Only In My Dreams

The NaBloPoMo prompt for tomorrow, “What is your secret (or not so secret) passion?” got me thinking about some jobs I’ve pipe dreamed about having throughout the years.

1. NFL Referee. I like sports. Being the tomboy and daddy’s girl that I am, I always have.  Not to the extent that I wanted to seriously play football outside of the occasional game of flag or touch.  But there was a time when I thought “maybe I could officiate!”  Not knowing where or how to start down that career tract, the dream was abandoned and forgotten until recently.

I’m still astonished that there have not yet been any female NFL refs, although apparently there are some “in the pipeline.”  Good for them! Wish I were one of them!

2. Chef/restaurant owner.  I may have mentioned recently that I like food.  What’s more, I love to create in the kitchen.  When I was younger, I would even pretend to run a restaurant and make dinner for my parents.  I think my mom was concerned that a career in food would only make my food problems worse.  From where I’m standing, it looks like a draw.

3. Debbie Gibson.  No, seriously. I wanted to be Debbie Gibson when I grew up.  I was a ham when I was a kid. And I was deeply entrenched in the Gibson camp in the teen queen rivalry between Debbie and Tiffany.  I’m happy to see they’ve put that all behind them and can make fun of themselves on Syfy.

Ah, the Foolish Beat of the Electric Youth.

Makin' Time

Just the other day, a friend asked me, "How do you do it all?"

Let's start at the beginning (of sorts). I work full time, commute two hours a day, have a husband (aka Fella), and a two-year-old son (aka 4.0).  I try to get homemade (OK, semi-homemade) dinners on the table most nights. And in my "spare time" I also belong to a philanthropic women's group that affords me opportunities to volunteer and give back to my community. I'm blessed to have our moms to watch 4.0 during the week, who also lend a hand after those nights I'm especially ambitious and there's clean laundry to fold.

So sure I do a lot, but I certainly don't do it all.

And since my son arrived, there have definitely been parts of my life that have suffered, especially in the relationships department.  Thanks be to social networking that I still have friends at all!  But I'm learning to not be so hard on myself for not being able to do it all.  And that the people that matter the most will always understand.

Aaaand We're Back!

Last week, a local cable company came and cut our service alleging that our service provider was using their line illegally. Without notice. Our service provider took two days and came out Friday to make amends. In the process, the technician cut the line to our phone and internet service (from yet a third provider).

By the time we were able to send our a smoke signal yesterday, it was too late to get a same-day house call. But they made it out this morning, and restored service. Except that our network settings were reset and I had to call for tech support AGAIN to get connected. And then reset both computers and our printer.  And I still have to reset my dad's computer when he comes over on Tuesday.

Sigh.

First world problems.

A.K.A. The Human Jukebox

Thursday's prompt: Can you listen to music and write? What song did you hear today?

Throughout school I always needed to listen to music when I studied and wrote papers. So naturally I can still listen to music and write.  Although, I don’t much tend to have music on while I write anymore.  Like tonight, it was the hum of a two-week old episode of Criminal Minds.  And at work, I find myself listening to podcasts more frequently. That is, until I find myself not concentrating on the talk. At which point I’ll throw on some tunes. But I’ve always been a music-oriented person. In the fourth grade I was known as the girl who knew every song in the world (a fourth grader's world is pretty small). And there’s a reason why now my co-workers call me the Human Jukebox.

Better Late Than Never

Wednesday's prompt was this: If you knew that whatever you ate next would be your last meal, what would you want it to be?

I tried to tackle a similar question earlier in the year in the short lived Saturday Seven post series. And when I sat down to write my list it felt inadequate. Not only did I want all of my favorites, but I wanted all of the food experiences that I’ve yet to have in my life (Chez Panisse, French Laundry, etc.)

You see, I like food. OK, I love food. You might even say I have a ready for a twelve step program food problem. But that’s beside the point.

So what would you want your last meal to be? I’d want it to be my last chance to sit down to share a meal with friends and family, whatever ended up on the table.  I’d want it to be the experience of a lifetime with the people I love in my life.  I’d want it to be a celebration of life and a bon voyage for whatever I was destined for next.

I’d want it to be one helluva party.

NaBloPoMo

I'm joining my friend over at Am I A Funny Girl? in NaBloPoMo. I've tried NaNoWriMo in the past and that went nowhere real fast.  And since I need to get a little momentum here, it's a perfect fit.  I'll be using the daily prompts and then some (I hope!) 


What is your favorite part of writing?

Writing is a lot of things to me: cathartic, creative, some other C-word to round out this alliteration.  But my favorite part of writing is the entertainment of the entire process. It’s the very reason I started to blog.

I was finishing law school and, as the saying goes, they were doing a bang up job at boring me to death in my third year.  So to entertain myself, I started a blog.  Along the way I picked up a few followers and it quickly became about entertaining them, as well.

Now there seems to be less time to sit down at the keyboard to play the entertainer, but even if I can once in a blue moon put something out there to make one reader happy, even if it's just me or a family member, it makes me very happy, too.

A Long Lunch Down Memory Lane

One bite. That’s all it took. One bite of my Caesar salad today and I was instantly transported back to the summers of my youth and our annual family vacation at Lakeside Inn and Resort in Whitehall, Michigan. Where I lived in the pool and was in love with the proprietor’s son.

The earthiness of the romaine and the buttery crunch of the crouton took me back to a time before Caesar salad was even in my lexicon. I only learned about Caesar salad sometime after my family had moved from a suburb of Chicago to a suburb of San Francisco, long after we took leave of the cottage where we would play Uno for hours on end.

A break in the Uno action.

It was where I cut my teeth swimming. I actually remember being in the pool in water wings, probably one of my first memories. We used the diving board so many times that it should have lost its spring. And imagine our astonishment the year we arrived to find that they added a waterslide to a corner of the pool. Christmas in July!

Swoon! There he is!!!

I remember sitting at the end of the resort dock, hanging my bamboo pole into the lake, and eagerly awaiting the first sign of a nibble.  Someone said the fish I caught (and usually instructed to throw back) were sunfish. What did I know?! The same dock where we spent one Fourth of July, listening to Neil Diamond on my brother’s boom box and watching fireworks.

I remember taking what seemed like the longest walks to the White Duck Country Market to get the most bountiful scoops of ice cream I had ever seen.  I usually got strawberry. Or chocolate. But never, ever plain ol’ vanilla.

One of the last years we were vacationed there, the resort even added a few pinball/arcade games to their amenities. For my preteen brother, this made passing the time more bearable even with his little sister often tagging along.  

Eat your hearts out Griswolds!

I used to daydream about being a teenager and still vacationing there and the day when the owner’s son might finally take notice of me, but that was not meant to be.  When we drove home in the summer of 1985, we probably weren’t even aware that we would not be returning the next year.  Or that instead, the following summer would find my dad living and working at his new job in California with rest of us to follow that fall.

It took a little Googling, but I managed to find the website for Lakeside.  And now that my nostalgia has gotten the best of me, I wish I could cancel the reservations we made last week for our sum--er, fall vacation in Santa Barbara and head to the Midwest instead.  While that’s a pipe dream at its core, I hope that someday I will head there again to share the same experiences with my husband and son. And perhaps pop a cork with the boy of my childhood dreams who now sits at Lakeside’s helm, grooming the next generation of innkeepers.