in advertising together. And not like Mad Men advertising where we wore pencil skirts and thought up clever slogans. Advertising Sales. Which means, among other things, that we are capable of drinking and cursing like sailors. While selling you a thirteen week ad run on The Weather Channel.

Being a classy dame, I ordered me up a Lone Star. They were outta PBR cans, apparently.

Did you know Lone Star beer has little puzzles on the insides of the caps?

That first one says "Who-Ray!"  The second one says, "Owl Be Clammin this O!" Or something. I'm not sure. I never actually figured that one out.

Being the excellent parent that I am, I recognized right away that these beer caps could be educational but that I couldn't take home just two puzzles to my children. That wouldn't be fair. In order to properly intellectually stimulate them, they'd need several. I sacrificed and ordered another Lone Star. For the lid.

Right about now is when bartender asked us for the third or fourth time, "So you're really here to have a cookbook signed?" And we assured him that maybe we were, maybe we weren't, maybe we needed an appetizer first.

 

Claudia, looking innocent. 

Me, posing perfectly for an ENT specialist.

This is when two things happened: 1) People began filling up the bar because there was no more room in the basement, and 2) I realized I had an odd number of caps and an even number of children so I'd need to order another Lone Star. For the children.

 

Other folks who like Pioneer Woman but don't like lines.

Also, Claudia.

Those people are totally nice, and one of them might be named Jill, and she might've had to borrow a car to get there from her home 80 miles away. That guy at the end just came to keep his girlfriend or possibly his wife company in line. Aren't those lovely chandeliers?

Since Claudia and I had no ads to sell, we drank more beer. I let everyone in the bar know that she was from Pawhuska, which made me sorta famous. Then Claudia admitted that not only has her brother been featured on the blog, you can very often see her other relatives' heads when PW posts shots of church, and...back in high school...Claudia babysat Marlboro Man.

This means absolutely NOTHING to you if you've never read The Pioneer Woman.

But if you have, well, you're kind of impressed right now. The nice people at the bar certainly were. Eventually, one of us, probably Claudia, realized that instead of us making our way through the crowds in the basement, we could send the books to Pawhuska...I mean, we're talking about Marlboro Man's babysitter, here. Because we had that kind of clout.

 

Claudia calls in a favor from Pawhuska.

The next day, PW posted about the lovely quiet dinner she had at a restaurant 4 blocks from my house. A half-empty, nobody in it, I coulda walked, restaurant FOUR blocks from my house. Meaning I could've put on my bitchin' shoes and swung by on my way to the liquor store to purchase beer that did not have puzzles in the lids and would not have left me with a ginormous head ache the next morning.

But alas. I would not have gotten to hang out with Marlboro Man's babysitter and drink beer on a school night. And I would not have this.

Ohemgee. I'm kind of a big deal on the Internet.

If you're like me, you probably forgot that I have a blog. This blog right here, in fact. You're likely blocking it from your memory because you cannot stand to read that story about how my dog died ONE MORE TIME. I know I can't. However, what you probably do NOT know is that while poor little LGBG has been lifeless (get it, lifeless? Because the dog DIED, right?) I have been flitting all about the worldwide web, spreading my own special brand of joy. JOY, people. Friggin look happy already!

First of all, I was the proud winner of some super sweet business cards on Catootes.  Of course, I have not designed them yet, but when I do, they will be SUPER SWEET. And, I shall pass them about whenever someone says "What's your blog? Why is it called that? Wha?"

Nextly, I was a little preoccupied with launching a little 112-page website for work. Not really a great excuse, but not really a bad one either, because holy crap - 112 pages. With 40 gazillion pictures. And a bunch of forms, and at least 19 people telling me immediate edits to make. If you see a typo on it, keep it to yourself, pretty please. When you're drinking later this evening, feel free to peruse it in all its loveliness and then send a comment form telling how fricking beautiful it is and how the marketing director must be A GENIUS. But, dudes, use your own words or something. Just make them be sort of synonymous with genius. K, thanks.

And lastly - and this is the part where my amazing level of fame-itude comes into play...I was the featured topic on a website about  FABULOUS THINGS.  Yeah, you heard me, every boy who ever broke up with me. I am fabulous. People who KNOW fab, they know me. And they think I'm fab. Also, I totally have shiny hair, as this post attests. I'm really going out on a limb sharing this link, since I like to just be the little cartoony avatar person over in the corner, and the HowFab post actually features real live unedited photos of moi, but I like living on the edge. Also, since Kara of HowFab lives in San Francisco, is hip and has unlimited fashionability, if she wants to steal photos off my Facebook page and put them on her website, who am I to keep her unique brand of Internet Gold to myself? Also, please go buy cards from her and she will send you a very nice moustache for FREE that you will find very handy in many situations.  Like, for example, your wedding photos.

That would be Ms. Fab herself, at her wedding, with her Fab British husband. Because all the very hip people marry foreigners. But not foreigners that speak a different language, because that'd be a pain in the ass.

I promise I will still write you little stories even though I'm totally famous with business cards now. Really I will, because deep down, I love you little people. You made me the Internet sensation I am today.

Imagine how long 100 posts would be if I double spaced them.

In the past couple of weeks, while I’ve busied myself with youth baseball, house guests, middle school football camp, general chauffering and oh yeah, WORK; a very important anniversary has come and gone. A year and several days ago, I got a wild hair, Googled “free blog hosting” and started typing. With this brilliant witticism I was officially a blogger.

I was not someone who really read blogs. For one thing, it’s a horrible sounding word and I wanted no part of it. Blog. Blogh. Bluh-og. Sounds like a belch after you throw up. But my friend Kara said, “sometimes things you say remind me of Dooce. Don’t you love Dooce?” And I said, “Doo-what HUH?”

For the record, I am not comparing myself to the 26th most influential woman in media, and neither was Kara. I think that it was more that I tend to curse when discussing my children or something. In any case, I sat down one afternoon to see what this Dooce person was all about and thought, “Hey, instead of driving my friends and my family away with my constant rambling – I could write something everyday on the Internet.”

Um yeah. Apparently, I so can NOT write everyday. Not even every week. But that is why fives of people read this and why Blogher emails me every ten days or so to pull their ads that they don’t pay me for anyway, right? If I wrote something pithy everyday then the entire economy would fall apart because everyone would be sitting on their computers laughing instead of working hard and paying their mortgages. Or something like that.

I wasn’t really sure what my blog was going to be in the beginning – a Little Girl with Big Glasses is just how I saw myself most of my life. I've always been more a spectator than a participant. I was a fly on the wall that could make people laugh when I told them how they appeared through my eyes. Or, I could really piss them off. Either way, I amused myself. Also, the name was available, and none of the other things I thought of were. At the time I wasn’t thinking at all of what search engines might think of the name and it never occurred to me at all that I might have a whole legion of visitors who stumble upon me while searching for “little girls” or “hot girls with glasses” and my personal favorite: “little girls with big asses.”. I have to admit, it’s really those folks I write for. As I sit down at my sleek MacBook Pro, I think to myself, “Now. If I was a lonely middle school custodian with repressed issues about my mother and I was in the mood for illegal pictures of underage girls and I found little essays by a plain-looking 42 year old woman INSTEAD, what would capture my attention and keep me reading?” And then I type what I was going to type anyway. Or more often, I just open an excel spreadsheet, and forget the whole thing.

The thing has kind of stayed relatively true to my original intent of observations, essays, rantings, et al. I follow very few, like NONE, of the suggestions for creating a successful blog. I hardly ever have interesting pictures, I don’t let the reader into my personal life all that much, hell - I have an avitar where my picture belongs, I use bad words and made up words. But I entertain myself, Spanxy, a couple of friends from high school and at least two people in Cheyenne, Wyoming, so I guess it’s all good. I probably should have started when my children were toddlers and still smelled so nice that you didn’t want to beat them for waking you up in the middle of the night. They said adorable little things and took nice long naps which would have made for a lot of good material. They were extremely photogenic so I could have had days where I just posted their edible cuteness when I was lacking for words. Alas, it wasn’t to be.

So here I sit, one year later after diving in, and I’m kinda proud that I’ve kept it up this long. I am flattered when someone I didn’t know reads LGBG tells me they do and that they like it. I love the feeling of clicking ‘PUBLISH’ and watching my rambling go live. I hate when two days go by, then five, then eight with no words. It feels like I’m letting myself down.

My friend KC asked me a couple days ago how many posts I’d written. I guessed, Oh, about a hundred? And he said, “Huh. You could’ve written a book by now.”

Hmm.

My high school English teacher once wrote on the side of a paper I’d turned in, “HA! You’re an amusing writer! You may be the next Erma Bombeck!” And then a nice big fat “D- Try to stay on topic. Antigone really shouldn’t be reviewed by Erma Bombeck.” (I took it as a compliment, but would’ve preferred she call me Dave Barry.) I wonder if Erma Bombeck would’ve been writing now if she’d have even bothered to try to write a book? Or would she be another Mommy Blogger, content to post here and there about beans in noses in between loads of laundry? I also wonder if a book of unrelated essays about shit that bothers me is worth the paper it’d be printed on and I realized, that eh, probably not. Also, screw you, English Teacher. I personally would be fascinated by what Erma thinks about Antigone and her beyotchy sister.

I’m considering trying harder, making something more permanent than this. When I read back to this and this and this I can remember what I was doing and thinking and listening to when I wrote it. Well, actually first I think, "Cripes, I am a genius!" THEN I think that other stuff. But I wonder if it lost forever? After Blogger moves it to page two, is it done? Is it even worth saving? What if aliens or pirates or ninjas attack the Internet and delete all my words? If a blogger deletes in the forest did she ever really blog?

So – here’s to a year ahead. I’m not sure what it will be. I'll probably just keep driving people to baseball and football and golf, doing the laundry, buying the groceries, oh yeah going to work, and sneaking in a post or two when I can.

We’ll see. Thanks to the fives of you who’ve been along for the ride. Except for the time that the Ace Young fans attacked me, I for one, have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.

No longer content to blog about blogging, I am now posting about posters.

So I realize this happened awhile ago, so I’m coming to this party rather late – but Farrah and MJ dying on the same day was weird, huh? Two huge entertainment icons to be sure, but more importantly, two huge POSTER icons.

Remember posters? Not like reproductions or framed art prints. Posters. Like stupid cheap pictures you plastered on your walls to decorate along with fishnets with those glass balls and Greg Brady beads. Do kids even have posters now? My kids have framed stuff on their walls that I put there, because if I hadn’t put stuff there, there would be nothing there but flicked boogers and thrown shoe marks. Pottery Barn Teen and Restoration Hardware have pretty much ruined it for modern parents who can no longer just ignore children’s living spaces – we’re forced to make every room look like either Martha Stewart or Vern Yip just got done with them.

When I was in junior high and high school, EVERYONE had posters. Loads of ‘em. The more you had, the cooler you were. My friend Sheila had posters overlapping posters overlapping TigerBeat pages of Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevinson and (gag) Scot Baio. I never really understood the Scot Baio thing. He was like a shorter version of Henry Winkler, and seriously? Henry Winkler as a teenage dreamboat? Uh, not working for me.

My friends Dorothy and Tracy had the most anal-y hung posters you would ever see. Whereas I slapped tape across the corners, these guys carefully reinforced the corners with invisible tape, then, after double-checking with a level, measured with a micrometer to exactly insert a pushpin in the precise corner of the tape reinforcement. I skirted the leveling issue by placing all my posters at jaunty angles, as if to say, “Screw authority, man! I hang my posters all crookedy on purpose! Mob rules!”

My best pal Pam had the quintessential poster of the 70s: A kitty hanging helpless by its front legs from a tree branch, her fuzzy little pink belly exposed to the whole world for the whole world’s amusement. What better relaxing sentiment for sleeping quarters? A young animal, inches from death. CUTE! Of course reading the caption “Hang on – Friday’s coming’” only reinforced the outright damned adorability. Decades later, I’d learn that my husband had the exact same poster in his room as a child. Only Pam’s was the nice rolled version, probably from Spencer Gifts, whereas my husband’s was the Scholastic Book Club version, which meant it had fold lines. Okay for kitty posters, not so good for Lynda Carter, which is who my high school boyfriend had on his wall, all decked out in her bitchin’ Wonder Woman costume. He also had Farrah, because every male child born from 1965 to 1983 had Farrah.

My poster inventory, circa 1983, consisted of this gem… preppy Michael, pre-extreme-plastic surgery and wearing Mom-jeans...


Also, a Rocky Horror picture show poster with this image and the caption “Don’t dream it, be it.” I totally had no idea what they meant by that.


I was also the proud owner of a Walter Payton poster made specially for the Post Office to encourage 18 year old boys to register for the draft…I got it at, well, um…the Post Office. Oh hey - is it a federal offense to steal a poster from the Post Office? Because if it is, Pam did it.

Lastly, I had a Prince poster whereon he sprawled across a pile of purple satin sheets, his diminutive bare ass crawling towards the edge as if to say, “Hey! Buy this poster or I’ll stand up!” If I had a daughter who hung it in her room I’d probably accidentally use it as a drop cloth.

So my “artwork” was three black guys (one butt naked) and a transvestite movie. It is so hard to be a rebel in a small town. Without, actually, you know…being rebellious.

I always wanted the poster of the guy sitting in a chair being blown away by his own speakers but never got it. Now THAT is art, man. Seriously, even the lamp was at an angle. So how about you fives of people who read this? What adorned the walls of your teenaged lair? What did you want but never get? Yearning for a "If life hands you lemons..." or an autographed Joni loves Chachi? Still hanging on to a Nagel in your storage unit hopin’ they’ll become popular again? P.S. They won't.

I'd like to thank the academy.

Holy catfish you guys. Look what I got yesterday.

This is the first time my writing has been recognized since that time Highlights Magazine printed my stirring poem "A Dandelion" back when I really truly was a little girl with big glasses. But I was published, baby. And every kid who went to the dentist in April 1973 knew about it.

This award, however, comes from the very talented and entertaining Heather over at Heatherty Featherty. Heather has not only said very nice things about me, I am pretty sure she actually believes them. I know, right? Heather has two cute little boys but in a crazy twist of fate, makes totally adorable girl clothes. And, she has perfect grammar. But probably the most amazing thing about her is that she is THE ONLY COOL HEATHER I've ever met. So I think that possibly her name is a big mistake or somehow she was switched at the hospital with an evil baby who is now wreaking havoc everywhere being named something perfectly innocent like "Susie" or "Nancy" or, I don't know, "Penny."

Just like Miss America, this award does not come without responsibility. I have been charged with granting it to others who strive daily to change the world for the better, one little blog post at a time. Therefore, I don my tiara and hereby sprinkle pixie dust and virtual awards on the following blogs that amuse me:

Funny in the 'Hood - Geezopizza, I am pretty sure Tracey and I were either separated at birth or lived parallel lives in the 80s. She is high-larious and has some wacky neighbors that make you want to drive to Iowa just so's you can slap 'em. Her "Friday Flashback" is always awesome, and I'm thinking of stealing the concept, so when you see me do it, pretend like I made it up, k?

Yellow Trash Diaries - This woman certainly doesn't need me to help boost her ratings. She's a funny writer and last week had a contest with Libby for followers, and is now the hottest thing on the Internet. Well, the hottest adopted Korean blogger who lives in the South anyway, and I think that is saying A LOT. She's honest and funny and funny and honest. I'm not quite through reading every word she's ever typed, but almost. I think if she lived next door, we'd have a bunch of fun ridiculing others together.

So - you guys, pass it on if you can. Thanks for entertaining me when I should be writing genius copy and reconciling advertising invoices. And thanks, Heather, for deep down being a Susie. I'll try not to get a big head. I wouldn't want to outgrow the tiara.