Read his post, and share with me your thoughts.

What are your dreams?

Where do you want to be?

What do you want to be doing?

With whom do you want to be doing it?

What are you willing to sacrifice now to get there?

What will it take to get there?

With regard to what, three years from now, will you look back ((at RIGHT NOW)) and say, “I should have been doing X back in 2012″?

Who will be poo-pooing your dream, and how will you ignore his/her/their doubts?

Can you start tonight?

I do ask God first, with regard to my dreams and my plans, “If this is not Your will, could you please show me how You want my resources and life used, because I am totally open, as I know Your plans are so much better than mine?”
(and here’s a picture of Skip, stressing out, because I cost him $12 on our date at the Cake concert the other night for two frozen lemonades and some chocolate-almond popcorn…)
I found the answer to my question, “How do we fix all this?”

Now have courage. Dream your dream. Pack your parachute. And go running off your cliff. You’ll be fine. Courage. Use it or lose it.

And do not fear failure. Never ever.
It’s just one of the steps to success.

Never settle.

Our skates aren’t sharpened. Our cars are low on gas. I’m late for my kids’ performance. My car is full of house plants and dog gates and workout equipment and empty boxes and makeup and hair rollers and four-day-old coffee and medicine and empty plastic bags and hangers with nothing on them and empty boxes and hair rollers and various necklaces and low-calorie fruit drinks and blankets for covering our knees during hockey and a stationary bike and various watches and other broken timepieces.

I thought, back when I was a teenager… I thought I would outgrow my slovenly ways.

Nope. From shambles to shabambalambles.

And the kicker?

Disorganization is my biggest pet peeve. Skip says I’m the worst kind of slob. “You’re a slob who makes huge messes and then stays totally freaked out that everything is such a mess. You’re a Type-A SLOB!”

This convenience store clerk just heckled me for buying a low calorie Gatorade along with some candy.

He said, “You are going to buy a low-calorie drink, but then eat some candy?” and he snickered.

I said, chuckling, “Well you drink the one, so that you can eat the other… “

He said, “Maybe if you didn’t eat one, you wouldn’t need the other.”

I said, “DUDE! Dude! Do you know ONE WOMAN? ONE SINGLE WOMAN! HAVE YOU EVER, EVER KNOWN A FEMALE… ever in your whole LIFE? Are there ANY women in your life?”

I said this to myself of course, and then smiled and shrugged my shoulders like the ding-bat girl I am not but didn’t have the time not to pretend to be, thinking, “Who the heck gets HECKLED by her convenience store clerk?”

When he first smiled at my purchase pile, I thought he was going to say something about my pack of Daisy razors or my baby oil, or even pity me for my limp or my headache (he could tell, because I was also buying Alka-Seltzer Cold/ Orange Zest- I was springing for the orange flavored kind even though I’d spent $60 in medical co-pays today alone, because I’ve had a headache since Monday).

I’ve also been thinking… You know that bridge part of George Michael’s “Star People ’97″ where he breaks-out, with a sample of the Gap Band’s “Burn Rubber (Why You Wanna Hurt Me)”? That is baaaaaaaaaad! I wanna kiss is producer or whomever thought to do that.

Skip thought this was yet another blatant show of disrespect; one of many from our dear Canadian friends (just the geese… you humans from Canada have been most polite and delightful).

P.S. Why do all the places I frequent lately look like this?

Ok, yes, those are my flannel bunny PJ bottoms. Bunnies make me laugh, all serious and all… as they are all the time, looking at me like, “You TOTALLY DISGUST ME,” not that I blame them.

So when I find socks or PJ bottoms with bunnies on them or deer (a blog for another day), I splurge. So sue me.

And then while cleaning and putting stuff away in Sweet Husband’s bedside table, I find THIS!
” TOUCHÉ, SWEET HUSBAND! TOUCHÉ!” (not that I blame him; there’s hot and then there’s H-O-T…)

Like Alec Baldwin’s character in 30 Rock, at least my husband knows hotness when he runs across it… and so do I. We are married; not DEAD! When you say “I do… And I WILL, FOREVER, NO MATTER,” nobody gouges out your eyeballs. At least our church let us opt out of that part of the ceremony.
God bless Texas, Condi, Taylor, and epic Disney blockbusters, and I just pray Skip never finds my stash of Rumsi mags or my old VHS recordings of his DOD/Press Corps briefings… Now THAT… THAT was livin’!

A great job: don’t fix your hair or makeup OR ever have to wear Spanx again or high heels…

CLICK LINK BELOW TO WATCH THE STORY:

now THIS is humiliating for me to post. Why I had to have bilateral hip replacements 6 months ago in my 30′s…

And I’ll blame Lyrica for the extra 27 lbs. I’ve gained since March 1st. Not the 12-a-day Kit-Kat diet it launched. Seriously. Google “Lyrica” and “massive weight gain” and “quickly.” 10% who take it get ravenous for carbs. Better than pain though…

Celebrate imperfection, right? More to love? … until I conquer this too! God is laughing at me for being all cocky and stuff.

]]> http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/03/24/cable-is-not-a-need/ Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:52:37 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/03/24/cable-is-not-a-need/
Much dreamier than cable.

]]> http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/03/24/on-my-nasty-little-floor-2/ Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:42:38 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/03/24/on-my-nasty-little-floor-2/ On My Nasty Little Floor….

]]> http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/03/22/this-i-believe/ Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:29:15 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/03/22/this-i-believe/ This I believe:

Salad is a finger food, when eaten warm in the car on your way home from work at 8:30 PM, after it’s been sitting in the car all day.

]]> http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/03/21/my-daughter-wanted-me-to-tweet-this/ Wed, 21 Mar 2012 01:49:35 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/03/21/my-daughter-wanted-me-to-tweet-this/

She wanted me to do an interpretive analysis on our dog Blizzard’s emotions in this photo.

Clearly though I do not have to do any interpretation here. Blizzard… is tired.

After a long day of policing a house, destroying a dog bed, rolling in goose poo, annoying the neighbors with extraneous barks (because SOMEONE keeps switching off her bark collar!!!! — sweet daughter of mine ), staining the concrete we just had pressure-washed because I am too chicken to start the grass seed this early in the growing season, and right now, we are pretty lucky our house isn’t sliding right off the back of this mud mountain we call our lot (I had big plans for retaining walls, built by an adorable giant named Eddie and his savvy contractor friend named Danny, both of whom have equally if not more adorable wives, Patty & Nanette, but not in that order, with Danny or Eddie who have lots of excavators and graders, I am imagining… and nothing excites me more than building permits and grading equipment, but instead, for my 40th birthday this year, I got two new titanium hips… or cobalt… or an alloy of some sort – whatever they are; I just said to the surgeon that morning, “Give me a metal margarita for each hand, and use the top-shelf tequila this time!” – I totally am going to get into metallurgy next; I even learned to solder today. Anyway my excavation and grading work AND retaining-wall money was ALL USED during my extended-stay medical staycation. So here we are: a mom eager to morph from media to metallurgy, a daughter who is learning to read at 9:48 p.m. by picking a photo for me to post here, and then trying to read the caption I write for it, and a muddy dog, hiding in our bed, under my husband’s side of the covers (we each have separate covers; I’m cold/he’s hot… Long story, but another reason to anticipate eagerly the onset of menopause) because she spent the day, ripping her bed to shreds in our grassless front yard… in the rain.

And I acted caught-off-guard when the neighbor told me that turning into her driveway and having to see our house’s debris every night made her have seizures every time she came home. Might want to have that checked…

And to think I’m equally as tired from stressing a little and spending the past two days in a cubicle or on the interstate.

]]> http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/03/09/our-week-in-pictures/ Fri, 09 Mar 2012 07:54:00 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/03/09/our-week-in-pictures/ Oh. Before I forget- go see John Carter tonight or this weekend at the movie theatre. It’s distributed by Disney, my employer, though they probably aren’t always proud to claim me, not that “they” really even know I work there… (just see the movie, go to the theme parks because they’re fun and buy stuffed crickets in top hats and stuff…), it was put together by Andrew Stanton (of Finding Nemo and Wall-E, and who didn’t COMPLETELY LOVE wall-E??), and it’s based on the books that inspired Spielberg and Lucas and thousands of others, and most importantly it stars my favorite actor-crush (who reminds me of Skip).

My husband, the Hankamer School of Business’ Accounting graduate (that’s at Baylor, for all of the non-Texans out there… Baylor’s in Texas, for all the non-Southerners out there) came in tonight from midnight grocery shopping again, SO excited to have found some Dr. Thunder. He was stoked that maybe cans of Dr. Thunder wouldn’t be disappearing at quite the rate the Dr. Peppers have been going from our fridge lately, taken by little ones who aren’t allowed soft drinks, which is perhaps why we find half-full cans of the Pepper, hidden behind wingback chairs in our living room, which is perhaps why we now have a raging ant problem. I’m just kidding; we don’t have any wingbacks.

Skip was so excited about the Dr. Thunder, I didn’t want to ruin it for him by reminding him that “Thunder” was ALSO the name of the half-blind black Labrador I knew and loved years ago, who was tragically hobbled at a young age ( like me!) by hip dysplasia, arthritis, and years of running and teaching aerobics (you should have seen him in those little biker shorts and sweat bands!)

You see… Thunder belonged to DAVE, the guy I was dating for a few months right after Skip and I first met. It’s a very painful memory for Skip, so I only bring it up on wildly-public websites and forums that are open to the WORLD, except maybe to people in China and one of the Vietnams I’m guessing.

So two weeks after meeting Skip and waiting the whole two weeks for him to call me, which he never did, because (he says) he thought that TV-news chicks like me were probably all weird, needy freaks like the pageant girls he’d dated in Texas, and because (I ‘know’) he was trying to date this red-headed pageant-looking girl who didn’t like him at all until he started dating me… well, when I got a call for a date from Skip’s friend Dave, whom I’d met the same night I’d met Skip, but DAVE AND I HADN’T TALKED AND LAUGHED AND TALKED AND LAUGHED FOR THE WHOLE FRIGGING THREE HOURS WE WERE ALL SITTING THERE, I said “Why, YES, Dave! I’d love to go out on a date with you this weekend and eventually fall in love with your dysplastic dog ‘Thunder’ and later your best buddy, Skip and marry him
and beg him to shave my calves when my belly, pregnant with our twins, wont let me actually reach my legs or make it outside to see the cattle we kept out back that always needed to be shaved, especially the younger ones who would over-heat in Summer and let him bring me food during the years I won’t be able to walk.”

Well, I didn’t say all that, exactly, but I did let Skip enjoy his Dr. Thunder without reintroducing him to the heartache he must have felt for the four or five months that I dated Dave and hung out with Thunder, and Skip kept trying to date that red head who didn’t like him or like him, liking anyone else. Obviously he’s still not over it…

Sure, I make fun of Skip & his Dr. Pepper knock-off buying and “Don’t call the exterminator; they’ll just spray the same stuff I’m spraying” ways, but while questioning him about the photos I’d found while poking around on his phone (don’t all wives check their husbands’ texts, email & photos periodically?), he reminded me that I had plenty of my own idiosyncrasies, and evidenced this:

That’s our family, having his celebratory birthday donuts at our local Dunkin’ Donuts. Actually, it’s me on the floor of our local Dunkin’ (WHEN are people goin’ to get tired of thinkin’ it’s so cute, goin’ ’round, droppin’ all the g’s off of everythin’?), picking up beads that I had been spillin’ all OVER the floor, as Skip and the kids ate donuts, but as I neurotically made beaded necklaces. My hip surgery has meant that for quite a few months once again, common sense would dictate that I be severely restricted in my activity level. Despite whatever THAT means, Skip keeps telling me I need to sit down, and maybe the pain will go away, so I have had to find ways to keep myself still.

Watching TV starts to make my skin crawl after about five minutes (or maybe it’s the ants). Plus we have three kids who’ll all need braces no matter whose teeth they got. Plus we/I have had ten years’ worth of fertility or hip-pain treatments, surgery, therapy and various other procedures that cost us a ton, so I’ve decided we can’t afford to buy books anymore.

My fingers are too fat for knotting– I mean knitting–. My friends are all busy with real lives that include things like walking and standing and bending and working and cleaning and bathing kids and cleaning out minivans and all that other fun stuff I used to get to do, and they can’t sit around and texting with ME all day, so that’s left beading.

I bought some pliers years ago, so I wouldn’t have to take my fake jewelry to a real jeweler when it broke. Then I ramped it up a notch when a TV News image consultant said my jewelry was, much like our social life right now, “lame, too small and was lacking ‘pop,’” a word she used to mean ‘color.’ So when I realized at a concert that, like the doctor had said, I really could not stand for more than 45 minutes on any given day, I decided beading was all I had left. Mom says that when I blog, Tweet or post on Yelp, Pinterest or Facebook too much, I seem desperate…

“MOM! I **AM** DESPERATE.”

Obviously my beading habit has NOT kept me still OR kept me from pushing my hips’ range of motion past the allowable limits (range of motion isn’t my post-op problem; my problem is that my muscles have atrophied too much over the years of pain, and my tendons and ligaments are TOO loose — save all ‘loose women’ comments for another post…) So I’m a TV News, needy, pageant girl freak after all, but instead of eating donuts with me for the rest of his blissful life, Skip will be getting to help me pick up the beads I’ve spilled in Dunkin’ Donuts.

Quote of the Week-
This one, from Skip, said tonight in our kitchen, as if he’d just figured it out:
“Women are so… SPIRITED!”

He’s also still thinking someone should produce the “Bed Vacuum,” a product for which he decided we had the need twelve years ago when he first conceptualized it… shortly after figuring out what life’s like, living with a crazy-woman who likes to keep her dogs in her bed.

No, Blizzard. I didn’t think putting that bandanna on your head was a good idea either, but nobody asked me.

I tried the Furminator on the Bliz this week, but hesitated to hook it to the vacuum attachment I’d also bought, fearing total revolt.
But even suction-less, the Furminator did create this little smidgen of fun:

… a thousand mini-Blizzards, blowing across our deck like baby-bunny tumbleweeds.

Favorite Phrase of the Week:

“Is the juice really worth the squeeze?”
It’s a little ditty, often-uttered by Skip’s boss, I hope not in reference to me. They work at a church, by the way, so don’t go thinking any bad stuff.

I’m not sure this is legal, but she IS over 80 pounds… I have to get a bigger car… Does Dodge make the Sprinter these days with a convertible option?

This picture is supposed to have one of our favorite artists in the background…
But instead we have this nice-looking-but-we-don’t-know-him-at-all guy, joining us in the picture. My idea, I’m sure… to grab him. I love to see the looks on strangers’ faces when I suddenly pull them into my pictures. Obviously it happens to this guy a lot.

Doesn’t the camaraderie of concerts just warm your soul? Oh, and here’s Robert Earl Keen, who was supposed to be in our picture.

This was the night I learned I wasn’t ready to stand yet.

But later we had a much better night, when I found the best pink cupcake icing I’d ever smelled.

]]> http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/02/06/bed-falling-out-of-age-limit/ Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:28:40 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/02/06/bed-falling-out-of-age-limit/ What’s the magic age at which a child learns to discern where the bed’s edge is while asleep? I’m afraid to let go of my six year old.

]]> http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/02/06/taylor-kitsch/ Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:18:34 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/02/06/taylor-kitsch/ Ummm, yea. That guy you’ve been seeing in all the Super Bowl commercials for coming blockbuster movies? Yea. That’d be the guy about whom I’ve been telling you for six years now. You’ll know his name well enough by this fall, Taylor Kitsch. Rrrrroweeeerrr.

((I’m married, not DEAD, folks.))

]]> http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/02/01/shes-gone-possum/ Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:45:40 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/02/01/shes-gone-possum/ The hub-ster thinks I’ve left my previous Night Owl classification and have become an opossum. 

It took me 4 hours to scan these in and position them, but the message was so wacky, we never sent them out.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA3rXfl7e0I&feature=related

 

]]> http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/01/30/an-poll-for-parents/ Sun, 29 Jan 2012 23:39:21 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/01/30/an-poll-for-parents/ Be completely honest. And reply anonymously if you must…

1). About what percentage of parents do you think pretend to be “busy in the restroom” solely to get the smallest of breaks from their beloved kids &/or spouses?

2). How many of you will admit doing so?

3). If you had to choose between getting your two young (6 & 8 years old) boys driven to, dressed for & ready for hockey… and getting your first shower in 4 days, which would you pick: kids’ hockey or bathing?

4). How many of you love— but secretly resent/hate Kenny Chesney, because so many of his songs are about islands, vacations, chilling out & being with friends, none of which you’ve seen or done since becoming a parent? He sings one song about settling down & having a few kids, but you are TOTALLY thinking he just wrote that to pick up chicks…

5). For how many days at a time have you opted for sock-less fashion, not because you wanted to, but because you’ve been out of clean socks for that long, or your socks are all clean, but just don’t ever make it up into your drawer, & your son is starting to be a little traumatized by you, walking naked through the kitchen while he eats his soup (some kids ASK FOR soup for breakfast!) to the laundry room in hopes of finding ANY clean garments?

6). How many of you have stopped eating completely because a) you’re too tired to chew b) you think, if you eat less, maybe you’ll be able to save more money for the trade school your kids will be opting for, once rejected from ALL colleges because of YOUR POOR PARENTING, c) you’ve had a few big surgeries in your life & have realized there MUST be some nutritional value to Dr. Pepper, because that’s all you consumed for four weeks one of those times, but you didn’t die then d) your brain is so caught up in all the noise, it forgets to mention to itself that maybe you should eat for the first time in two weeks, or e) there’s nothing left in the house that you can just “unwrap & eat,” so why bother?

I have a friend who was wondering.

]]> http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/01/24/crapping/ Tue, 24 Jan 2012 04:35:34 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2012/01/24/crapping/

I’ve read that Apple was started by some creative techies in a garage.

So ya think my big jewelry-making/Home&Gardenmedia-content-provider empire can start from this mess on the floor?

I’m thinking that passionate souls don’t always wait to start until everything around them is perfectly planned and spec’d out (that’s just how I procrastinate to delay doing housework & laundry & cooking!).

It’s my contention and hope that creators just START. Then they fail a lot. And then sometimes, serendipitously, something bigger pops out. Right?

I mean that’s how it’s always worked for me, and look how far I’VE come! ((cough, cough… Look, it may be a ’95 Taurus, but it’s been paid off for MONTHS now!))

My husband doesn’t think it’s plausible– my concept of how creativity, unrestrained, can breed the potential for success. He doesn’t think I can just CREATE something on my bedroom floor, while I do clams & bridges (ask a physical therapist) & do my gluteal re-education (you don’t want to know; just consider it “kegel exercises on steroids”… they help to reduce hip pain), and ever end up with anything to show for it.

Fact is… I don’t CREATE to produce or succeed; I create because I cannot NOT create. My creations may never afford my family a lifestyle, ripe with quadra-annual (4x a year, right?) trips to the Amalfi Coast, Lake Como, British Columbia in Summer, Coastal Maine also in Summer, Vienna, Austin, or to Cabo San Lucas (my favorite places, by the way. Honey, if you’re reading my blogs & have squirreled away millions about which I have never known, now’s the time to tell me & start taking us somewhere! Please take us to all of these places. I won’t ask a thing about how you got the money. Just give me time to get my washboard abs back… or at least to borrow some. If you have a thousand squirreled away, I’d settle for a trip to North Myrtle with my cousins & some of our cooler friends– You know who they are.–)

Point is- trying to create stuff has been & will always be just ‘me.’ If i am someday jailed (plausible), I would probably end up, gnawing some plaster off the walls & using anything sticky i could find (DON’T use your imagination for this part) to smash it back together & start sculpting.

In real, non-prison life, if I stumble into something that can benefit us financially, cool. Otherwise I will just continue to drain our accounts and spend all those quarters on crap from Michael’s (an arts & crafts store, in case you are reading this from Salzburg, Austria or Rome, dang you); on things like hole-punchers that punch-out paw prints, make-your-own-stamp kits, bead bags, wooden containers & tiny vestibular plastic boxes. (I had to google “vestibular.” I thought it might work in this context, & after reviewing all definitions, I’m sticking with it. Someone correct me if I’m way off base. I mean it is a “chamber” right? Why couldn’t it be a chamber or hall-like container, holding beads?)

Well I buy this stuff anyway, & it ends up here on my bedroom floor, where most of my masterpieces are constructed, and a spouse-ish-looking human is almost always chastising me about it, but not for the mess; for staying up too late “crafting.”

We used to say, instead of “making crafts,” as was my desired intent, I was actually just making crap. You know where I’m going with this… Yes…

Instead of “crafting,” I was crapping.

Instead of being a crafter, I was a crapper.

Maybe I still am crapping, but for the first time ever yesterday, someone bought a piece of my crappy life: a tiny pair of black & silver earrings… for nine bucks… from Java Jive (2425 Kildaire Farm Rd., Cary, NC 27518. PLEASE GO. The lady who owns it took pity on me on one of the days I hobbled in behind my walker after bilateral hip replacement with version correction, & asked how I’d survived so many months with two bum wheels. When I told her, “Beading,” I think she took pity on me, and offered to look at some of my home-made jewelry and to possibly to sell it there. Her name’s Cheri & I LOVE HER for having compassion upon me as I endured the crescendo of ten years of pain: my double THR surgery recovery. God sends us angels all the time. Whether we choose to notice them is ours to decide, but this woman was one of the many angels He’s sent me in the past decade.)

But I meant to be talking about crapping, not God. For me, it all always goes back to God, in case you haven’t looked beyond my potty mouth & distasteful subject matter to notice.

So whether it’s crap to your husband or to the rest of the world or even to you, yourself, i say, “Go for it, Lady! Crap away wit yo’ bad self!” because I believe it is God Himself who put that desire to crap/craft inside you, & you have to get it out, or you’re not fulfilling His purpose for your life. Trash your bedroom if you have to. God told me it’s OK.

So if you’re not one of the pragmatists whom God has also surrounded me with consistently, try doing some crapping, & give birth to who knows what! Maybe YOUR company will be trading at $427 a share someday! (I feel sick. I just checked that closing price for this post & now distinctly remember when Hubby & I felt certain Apple could not go higher than $300… And. Sold. It. All… ((echoing)) “all, all, all, all…”)

Anyway, creationism… My kind of creating has always worked this way: throw up (don’t vomit- TOSS into the air) a bunch of pencils, & see whether a few get stuck in the ceiling tiles. Maybe that one pencil, your crap, is really an egg, waiting for just oooone sperm to swim by, so it can begin its life as the next iPhone. What do I know? But why not try? What else ‘ya got going anyway? A couple of re-runs of Matlock, on this weekend?

Or maybe it’ll just help you pass the time until your bosses let you come back to work after medical leave or until you spinal fusion fuses or until your glutes begin to take shape again or until your husband gets home from wherever the HECK he is tonight (Where IS HE??? It’s freaking 9
11:22 in the pm! Has he taken another family to raise???)

P.S. If it turns out Dear Husband has a girlfriend, I’ll be sure to blog about the whole thing: me, finding out, him, begging for mercy -or mercury, which is what my Spell Checker thought he’d be wanting from me. It would sure make for juicier reading than about “crapping,” because God wants you to.

I don’t THINK he has a girlfriend though. I mean the man has eaten the same EXACT breakfast for the entire span of our almost-12-year marriage; surely he’d get sick of a PB&B sandwich before he’d get sick of me! (Should “almost-12-year” really be hyphenated? I have to get an editor. As soon as I run out of money & can’t buy paw-print hole punchers anymore, I’ll save up to hire an editor… maybe then a publisher… maybe then an agent! Maybe then a publicist! Maybe then a professional stretcher! ((I feel really tight, yet my therapist– PHYSICAL THERAPIST– knock it off, with all the crazy person jokes– says I need to strengthen, not stretch.)) Hiring a personal stretcher really would be the pinnacle of my life, you know. Babies & marriage are great & all, but really? You muscles get longer, with absolutely NO effort on your part? That’s making it, if you asked me…

Anyway, the last time I spent weeks, wondering where the heck my husband was all the time & why he was always gone, yet was bringing home so little cash, it turned out that he was WORKING ALL THE TIME, doing deals to save up the thousands it was going cost him to REPLACE MY ENGAGEMENT RING!!! He’d lost it while waiting for me to come out of my first hip surgery (On 12/08/10, at Wake Forest University’s Baptist Hospital… in the surgical waiting room. It was 2.02 carats, a solitaire, on a gold band with four platinum prongs, in case you happened to have found it when it slipped off his pinky while he slept). Boy did i feel like a black-hearted shrew, when I opened the ring box last month & realized I’d been bitching about him all that time, while he was working for MY benefit! God has a very special way of showing me just how BIG a buffoon I really am, & why I should be forever grateful that neither my husband nor God, Himself have left me!

Not that I don’t deserve to be left. (Honey, if you’re leaving me & your attorney’s planning on using this post in court, I’m going to be SO MAD; I might even not let you take back your fire-hydrant lamp, your cool, Texas-looking sofa, OR your lasso, & I’m certainly not releasing my grip on these hundred-thousand beads you help me pick up when I drop them all out of one of my plastic vestibules.

I really love you, Baby, wherever you are. I meant to blog about my messy, impetuous nature & whether it’ll ever help me become Martha Stewart (but hopefully funnier) or will ever help me earn any money, so I can save enough to move us to Austin, where it’s warm enough that, even if I forget my thyroid meds, as any girl with ADD who forgets to take her ADD meds does, I will still feel warm enough to leave our family bed in the morning (or at noon) to go & open Puppuccino’s, the free-range-dog-park/coffee-bar/newspaper-stand-place-for-me-to-showcase-&-sell-my-glittered/epoxy-covered-furniture-&-other-crap/crafts-I’ve made while you sip joe & not worry about Dave, your four-pound poodle, hoping out in front of an F-350- a place we will own & run…

But i digress from my last digressions. Yep, forgot my ADD meds again. Happens often, I hear… All my posts end up, back, focused upon you– my dear, sweet, wonderful husband. How do you ever put up with me? I’m serious! No, wait…

I just want to say that I am so grateful that you still choose to love me and that you don’t yell too loudly when your bare feet step on a stray bead again.

((Just kidding, with that Puppuccino’s description. Oh, really, I do plan to open a place like that someday. I was just kidding you with my hyper-hyphenation.))

]]> http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2011/12/29/leia-hut-teach-marriage/ Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:37:53 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2011/12/29/leia-hut-teach-marriage/ Husband says all he ever needed to know about marriage he learned from _Return_of_the_Jedi_ and Jabba the Hut and Princess Leia:  Never chain yourself to something more vicious, mean or more dangerous than you are.

(I’m not sure if I’m Leia in this story… or Jabba, but either way, I’m either a giant, obese monster or a woman capable of killing one.)

]]> http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2011/12/29/i-told-him-thank-you-so-why-did-he-walk-out-of-the-room-shaking-his-head-when-i-asked-if-he-could-grind-just-a-little-nutmeg-on-top/ Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:55:10 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2011/12/29/i-told-him-thank-you-so-why-did-he-walk-out-of-the-room-shaking-his-head-when-i-asked-if-he-could-grind-just-a-little-nutmeg-on-top/ http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2011/12/16/cake-balls/ Fri, 16 Dec 2011 10:29:00 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2011/12/16/cake-balls/ I worked SO hard today.  Making freaking Christmas balls for my kids’ birthday party.  No, I know correct punctuation.  It was the party my husband had said we had to have for all three of our kids.  Only one of our kids was born in December.  The twins were August babies, but I was in horrible hip pain last August. We were trying to figure out whether to have my hips chopped completely OUT or to just have them tweaked again. We were in such a state of turmoil, we just couldn’t pull off the twins’ birthday party. They’ve let us know, that decision was, is and always will be unacceptable. So we dumped them into Younger Son’s party and called it

“Family Birthday Pirate Party with Cake Balls… Please come.”

The problem is… my medical bills are astounding.  Older Son is incredibly driven and thinks we are related to Donald and Ivanka.  He’s been begging for a sleep number bed for weeks now.  A SLEEP NUMBER BED. He is eight. Husband said, if he didn’t knock it off, he was going to end up sleeping on a sleep-number towel, and it was going to be set permanently on “Hard.”  For Older Son’s birthdays, he always wants to take 80 of his closest friends, and he doesn’t HAVE 80 friends, to Cabo San Lucas or Lego Land or something we can’t even afford to do, just the five of us.  I was so overwhelmed at the idea of quite possibly –probably– letting him down, that I just kept postponing the family birthday party, because I knew after such a huge surgery (I had both hips replaced 9/16/11), I could not pull off a party good enough to past his muster.

So when Husband agreed to lead the charge and get this thing over with, I decided my special contribution would be to make cake balls.  As happened with the infamous Blue-Green Crayon Costume Disaster of 2010 (my fault), I had no idea, but I was indeed bound to screw this one up too.

My children have been home with me, recovering from surgery, for four months now. (translation: boooooring,when your mom can’t walk or even drive for most of it).  I reeeeeally didn’t want to let them down. Husband had opted for a pirate-themed party, so I knew I wasn’t going to be hobbling around on his treasure hunt.  The least I could do was prove my love for them by not showing up with a store-bought cake, even if they are ten times better than anything I’ve ever made.  It was the least I could do; to make one home-made treat.  Right? The LEAST I could do.  (Plus, we are broke from surgery, and those cakes are exPENsive!)

((Please imagine some really cool Mission Impossible or The Hunt for Red October clicking here, as the words are typed out))

TUESDAY. TWO DAYS BEFORE PARTY:

I made about 5 or 6 cakes. Funfetti, Chocolate. Vanilla.  You’re supposed to start by baking some cake-mix cakes. Check. I’m so talented. I can make box cakes. So I bake the cakes and am quite proud. I even have minimal leg cramping that night, so I didn’t even abuse my body in the process of cake-making.

WEDNESDAY. DAY BEFORE PARTY:

Wednesday is crazy. The kids have some choir performance, and my girlfriends have so sweetly offered to take me to a spa to get me ready for my big “come back” to work, about which I had already been incredibly apprehensive. I get very stressed about the idea of leaving my kids for all but one of their waking hours.  Plus I’ve been envisioning during this whole hip-replacement-surgery-recovery time period just how much my coworkers must have grown to hate me for missing work and letting all the work flop into their laps.  So we rush through Wednesday, and I made no cake ball progress. Legs are killing me from walking all the way in to the choir performance and back out. Whew.

THURSDAY MORNING.  DAY OF PARTY.

I’m thinking… “No big deal. I’ll get up, crumble the cakes, add the icing, form the dough, make the balls, dip them in melted chocolate chips, add sprinkles, add sticks, and poof… awesome birthday cake balls.  My kids and their friends’ moms will be so happy.”

I get up, hung over from the choir performance the night before. I’m stiff from the waist down and everything is throbbing. There was no drinking, but I still throb. Nice. It’s fun to be 40.  I stumble downstairs.

Mom is already stressed that I’ve not started the next step of cake balling. She’s always pretty stressed. I pretend not to be. I crumble the cakes as she discusses with me what I need before she goes home to Charlotte.  She… has come to help… me.  In the past 23 months or so, she’s had one knee replaced, has torn her rotator cuff, has lost both her mom and husband, has had rotator cuff surgery, has worried endlessly about her sister who has breast cancer, has torn her rotator cuff again (yes, the one that was just fixed), and has been informed that her re-torn rotator cuff means she can’t have her SECOND knee replaced, until they do the rotator cuff surgery AGAIN, she heals from it and is strong enough to hold herself up on a walker after her second knee replacement. I repeat:  *SHE* has come to help *ME.* Evidently I am THAT BAD OFF…

So as she heads out for the extra bag of white chocolate chips, I begin mixing store-bought icing into the now-crumbled cake.  I roll the balls. Very nice. “I rock,” I think to myself.  ”I really am Martha Stewart, except I’m a lot funnier.”  I keep rolling balls. I eat one.  I want coffee, but my hands are all gooey, and my legs hurt too much from the wild kids- choir thingy from the night before to get up and make some. I ask Husband to text Mom for me and ask her to also grab some Diet Mountain Dew, because I am too lazy to stop, wash my hands and make my own damn coffee, and I really need caffeine. Besides I’m busy with the cake balls.

I melt the chocolate chips. I put the first ball into the melted chocolate and start rolling it around. CRAP.  The ball falls apart.  Ugh.  Then I remember!  ”I’m supposed to FREEZE these dang things, so they don’t fall apart when they hit the warm chocolate!” So I go to put the cookie sheet in the freezer.  Freezer’s too narrow.   I transfer all the balls to three smaller casserole dishes, so they’ll fit in the freezer.

I still rock at this point.  It’s about 11 a.m., and I’ve been rolling cake balls since 9 a.m. Mom comes back, all stressed because she got the 911 Diet Mountain Dew text after she’d left the grocery so she wasn’t able to get it for me.  Husband agrees to make the coffee.  I am, after all, still rolling cake balls and beginning to pray they freeze in time to roll them in the warm chocolate and sprinkle them.  Husband says he’s going up for a nap.  Yes, a nap. Who naps on the day of a kid’s birthday party?  Oh, that’s right. Men nap.

I roll about 250 cake balls.  Our kids are small, and the balls need to be small enough to fit in a kid’s mouth in one bite because we haven’t bought napkins, so I have to make lots.  Also, Husband didn’t invite anyone to the party until Wednesday (the day before the party), and Oldest Son has informed me that he’s talked to EVERYONE, and NOBODY… nobody is coming.  This troubles me. They will be scarred for life if nobody shows up for their delayed party.  So I’m thinking nobody’s coming, but if everyone does come, I have to have enough cake balls.

It’s 1:00 at this point. Party starts at 3:30 but I have to leave to pick up the kids at 2:30.  I ask Husband, before his nap, if he will please make me coffee.  He points out that it’s right there, already made. “No,” I say, “Will you MAKE my coffee.”  He agrees to pour it in a cup, add sugar, Splenda, cream and a straw and lift it to my lips.  He says again that he’s going to take a nap. Panic sets in a little more deeply.

The balls are not freezing. I try to roll them around… and they crumble.  Some crack and fall apart right there on their sticks.  I kid you not.

Sprinkles are everywhere at this point, and I’ve run out of dishes. I start using frying pans for the “add sprinkles” part of the cake ball process.  Then… I run out of sprinkles. I’m still in my pajamas (OK, we don’t wear pajamas, but I’m still in the clothes in which I slept).  I’ve not had one sip of coffee yet. (He forgot the “lift it to my lips” part.) I have no more room in narrow freezer, so I start removing pizzas, broccoli, and tiny carcasses of innocent birds Husband shot years ago. I rush to the car, which is blocked in by the trailer and SUV which Husband and I have been using for weeks (yes weekS) to move in.

Oh, I didn’t mention we’re in the process of moving into a house?  Yea, right after double hip replacement surgery, we move ourselves into a house. Brilliance obviously abounds here.

So I take the car with the trailer still hitched to get sprinkles.  I can’t take it off, because I don’t know how to unhitch a trailer. I don’t know how to drive a car with a trailer attached, but hey, I drove that live-truck that time… all the way down to Rocky Mount and back when Mike Wright wanted to take a nap before and after he had to shoot my story. I leave, thinking about how my entire kitchen is destroyed. It looks like I’ve let my twin  eight year olds and my six year old make the cake balls themselves. It looks like I let them have a cake ball fight. It looks like we all got naked with the dog and rolled around in cake ball debris and then jumped into chocolate and sprinkles, but it was just me.

I get to the grocery check-out with my Diet Mountain Dew, treats for the gift bags (Oh you didn’t know that the party isn’t good enough these days?  Oh yes, kids will waltz right out of your party in disgust if you don’t have treat bags for them.) So I’m in line, crusted with sprinkles and chocolate, and I see this on a magazine cover: something about cute little cake pops being so easy to make.

“Yea, Right.” I roll my eyes and crack open a Dew right there in the line before I’ve even paid for it. I’m feeling rebellious.

I get home and complete what seems to be my first semi-successful half-dozen cake balls.  For some reason, my blue balls turn out the best.

I must have some special knack.  I stick the next dozen in the fridge.

One ball falls to the bottom of the stick.  Crap.

I bet Martha’s ball doesn’t fall to the bottom of her stick. Damn her. I have like 14 minutes until I have to have the car loaded with 250 cake balls (oh, and Husband is awake from his nap at this point.  Husband tells me he has no drinks, no cups, no plates, no napkins etc. and he still has to get the coffee that he promised on the invitations and make the treasure-hunt maps. I go into full freak mode.)

GOAL CHANGES FROM…

“MAKE 250 GORGEOUS CAKE BALLS TO CELEBRATE THE BIRTH OF OUR CHILDREN”

to…

“DON’T GET HAIR IN THE BALLS… MAKE SOME BALLS, AND GET THEM TO THE PARTY WITHOUT ANY DOG HAIR OR MOMMY HAIR… STUCK TO THEM.”

I think that, well, maybe I can pull that off. I throw in the oven the two pizzas that have been defrosting on the kitchen counter for five hours at this point, just because, you know… it’s food, and in ten more minutes, I may not have anything else completed for this party.

“You know, if you let those pizzas thaw before you bake them, they won’t turn out right,” Husband points out.  Obviously his nap hasn’t helped his judgment much.

My great-grandfather was, I kid you not… a Belgian chocolatier.  Like, as in… Belgian chocolates.  He made them. He supported a whole family by doing this. I can’t knock out one batch of homemade cake balls without nuking my block and the block down the street too. I cook like a four year old. I remember that this is why I stopped cooking.

About cake ball number 235, I figure out how to roll the chocolate-dipped balls in sprinkles without completely sprinkle-encrusting eight of my ten fingers. I still worry there is hair somewhere on one of the balls.  I add sticks to the balls. I’m using shisk-ka-bob skewers, because I was trying to save money and didn’t want to splurge on more than one pack of actual cake pop sticks. Yes, there is such a thing, and someone’s feeding his family from the sale of cake pop sticks. Yet the CPA and the girl with two degrees can barely seem to squeak by.

I get Dog into the car and remember to take off her shock collar, so she won’t get stocked again as we drive across the driveway line.  Drinks. Crap. We have no drinks. We can’t give the kids just coffee. That worked for my baby, but nobody knew about that. Parents may not WANT their kids to have coffee, as crazy as that may sound to you.  I grab a container and start mixing in whatever scraps of drinks we have left in the fridge. “Punch!”   I start stacking glass dishes and glasses… everything we have into the back of the car… so the kids can– share– one of the 10 unopened water bottles I know Husband keeps in his car as standard operating procedure. First I have to move the flats of plants that I bought four days ago out of the car, and get all the… well some of the dirt brushed off the floorboards.

“Maybe Older Son was correct in his polling, and nobody will show,” I begin to hope.  I’ve already lost the top to the punch container. There is no HOPE of finding it in the debris that used to be a kitchen, and it’s past the time I needed to leave to get the kids.

I can’t even consider that I could make it all the way to the party with an  80-pound puppy, two pizzas (neatly cut into 25 equal slices), three kids and all their school crap, several dozen cake pops, all the glassware we’ve ever owned and this open bottle of orange juice, mango-pineapple juice and diet ginger-ale without spilling it, so I go ahead and accept that my car will be trashed soon too.  I pick up the kids. Punch spills in the chaos.

Dog (did I mention she’s covered in something brown which I think must be dog poo because when she rolls in goose poo, her fur is normally more green and doesn’t stink as much) jumps into front seat right in front of the principal who is trying to keep dog from jumping out into the carpool line… as my manager calls from work to ask when the last doctor will approve me to come back and to tell me which parking space will be mine. All kids start screaming because the whole back seat is wet. Dog probably has peed in their seats on the way to the school. Why should the car seat be any different than the mattress she nailed last week that also happened to be my daughter’s only sleeping spot until the bunks arrive at Christmas? Hey, when you gotta go…

“Why do kids make you fight with your husband?” my single friend asked my married friend and me  yesterday at the spa. Married Friend and I agree. “It’s because for the first eight or so years with kids, you work your friggin’ tail off and your kids are never pleased with your efforts, and the whole time, you feel like you’re giving 190 percent and your spouse is giving minus 12 percent, and he’s thinking the exact damn thing about you, and nobody sleeps through the entire 18-year process.”

And you can’t help but get hair in your blue cake balls, because my WORD, you haven’t slept in three complete weeks, and your hair IS falling OUT, because you remember to give Older Son his allergy medicine and Daughter her cough medicine so she won’t get sent home from school again, but you cannot remember to take your own thyroid medicine or drink a whole cup of coffee or even have time to put your make-up on before you hostess a party, even though you skipped the shower and opted for the baseball cap, hoping you’ll just seem like “Laid-Back Mom.”

That’s not a dimple or a shadow. It’s an AGE SPOT.  I had to ride with the windows open because I didn’t wash the dog as I had promised.  At least that way, I would have gotten my shower and maybe could have put on my make-up.  You always think you’ll just put it on in the car when you get two minutes, but you can’t because the dog knocked all the punch into your purse, and your make-up is floating in the puddle of juice that is the  bottom of your purse. Married Friend put it so well yesterday: “I’m taking care of everybody, so who’s taking care of me?”

But you pray that other parents will know what you’re going through and cut you some slack and just pick the dog-or-mom-hair off the ball, and eat the damn thing anyway and say it’s good even if they think cake balls are damn weird as hell.

And you know what?  This time they did.  There were more kids there than we could count, and I had enough cake balls, pizza, pineapple, carrots and dip, and glasses and plates for everyone, and Husband was INSANELY TERRIFIC at leading the treasure hunt, and even though the orange juice spilled all into the console of my car, and the dog rolled in a dead bird carcass as soon as the kids found it, and it may be a mild case of PTSD that’s keeping me up tonight, the party was deemed by Younger Son not just a party but “a really GREAT party,” and Older Son said it was fine.

Thank the Lord. It was fine. 12 hours of cake ball making and now my legs hurt too much to stand, walk or lay down peacefully, but the party and the cake balls and the kids and my husband… were all fine. And when you’re a mom, after all you’ve been through on any given day, party or not, ‘fine’ feels good enough to count as ‘great.’  My balls rocked after all. And Martha Stewart only has ONE kid…     

]]> http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2011/08/15/171/ Mon, 15 Aug 2011 03:26:38 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2011/08/15/171/ When i get stressed, i throw everything into big piles.

Drinking was more fun…

]]> http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2011/08/14/itll-be-anarchy/ Sun, 14 Aug 2011 05:43:44 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2011/08/14/itll-be-anarchy/

]]> http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2011/08/12/i-love-my-kids-so-much-it-hurts-me-at-least-once-an-hour/ Thu, 11 Aug 2011 18:13:59 +0000 Frannie http://puppuccinosbyfrancesscott.com/2011/08/12/i-love-my-kids-so-much-it-hurts-me-at-least-once-an-hour/ I love my kids so much it hurts (being away from them, for as few as 31 minutes), but they went shopping with my mom to Target of course, because most moms (not me) go at least once a day, and I’m sad to say it, but these have been the most relaxing 67 minutes of the past 8 years of my life. And yes, I do expect hell to be paid when they return; I’m sure they were uncharacteristically horrible, & she probably fell & busted her newly-replaced knee, & I will feel guilty for the next 38 years, but I’m starting to think….

MAYBE I AM AN INTROVERT???

Lately, daily, all I want is to read, write, surf for articles about muscular imbalances or microscopic pituitary tumors I might like to wonder whether I have, listen to “The Boys of Fall” 38-million times & move as quickly or as slowly as I want to without being criticized for it.

Do you ever just want to be alone?

Surely that really doesn’t mean we hate our kids, spouses, friends or parents, does it? Maybe we just want to hear Dierks Bently sing “It’s a Beautiful World” to us over & over again… until we start remembering that it is. ‘Cause it is…

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