Year: 2009

There’s a reason Elvis didn’t make “Blue Port Aransas”

We made it home yesterday afternoon and I am currently buried under fifty-eight pounds of laundry and six bags of half-eaten chips that probably need to be thrown away because I’m the only one in my family who thinks it might not be the best idea to play with live bait and then promptly help myself to a Frito covered in bean dip.

Also, today is my 38th birthday.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to mention my birthday because it feels like a desperate ploy to get y’all to leave me lots of comments saying “Happy Birthday!”, but considering there’s a good chance that later today I’ll spontaneously announce “It’s my birthday!” to the cashier at HEB in a desperate ploy to get her to wish me happy birthday, it only seems natural that I do the same thing here.

Last night, P offered to write a guest birthday post about ten things I do that get on his nerves, but when I questioned him further about what those things could possibly be, he couldn’t come up with anything.

I don’t think it had anything to do with the fact he knows I’m suffering from PMS and was holding a sharp knife at the time. And, honestly, the sharp knife was to cut up the barbecued turkey we were having for dinner.

So, in honor of my birthday, here’s a video of Caroline. Which has nothing at all to do with my birthday unless you count the fact that if I hadn’t been born thirty-eight years ago today, then she wouldn’t be here either.

The Beach from Big Mama on Vimeo.

A few quick notes:

I think “It’s almost like Hawaii” should be Port Aransas’ new ad campaign, even though it’s not at all like Hawaii except they both involve the ocean and sand.

Apparently, being in a tropical locale makes her want to employ her limited Spanish vocabulary.

She knows how to enjoy a piece of bubblegum. I think she gets it from me, which might be one of the ten things I do that gets on P’s nerves.

I mean, if I actually did anything that gets on his nerves.

Which I don’t.

Except for when I do.

Y’all have a great Friday.
I went to Port Aransas and all you get is this lousy post

Here’s something that most of y’all didn’t know, we’ve actually been on a little vacation at the coast for the last few days. However, due to our new and improved heightened state of paranoia, I haven’t mentioned that we’ve been out of town and am only mentioning it now because, by the time most of you read this, we’ll be back at home and any attempts to burglarize our house and steal my jewelry collection, full of quality pieces some of which cost upwards of $5.99, will be useless.

Although one time, several years ago, an evil-doer stole these fabulous Mexican-style pottery urns complete with blooming flowers right off my front steps in broad daylight while I sat on my living room couch glued to an episode of Alias. They’re lucky I didn’t hear them because otherwise I would have been forced to put down my bag of M&M’s, jump off the couch, fling open the front door and yell, “Hey! You! Why are you stealing my urns? Why would you do that? That’s just mean.”

I’m sure my line of intense questioning would have caused them to second guess their urn-stealing ways and place the urns promptly back on my front steps.

We’ve been looking forward to our week at the beach all summer long, even though we knew it would mean the first day of school is right around the corner. But we have carpe diemed the heck out of the last four days.

One of my requests this year was for P to provide me with some sort of shelter on the beach because Ma-Maw is too old to expose my fragile, age-spotted skin to the sun for long periods at a time. I can’t undo the sins of my Hawaiian Tropic SPF 4 past, but I can try to learn from my mistakes and the brown spot under my eyebrow that no Oil of Olay can erase.

When we got to the beach the first day, I reminded him that I needed some sort of shade tarp. In my mind I had envisioned one of those cool tent-like things with maybe a Texas flag on the side and some comfortable chairs.

P went all Survivor Season 1 on me, pulled a few things out of his toolbox, and this is what I got.

I’m just going to say that it’s not easy to have the most redneck makeshift shelter on a Texas beach, but I think we managed quite nicely.

Of course, in all fairness, it served its purpose even though I was a little concerned that the rusted rebar stakes might cause the trip to end with someone needing a tetanus shot. And really, we fit right in because right down the beach from us was this fine structure.

From a distance I thought it was some kind of memorial and a memorial on the beach can never serve as the harbinger of good news. If this was a memorial to someone who was the victim of a shark attack, then I don’t know that I want to be within in a thirty mile radius. On closer inspection, it does not appear to a memorial, but rather a white trash totem pole. I’m not sure if you can clearly see that there are some leopard-print underwear hanging from the top but I assure you that they are there, right above the empty cans of Lone Star Light.

The rest of the trip was spent doing all the normal things we do in Port Aransas.

Taking a picture in the mouth of the large shark outside a souvenir shop.

Trying on kicky fedoras.

Feeding a pound of fresh, dead shrimp to a flock of seagulls.

(And I ran, I ran so far away.) (Did you go there? Because I did the minute I typed it.)

The fresh, dead shrimp cost a little more than the old, dead shrimp, but we feel that they’re worth the investment.

Catching baby sharks which caused me to promptly vacate the water because if there’s a baby then there’s a baby mama somewhere nearby.

Be free, little one. Let your mama know we treated you well.

We ate snowcones thanks to the ice cream man that drove right down the beach.

We ate lots of chips thanks to a mama who went grocery shopping with PMS.

And we watched P do his best version of Captain Ahab because he hooked a four foot shark that got away and spent the rest of the trip trying to catch his nemesis. I don’t have a picture of his quest because did I mention the shark hunt was taking place past the second sandbar, also known as where you become part of the food chain?

But I did get a picture of this.

There’s really no other explanation than that’s an apple that didn’t fall far from the tree.

And they make me so happy.
The backseat perspective

Way back in July when Gulley and I took the kids on our little Texas roadtrip, I discovered that Caroline’s portable DVD player had officially pooped the bed. I kind of knew that it was just a matter of time because when we’d driven to Houston a few months before it was acting all irritable and hormonal to the point that I wanted to just throw it out the car window while driving 70 miles per hour. In retrospect, maybe I was the one who was irritable and hormonal.

I’d conveniently forgotten the faulty DVD player until the morning we were leaving for Beaumont because a portable DVD player isn’t an immediate need like, say, water, food, or a great pair of jeans that make your bottom look small. Since desperate times call for desperate measures, I made the decision that Caroline could watch movies on my beloved Macbook, much like the way the Walton family used to watch movies as they traveled to town in their Model T Ford.

Fortunately, her pink headphones were still working so I could enjoy listening to all the classic country music while she watched Barbie Fairytopia for the 82nd time.

But that wasn’t all she was doing because when we finally arrived home, I discovered this.

Looks like Barbie Fairytopia got traded in for Photobooth.

I think that last picture was taken about five minutes before we got back home, at which point we were all just praying that the trip would be over soon.
I was country when country wasn’t cool

After the last reunion event on Saturday night, I got in my car and attempted to navigate my way out of downtown Beaumont. Downtown areas always seem to get the best of me because they involve a lot of one way streets that seem to lead to a lot of locations, none of which seem to be the location I’m actually interested in. So I locked my doors and meandered around until I finally saw a sign that read “I-10”. I wasn’t sure that was what I was looking for, but I figured it was an interstate and, worse case scenario, I’d end up in Baton Rouge.

While driving around, I scanned through the available radio stations in the hopes of finding some decent music to listen to as I possibly headed to the Louisiana state line. When I last lived in Beaumont, twenty years ago, I was a big fan of B-95 FM because they alternated between a mix of Debbie Gibson, Tiffany, Erasure and Depeche Mode. What’s not to like?

Other than “Shake Your Love” since even at the tender age of seventeen I knew it was just a little too peppy and the odds were not in favor of it becoming a classic, as opposed to “Chains of Love”.

Right about the time I discovered that I was actually headed the right way, I stumbled upon Kenny Rogers singing “Lucille”. Just to clarify, I found it on the radio. I didn’t actually run into Kenny Rogers standing on a street corner singing it, although if I had it would have easily qualified as one of the top ten moments of my life. I think I’ve mentioned before that, during the formative years of my childhood, my Pa-Pa drove a baby blue 1977 Fleetwood Cadillac and the “Kenny Rogers’ Greatest Hits” album was permanently stuck in the 8-track player. I was a young, impressionable girl and, even though I didn’t exactly understand what he meant when he warned Ruby not to take her love to town, I knew she should have listened to him and stayed home.

So there I was, aimlessly wondering the streets of Beaumont and listening to Kenny Rogers when it dawned on me that my Pa-Pa was probably doing the exact same thing twenty years earlier, except he was in a sweet ride with an 8-track player. I turned up the volume on “Lucille” and sang my heart out because, even though it’s a dreadful song about a woman leaving her husband with four hungry (not four hundred as I used to believe) children and some crops in the field, it makes me so happy. Maybe he deserved it. Why was he counting on her to help with those crops in the field anyway? Shouldn’t that have been his job?

The next morning (I eventually found my way home) my sister and I loaded our two hungry children in the car, stopped to buy some cookies for the road and began the long journey home. We hadn’t been on the road for more than five minutes when guess what I heard on the radio?

“Lucille”

I almost felt like it was some sort of sign, but a sign of what? Am I about to come into some land that will yield crops? Will I have four hungry children? Is my radio stuck on some “All Kenny All The Time” station?

As it turns out it was just purely coincidence which is such a relief because what would I do with some crops?

I’d had the good fortune to find the best classic country station ever. EVER. It’s 97.1 in Houston which, to my great joy and delight, transmits all the way to Beaumont and lasted for about two and a half hours of our road trip. It was like listening to a soundtrack of my childhood and I seriously clapped my hands with joy when we hit the Houston city limits and, I kid you not, Larry Gatlin started singing “Houston” and then five minutes later it started raining and Willie began to sing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”. It was like the radio could see into my soul.

I was so inspired that I got home and immediately downloaded the following songs to my iTunes:

1. “Danny’s Song” – Anne Murray
2. “Two Doors Down” – Dolly Parton
3. “Lucille” – Kenny Rogers (obviously)
4. “Somebody’s Knockin” – Terri Gibbs
5. “Looking for Love” – Johnny Lee (I’m embarrassed it took me this long)
6. “Good Hearted Woman” – Waylon Jennings
7. “Jolene” – Dolly Parton (seeing all the Dolly options was like opening Pandora’s box)
8. “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” – Willie Nelson
9. “Lousiana Woman, Mississippi Man” – Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn
10. “It Must Be Love” – Don Williams

I’ll be honest. I think I got a little carried away, but I don’t regret it for one instant because listening to all these songs brings me right back to somewhere around 1979. It’s just too bad that I can’t listen to them on an 8-track player.

And in case I feel the need to download about twenty-six more songs, what would your choices be?
Reunion-ing

After attending my twentieth high school reunion this weekend, I am headed to the store to stock up on some Sudoku puzzle books to help my cognitive function because I discovered I have a terrible memory. All I can say is I will be forever thankful for the name tags complete with senior year portraits that everyone was forced to wear because otherwise I would have had to ask an embarrassing amount of people who they were instead of glancing awkwardly at their stomachs where their name tags hung on a fancy lanyard made of yarn.

Of course I wasn’t necessarily grateful for my own personal name tag because it was a reminder that my hair didn’t even fit in the frame of the picture. Several people remarked on the size of my high school hair when they looked at it and I was quick to point out that I had plenty of time to roll my hair with three different sets of hot rollers because I spent no time at all plucking my eyebrows.

I had a great time and there were so many people that I enjoyed catching up with in person and not just through their photo albums and brief profiles on Facebook that let me know they enjoy watching “30 Rock” and vintage Richard Simmons exercise videos.

The nice thing about a twenty year reunion as opposed to the ten year version is that everyone is more relaxed. It didn’t feel like anyone had anything to prove or tried to play the “my life is better than yours” game. We were just glad to see each other and hear about the ups and downs of life because after twenty years we’ve all had our share of things that turned out like we thought, but probably more things that haven’t.

It’s not like twenty years ago I would have hoped to write on the internet because all I knew how to do was type in some DOS code that made my name scroll down the computer screen in little asterisks and, besides that, who would actually have a computer in their home for personal use? And internet? I do not know of what you speak.

Also, I am not married to Tom Cruise which really turned out for the best because he’s not all he was cracked up to be in “Top Gun”.

Our valedictorian was asked to make a speech at the dinner on Saturday night and he’s still brilliant because he used at least six different words that I’ve never heard. I made a note to look them up later so I’d know what he was talking about, but I have no idea how to spell them and, to be honest, I can’t even remember them at this point.

(Seriously, I’m buying Sudoku today. But I think it involves numbers so maybe just some crossword puzzles instead. Or maybe I won’t remember to buy either one.)

Later on, I talked to him and met his fiance’. She asked what group I was in and how we knew each other. I told her I was in some of the smart classes in spite of the fact that I was a National Honor Society reject due to my inability to pass Algebra II on my first two tries. I said I felt like all the smart kids knew I was an imposter, but the valedictorian said he didn’t feel that way at all and I should have hung out with them more because they played some mean rounds of Chess on the weekends after band practice, which is totally what my friends did on the weekend but without the Chess and the band practice.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun and laughed until I cried with old friends. The only sad part was when they called everyone to the dance floor to do the Cupid Shuffle and I had no idea what they were talking about. Apparently they sent out a link so we could practice the moves at home before the reunion but I didn’t pay any attention the email.

So in a way it really was like high school because I felt like everyone was totally prepared for some sort of test and I didn’t even know I was supposed to be studying.

Granted, we never had any tests on some sort of tricked-out line dance which is really too bad because that would have been a useful life skill, as opposed to Algebra II.

Maybe I’ll learn it in time for the thirtieth reunion.

Of course by then I’ll have to be careful not to break a hip.

(I’m referring to the Cupid Shuffle, not Algebra II. Just wanted to be clear.)
Good Nite! We have another winner

It’s time to announce the second winner in the GoodNites Bedtime Moments contest. Click over to my giveaways page to see who won and to find out how you could win a tote bag full of cool stuff or even a $2,000 bedroom makeover.