I'm Just Sayin...

 I know this product has been out for a while, and is probably doing well since I still see many ads for it, but something just dawned on me when I was watching a commercial for Mio today. I think their ad should go like this...

 MIO... The colorful way to rufie someone's drink!

I'm just sayin....



Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you!

Queen Pat My Own Back

My daughter wanted to be Glenda the Good Witch this Halloween. I went to the fabric store and got the pattern. A week later I took the little monster back to the fabric store to pick out material for the costume. All of the fabric she wanted to get was pink and more pink. Glenda does not have a pink dress, it's peach. Being the perfectionist, stick to the facts sort of gal that I am, I couldn't let her be a pink Glenda. I know, I know, I should have let her be a pink Glenda. It's just a Halloween costume. Perhaps I have a slight touch of OCD because I couldn't do it. A pink Glenda would have made me nuts, it just isn't right. So I explained the facts to my munchkin and convinced her to let me make her a pink princess costume instead. We bought a new pattern. I must say that I made a damn good princess costume. Check it out.

Not Now! Mommy's Blogging.

"Mommy-hood changes things...and that's great. In fact that is the way it should be if everyone would take it seriously. But I feel as though there are an aweful lot of mommies out there that sugar coat being a mom. In my opinion, not all things about being a mommy are peaches and cream and I feel like it's taboo to talk about that."

An excerpt from a Coffee Beans and Daydreams post. Click the link to see the full post.

http://coffeebeansdaydreams.blogspot.com/2011/10/mommy-hood-changes-things.html

Geez, where do I begin? First of all, not most things about being a mommy are peaches and cream. I have two daughters ages three and one. Of course I love them with every ounce of my being but some days I wish my name wasn't "MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY!" Some times I even declare that my name isn't mommy anymore. Who's mommy? It never works. They never go away. That's not correct, let me rephrase it: They never go away unless they are up to something. Silence equals mischief, don't ever forget that. Sometimes I sneak up on the three year old to see what she's getting into. There are days when I will not yell at her for squeezing the contents of an entire tube of toothpaste into her hair. Instead, while she styles her minty fresh do, I tip toe away before she sees me and enjoy the peace and quiet. 

Do you want to buy a duck?

2 FAMILY GARAGE SALE!!!! - $1 (Midland)

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Date: 2011-10-07, 12:18PM EDT
Reply to: sale-vj7zp-2637382798@craigslist.org 

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2 FAMILY GARAGE SALE HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND!

•  Baby clothes and gear: girl's clothing, walker, jumparoo, swings, exersaucers, toys, etc.

• Outdoor play set, Kegerator conversion kit, women's designer purses, dishes, end tables, lamps, kitchen items, and much much more!!!

 SATURDAY 8AM-4PM
SUNDAY 10AM-2PM

4700 and 4704 Hampshire Ct.
Midland, Mi 48640

• Location: Midland

• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

	PostingID: 2637382798

Just An Average Psychopath

Just an Average

Psychopath… By Allison P. Slep

Role Model Logo

Practicing My Negotiation Face

I'm sale-ing away,

Out of the garage into the yard you see,

'Cause I've got to be free,

Free of all this crap that I'm sell-elling,

my yard, I'm the captain, all aboard my yard,

You can find lots of junk here that I know for sure,

And I'll try, Oh man I'll try, to sell it all...

Things That Go Bump in the Business

Things that Go Bump in the Business

By Allison P. Slep

Last May my husband and I, and our two daughters, moved into a house in Midland, Michigan. The house was built in the early nineteen-fifties and has some peculiar features. There are steel storm shutters on all of the windows that roll down manually by a rope and pulley and also by pushing a button that closes and opens them electronically. It’s the sort of thing you might see at a business in Detroit or any other high crime area, not in a suburban neighborhood. The bedroom my husband and I share has a gun safe built into the wall. I imagine it once had a large oil painting with a gold painted, carved wooden frame hung on the wall to conceal it. The basement has the most interesting feature, a full bar. I’m not talking about a bar that someone may add to their home for the purpose of entertaining a few guests; this bar is the real deal. It was built around the same time that the house was built and has everything a bar would need for the purpose of conducting business. There is a bar counter, working sinks to wash bar glasses in just underneath it, shelves to house all types of liquor, a tap for draft beer, and a special refrigerator to keep the kegs in. One wall has a classroom sized old chalk board attached to it and there is room for tables and chairs. With all of these out-of-the-ordinary things added together, it seems as though there may have been a speakeasy operation going on or possibly gambling. I can only speculate about what once went on in my home.

Secretary of Cake

Let them eat cake!

Cake Boss

In honor of my youngest daughter turning one this Saturday, I am dedicating this post to all of things I know about making birthday cakes. 
(This will be brief.)

Curiosity Killed My Face

I was in the bathroom looking in the mirror the other day and noticed that I have killer forehead wrinkles. It's kind of a bummer. I mentioned something about it out loud in front of my three year old daughter, who seems to materialize before me when ever I am in the bathroom. She asked me what was wrong with my forehead. Not wanting to complain about the way I look in front of her I said "oh it's nothing, I was just making a joke." Then she asked how I got those lines on my head and I told her that it's because I'm old. She reacted like I had just told her that I was going to give her away to the UPS guy. She calls him the "GPS" guy and runs into the house screaming "The stranger GPS guy is going to take me! He's going to kill meeee!" every time he delivers a package to us or anyone else on our court. She was horrified! I didn't realize that the thought of me being old was such a frightening thing for her.

Then I got to wondering how I did get the particular lines I have. Most women are aware of what frown lines are but I don't frown much, certainly not enough to leave lines! So I tried out several expressions in the mirror to see if I could figure out how they got there.

Job Experience #1

In my thirty-one years of life on this planet I have managed to obtain fifty-eight jobs. I think it's been that many, there could be more. I'm going to start at the first one and make my way every week through the list. I hope you find it humorous and, at the very least, interesting.

In order to explain the first job, I must first tell the story of the best friend I had growing up, Jamie. Jamie was about two years older than me and lived across the street from my family in Lake Orion, MI. She was a female, adolescent version of Dr. Dolittle. I swear the girl could talk to animals. This girl had a zoo in her house. There were dogs of all kinds; Great Danes, Terriers, Cockapoos, Cockalazapoos, you name it. She had cats and fish, turtles, snakes, flying squirrels, chinchillas, rats, mice and gerbils. There were over forty birds in her house, including a white Cockatoo named Snow that could scream her name exactly like her mother did so we often thought we were getting in trouble when, in fact, no one was home to catch us doing what ever it was we surely should not have been doing. Jamie grew butterflies in her bedroom and let them fly around in it, she introduced me to Sea Monkeys and Tent Worms. One time during a thunderstorm we were in her bedroom and a blue Parakeet that must have escaped from another house in the neighborhood crashed into her bedroom window. Jamie went outside and rescued it and kept it for many years. I suppose the bird had heard through the grapevine about the house with all the animals and the girl who could talk to them because how else could it have ended up there? Maybe the Parakeet had gotten news of the Seagull with the broken wing that Jamie took in. Her mother was an RN and helped Jamie amputate the wing that was broken beyond repair and they kept that Seagull for many years too, until it died from old age. Seriously, I couldn't make this stuff up.

Just Like Me

When you were growing up did your parents ever say to you, "When you grow up and have your own children, I hope they are just like you!" Well my parents did. At least my mother did. I guess she must have rubbed the right lamp and met the right genie because her wish came true. This is confirmed every time I call her to ask what I should do about some situation or another related to my daughters and her first response is to fall over laughing. This isn't the sort of laughter one would expect to hear after explaining a humorous story, this laughter is much more maniacal, a pinch of evil and a tablespoon of "I told you so."

My New Favorite Past Time

My husband and I bought our first house back in May. Brutus, the guy who sold it to us, had been renting it out to college kids and a couple different families over the course of several years. We were excited when he said we could keep all of the appliances that were in it. That meant we could keep the washer and dryer, three refrigerators, and the dish washer. He even threw in a hot tub that fits five or six people. "Too good to be true," you say? Exactly.

Public Humiliation at its Finest

 A post from the blog Magic In The Backyard asks what are some reasons why people censor their writing and how can we be fearless writers. While this isn't one of the assignments on the blog, this relates very much to the topic.


 I mentioned in my previous post that I had kept journals from the time that I was nine years old until a little over two years ago when I experienced something that made me afraid to write. It sounds a little crazy, I know. Talking about it now gives me a mental image that I am holding a pen in my trembling hand and can't make eye contact with the notebook. As I move my pen closer to the notebook my whole body begins to shake with fear as if I know that once the ink touches the paper a giant monster is going to emerge from the page and steal me away to a dark land where they eat people like me for lunch, people who express their feelings. You would be frightened too. Wouldn't you?

Entering the Blogosphere...

       Hello? Hello? Hello? Is there anybody out there? Comment on my blog if you can hear me... Is there anyone home?

From the age of nine, until a little over two years ago, I kept journals. I documented everything going on in my life and the way I was feeling about it, wrote stories, and poetry. I must have over eighty notebooks and at least a dozen more that got lost throughout the years. It was my way of getting my thoughts out of my head and onto paper so I could see them and sort them out. My spiral-bound therapists. 

Not everything I wrote about was an issue that needed to be resolved but a lot of it was. Every now and then I get a stack of them out and revisit the past. Some of the things I wrote are so funny to me now. The teenage angst/boy crazy years are especially hilarious. If I had married every boy that I swore I was going to marry I would have beat Elizabeth Taylor and Zsa Zsa Gabor by a land slide! I also get a kick out of all of the times I had wished I didn't live with my parents because "I wanted to be free and happy." I really thought that when I graduated from high school I would buy a Volkswagon bus and follow the Grateful Dead using the profit I'd make from selling hand-woven purses and grilled cheese sandwiches in the parking lots at their shows. I was sixteen when Jerry died. It was devastating. I can only imagine what my parents thought when I cried about it for days. They had no idea that my dream of owning a parking lot retail business and traveling the country in a vehicle that used diesel fuel was crushed. I may laugh now about how ridiculous I was back then, but when I wrote those journal entries I was serious. Maybe they'll come in handy as a sort of emotional reference manual when my daughters become teenagers. Actually, I'm going to save that scary thought for at least eight more years since my oldest is three and the second is only eleven months old.     

    

      Getting back to the subject of writing, I mentioned before that I have not really written anything in over two years. I experienced something that was emotionally traumatizing and I became afraid to write because of it (that post is next). Only recently have I felt that I can write again and I have a lot to say. My life has been very colorful and interesting so far. I am thirty-one and probably have more life experiences than some people have during their entire life. The last few years of my life have been eye opening, terrifying, frustrating and exhausting; however, I got through it and gained a lot of knowledge and wisdom, found love and strength, and managed to keep my sense of humor. I hope whoever reads this can get something positive out of it.Welcome to my blog. Thank you for letting me share my life with you.