What, you thought I'd start with something important?

I was sitting there listening to the blues, to Pinetop Perkins specifically, when I wondered what my blues name would be.
Henry and I were talking on Monday about some of the rappers who have cool, organic nicknames that really fit, like Eminem for Marshall Mathers or Ludacris for Chris Bridges. I thought it was hilarious how Chad Ochocinco calls his football friend Bernard Berrian "B-Twice."
Then I thought it would be cool if there was a blues name generator so I Googled it and, of course, there is.
The site I tried had a formula where you name a physical infirmity, a fruit and the last name of a former president to get your blues name. The first name it supplied me randomly after I clicked the button (which probably bought me some spy ware) was Lame Melon Fillmore.
I don't think so.
Click again.
Sleepy Raisin Cleveland. Really? Really?!
Try again.
Crazy Raisin Johnson.

!!!!!! WTF????!!!!!

I don't even like raisins! Seriously, this is starting to not be fun. The next one is it.
CLICK

Cryin' Tater Lincoln.

I'm keeping it, even though a tater isn't a fruit.

A hiatus

I'll be taking a break from this blog for a bit.

If you just can't get enough of our shenanigans, check here every Monday.

I'll be back in a little while.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Had a fun new job last week that, thankfully, was temporary.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Some days I really feel old around all the young mommies at our elementary school.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Why I spent a few hours at the county jail.

Great idea on paper

Just a heads up: These are the plastic eggs I bought last year for Owen to take to his preschool Easter egg hunt. They're camouflage because he LOVES military stuff. I saw them and thought, "What a cool thing! Owen will be so excited because they are just so HIM."

The thing about camouflage eggs is that when you hide them, they're CAMOUFLAGED, so it takes every bit of fun out of the hunt when your child can't find any of the eggs HE brought.

It also spices up the lawn mowing process later in the summer when you inevitably can't find all the camo eggs and your husband mows over them in the grass.

So, just so we're clear: The point of an Easter egg hunt is for the kids to FIND the eggs. Don't buy grass- and dirt-colored eggs.

Small victories

The best way to bond with your 13-year-old son is when he's home for a sick day.

One of my twins called me to come get him in the middle of the day Tuesday. He came home and was VERY ill all afternoon. Then he slept without moving one bit for two solid hours.

It was like one of those red storm lines loving across the TV weather radar screen. A few hours of upheaval and disturbance and then ... peace.

He couldn't go to school Wednesday because he was so weak and needed rest. So I took full advantage of his weakened state and babied him like he's never been babied before. I tucked him in, brought him gallons of Gatorade upon request and made the best toast in the history of toast. And he let me.

When he left for school this morning, I went in to hug him, and he didn't recoil the way he usually does.

I call that a breakthrough.

Why hasn't this house sold?

For fun, I'm going to start an occasional feature in which I ask, "Why hasn't this house sold?"

It gives me a chance to share one of my weird hobbies, obsessing over local real estate.

When the opportunity presents itself, I'll post a little blurb about a house that I, as a more than casual observer but not a professional, think is a diamond in the rough and shouldn't still be on the market.

Of course, I'm not privy to most of the details about these listings, so there may be a real problem such as liens or a stubborn owner. Other than that, I'm just going on the facts presented by the agent.

Case in point: 304 Deerwood Lane in Brentwood.

For a mere $595,000, the buyer would get more than 5,000 square feet and 3 acres on a peaceful, prestigious road hidden away on the west side of Brentwood. Other homes in this area are listed for twice as much.

I will admit that the exterior is not traditional, there is an indoor pool instead of a bonus room, which is weird, and the lot is sloping. Also, the interior fixtures look like something the pope's little brother might have chosen. OTHER THAN THAT, why hasn't this house sold?

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Who knew so much anxiety could precede a birthday party? And I wasn't even hosting!

A "laptop" sounds like such an innocent thing

My new laptop has aged me by about 20 years.

Maybe not literally, but when I try to use it, I feel like a grandma getting her first look at one of them newfangled telephone machines.

I'm always having to call over my kids and ask, "Now what's this here thang do?" "Wait, what was that you did?" "Hey, uh, where'd that thing I wrote go? It just disappeared!!"

I sound just like this 50-ish woman who was a grad student at Memphis State when I was in my, ahem, fifth year of college there (after my parents had given me three years to figure it out at UT). We were in a brand new class called Electronic Publishing, and Professor Art Terry was showing us a Mac with - gasp! - a program called Windows. We all sat agog as he showed us the mouse and used it to click on the drop-down menus. We couldn't wait to get out fingers on it, and at first the cursors flew wildly around the screens as if we were trying to steer a car with our elbows.

Most of us, when we didn't catch onto something right away, were too cool to say anything. Not Miss 50, though. She'd panic at the slightest blink on the screen and yell out stuff similar to what I posted above.

Of course, now I am closer to 50 than I am to 20, and I sometimes find myself sitting slack-jawed in front of this-here new computer.

For one thing, it has a shiny new version of Word, rather than the B.C. version I had been using. That's awesome, except that the icons are all in the wrong place, and I have to stop and think, "Where is that spell check icon? On my OLD computer, it was always right here where I could find it."

The worst thing you can do to an impatient person is make them have to stop and think about how to do something.

The laptop keyboard is my biggest nemesis right now. The delete button is in the wrong spot, "page up" and "page down" are switched, and "control" is right where my hand wants to reach to hit "shift." Instead of capitalizing something, I end up hitting Ctrl + T and opening a new tab or something equally jarring when I'm trying to be brilliant.

Don't even get me started on the touchpad.

My husband keeps telling me I could get a laptop keyboard, but that would not work very well when I'm using it in my Mister Chair.

To top it all off, I think this screen is telling me I need bifocals.

Gender confusion

For the first time ever, I walked into a store and mistook men's clothes for women's clothes.

Yes, it's true. I don't shop very often. But I didn't think I was that out of practice!

I had gone to my local Stein Mart to exchange something. As I walked over to the customer service counter, I thought they had rearranged the store and put women's clothes where the men's department used to be.

The corner display featured Lucky jeans and shirts with pretty embroidery on the cuffs and pastel paisley prints. I honestly did not realize they were for men.

I tried really hard to find a photo of the Malibu Cowboy shirts so I could post it here and say, "Am I right?!" "And you'd go, "Yep. I'd pick that for a woman." The best I could find was this Lucky Brand shirt that is quite representative of the shirts in question.

It's really no big deal, I know. Even though I live in a very creative town and see so-called "music-industry types" with chunky, highlighted haircuts and contrast-stitched jeans, I'm married to a man who thinks turquoise blue is a very flamboyant color. So there are men around here who get haircuts that cost more than mine and wear boots with heels higher than mine. I just never actually found myself this ... confused.

I need to get out more often.

Bringing the family tree to life

Happy 2010! It's taken me a while to acknowledge the transition, but I guess I'll go along with it.

One reason I've been out of touch is because I spent so much time over the holiday in my alternate universe, tracing my family's history.

I am a proud participant in this old person's hobby, as one of my neighbors once called it. Maybe it used to be a geriatric pursuit because you needed a lot of time to research the documents involved. Now, though, online access makes it so easy that I end up spending a lot of doing it because I just can't quit.

My pursuit of my ancestors began in 2007 when my kids asked me a question and I didn't know the answer. We were on a Cub Scout outing, placing flags on graves at Stone River Battlefield in Murfreesboro in 2007. After reading name after name on the headstones, my boys asked if we had any relatives who had fought in the Civil War.

I didn't know, and that bothered me. My parents weren't sure, and I only have one living grandmother whose memory tends to be selective. So I did what I always do when I have a question: I turned to the Internet.

In just a little while, I found my great-grandfather's name on an original image of a 1910 census form, and I cried. Hey, I was surprised, too, but I felt overwhelmed when I saw evidence of a man I knew only from family stories. Here he was listed as a newly married 22-year-old with only one of his five children, my great aunt Allie.

I was addicted.

Since then, I've answered my kids' questions plus a whole lot more. We did, in fact, have several ancestors who fought in the Civil War, both in the infantry and the militia from Virginia through Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. I found out from a long-lost cousin that one of my mom's great-grandfathers fought with Virginia at the Battle of Chickamauga, then walked to West Tennessee where he started farming.

I even found the above photo online of my great-great-great grandfather born in 1822.

Though my dad's side has been fairly simple to trace, my mom's side of the family, in fact, has been quite troublesome. I've traced my dad's side all the way to medieval Scotland. One of his ancestors came over on the Mayflower and holds the dubious honor of being the first person to be arrested in the new world. He apparently went all redneck and got into a fight with a man named Edward Lister. They were bound together by their hands and feet for two days with no food or water, then finally released.

My parents and I have laughed about this and bonded over our checkered past, though they may not laugh when they read it here.

It's funny what you'll remember, though, even when the past seems too cloudy to peer through. One reason my mom's side was so hard to trace is because her relatives all have the most common names in North America. Even with the Internet, it's maddening to sort through decades of documents to determine which James Mills is yours. How many James Johnsons do you think there were in antebellum Mississippi? Plenty. The same holds for William Baker and Charles Mason.

The breakthrough on my mom's side came as I was on the phone with her, discussing a Census form I'd found. As I started reading the names of the many children in one family, she suddenly remembered why old "Uncle Shack" had been called that. His mom's maiden name had been Shackleford. I found someone else's online family tree with another great-grandmother's missing maiden name: Lindsey. That opened a long line leading back to French Huguenots who settled in Abbeville, South Carolina. Fancy!

Fortunately the ladies on Mom's side had charming, memorable names like Almarinda and Arrietta. It's just unfortunate that most record keepers didn't care much about tracking maiden names back then.

So when Census time rolls around this year, don't turn your back on that person collecting your family info. You'll be helping your great-grandchildren connect to their past.

Or you could do it the easy way and keep your Facebook page up to date.

Christmas Eve Eve freakout

I was so worried about getting to Kroger early to beat the crowds that I left the house without my list. Those who know me know that I am helpless at Kroger without my list. I will just wander aimlessly throwing kumquats and garlic bread in my buggy.

I was NOT going to drive back home, so I had to call home and get one of my 13-year-olds to read the list over the phone to me. This was no ordinary list but a list that covered Christmas dinner plus regular meals for five people for four other days.

The kid translates fine except for my weird abbreviations: He really gets hung up on "crm of chkn."

I also happened to forget my Honeybaked Ham reservation number, but he read that to me too. After all was bought and done, I felt pretty blessed to walk out carrying a $50 ham for Christmas dinner.

And I did get back home by 10 a.m.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Click here to read about yet another reason my youngest child may need therapy in a few years.

Why, yes, that is a log in my eye

I've been going to church for, like, my whole life now, but I'm not getting any better at it.

It's not church's fault, of course. It's just that there are so many other people there messing up my holy experience.

My entire family manages to get out of the house early on other days, but on Sundays we act like we've never done it before. In fact, I've written before about how a visit to church is an opportunity for all seven deadly sins to pop up. I sin all the other days of the week, but shouldn't I do it less, not more, at church? God is REALLY watching me on Sunday, right? Shouldn't I be at my best while I'm in His house?

I think God's onto me.

The main thing working against me on Sunday, besides pride and judgment, is that I don't deal well with crowds. My church is really big and has a lot of people trying to get to different places in a hurry. It wasn't always that way. It had a beautiful, normal-sized sanctuary when I started going there in 1991, but it has grown tremendously over the past two decades because it is so awesome and so many other people want to attend. My husband started going there in 1978 as an eighth-grader, and it's where we want our boys to grow up, too.

I just hope the church experience doesn't kill me before I get to see that happen.

The breakdown begins before we even arrive. With so many faithful followers, our church naturally has parking "issues." To relieve some of those issues, they implemented a shuttle bus to ferry people to and from an empty office parking lot across the street.

My family used to ride the shuttle bus, but I'll tell you the truth. I shied away from the shuttle because those folks were just too damn cheerful for Sunday morning. Am I the only one who finds it hard to be sweet after an exhausting car ride spent convincing 13-year-olds that, no, they are not the only boys on earth who have to wear long pants and a collared shirt to church?

Maybe it's also the fact that my body is two decades older, too, but some mornings before we're even done with church, I am worn out. After we forgo the shuttle and park a quarter-mile away, we get upstairs to the balcony, where we like to sit so our 6-year-old can see everything. We used to choose our seat according to whatever activity we needed to watch our kids doing, whether they were acolyting or singing in the choir. Lately, however, a new factor has come into play: the overly fragranced parishioner.

If I didn't already have a headache after the drive to church, I will have one after sitting near a woman who has on too much perfume. It doesn't matter if I'm in front of, next to or behind her, that overwhelming smell will keep me from focusing on the "Our Father" no matter how hard I try.

All I can do is watch carefully next week and hope she heads the other way. But then I'm judging again, right? In church! Zap!

Still, you never know who's going to overdo the Estee Lauder on any given Sunday.

Other worship service regulars who mess with my holiness include the Toddler who Colors Very Vigorously. And you thought coloring was a quiet activity! It always enhances prayer time when mom stores the crayons in a metal box or a Velcro pouch.

Some men in my church have begun letting their Sunday clothes speak for them, especially in the fall. When their favorite college football team wins the day before, they'll wear the school logo or colors to church the next day. Now, I don't have a problem with a tie that has little tigers or even tiny gators on it. But if you're 54 years old and you wear a crimson Alabama T-shirt to church under your suit jacket, I think you're violating, like, the whole book of Matthew. We're supposed to be praising God, not Nick Saban.

Zap!!

After we stand up and sit down 27 times in the service, with all the "singing" of songs I still don't know because I can't read music, we have to run our 6-year-old down two flights of stairs to his Sunday school class and then find our own class on another floor, with a possible trip to the cavernous youth area downstairs. In heels. When that's over, it's time to head to the back of the parking lot to our car. That's all before 11 a.m.

Whew!

I'm not the only one still seeking peace in the sanctuary. Last week I ran into a friend in the hallway, and she had such an exasperated look on her face, I asked, "Are you okay?"

"No," she huffed. "You will not believe what I just saw."

She had just left the casual service that has praise music with a band, which I can't stand, but that's another post for another day. My friend is not a complainer, though, so I was really concerned about what got her riled up.

"We were praying, during the final benediction, and I kept hearing someone talking. I looked over, and this woman was standing in front of the stained glass window talking on her cell phone! During the prayer! She was trying to cover the mouthpiece to keep it quiet, but I kept thinking, 'There's a door right there! Why don't you just step out?!'"

No, nothing is sacred anymore.

Really, I love my church. Besides the whole eternal salvation thing, I love sitting close to my family in the pews, because I can't make my older boys sit next to me any other day of the week. I love seeing my kindergartner recite "Our Father" by heart. I love looking down at the choir and seeing my friends' babies, who somehow along the way grew up and drove themselves there. I feel for the ministers, who do this three times on Sunday and once on Saturday night.

The fact that I can't turn off my powers of observation when I'm there is my problem.

So, why do it, you ask? If it's so stressful, why not go to a smaller church, if a big church is "not for you"?

With my luck, I'd find a small church where the membership was just my family plus Mr. Alabama Fan, Mrs. Estee Lauder and their children, Miss Vigorous Colorer and Little Pew Kicker.

And me, Church Lady in Training.

Knocked out with one punch

When my older boys accompanied me to Kroger the other day, they nearly died from embarrassment when I dared to say goodbye to one of the baggers by name.

All I did was say, "See ya later, Clayton." You'd have thought I'd danced naked on the check-out scanner, the way they shushed me and tried to hustle me out the door.

I don't see the big deal. I see Clayton almost more than I see my husband.

Book 'em

So I did something today that I've never done before. I got fingerprinted.
I hadn't been arrested, so this post probably won't be as exciting as you'd hoped. It was all part of the extremely rigorous hiring process in my local school system. I was hoping to spice up my life by working a few days a month as a substitute teacher at my kindergartner's school. So I dug up my old grad school transcript and my real Social Security card and attended a new hire orientation. All that still wasn't enough; I had to fork over a refundable $48 to get fingerprinted for a background check.
With all the headline-making, teacher-student scenarios inspired by that old Van Halen song, you'll be glad to know that our school system is doing its best to keep your kids from being locked in a classroom with a raving maniac.

I guess fingerprinting has come a long way since the days of Dragnet or even NYPD Blue. Of course, it's digital. I had to place my fingers just so on a touch pad that relayed a digital image to a computer screen and deemed them acceptable or not. Guess what? Mine were never acceptable. My fingerprints failed! The poor Official Fingerprint Lady had to try three times for each finger and thumb! It was a day of firsts for her, too.

"Well, I guess your ridges aren't very deep," she mused as she smashed and rolled my fingers on the screen in an attempt to capture an acceptable image. "I've never had one where I had to override all ten."

See, I AM special!

By the way, you can't go just anywhere to get fingerprinted. The school system's current list of approved locations included some random security agencies, but only one place in my county, about 20 miles from my house. It was at a UPS Store! I really wanted to go to the Guns and Leather location in Greenbrier, but that's two counties away.

After holding hands with the nice UPS lady for about 15 minutes, I finished and turned to head back home. She did have some parting words of advice for me, though.

"I guess if teaching doesn't work out, you'd be perfect for a life of crime!"

Don't even tempt me.

NaBloPoMo Day 1

November is National Blog Posting Month. Since it takes longer for the power of the Internet to reach us here in Tennessee, I am just now getting this news.
Inspired by the Fussy one herself, I will try:

Things I like

Hostess Ding Dongs
birds singing
red wine
shopping very early in the morning
flannel sheets
green left-turn arrows

Things I don't like

monkeys
twisted police dramas on TV
kids who sing Broadway style
emptying the dishwasher
already being awake when my alarm goes off

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Read about why I'm not nervous around old cemeteries anymore.

The inevitable

I’ve been thinking a lot about a mom I used to know named Laura. We weren’t friends; her daughter was in the same preschool class as one of my twins. Still, she was one of my favorite people to see four days a week because she always smiled, and her daughter was sweet. She didn’t gang up with some cronies in the school entrance like a sorority clique, ignoring anyone who didn’t serve one of her purposes. She walked her kid in, spoke a few friendly words to any moms who also happened to be there, and went on her way.
I was fascinated by her because she just seemed above it all, but not in a snobby way. She had a life waiting for her, you could tell, but she wasn’t trying to prove it to anyone. And she influenced me a lot.
See, some moms behave the way they probably behaved in high school, the way a lot of grown guys act like frat boys when they get together. A really good blogger I like to read calls them the Muffia, because they can be pretty intimidating if you’re just trying to get your kid in the door and to the right classroom. They’re the ones who drive the biggest SUVs, park where there’s not really a parking spot (oh, wait, I used to do that sometimes), talk really loudly about the awesome stuff they’re doing, and wear kitten heels on field day.
So if you know you’re not one of the Muffia (and you know when you’re not), it’s a relief to come across someone who just is open and friendly to everyone, even someone like me who dares to wear house pants to preschool drop-off instead of True Religion jeans.
Sometimes during field trips or class parties, Laura and I would talk, and I found out that her preschool daughter was her third child, not her first, which would explain why she was not one of the giddy sorority types. She had done it all before, and she could control herself in the presence of her peers.
Not only was this her third child, but there was a significant age difference between her first two and her third kid. Kind of like how Owen is seven years younger than his brothers. At the time, I just had the twins, but hearing Laura talk about her family and the perspective the age difference gave her made me consider having another child someday.
Up until then, I always said, “No way, no how. Never, never, never again.” Caring for the twins as infants and toddlers was so hard for me that I told myself that we would always be a family of four. Then during the twins’ last year of preschool, when they were 5, I lay awake one night and realized that they would both leave the house for college at the same time and that would be it. I didn’t want that.
Now my third child, the one who is seven years younger than my first kids, is barreling toward kindergarten, and I think about Laura a lot. One thing she told me as we finished up that last preschool year was that she couldn’t wait for summer. I shivered because, with the twins, I was at the preschool any time the doors were open, looking for something else to entertain my two boys, someone else for them to look at and talk to instead of me. A change of scenery, if you will.
“No, I’m really looking forward to this summer,” Laura said, “because it’s the last one before they start real school. I’m just really going to enjoy my time with her because once you get on that school schedule, you don’t get off until they graduate.”
She was speaking from experience, and I knew she was right. She didn’t see her child’s childhood as something to get through. Moms can and should enjoy it, too, and I do now, thanks to Laura.
My 13-year-olds don’t give me good pajama hugs anymore, but my 5-year-old still does. I’m so glad I have him, even though a party of five is way harder to seat at a restaurant than a party of four.