Category Archives: updates

Angry Mood at Check-out

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by Bronwyn,
missionary in Arizona, helping the caffeine-deprived understand that real coffee doesn’t necessarily have to taste like bitter charcoal water.

Alison Farmer, an extraordinary artist, brightened my day and, really, my life ...by sending me her painting of a sunflower, my favorite flower. You can see what an amazing artist she is.

Alison Farmer, an extraordinary artist in Woodinville, WA, brightened my day…well, really, my life …by surprising me with her painting of a sunflower, my favorite flower. You can see what an amazing artist she is. Her painting hangs cheerfully in my dining room.

Jerry and I stood in a long check-out line at Hobby Lobby, my favorite craft and home décor store. Although there were four check-out stands, only one had a cashier and the other three remained vacant. Many people–five, six, maybe ten–stood in line ahead of us. Just as many stood behind us. The line crept slowly, then stopped. Our cashier apparently had a problem with a transaction. She held the phone to her ear, her eyes darting anxiously around for assistance. Finally I had to break my new year’s resolution to not complain. read more

How Women Can Be Happy In Their Marriage (and refrain from gnawing on the car dashboard in a fit of anguish)  

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Love is You

 Rules for a Happy Marriage:

  • The day after the honeymoon, wives must present a Happy Marriage Contract to their beloved. He signs immediately, if happiness is to continue. The contract states the husband promises to never complain. He won’t say, “It’s too hot, it’s too cold, or the soft water system is broken and we don’t have water.” Or make any other complaints like these. He must especially, (and this is big), not complain about money. This means he will not come home shouting, “That So-and So Hardware store just robbed me blind. They want five cents for one nail and I can get them for two cents a nail at the Such-and-Such Hardware store.” (Such-and-Such store is sixty miles from your residence and the cost of gas to get there to save three-cents a nail is not factored into the husband’s rant.) The Happy Marriage Contract requires husbands to never ask their wives how much something she purchased cost. Therefore, when his wife (you) come home with shopping bags full of new shoes and new purse and new Michael Kors earrings, he must never ever ask, “How much did that cost?” This is a ploy husbands use to figure how much they can equally spend on a new golf club, fishing pole, or welder. If you say, “The Michael Kors earrings cost fifty-eight dollars,” he’ll exhale a whistle and blurt, “Boy, they’re proud of those!” Then he’ll think to himself, “Aha, now I can drive back to the hardware store and shop ’till I drop with armloads of tools and a shiny new drill.”
  • The Happy Marriage Contract must also include a ban on hobbies for husbands. For some reason unbeknownst to me, husbands can become addicted to hobbies. I don’t know of any twelve-step recovery programs for the husband-hobby addiction. If the hobby is photography, the husband might start out with one camera and one camera bag. But then he must have the best and most expensive cameras and lenses and tripods and the addiction takes over. Or if it’s tropical fish, the husband begins with goldfish in a bowl and then suddenly must have a two-thousand gallon aquarium that stretches from the living room down the hallway into the bathroom where expensive Lion Fish gawk through the glass while you apply your mascara. The spiny-finned fish try to kiss you with smoochy lips. It’s unnerving. If the hobby involves building things, husbands must have screwdrivers with names like Phillips and Flathead. They need wrenches and files and hundreds of pliers and tool chests to put it all in. Then comes a lathe, a mill, a cold saw, hot saw and every imaginable kind of saw. Therefore, a happy marriage allows wives only to have hobbies, as we can exercise restraint. Husbands, sadly, must abstain.
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    The Miracle in the Hair Salon

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    A red-headed woman popped her head through the salon door with a jubilant announcement.

    “That stuff for thin hair is a miracle! I just love it!” she hollered over the jazzy music and the lull of salon chatter. Everyone in Arizona, plus a few people in Texas, heard her.

    I’m seated in the stylist chair, in the process of having highlights, lowlights, and any other available lights, applied to my hair.

    “I WANT TO BUY ALL YOU HAVE,” the woman thundered, making me wonder why I don’t carry ear plugs with me when I go to the salon. She added,  “I CAN’T BELIEVE WHAT A MIRACLE THIS STUFF IS. GREATEST THING EVER.” read more

    What I Learned From Fluffing Plastic Bags (and living a better life)

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    People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered; Forgive them anyway.

    People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
    Forgive them anyway.

    When you volunteer to work at the food bank, you probably think to yourself, I’m going to help people and that’s a good thing. I’m going to help people who have hit hard financial times and need a lift in their spirit as well as food in their cupboard.

    You imagine the recipients will look upon you as a Mother Teresa-type, grateful to your sweet spirit of volunteerism of handing out turkeys and canned pumpkin and toys for the kids.

    A week before Christmas, I showed up on time for my assigned volunteer shift,  ready for my Mother Teresa benevolence to begin. read more

    I’m a Survivor and You Are Too

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    Merry Survival! Merry Survival!

    “Your book title tells me nothing about your book,” says the literary agent.

    She sits across from me at a table in the far corner of an empty room. She flips through the pages of my book, Five Minutes For France, with nonchalant abandon.

    I assume she’s a nice lady in real life. She probably packs her kids’ lunches with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches along with brightly-colored Post-it notes reading: “You’re awesome!”

    But at writers conferences~agents who sit behind tables in far corners can morph into Cruella Devilles.

    Not that they’re intentionally mean. But they don’t want you to get your hopes high without equipping yourself with some nice, hard truth. And there’s a lot of hard truth for a writer to swallow. read more