Tankinis

I wasn’t shopping for a bathing suit. I don't even take a bathing suit to the beach. I'm quite content to sit on the sandbar in my caftan or capris and watch the waves come in and go out. Besides, After the last time I tried on bathing suits, I had vowed I’d have my toenails pulled out with rusty pliers before I put my body through that ordeal again. I was just waiting for a dressing room so I could try on the newest muumuu designed by Omar the Tentmaker when I overheard the conversation.

“Please show me a bathing suit designed for a grandmother.” The lady said with a giggle.

“Oh, honey, grandmothers this year are wearing tankinis. Every color imaginable. You’ll simply love the design. Here let me bring in several for you to try on,” the sales lady said.

So I am a grandmother. The designers could have come up with an innovative new idea to make us feel less like a dinosaur and more like a cute little model. I meandered over to the bathing suit aisle ... just to look, mind you. Not to carry one of the tankinis back to the dressing room. Definitely not to try the thing on.

There they were, displayed in all their radiant glory. Tankinis. The top looks like a shortened tank top and the bottom like a bikini. The designers truly had come up with an ingenious new style. I picked up six of them and marched back to the dressing room. It was just a matter of deciding which color I wanted.

Life was good. Someone had finally listened to the wants and needs of women who exceeded a size five junior petite.

“Oh, this is wonderful. Just what I need to play in the pool with my little granddaughter. Do they make them in children’s sizes? I’d like her to have one to match mine.” I overheard the granny in the next dressing stall exclaiming.

It sounded promising. Daringly, I chose the green and black striped suit and commenced to putting it upon my chubby little body. Tankinis. Made for grandmothers but stylish enough for teenagers and even children. Maybe I’d just buy it in two or three colors.

I tugged the top over my head. The straps fit just fine. No sag. No slipping off the shoulders. I kept tugging until I got the rest of the top down to just above my navel. The stripes were stretched out so far that I looked like a Tyrannosaurs Rex dressed up in camouflage.

But hey, the bottoms would complete the outfit and make me look like I was a size five. I didn’t have to buy the stripes. I could buy it in blaze orange or lime green instead. I wasn’t going to give up until I saw the whole tankini. Miracles did still happen sometimes! I pulled the bottoms up and stood back to look in the three way mirror.


Oops! Where did my chest go? Guess I didn’t get everything lined up inside the thing. When I began the lift and shift method, I found nothing but a flesh colored stretchy lining inside the tankini top. And this thing was made for a granny? Someone evidently got their signals crossed. Granny’s are plagued by the gravity-itis. The inside of a bathing suit for a real Granny has to have some kind of wires and corset like gizmo to keep everything from sagging and bagging. It had to be built to withstand forces greater than a hurricane or even a tornado.

I held my breath and fought gravity for just a minute to see if I attached a corset underneath it if perhaps it would work. I checked the reflection in the mirror.

I was turning blue and there was still something hanging out in the inch and a half space between the bottom of the top and the top of the bottoms. A nice little roll of pure old unadulterated fat cells. I exhaled and what was staring back at me resembled a overstuffed Cabbage Patch doll in a Barbie doll bathing suit.

At the checkout counter I got behind the granny who had been in the dressing room next to me. I overheard her talking to her friend about being a grandmother at 25. Seems the lady married a man twenty years older than she was and in doing so became an instant grandmother.

She paid for her tankini and left.

I paid for my brand new set of pliers which I put in my purse. Next time I get a wild notion to try on a bathing suit, I will take them out and attach them to my big toe nail and pull. We’ll see just how badly I want to try another tankini on.

Voices in my head!

 

 

 

 

 

Shhh…don’t tell anyone but I have voices in my head. I understand it’s a common malady for romance authors and that we don’t fuss about it. After all, who would throw a steamy hot cowboy out in the rain? Not me. I invite him into my office, let him sit on the recliner behind me and tell me his story, and I type just as fast as my fingers will go.

 So this week I’m on the downhill slide on the Work in Progress (WIP) and hoping to polish it off by Friday. My friend, Shirley Marks, and I have this ongoing thing about Friday…it’s the day when we finish all the work on our desk, if possible, so that the weekend isn’t cluttered with things to do. It’s the day when we put the voices in our heads into their little boxes and do what we have to do to get ready for another week of writing.

That’s not always possible when the WIP is a 90-100,000 word book but at the beginning Friday can be the day when the first twenty percent of the book is done or when we finish the next chapter. And it’s almost a mortal sin to leave a chapter hanging all weekend. I’ve tried that a few times and it always ends up with the voices in my head keeping me awake all weekend and never leaving me alone, not even in the grocery store.

This is the second book in a brand new series that will debut The Lucky Penny Ranch Series in Dec./ Jan. with Wild Cowboys Ways. What I’m working on now is Hot Cowboy Nights and believe me Toby Dawson is one of those swaggering cowboys in tight fittin’ jeans that has that cowboy strut down just perfect. There’s no doubt he can deliver a hot cowboy night, but can he settle down?

 

Toby is on one side of me and Lizzy on the other, both demanding their stories be told from their point of view. They are flirting like the devil one minute and shooting daggers at each other the next but both of them are talking to me nonstop. Toby has been one of those cowboy, one-night-stand, players his entire life so he’s not even sure how to go about a real relationship. Lizzy has had more than one failed attempt at love and she’s not sure she wants to try again.

 

But the heart knows what it wants and it whines until it gets it. The voices in my head keep telling me that Toby and Lizzy’s hearts are doing some loud talking but that they are not listening.

What’s it like to have voices in my head? That’s difficult to describe but I do keep a notepad by the bed so that when they enter my dreams as well as my day life, I can write down a couple of words so I don’t forget anything. When I open up a file and write the first sentence I have tunnel vision from that moment until the book ends. I talk to the characters and yes, people do look at me strangely in the grocery store when we argue about what kind of pickles to buy. I like one kind but they are out of dill slices in the book so it’s not unusual for me to buy both kinds and then remember when I get home that Mr. B nor I either one eat dill slices.

Do you ever have voices in your head? What do they tell you? Have they ever talked to you in the grocery store?

One High Dollar Tomato

Right when we walked in the door of the Lowes store there were displays of flower bulbs and seed and fertilizer and potting soil. And it was a pretty day. And immediately I thought of gardening and fresh tomatoes.

In my back yard there are four huge flower pots one of my daughters bought at some big bargain sale a few years ago. That meant we didn’t have to dig up the yard because I could do some pot gardening.. My daughter bought them twenty years ago so I know they are durable . It has rained in them. The water has frozen in them and they didn’t even crack. They survived summers of blistering heat and we raised a crop of good healthy mosquitoes (about the size of Texas buzzards) in the rain water that filled them one spring.

I was picking up one of those description tags on a tomato plant when Mr. B reminded me of the last time I decided to raise tomatoes in those same pots!

It all started like this:

The pots were there and I had dipped strongly into my paternal grandfather’s gene pool. He thought if something did not produce food then it shouldn’t take up space in the earth. I decided to plant tomatoes in my four big pots. Hey, if those pots could survive Oklahoma winters and summers they would support tomato roots.

I love vine ripened tomatoes. They just plain dress up any meal. Be it chicken and dumplings or shrimp scampi. So I went to a nice reputable green house and studied the tomato plants. I didn’t want those little cherry sized things they put in salads. Or the golf ball sized ones that barely make two bites, either. I wanted some of those big old boys. The ones that produce a nice size plate of slices for the dinner table.

Finally I picked out my four plants. I started to get eight, but there was no use in crowding them. Four plants should give us tomatoes from the first of July until frost time. After selecting the right size with the shortest growing season I went in search of just the right kind of potting soil for tomatoes.

When we got home I filled the pots and planted the tomatoes. I put the pots in front of lattice so if the vines were over laden with succulent fruit I could tie them up. Patience is a virtue. When they passed out virtues, I was over at the snow cone stand getting a rainbow snow cone in one of those pointed cups. Realizing my limitations in the patience department, I told myself to relax and let mother nature do her job. In 60 days according to the literature, I would have big, red ripe tomatoes just like the picture showed.

I began to water and put food on them at the right intervals and wait. When the temperature hit ninety I made sure the water was cool that I put on them every evening. I told them bedtime stories and counted the blooms. If every blossom made a tomato, the Jolly Green Giant might be standing in line trying to purchase my pots by the end of the summer.

Just a few more days and those little yellow critters would turn into little green BB’s and then they’d grow bigger and bigger until all four pots were filled with big red tomatoes. It was a beautiful vision.

The wind blew and the rain fell in great clumps and I worried about my tomato plants. Didn’t matter if it shook a few more limbs off the hackberry tree. It already was already pretty pitiful looking and besides I’ve never had a hankering for a tasty hackberry leaves. The next morning I rushed out to find my four babies all bend over, looking almost as ragged as the hackberry. I braced them up, fed them more of the tomato miracle food and waited.

Finally, there was a little tiny tomato underneath where the yellow bloom had been. Hallelujah! My first crop was just around the corner. No doubt about it, there would be enough to feed most of Murray County. I saw visions of there being so many tomatoes that I could make a few jars of my own spaghetti sauce and maybe even some home made ketchup.

I watered and waited. Watered and waited. The grasshoppers came and had supper one night and my vines were naked stalks the next day. But my tomato hung in there. It got as big as a grape and then a cherry. And then the worm found it.

At the end of the sixty days I harvested my one tomato. It was almost as big as a golf ball but by the time I cut the worm hole away it dwindled to one bite. When I figured up the cost of everything that went into that tomato, it was one expensive bite of food.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of forty dollars!

Thinking of that expensive bite of homegrown tomato did not make me rush over to buy tomato plants at the store this year. I rushed home and took a hammer to those pots, which is what I should have done years ago! Like Grandpa said, "If it don't produce food then it doesn't need to take up space in my yard!"

Pizza Monkey Bread

Not only is Sunday going to be the day to announce the winner of that week's contest. I've decided that it's going to be Recipe Sunday when I share one of my favorite recipes with all y'all. A few weeks ago the kids came home for a soup day. That's when I drag out all the slow cookers in the house and fill them with different kinds of soup. That day we had chili, kidney bean soup, clam chowder, broccoli cheese and ham soup, and baked potato soup. I did mention that we have a lot of family, didn't I?

We had crackers, Italian bread and my brand new recipe called Pizza Monkey bread. They loved it all but the new recipe was cleaned up so fast that it was evident I should have made two bundt pans full. So that's the recipe I'm sharing today. The kids loved it with all five of the soups!


But winner first!! This week's winner of a $10 Amazon gift card is Kim Cornwell. Congratulations, Kim and thank you so much for all your support.

Next week I'll give away the winner's choice of a $10 Amazon gift card or a $10 B&N gift card. And each person who joins the blog gets their name put into the famous red boot an extra time. Good luck and thanks to everyone who has joined and who has left comments. You are all awesome.

 

PIZZA MONKEY BREAD

 

WARNING...

according to my grandchildren, once you start eating, you might not be able to stop

Ingredients:
2 cans ready to bake biscuits, such as Pillsbury Grands
1/4 cup of oil
2 T. oregano, fresh or dried
2 T. garlic powder
2 cups mozzarella, shredded
Cooking spray

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Quarter the biscuits and place the pieces in a large bowl. Add the remaining ingredients, reserving 1/2 cup of the cheese for later. Toss to mix and coat. Spray your bundt pan well, making sure to coat it entirely. Pour the biscuit mixture into the pan. Sprinkle the remaining cheese on the top.
Bake 30 minutes or until golden and bubbling on the top. Invert the pan onto a plate or cutting board and serve it!

 

When I look like the picture on my passport...

The late, very great Erma Bombeck wrote a book entitled When You Look Like Your Passport Picture, It’s Time to Go Home. I always thought it was a hoot…until today! 

You and Mr. B need a passport, they said. So I begrudgingly dragged my shoes out from under the dining room table and dusted them off. It snowed last Sunday so I haven’t worn them for almost two weeks. Mr. B’s socks work just fine for house shoes and one does not need shoes if one does not go outside. Sure he wears a size 12 shoe and my feet are the only small thing about me but that means his socks don’t bind up my toes. 

Then there was a thing about fixing my hair and putting on something other than flannel pajama pants and a faded T-shirt. All this for a 2x2 picture to go on the passport application! I'm right glad that they didn’t want a 5x7 or I would have had to shave my legs and pluck my eyebrows. 

Don’t go without the proper form all filled out, either, they said. And take your birth certificates and driver’s license. So I printed the form, filled it out all the way to where the thing said STOP! DO NOT SIGN UNLESS ASKED. 

Well, dear hearts, I wasn’t going to even let a drop of ink filter out of my pen and fall upon that portion from there down. They might come and take my two tom cats for punishment. Or worse yet, tell me to get out of their office and never apply for a passport again since I couldn’t follow simple instructions.  

We stopped on the way to the courthouse to get the 2x2 picture taken. The whole way from that point to the office where I was told to go, I prayed that they wouldn’t look at that picture and see a descendent of Ma Barker. Would they make me lay one hand on the Good Book and raise the other and promise that I would not rob any trains or stage coaches on my way to the ship?  

March 6 was my lucky day! The ladies in the office were too young to have known Ma Barker. They hadn’t had any FBI profiling classes so they didn’t realize how nervous I was about this whole procedure. And I didn’t even see a copy of the Good Book so my blood pressure settled down a little bit. 

I handed over the documents and she handed it right back to me with orders to fill out page two. And after I'd been so careful to STOP RIGHT HERE!

Right off the bat, I did it wrong and had to ask for another copy. That was because I was scanning down page two making sure the rotten thing didn't want to know my weight. Only me and God and the lady at the doctor's office know that number and she had to sign an affidavit saying that if she ever repeated it out loud, they would never find her body.

I got to the part about my parents and got stumped again. How was I supposed to remember when my father’s birthday was or where he’d been born? Lord, have mercy! I was the oldest of the first bunch of kids with his first of ten wives. He passed away years ago. I shut my eyes and tried to remember. I hope I got it right or at least close enough. Maybe if I got it wrong they won’t find out about a certain bank robbery when they do the back ground check on my infamous father and find out that I might actually be related to Ma Barker. 

Finally, I got it all done, wrote the checks and she assured me that I should have a passport in a couple of weeks. But after today, I have decided that Miz Erma had it all wrong because folks who look like my passport should put their shoes in the dumpster and forget about going anywhere at all!

 

Ain't that snow pretty?

It’s always been my dream to someday live in Alaska. After two snow storms that kept me from going on a research trip and then receiving a letter from my friend about her housekeeper’s son’s grandparents cousin, suffice it to say that I reevaluated my dream and changed it slightly.

 

Following last summer’s sweltering heat, these above mentioned folks moved north. Anywhere to escape another wrath filled summer. They could hardly wait for the first snow and they were never going to endure temperatures in the three digit numbers again.

 

Sometime in the first week of December it snowed. She said they made hot chocolate, sat by the picture window and watched the big white flakes float from Heaven. It was a romantic second honeymoon and they fell in love all over again.

 

The next morning they awoke to a beautiful sparkling blanket and her husband could hardly wait to get outside and try out his brand new red handled show shovel. He threw snow balls at her while she swept the front porch and they decided that moving away from heat infested Oklahoma was the best thing they ever did.

 

The sun came out and melted all their beautiful snow and her husband pouted until the next day when it started again. A neighbor told them that by the end of the month they’d be so sick of snow they’d take a loss on their lovely home and move to west Texas. They both agreed the neighbor was slightly senile.

 

The second week in December it snowed again. Eight inches and the temperature dropped to -20 degrees. Her husband grabbed his shovel and got everything cleaned off just minutes before the snow plow came along and pushed it all right back on his sidewalks. He grumbled a little when he had to remove it the second time.

 

The next day the weather forecast called for 20 more inches. They sold their car and bought a pick-up truck complete with snow chains, and a couple of extra shovels. They stocked the freezer and bought extra hot chocolate. She wanted to buy a wood stove. He told her she was over reacting.

 

On Dec. 16, an ice storm hit their part of the country. Her husband slipped on his way to the shed to get the shovels and landed on his fanny. She laughed. He didn’t.

 

The next day the electricity went off for five hours and they huddled together under blankets to keep warm. It wasn’t fun anymore. She reminded him that they should have bought the stove. He said she was nagging. She wanted to put the house on the market and live in a tent in the Sahara Desert.

 

Neither of them laughed.

 

Four days later another 14 inches of the miserable stuff fell from ugly gray clouds and the husband shoveled it three times. The snow plow came by two times. Their neighbor said they had to get it shoveled off the walks or the city would have it done and bill them for it on their water bill.

 

On Christmas another 13 inches of horrid snow fell and it was cold enough they didn’t think they’d thaw out until at least August of the next year. They had a white Christmas. It wasn’t romantic. The second honeymoon was definitely over. The husband got all dressed in his insulated coveralls and went out to shovel ... again. He said she’d better put the CD of White Christmas in the blender and pulverize it.

 

The day after Christmas another six inches of the slop came down and they were snowed in. She looked up the number for a divorce lawyer. The snow plow driver stopped to ask for a donation and the husband shoved him off the porch, then he vowed that if he had to watch another movie with the wife he was going to look up the telephone number of the nearest divorce lawyer.

 

On December 27, he declared that moving to that forsaken ice berg state was all her idea and that she was getting on his nerves. She reminded him that he’d been the one who moaned and complained about the heat last summer and it was his idea to move. She loved the sunshine. They both called the lawyer.

 

On December 29, it warmed up to -10 degrees but they were still snowed in. She said if he didn’t do something she was going to buy sled dogs to take her home to her mother’s house and he could freeze to death or set fire to the house to get warm. He gave the snow plow man enough money to put his eldest child through medical school just to take them to the nearest airport. They are in Florida for the rest of the winter.

 

I do not dream of Alaska or snow anymore and I will not complain about the heat this summer…as long as the air conditioner is working, that is!

 

Moving? No thank you!

Husband, aka Mr. B, said something the other day about us downsizing to something smaller. Before he got the question out, I was already shaking my head. It’s not that I don’t want to downsize. It’s the move and all it entails. No, thank you! I do not ever want to move, or pack or clean out the two storage sheds or horror of horrors face off with his shop.

 

More than thirty years ago, Husband and I, along with three kids, two dogs and a few tropical fish moved into the house on Sixth Street in Davis, Oklahoma. I simply phoned the electric company, talked to someone named Anna about deposits and such and we were able to turn on lights.

 

Nothing to it!

 

I guess I expected such simplicity when we rented an apartment in north Texas about fifteen years ago when Husband got a teaching job on the south side of the Red River (FYI, we did not move anything but bought a skeleton housekeeping set to use while we were there). I was dead wrong. New and improved technology had replaced that slightly nasal voice asking how she could help me. Anna was not there when I called the electric company.

 

“Thank you for calling this electric company,” an automated voice said. It didn’t have any sign of a Texas drawl or even of an Okie brogue. Matter of fact, it sounded like it might have come from a cross between a robot and a broken down vacuum cleaner.  “If you are calling about your account press one. If you are calling concerning the nature of your latest bill, press two. If you are calling about new service, have your social security number ready and press three.”

 

I pressed three and waited. I vacuumed the whole apartment, loaded the dishwasher, unpacked two more boxes and read three chapters in the romance novel I’d started. Finally, I got the same flat voice, “All of our representatives are busy right now. Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received. Please do not hang up. We appreciate your business.”

 

Hang up? I wasn’t about to hang up. I balanced the cordless phone on my shoulder and kept right on working. I wiped out the ‘fridge and loaded it up with groceries. Scrubbed the bathroom, and hung up a roll of toilet paper. All the while some kind of elevator music was piped into my ear via the cordless phone.

It got dark outside and the music along with pure old tiredness made me sleepy. My eyes got heavy and I started to yawn. The phone slipped off my shoulder. No doubt about it, I was going to need a visit to a chiropractor by morning if the next representative didn’t finish that eight course meal they were having somewhere in Houston. If only they’d find Anna ... wherever she had retired to. She knew all about this kind of business.

 

Finally, a real person answered the phone. “This is Anna. What can I do for you?”

 

I was in shock. Anna! A real, honest-to-goodness woman with a nasal twang.

 

“I need the electricity for this apartment fixed up in Husband’s name. Is the same Anna who took care of this kind of business more than thirty years ago?” I asked.

 

“This is her granddaughter. She’s retired to the Azore Islands but I have to call her every so often for pointers. Give me your Husband’s social security number,” she said.

 

I did and in seconds the job was finished. I made a note to write the company a note and suggest they give Anna, the granddaughter a substantial raise, and put Anna, the grandmother, on the payroll as a consultant. 

 

Next item on the list was a toll free number to call about Internet services. I pushed all the buttons and the automated voice came on, “If you are calling about new service, press one. If you are calling about your bill, press two. If you are ...”

 

I pressed every button there at least twice and put the phone on my shoulder. Might as well get two calls out of the chiropractic visit the next day. In mere seconds another voice came on the line, “You are important to us. Please do not hang up. Please press one ...”

 

I didn’t give he/she/it time to go any further. I pressed all the buttons clockwise, and then counter clockwise. When I hit the last one a familiar voice came on the line, “Hello this is Anna. How may I help you?”

 

“I need Internet, a newspaper delivered in the mornings, pizza coupons, a card for the local Kroger store, the name of a good dry cleaning business, directions to the nearest Wal-Mart, a recipe for shoo-fly pie and to be put on the list for weekly discount coupons for area stores,” I said.

 

“I’ll take care of all of it. Has your husband changed his social security number in the last five minutes?”

 

“No, ma’am,” I smiled. “And tell your grandmother we all miss her terribly.”

 

So no, ma’am, I do not want to move again. Husband finally retired. We’ve been back in Oklahoma eight years and Anna’s granddaughter might have moved on to another job. I’ll stay right here!