A Writer's Life

In Honor of the Grandma with the Dolls

When I was a little girl, I had two grandmas, both named Ella, both living in a land that seemed very far away (Thief River Falls, Minnesota.)  When we'd make the drive to visit, my little brother and I would dub the grandmas "grandma with the dog" and "grandma with the dolls."  (Both grandmothers were special to me for different reasons; grandma with the dog passed away a few years ago.)

Grandma with the Dolls passed away last night.  This morning, I had a vision of her, in which she looked exactly the way I remembered her as a child of about eleven or twelve.  She looked like a beautiful angel, full of warmth and kindness, and I could almost feel her smile and reassuring touch as tears welled up in my eyes as I stood at the kitchen sink and looked out the window this morning.

I know she is in a good place, and I have read about the comforts of her family during her last few days.  Tonight, I'm thinking of a few favorite memories of her from when we used to visit in the summertimes.  She lived in a two story house, and at the top of the steps, there was a railing and a bookcase.  Her bookcase was packed full of Harlequin Romance Novels, the old ones that were sweet and still decently written.  One summer, my cousin Lisa and I cut puppets out of paper and drew up tickets and gave a "show" to our families (I believe we charged a dime to attend) where we dangled paper puppets through the wooden railing at the top of the stairs. 

I remember all the dolls and toys, and I remember her making pancakes in her kitchen (I can even smell them.)  I remember the kitchen table, and I remember one time, how we got in her car, just the two us, and went and had dinner at The Country Kitchen.  I remember how she taught me how to play games on paper like "lost in the forest" and how we'd sit and play games like "button, button who's got the button."  As I type this tonight, I can hear the sound of her voice and I can picture her visiting my family in Kansas and sitting at this restaurant called Sambas. 

Oh, I remember the summer she came to visit and we went and picked tons of strawberries, and how she made strawberry pie.  I can see her standing at our stove, mixing up the gelatin for the pie.  We also made  strawberry shortcake that summer, and we ate it with ice cream from the Dairy Queen.

I know she's in a good place.

Love, Rachel

Food Critic

This food critic has taken residence in my mind, and I am pretty much just ready for her to leave.

I'm just really tired of every bite I eat being put up for evaluation.

Shouldn't eat that.

Can't eat that.

Wasn't suppose to eat that.

That's unhealthy.

That's healthy.

I wasn't hungry enough to eat that.

Why didn't I stop after that.

I need a new diet.

I need an old diet.

I'm drinking coffee when I should be drinking tea.

I'm drinking tea when I should be drinking water.

That's too much. (it's going to wreck my metabolism)

That's too little. (it's going to wreck my metabolism)

My, look what a healthy eater I appear to be.

(Look out ice cream sundae.)

As long as it's organic, it's okay.

(Uncle Eddie's Vegan Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip cookies are a health food, right?)

If I eat a can of pineapple, that's 4.5 servings of fruit for the day.

What's the glycemic index of Rice Chex?

ARGH.  I don't even really know the answer to what kind of foods I like anymore. 

But right now, I'm craving a blueberry muffin from the Espresso stand by Jaeme's school.

(Too many carbs.  Too much fat.  Blueberries are a powerful antioxidant.  But Dr. Perricone says nothing about combining them with flour and sugar. The Hellers would allow a blueberry muffin as part of a Reward Meal but how would I fit a salad into breakfast and would I want to do so?  I could do WW and count the points, but one of those would probably be my 18 point allotment for the day.  I could claim to be eating a muffin intuitively, but I'd have to eat it consciously, and I don't know if it would taste nearly as good if I wasn't driving down the road and chomping on it at the same time.  Dr. Atkins would allow the blueberries on OWL (the second or third "rung" of the Atkin's ladder.) 

I'm in Dante's Diet Inferno with the food critic from the seventh rung. (I just picked that number at random, I really can't recall the literature properly when I'm trying to justify the eating of a blueberry muffin.)

Love, Rachel

Pin Up Girls

During a recent marathon of America's Next Top Model, the models had a challenge where they dressed up like 1940's pinup girls.  My daughter told me she knew all about pinup girls from watching cartoons (which is funny in and of itself) and told me that they were curvy girls dressed in too-short dresses with old-fashioned hairstyles.  I asked her if she knew why they were called pinup girls, and she said, "those outfits are so tight that they must have pinned them up in the back!" 

I just started laughing.  When we shop, we always look at the plastic models in the store and see whether or not the clothes have been pinned in the back to give a more tailored appearance or not.  Combine that knowledge with a poster of a pretty girl in an old cartoon like "Popeye," and it's on point. 

Who knows, maybe the pinup girls were all pinned up? *still laughing*

Love, Rachel

Tales of the Moth Hunter

Last night, Jaeme and I stayed up really late watching an "America's Next Top Model" marathon.   We both crawled into my bed sometime this morning, and I thought, no big deal, we'll just sleep in this morning.  Unfortunately, my cat, who'd been peacefully sleeping wedged between us all night, decided that she needed to expel a hairball at 7AM.  The yakking delop, DELOP, DELOP sound was enough to wake us both up from a very sound sleep.  So, our day started a little earlier than we'd planned.

But Jasmine redeemed herself tonight.  Jaeme and I hate bugs of any kind, and when we were sitting here watching Kitchens and Baths 2008, Jaeme started screaming "ahhhhhhhhhhhh."  I said, "what's wrong?" (I didn't think the cabinets were that ugly) she said, "look a moth!"  I said, "oh come on.  It's not like a real bug.  It's kinda just like a butterfly."  "No way!"  she said.  And I said, "look, it's gone now, no worries." 

Well, no worries until it landed right by my laptop with an ominous moth-buzzing sound.  I screamed and started waving my hands in the air and my cat was right there and jumped into the fray, smacking that moth around with her little kitty paws.  She cornered the moth on the endtable and started patting away at it with her paws.  She's still on the hunt for it (somehow it flew down between the couch and the coffeetable and escaped into the curtains.)

I'm sure our neighbors were delighted to hear us screaming "AHHHHHHHH!!  Jasmine, help us!! help us!!" 

Love, Rachel

Imaginary Baseball

At the park today, we played on the swings and then went for a walk around the park.  At our favorite park, there are two sets of play equipment, a very large tree, and at least three baseball diamonds.  Today, no one was playing baseball, but the field beckoned to us. 

And so, even though I was wearing little black flats and even though we didn't actually have a bat, a ball or a glove, we ran out onto the fields.  I "pitched" the ball to Jaeme; she "hit" a homerun on her very first time up to bat.  Then it was my turn.  I'm pretty sure I was out at first (I'd blame it on my flats but I guess I could have pretended to be wearing baseball cleats if I had chosen to do so!) but I'm lucky I connected with the ball at all after my first two swings were strikes.

I'm not sure who won the game, but the crowd went wild. :) 

Love, Rachel

Proof

I'm exhausted tonight.  Spent the day at work proofing copy in both English and Spanish.  I don't read Spanish, but I can look at the copy and sometimes see errors in spacing.  I was down-to-the-wire proofing at 3PM when I had an urgent request for a press release and another urgent request for a PDF.  Everything was last minute and as soon as possible today, and I wound up four pages short of finishing the magazine before I needed to get my daughter from school.

But the funny part of it is that after dinner, she handed me a twelve page story to proof.  She'd already proofed it in purple ink, so I went through it in pink.  She's very open to writing critique, and it turned out to actually be a fun two hours of collaboration.  When we finished, she read the story aloud to me, and I read the story aloud to her.  I always pick up different things reading silently than I do reading aloud, and it turns out that she did, too.

I was thinking of the idea of proof as I worked through my day.  Proof that I shouldn't have worn a denim mini-skirt to work: it snowed.  Proof that spring is hovering around here somewhere: my yellow tulips are attempting to debut.  Proof that I'm exhausted from all the proofing: I can't make another connection to the word proof tonight, and I know there's about a million out there. 

So, I'm going to put on my meditation CD and call it a blog.

Love, Rachel

Your Turn: I work with good people. One of our designers came in to help me proof today, just because he wanted to see what I was doing.  Both of my US English writers pitched in to help me take care of other projects so that I could keep working.  My Latin copywriter and I were able to collaborate on changes to the Spanish copy.  Proof is, the people on my team are a benefit; they are kinda like my health insurance.     

My Own Style Guide

No, not a post about my summer dresses (this one is for the person who finds me shallow for writing about my only my clothes, my hair, and my daughter. Hi!!) 

This post is the manifestation of the realization that I have my own style guide for e-mail and my own style guide for blogging.  As a writer/editor, at work, I am putting together a style guide for my writers to follow.  However, I didn't realize how much of a personal writing style guide I have in my head.  I have different conventions for, well, different conventions. 

For example, when I e-mail the word smile, I always type it *smile* but when I blog the word smile, it's just smile.  Sometimes at work, I will try and type *smile* instead of :) but the problem is that some programs think those little stars mean BOLD ME!  And then the cutesy-ness of it all gets lost in big black print.

Love, Rachel

Your Turn: Do you have a personal writing style guide?  I don't mean the one they made you memorize in college or at that job you took one summer at the newspaper.  I mean, do you have little quirky conventions that find their way into your words?

Tilting and Smiling

My daughter, the oh so observant one, recently made an interesting observation about me.  (Yes, this AGAIN all about me.  As Happy Bunny would say, deal with it.)   The observation she made was that when I'm writing something that interests me or writing to someone who interests me that I slightly tilt my head to one side and smile.  (I just did it, she reports.  Guess I must like this post quite a bit.) 

I never knew that I did this (there's another one, she yells and laughs) before she announced it on our recent trip to St. George, in which I was e-mailing with my old friend M.   Sometimes I just type and tilt and sometimes I tilt when I pause to think.  All this tilting and smiling has to be good for something, right?  (There's another one, a big one, she shouts.  And there's one more.)

It's hard to type when I'm laughing so hard.

Love, Rachel

Your Turn:  How about you?  What's your demeanor like when you're writing (oh look!) something that you enjoy?  I wonder if this tilting body language transfers over into other situations?  For example, if I'm hanging out with people who I like, do I tend to tilt and smile?  I'm learning that I can't control it, either.  I am trying to stop now that the behavior has been noticed and commented on about 156 times since I started typing this.  It's about impossible.  Tilt.  Smile. 

Broggers

This morning, I was thinking of all the purposes that a blog can serve, including acting as one of those little "brag books" that a mom or a grandma can get after a wedding.  (You know, those little party favorish albums filled with pictures that can be pulled out of a handbag in 1.4 seconds flat?)  I was thinking about this after a friend asked me, "what's the purpose of a blog, anyway?  I just don't get it."

I was talking to my daughter about how a blog can be a place to brag this morning on our drive to her school.  And she said, "you mean brogging?"  I started to laugh because it seemed to be the perfect made-up word, a combination of blogging and bragging.  Yes, I am a bloggart sometimes.  Aren't we all?

Love, Rachel

Your Turn:  Are you into brogging?  Do you like to brog?  I know that my posts are personally often filled with a bit too much self reflection, but better it here on the computer than randomly pounding on the confines of my brain (let me out!!) 

Happy Birthday El Signatore

May your pen never run out of gold ink.

Rachel