My Real Life Was Backordered

A Mom Like Me

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Thu, 09 May 2013 20:47:00 +0000

One April afternoon, my husband and I walked from our hotel in Cusco, Peru, to the city's central plaza. After living for ten years at or near sea level, Cusco's 10,000 foot elevation had us sucking wind like we had just one lung between us, and the five minute walk had wiped us out. We sat down to catch our breath on the lip of the fountain shown in the above picture.

It was a beautiful day. Temperatures in the 70s, a light breeze floating over the city, children playing -- heavenly. Provided I had an endless supply of oxygen tanks, I really believe I could live in Cusco.

Not long after we reached the fountain, we were approached by a Peruvian woman of perhaps sixty. She was dressed traditionally, and carried a satchel from which she drew a carved gourd. This one, to be precise:

I thought it was lovely, and thoroughly Peruvian. She claimed to have carved it herself, although I suspected they all said that. Still, I was interested in buying it from her, and asked her the price.

Before we could continue, however, a police officer showed up and chastised her for selling to the tourists. Even my assurances that I didn't mind her being there couldn't sway him; he hustled her across the street. But before she turned to leave, she caught my eye, and I winked at her.

The little Peruvian woman understood the signal; as soon as the policeman was on the other side of the plaza, she returned to the fountain and carefully withdrew the gourd. Quickly, I paid the asking price and dropped the prize into my bag. Nothing to see here, officer.

We began to chat, this stealthy gourd seller and me. I asked if Cusco was her home, and she told me no, she lived another mile up the mountain, in the village we had come to Peru to help. She had lived there all her life -- had been born there. She went on to say that she walked to the city every day with her children, who attended the private Catholic school there. While the kids were in school, she sold gourds to the tourists to earn the money for their tuition.

This woman was immensely proud of her four children. They were the first in her family to attend school, the first to learn to read. I told her that I, too, had four children, that two of them were with me in Peru, and that watching them grow into selfless, delightful teenagers was the joy of my life.

Oh, she said, my children are still small. How do you manage them when they are grown? Sometimes, I said, I think they manage me. We laughed at that. She shared stories of her little family, of the daily walk up and down the muddy Andean mountainside, of the constant challenge involved in keeping their uniforms clean, of arriving at the school and scraping mud off the kids' shoes before sending them to class, and before taking up her bag of gourds and heading to the plaza.

I considered the work our humanitarian group was doing. Just the day before, my 15-year old daughter had helped lay pipe for a water system that would eliminate the need to walk a half mile straight up the mountain to the well, and I hoped that somehow it would make cleaning those school clothes a little easier.

Her children were young; the oldest was ten. I found that odd, considering her seemingly advanced age. She was weathered, her skin ruddy and lined from years of exposure to the sun and wind. Had she really not started her family until she was in her fifties? It seemed unlikely.

So, in my typically bold way, I asked her: "How old are you?"

"Forty-one," she said. Forty-one! My age!

"Ah!" I said. "I'm forty-one!"

She grinned. "No," she said, "you look so young!"

"Not so young as I once was," I said. "Kids make you old." She nodded vigorously. We laughed again.

"I will be forty-two in June," I added.

"I will also be forty-two in June!"

Our eyes widened in that "We're so much alike!" look that women share -- that women crave, thrive on.

"When?" I asked. "When is your birthday?"

"June 29," she said.

This woman whom I had taken to be my mother's age, was in fact twelve days younger than me.

"June 17," I said. "See? We're practically twins!"

Could any women have had more different lives, I wondered. I was born in a modern hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. She arrived two weeks later, in a still-primitive village high in the Peruvian Andes. I could read by the time I was three. I had my first job in a comfortable shopping center near my home. Studied music, graduated from college. Drove a car, travelled, swam in my backyard pool.

And she walked down the mountainside every day, to take her children to school and evade the police while she eked out a meager living selling gourds.

So different. And yet, on that lovely spring morning on the edge of a city fountain, we were just two moms, sharing the joys and struggles of raising kids. We were doing what we had to do, day after day, sometimes at a cost, often without giving it much thought.

Life in the Andes is hard; most villagers don't live much past fifty, and this year, she and I will be forty-nine. I hope she's still alive, that her kids are happy, that she's getting her shot at managing teenagers.

She's a long way away from everything I know. But she's a mother.

A mother.

Just like me.

Blogging as a Path to Self-Discovery. No, seriously.

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:50:00 +0000

Story @ Home / Roots Tech 2013

It was important to include the exit sign over the door,

to show that people could have fled safely

if they had felt the need.

You will note, there is no fleeing happening.

In the public speaking biz, we call that a 'fully successful gig.'

Hey, everybody! Did you miss me? Well, I was right here, in my winter-defying orange sherbet jacket, yapping and flailing like usual. Shoulda looked here first!

So, I spoke at the above mentioned Story @ Home conference again this year. Gosh, I love that event. You totally have to come next time. We have such fun. It's all about story -- story this, story that, story, story, story.

There's a blogging / Internet track, and that's where you find me. My topic was The Journey of Self-Discovery, which on first blush seems just far too froo-froo for yours truly.

But honestly? It was a great subject to think about and share with others. I think most bloggers agree that, regardless of why they started to blog, the experience turned into something more. Nearly everyone I meet in the blogging world has some story to tell about the things they learned along the way about themselves, their goals, their priorities, their businesses, and -- depending on the camera angle -- the importance of wearing properly fitted jeans.

Now, I don't want to appear immodest (and by that I mean, I don't want you to know how truly stuck-up I am), but my class was stuffed clean to the gills. And there were people in the hall, looking in. I suppose it was possible they were getting the gist simply by watching my windmill arms, and of course it helps to have a voice like a foghorn. So I hope everyone who attended got what they came for.

But some lamented later that they couldn't get into the class (stupid fire codes) and would like a sum-up of what we talked about.

So in a move that is completely out of the ordinary for me, I thought I'd put something useful on my blog. Please don't panic; the silliness will return soon.

The main ideas of that presentation are here. And please, use the comments to share your own stories of this unexpected path that leads to, "Wow. Didn't know that about myself" land.

Discovering What Has Already Been, and Things as They Are Now

The first part of the class centered on the common use of blogging (at least old-school blogging, before we all decided that, with enough typing, we could become millionaires), namely, chronicling the current events of life, and / or recording stories from our past.

There is something about the act of writing that requires an element of focus, which in turn tends to slough off details that we may have felt were 'the point of the story' but really turned out to be extraneous to the core experience. This isn't to suggest that those details aren't worthy of their own story, only to say that for a given telling of a specific story, there is a lot that drops off.

For me, this has meant bringing clarity to memories that had always just been a sort of foggy blur. The most extreme example of this (on my blog, anyway), and the one I typically share at conferences, is a post I wrote called The Wendy Bird, where I thought I was just reminiscing about pretending to be Samantha Stevens with my little neighbor friend back in the third grade, and discovered in the writing that I was telling a very different story -- one whose ending I hadn't understood until I was an adult.

I spent some time talking about my dear friend Debbie Frampton, and her own journey -- taken on the blogging road -- to forgiveness and understanding surrounding the death of her father by drug overdose when she was just 15. Her blog, which on the surface is just funny and goofy and random, has nonetheless led her to such an extraordinary place that she is now writing one of the most beautiful, delightful memoirs I've ever read. Move over, Haven Kimmel. There's a new sheriff in town.

The interactive nature of blogging sets it apart from journaling. Not only do we share our own stories, we then get the feedback and commiseration of our community. A nothing little blog post on the subject of falling down in public was improved 1,000% by the comments that came later. It is one of the funniest posts on my blog -- and you don't even hit the good stuff until I stop talking and my readers start.

I have found that even the posts I've written over the years that deal with difficult things -- depression, betrayal, loneliness, and loss -- have brought me closer to making peace with life's unexpected turns, and have invariably taken me to a place where I could not only forgive and move on, but I was actually grateful for the good that came with the bad, and with the deeper love I've felt for and from God during difficult times. Left alone with my thoughts, I undoubtedly would have become bitter and isolated; blogging about trials put me in the company of people I love and trust, who gave their whole hearts to the effort of healing mine.

Blogging as a Way to Write a Better Story for your Life

The other part of the presentation had to do with some inspiring ideas I got from the book "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years" by Donald Miller. (Incidentally, I've never been paid to endorse any product, and that includes this book.) If you'll just read that, you'll have everything I wanted to tell you in that part of the presentation but ran out of time.

Miller's experience is interesting: He found himself in the position of having to write a fictional version of himself for a film about his first memoir. And he realized that the screenplay wasn't working -- the story was lackluster -- because his own story was boring. So rather than just tell a bunch of tales about the fictional Don Miller that weren't true, he decided to live a more deliberate, more interesting story, and then put that in the film.

The Peruvian Andes

Over the years, we've done similar things. Our humanitarian trip to Peru, my husband's radical career change from accountant for the LDS church to FBI agent, our multiple moves, including four wild and wacky years in the Caribbean, even my decision to become a writer and public speaker -- all of these represented focused, deliberate choices to wrestle the pen out of the hands of Fate and write a new chapter for ourselves.

A blog is a great place to announce those kinds of intentions to the universe. The feedback, suggestions, encouragement, and accountability that come from your friends (and that's how I think of my readers -- real friends, who take a genuine interest in my well-being) can take a simple 'what if' and turn it into a life changing, story changing reality. And of course, where better to record your experiences than a blog?

What's the next step?

Well, there are a lot of things you can do with your blog. I encourage you to build a little redundancy into your archives -- use the various blog-publishing sites and tools that will print your blog as-is for a nominal fee, or back everything up on another drive, or print off your favorite posts as Word docs. For me and 16 other writers, our blogs became the resources for the book "Tell Me Who I Am," many of whose chapters were refined versions of posts that were first published on our blogs. I mentioned Debbie Frampton's memoir. I am a columnist for Meridian Magazine, and I'm also putting together two different essay collections. Many of those essays and even a few of my Meridian articles lived their first lives on my blog.

And of course, you can just enjoy what you've written. Go back a year or two, and re-read the stories you were telling back then. I'm not ashamed to admit (see 'stuck-up' above) that I have spent many hours reading old posts and laughing with my friends as the dialogue poured onto the comments page. In many ways, my blog has always felt like my virtual living room, where anyone who promised to play nice and not hog all the digital Diet Coke was welcome. Those little snapshots of my life, and the relationships that grew out of them, have become some of my richest treasures.

So, there you go.

Those are the highlights of my presentation on Blogging as a Journey of Self-Discovery. There was more, of course. Lots of laughing, and a little crying (because if I can't roll through at least 17 emotional stages in any given class, then I haven't done it right) and a bit of sharing, and a renewed enthusiasm for telling our own stories and being the authors of our own lives -- that pretty much sums up those thoroughly enjoyable 50 minutes, for me anyway.

Now it's your turn.

Tell us how blogging has taught you more about yourself. Why did you start blogging? Did it turn out the way you thought it would? What surprises did it hold? What would you change if you could?

Old-school blogging is MY school of blogging. But regardless of why you blog, promise me one thing: Keep telling your stories. I'm reading. I'm engaged. And I'm dying to see how it all turns out for you!

All We, Like Sheep

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 18:38:00 +0000

Note: This piece, written three years ago, is one of just a handful that I've had requests for reprints. It was certainly a fun essay to write, and I've been delighted at how many people have enjoyed and related to it. Every word is true -- we were every bit the completely naive fools described in this story. The fact that the sheep didn't manage to herd US off the cliff into the Urubamba river speaks only to the lack of imagination in your standard Ovis Aries, and does not in any way suggest that the 35 college graduates involved could have found half a brain between them. Nevertheless, what we lacked in intelligence or even a semi-reasonable game plan, we made up for in determination and good old fashioned American obstinacy. And I, for one, learned a little more about the love and patience required to save creatures who would just rather be left to their fate.

(If you enjoy this, I invite you to read 'Tell Me Who I Am,' found on my sidebar.)

*********************************************************************

Easter 2006 found my family in the Peruvian Andes. How it ever thought to look there was a true mystery; all we could remember was one minute we were playing "Quién es mas macho?" with an Incan bartender, and the next we were sniffing llama poo.

(Just kidding. The only drinking game my family plays is the one where you eat a fistful of Mentos and drink a jumbo extra grande Diet Coke and then watch each other's heads explode. It's all good fun 'til someone loses an eye.)

Anyway, we were working with a humanitarian group in the little village of Salkantay, which is a mile above and 200 years behind Cuzco.

There is not a more beautiful place on the earth than Salkantay, Peru. Those Andes don't mess around with gentle slopes and rolling foot-hills. They shoot straight up into the stratosphere, beyond, it seems, the 14,000 foot elevation where the village is situated, thumbing their majestic noses at wimpy ideas like gravity.

My guy, a long way from home

They're green and precipitous and, in every possible sense of the word, breathtaking. This is the only place I've ever visited where you actually order oxygen from the hotel desk, and a bellman brings it to your room and, if necessary, straps a bicycle pump to your face and re-inflates your lungs.

Our group spent a week or so helping the villagers with a variety of projects, including building a greenhouse, constructing a running water system, and introducing the little Peruvian children to the modern, transcendent wonders of Spicy Cheetos.

Many of the villagers were descendents of the Inca, and only spoke Ketchua. A few spoke Spanish as well. None spoke English.

Yet it was so great to see our kids working side-by-side with these villagers, communicating with sign language and stick-in-the-dirt drawings and the kind of laughter you get when you realize the table you just spent an hour building together has three legs pointing south and one due west.

It was life changing. I have forever after looked at my oldest two children with different eyes.

One morning, however, we arrived at the village to learn that we would be participating in a new project.

The village was raising a special variety of sheep. (I'm not sure which breed. I think it was the "Woolicus Stupidus," but I could be lying.)

It was hoped that these sheep, if kept healthy, would provide a high-quality wool which could be used to make blankets, clothing, and other products which the villagers would take into Cuzco and sell. The impoverished residents of Salkantay had pinned a lot of their hopes for future prosperity on those sheep.

Well, a big part of keeping the sheep healthy long enough to realize a return on the village's investment was immunizing them. I couldn't tell you what kinds of diseases sheep are likely to get (mad cow?) but we were nonetheless pegged for the job of getting them vaccinated.

It should probably be noted here that, to a man, not a single member of our humanitarian expedition knew the first thing about sheep. Zip. I'm not sure any could even spell 'sheep.'

Nevertheless, possessed of the hubris that is the downfall of tourists everywhere, we trotted up the hillside to assume our duties as Sheep Herding & Immunization Technology Specialists, or for short, umm…well, never mind. We won't abbreviate that one.

The first thing we noticed after regaining consciousness (remember, we were three stinkin' miles above sea level) was that there were no sheep in the pasture. There was, technically, no pasture in the pasture. It was more along the lines of a grassy wall, which ran at a gentle 175 degree angle until it met with an ascending cliff that rose so aggressively "up" it appeared to loop back on the geometric continuum, qualifying more as an inverted "down".

This cliff was where the sheep were grazing, evidently affixed to the mountain by Velcro. And keeping them company was a herd of llamas.

Also on that vertiginous mountainside were some of the local shepherds, who, upon noticing our group sucking wind and collapsing like fish on a boat bottom, began to direct both the sheep and the llamas toward the pasture.

I can't really describe how they did it (tasers, perhaps) but somehow they managed to separate the llamas from the sheep, dispatching the llamas toward the village and leaving the sheep - and their victims - to their respective fates.

One of the men began instructing our group on the finer points of immunizing sheep. It seemed we were to first encourage the sheep into an adobe pen, where the local toughs would then single out individual animals and, using a complex formula known as "guessing," would holler out to we, the volunteer sheep-dopers, the amount of medicine their sheep required.

After the medicine had been administered, another batch of idiots, er, I mean humanitarians, would 'paint' the heads of the now-vaccinated sheep with red goo, which indicated that they were finished, and point them in the direction of the gate.

Sounds simple enough, right?

Oh. My. Word.

Let it here be observed, when the Lord referred to His children as "sheep" He was not paying them a compliment.

The only creatures on that hillside who were more brainless, more stubborn, more skittish and goofy and easily distracted than those blasted sheep were the human volunteers. The pasture and the pen were only maybe fifty yards away from each other (forty-nine of those yards pointing straight down; we could have simply picked up the sheep and dropped them into the pen if we could have caught the crazy beasts), but it took us nearly an hour of sheer buffoonery to do the job.

First, we thought we could just 'holler' them down the hill. "Go, sheep! Go on! Go, sheep, go!" Like we'd been scripted by Dr. Seuss.

The sheep, naturally, heeded our counsel by running in a circle and pooing.

So we determined that we were going to have to 'chase' them to the pen. We removed various jackets and hats and began jogging and flailing and, by this time, breathing out threatenings against those cursed sheep and their posterity to the third and fourth generations, convinced that we could scare them into cooperating.

The sheep responded by assuming individual trajectories and running in what was now forty different circles and bleating revolutionary slogans back at their tormentors. And pooing some more.

Next on the agenda, then, was an attempt at creating a Lifetime Original Movie moment by kidnapping a few of the lambs and carrying them toward the pen, confident that their mothers would follow along out of powerful maternal instinct. Oh, the mileage we would get out of this object lesson!

See? Moms stick close to their little ones. Right? Right? Well, I did anyway.

Unfortunately, sheep don't watch Lifetime Original Movies, and instead read in our act of collecting all the lambs an offer of free babysitting. They celebrated their new-found liberty by frolicking in a general anti-pen direction, and of course, pooing.

The hillside was becoming a slippery slope of unmentionable terrors for we gringos, who were wearing our "old" sneakers for the job. This meant we had essentially strapped rubber ice skates to our feet and were now trying to keep from falling into what you get when you combine a stressed-out sheep with a grass-intensive brunch.

My son, Dave, was one of many victims.

I think we burned his clothes and made him return to the hotel wearing a festively colored poncho.
Or at least we should have.

Strangely, we had the best luck when we simply hid from the sheep. "They're getting nervous," we reasoned. "Give them some time to settle down. Let 'em think we've lost interest. Then we'll break out the tranquilizer darts."

And sure enough, a few sheep gravitated toward the pen. Typical. And once we got three or four contained, the rest, as sheep are wont to do, followed them in.

Now it was time for the wrestling match wherein the local herdsmen would quite literally pick up a sheep in a position reminiscent of the Heimlich maneuver, and call out "Dos!" or "Cuatro!" which told the volunteers how many cc's of medicine that sheep would need.

Meanwhile, we were either filling syringes with anywhere from two to five cc's of this milky substance or handing them to others, who would then rush over to the Heimliched sheep and squirt the medicine into its mouth.

Yeah, that went well.

Not knowing that this stuff could well mean the difference between good health and poor, perhaps even between surviving the wet Andean winter or not, the sheep had less than zero interest in cooperating with the immunizers.

They spit. They thrashed. They pulled out shivs and menaced the other sheep. They mouthed off and stomped up to their rooms.

As if that weren't enough, once the medicine which wasn't all over the volunteer's shoe was in the sheep's mouth, the volunteer would actually have to massage its throat to FORCE it to swallow.

Then the immunizer would shout "PAINT!" and another volunteer would rush over to brush red dye on the sheep's head, who would finally be released to go its way, only to be as obstinate and stupid about exiting the pen as it had been about entering.

From start to finish, it was one big exercise in coercion and, at times, sheer, teeth-gritting determination not to be out-maneuvered by a 150 pound bag of helium in a wool sweater. Those sheep did everything they could to reject what was being offered to them.

They were short-sighted and temperamental and even aggressively determined to remain unprotected, exposed, and vulnerable to whatever disease lay ahead. They had to be led, pushed, and threatened. Some took several attempts from several well-stomped laborers to finally get the job done.

But at the end of the day, every one of those silly sheep bore on its head the symbol of its renewed health and brighter future.

Sheep Herding & Immunization Technology Specialists

I learned a lot of things that morning. About sheep and people and how mind-blowingly difficult it can sometimes be to do something good and necessary and life-saving for others.

About the kind of vision and effort it takes to call and contain and get the attention of creatures who might otherwise never pay any heed to what you do or say or want for them.

About the love that is poured into the healing of all mortality's pain, including -- especially -- the healing of broken hearts, and the mark set upon those hearts when they have been made whole by the Master Physician.

And mostly, I learned a little more about the Good Shepherd, who on another hillside on another Easter, reclaimed His sheep and, one by one, anointed their heads with salvation, inviting them to forever lie down in the green pastures of eternal life.

All we, like sheep, have gone astray. But we hear the voice of the Shepherd, who knows us, who has borne our griefs, carried our sorrows, and graven us on the palms of His hands.

And we follow Him.

Happy Easter.

As Good as it Gets

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 06:14:00 +0000

Look! A new picture of me speaking at a conference! And this was no ordinary conference. Oh, no my friends. This was the Story @ Home conference, 2012.

I had a great time at this conference. At one point, I sat down at the piano and played 'Battle Hymn of the Republic.' Yes, in my presentation. How could I not? There was a nine-foot Steinway just sitting there, completely unsupervised. What would you have done? Ignored the poor thing?

No. You would have waltzed right over to it, lifted the lid, and used the last 16 measures of the aforementioned 'Battle Hymn' to demonstrate the idea that tension drives music, just like it drives narrative.

Right?

Right.

This year's conference has me thinking in different directions. I've been asked to speak on how blogging has been something of a 'path of self-discovery.' Anyone who knows how I went from being a tobacco farmer in 19th century Georgia to a writer and public speaker will tell you that it all came as a result of blogging. One day I was yanking the drapes out of the window and fashioning a ball gown out of them, and the next I was up on a stage, pinning a mic to my blouse and yapping about the Hero's Journey.

It's a funny old world, isn't it?

The truth is, I love talking about story. And this time around, I'm going to explore the possibilities inherent in writing a better, more enriching narrative for ourselves. Remember Jack Nicholson, turning to a waiting room full of psychiatric patients and asking them, "What if this is as good as it gets?"

Well, that scene fried itself into my cranium. There are moments that, if they were all life had to offer, would be enough -- the birth of a child, or the discovery that hot fudge lowers blood pressure and dissolves chin hairs.

But if we aren't vigilant, if we start making molehills into anthills and anthills into gopher holes, before we know it we're living a story that's completely unworthy of us. And then we're stuck in that waiting room, at risk of answering 'yes' to Jack's terrible question, when all that it would take would be a great plot twist, maybe something involving pirates, and we'd be off on a narrative adventure that writes well because it was lived well.

So that's what we'll be talking about in my workshop.

NOW, here's something exceptionally cool: This year, the Story @ Home conference is joining forces with the RootsTech conference, which is a massive Family History conference held at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City. And for $79, you can get a pass to the whole dealio! Three days of presentations, workshops, training and enthusiasm for all things story. Honestly, the vendor floor alone will be awesome, with everything from books and recordings from your favorite writers and storytellers to all the technology necessary to track down those wild and wacky ancestors and find out once and for all just who was responsible for the family tendency to grow noses you could cut timber with.

AND, if you use the code URSTRY13, you can save $10 on the pass.

Mark your calendars for March 21-23, 2013, and join me in Salt Lake for three of the most enjoyable, entertaining, and motivating days you'll have all year.

And you can't miss me! I'll be the one in the ball gown.

Fudge, Facebook, & Avian Anger Issues

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 19:08:00 +0000

See that little fiend of walnutty, chocolatey deliciousness? Yeah, it looks sweet, but it has me in a fudge induced stupor right now. And I'm also wearing my stretchy pants, out of necessity, and not because I'm thinking of becoming a Mexican pro wrestler.

However, as this is the fundamental job of fudge, no hard feelings, little chunk o' heaven.

But because of the aforementioned stupor, I can only hold on to a single thought for just a few seconds before my mind wanders off and I wake up 30 minutes later swearing at a green pig in a hard hat for surviving the havoc my angry bird just wreaked on its house.

So. A few of those thoughts, and then it's back to strategizing. (Did you know those green ones can fly backwards?? What a world!)

I miss blogland. A lot. The crazy thing is, I became a blogger in order to practice writing. I had no idea all of YOU were out there, lining up to be supportive and kind and my friends and stuff. And then came the real stunner: blogging worked. I did improve as a writer. So much so that before I knew what was happening, I was, you know, a writer. And I slowly transitioned from being a blogger who did a little writing into a writer who did a little blogging. Be careful what you wish for, and all that jazz.
If anyone is going to Costco this week, please pick up some laundry soap and those chocolate covered pretend pomegranate seeds for me. Then come to my house and do my laundry, because I'll be busy eating chocolate covered pretend pomegranate seeds.
I just read a comment on Facebook written by one of the guys who gave me such a hard time for saying 'damn' and 'hell' and 'visiting teaching' all in the same novel a couple of years ago. He absolutely loathed the movie Les Miserables because of the rape and the suicide and the suggestion that, if you add singing, it suddenly becomes Disney on Ice. Someone please send him a translation of the word 'miserables,' along with a list of books written for people older than age 11.
It's entirely possible I'm still bitter about the whole 'hell' and 'damn' and 'visiting teaching' thing.
Here's a psychology question for you all: Why do I always block access to my closet? I mean, always. My room was Christmas central for the last couple of weeks. Guess where everything landed? Right in front of my closet. We went on a trip last week. The suitcase is still sitting there, chatting up the wrapping paper and empty Amazon boxes, making the act of choosing a blouse to match Nacho Libre stretchy pants both perilous and acrobatic. And I always do this. WHY?
I upgraded the operating system on my iPhone recently, and now it won't let me write sideways on Facebook. It's astonishing how annoyed this makes me.

I'm noticing that there is a certain grumpiness to these observations, which doesn't make sense because I'm actually quite happy about the way things are going at the moment. Is it possible I've developed a dual personality, and the other one is a big, red, triangle-shaped bird? Cuz that would explain what I did to the ham this morning.

I'll be back after the New Year! Stay warm, ma peeps!

God With Us

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 18:54:00 +0000

Sometimes I get caught up in the social, cultural, and personality aspects of my religious life, and it gets me down and out of sync. A reminder like this helps bring me back to that place of humble discipleship, that frame of heart that says I'll say, and do, and strive to become whatever the Savior asks, because in the end my relationship with Him is all that matters.

I'm not sure how much blogging I'll get done this month, but please enjoy this lovely performance of O Come Immanuel as my Christmas gift to all of you.

Much, much love,
DeNae

What the What the What?

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 01:09:00 +0000

This is a picture of my house in happier times. Specifically, the times when someone who wasn't a lunatic lived in it.

Then we moved in, and the crazy began.

A little backstory:

My mother usually hosts Thanksgiving at her home, which is just around the corner, down the street, over the river and through the woods from my place. She has a big finished basement that is just the right size for the umpteen gazillion of us.

But two weeks ago -- with no consideration for anyone else's feelings -- she went and had a double knee replacement.

That's right. Double. As in both knees. She's an animal.

So, yesterday, I was with her at the rehab center where, if she doesn't stop mouthing off, she will live out her days, and as she lifted weights, she told her Occupational Therapist that I'm not a very organized person.

The evidence of this, she posited, was the fact that I own roughly nine thousand Rubbermaid bins, into which I attempt to file and categorize my life, only to become frustrated when I can't get my kids to stop eating in my kitchen and dirtying their clothes, and just stay in the garage like they've been ordered.

When I suggested a change of subject (I believe my actual words were, "Zip it, old lady, or you're walking home from this joint") she just laughed and went right on not zipping it.

First my kids, and now my mother. Is there anyone my threats actually work on?

As if that weren't enough, she continued by comparing me to my sister, Jill.

Jill, the sister who never sits down.

Jill, the sister whose house is so immaculate all the time you could perform a kidney transplant on her coffee table.

Jill, the sister who was born with a glue gun in one hand and Martha Stewart Living in the other. (It was a tricky delivery.)

Jill, who lives a mere 50 yards across the golf course from me, and who has an awesome finished basement, because she and her husband can go to the Parade of Homes armed with nothing more than a camera phone and a ruler, and then come home and replicate all the cool stuff they saw without any plans or contractors or marriage counselors. They are both just ridiculous.

So. Back to Thanksgiving.

This year, Mom can't host the dinner because (she whines) "I can't go up and down that staircase with these bum knees." Honestly, it is always something with that woman.

So Jill suggested we find someplace else. Someplace where everyone could fit comfortably. Someplace close to Mom's house so she doesn't have to travel far for dinner.

Someplace ... like MY house!

MY unorganized house!

MY house with the unfinished basement and the nine thousand Rubbermaid bins scattered helter-skelter!

MY house where the largest room is the broom closet!

We'll be bunking the chairs, for crying out loud! Seating people in an 'eight around and three high' formation.

And do you know what's even worse?

We're eating here because Jill nailed me on a technicality, in the sense that "technically" I volunteered.

I am so sick of people reading texts that say, "Well, I suppose we could have Thanksgiving at my house" and assuming that what I meant was, "Well, I suppose we could have Thanksgiving at my house."

So now I have to move furniture and scrub toilets and lock the dog in the attic. I have to measure rooms and round up card tables and make food assignments.

But the good news is that this will finally motivate me to get organized. This time, I mean business. Of course, I'll have to make a quick trip to Target for one more bin, five feet, nine inches long.

With extra knee room.

You Tell Me Yours, I'll Tell You Mine

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 06:26:00 +0000

This is me, speaking at the Casual Bloggers Conference a few years ago.

Either that, or it's me playing peek-a-boo with a room of incredibly patient people.

No, I'm pretty sure it's the conference one.

November! Seriously? It seems like just 31 days ago it was September!

What's worse, I only blogged once in all of October. Remember when we blogged a couple times a week? And we were all reading each other's blogs? And commenting like crazy? And not always going on and on about making money on our blogs and stuff like that? Just hanging out together and having fun?

Sigh. I miss those days.

Now it's all 'Facebook' this and 'Pinterest' that and 'I have a life, you know' and blah blah blah. It is a sad, sorry state of affairs when having a life gets in the way of reading about falling down in public or the time I tried to get my driver's license and it was very inconveniently 9/11. I'm just saying.

So. A quick update.

The women in my family just finished our annual Girls' Weekend. We're up to 17 girls now, although my DIL couldn't make it. That's really a shame, on accounta this time there was nudity. Sorry. No pictures except the fully dressed one above. But I do have a video that, if I were one of those people who is always scrambling for ways to make money off the Internet, I could upload right now and pay off my house by Christmas.

Oh, the stories that emerge from Girls' Weekend. Remember the waxing year? And the time Jill and Kim scared Amber so bad she widdled in her drawers? And those are just the ones we blog about.

And speaking of stories, I have some news for those of you who might be interested in attending the Story @ Home Conference in Salt Lake City March 21-23, 2013.

And there is great news! The conference has been incorporated into the hugely popular RootsTech conference! This is such a wonderful opportunity for everyone involved -- inluding YOU!

Not only am I speaking on the subject of "Blogging as a Path to Self-Discovery," (No, I really am. I don't know, because they asked me to? Because it's exactly what has happened to me in a thousand different ways?) I have also been given the green-light to offer $10 off the already insanely reasonable ticket price of $79. Use the code URSTRY13 and your ticket will only be $69.

This is a 3-day event, and one I really believe in.

Anyway, if you have any interest in attending, don't forget to use that code. I want you to have the best deal you can get.

And if you'd like to see the video from this year's Girls' Weekend, PayPal me $1,000 and I'll email you the footage. I'll need 200 of you to do that if I'm going to have clear title to my house by the holidays.

Thou Dost Protest Too Much and Stuff

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 20:46:00 +0000

This is Brandon Flowers and Richard Dawkins. And this post is kinda Mormony.

Like, I use words that even I had to look up, and I know freaking everything.

Still, it's loads of laughs, and it also invites anyone who has ever attended a large gathering of members of your same faith without having protesters on every corner screaming at your children that they're going to hell for saying they love Jesus but doing it in the wrong Christian language, to consider what we deal with every six months.

Having lived in Las Vegas for ten years, I’ve pretty much seen it all. Well, not all of the ‘all’ that is available for viewing in Las Vegas—for example I’ve never seen Wayne Newton, nor have I seen the city hurtling toward me as I was suspended from a giant rubber band. One can now pay to BASE jump from the Stratosphere, which several otherwise rational people of my acquaintance have done multiple times, many on purpose.

But in all those years of living in Vegas, I never realized I was neighbors with Brandon Flowers—the front man for The Killers, a band I am assuming has nothing to do with Gadianton. It wasn’t until I saw him interviewed on a Swedish broadcast that also included a gentleman by the name of Richard Dawkins that his Las Vegas roots were mentioned.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Wasn’t Richard Dawkins the host of Family Feud?” And my answer is, “I don’t know. Let me check Google.”

No! It turns out that Mr. Dawkins is a scientist, atheist, and full-time naysayer who, during the course of the interview, called Joseph Smith a ‘proven charlatan,’ admitted to starting but not finishing the Book of Mormon, claimed that ‘biology explains everything,’ and then bungee jumped off the stage. It was left to the audience to decide whether biology explained why he forgot to cinch up his giant rubber band first.

Ha! I’m kidding about the bungee jumping one. But everything else happened just as I’ve described it. It was all terribly exciting.

Now Brandon, who undoubtedly thought he was on the Swedish version of Late Night with David Letterman and was likely chagrined to learn he was actually on Inquisition 2012 (a name I just this minute made up so don’t bother looking for it on YouTube), was given the opportunity to defend—on the spot—the LDS Church, Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and rock n’ roll. Wasn’t he lucky?

Given that he hadn’t been warned of the upcoming confrontation and spent the first part of the interview singing ‘mi-mi-mi-miiii’ behind his hand whenever the others were talking in Swedish, Brandon deported himself with great aplomb, which being interpreted means, he said, “Oh, yeah? You and me. Stratosphere. Tuesday.”

But this isn’t about Brandon Flowers, although I think that would be a great name for a Gadianton Robber. Do you think ‘Kishkumen’ was Nephite for ‘Pleasance Shadybrook?’ With a name like that, you really could get away with murder.

No, this is about Richard Dawkins, General Conference, and a job I hope my kids never find out about: The Professional Protester.

Those who have had the opportunity to attend General Conference at the Conference Center in Salt Lake City have undoubtedly passed individuals on the sidewalk waving pickets and shouting well-reasoned claims like, “The Bible says Mormons are big dumb jerks! Read it! It’s there, I’m not kidding!”

And for the most part, conference attendees manage to ignore these people, usually because one of their children has fled the thirteen-passenger stroller and is now licking a pigeon.

But invariably someone is filled to overflowing with righteous indignation and, like Samuel the Lamanite, leaps onto a decorative planter, determined to set the Professional Protester straight once and for all. (If this is you, please note that despite your good intentions you are probably not impervious to spears and arrows. Dress accordingly.)

No matter who is playing the role of Protester and who is playing Samuel, the script is nearly identical each time. The Protester quotes Revelation, strategically ignoring silly details like historical timelines, and decries the Book of Mormon as having broken the rules for showing up after the printing press was invented. Then ‘Samuel’ says, “What about the ‘other sheep’ Jesus mentions in John 10:16, huh? Didja ever think about them?” and the Protester responds with, “Since when was this about agriculture?”

Typically the intelligence level of the dialogue drops steadily after this, until Biblical language is hurled from both sides and not in a good way.

The problem is that the Professional Protester doesn’t care a bit about anyone’s religious beliefs. He may be interested in John, but only because he’s been chugging Diet Coke all morning and no one will hold his sign while he takes a break. Shouting inflammatory nonsense and annoying passers-by is his job. He gets paid to do it. Last weekend it was the LDS General Conference. Next week he’ll be protesting a political event, checking his script and selecting the appropriate dogma for whatever he’s been hired to feel strongly about.

Professional Protesting seems like a strange way to make a living, but I can see some advantages to it. For starters, anyone who was ever a teenager has already been through extensive training, including field work in Upper Division Ranting and Sass for All Occasions. There is almost no overhead; Magic Markers, poster board, maybe a thesaurus for when you run out of synonyms for ‘vengeance’—that just about covers the initial investment, near as I can tell. You get the chance to connect with a variety of people, or at least the parts with knuckles. And every day you’re spared the challenge of forming an opinion beyond the one your employers have assigned to you.

I wouldn’t want my kids to know that such a career option is available to them; they need to pay their dues first. ‘Complain for free, then whine for a fee’—that’s my motto. But there’s no reason why I, an experienced adult, couldn’t take it up, at least part time. I’d love to get paid to squawk about things, particularly since, on a productive day, I can find at least 764,000 reasons to be irritated. Here are a few:

· Pickup trucks with those purple-ish halogen headlamps. I assume the owners of these trucks went with halogen because they couldn’t afford nuclear reactors, since those headlamps essentially use your own rearview mirror to fry your eyeballs to dust. If I could get paid for doing so, I’d stand on the side of the highway and holler “turnoffthosestupid—” and “owmyeyesyourude—.” I’d have to yell really fast, of course, because the drivers of pickups with halogen headlamps don’t consider it a good ride if it doesn’t feel like they’ve been shot out of a cannon.

· Acquaintances who shop in the same supermarket aisles as you but move in the opposite direction, so that throughout the entire store you keep running into them and have to come up with new, clever things to say. For a nominal fee, I’d wear a sandwich board that reads, “Speed up or slow down, or so help me I’ll find a new use for this zucchini.”

· Sunday speakers who start their talks with, “When I saw the bishop’s number on the caller I.D. I almost didn’t answer, hrr hrr.” On behalf of that overworked bishop and his family, I would roll my bulletin into a little megaphone and announce that never, not once in the history of public speaking has that line ever been funny. Believe it or not (I’d say) we really don’t care how you felt when you were asked to speak. Just get on with it, because if we go into overtime and my roast burns, I’m suing you for damages.

· People who try to reform Professional Protesters. When the debate in Sweden got heated, Brandon Flowers just left the stage, presumably to warm up his band (or write a letter to the Chief Judge, demanding the immediate surrender of Zarahemla. I probably should find out just what kind of band The Killers really is). Please, just leave the protesters alone. It’s like waiting in line at Disneyland; the walk from the parking lot (“Conveniently Located in Nevada”) to the Conference Center is more fun when there’s free entertainment along the way.

Supply and Demand

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 06:04:00 +0000

One of life's tragedies is when something monumental occurs, something that is so huge and dramatic and staggering that the earth actually tilts even more on its so-called axis than it already does. I say 'so-called' so I can have plausible deniability when so-called scientists revert back to their original flat earth theory, which you know perfectly well they'll do if it means a government grant to study just who was responsible for that nonsense about globes.

And then the monumental, staggering thing is overshadowed by smaller, less significant events -- in this case, the Republican and Democratic conventions.

Because of all that political stuff, the universe nearly missed the earth / axis thing mentioned in the opening paragraph, namely, the LDS church finally admitted in print that Joseph Smith never -- no, not once -- said anything about Diet Coke. Not in speeches, not in writings, not in a boat, not with a goat, and certainly not in the presence of green eggs and ham.

As you well know, this came as no surprise to me and my wired band of rebels, although we're happy to no longer have to drink our Diet Coke in caves or behind the water heater.

But here's what else you missed when you were watching the Democrats party (had a nice beat and I could dance to it) and / or the Republicans hold Stake Conference (allowing dear Mitt to practice his 'passing a kidney stone' face, which I think was supposed to be his 'looking very loving and caring and not richer than Australia' face):

There was a full-on RIOT at BYU following the announcement!

I'm not talking about the announcement that the University of Utah football team had defeated the Cougars 24-21 after a questionable episode wherein all the BYU fans rushed the field and dragged their players to safety before they inadvertently kicked a successful field goal one minute before Sunday, which would have forced the game into overtime and created a real conundrum for the Gnat Strainers Booster Club.

No, this riot had to do with BYU declaring that the reason caffeinated soda hadn't been sold on campus until now was that -- you need to sit down, because this declaration will make you want to jump right back up again and holler, "Seriously?" -- there had never been a demand for it.

I know, right??

I personally myself am acquainted with just scads of BYU faculty members -- and by 'scads' I mean 'two' -- and I know for a fact -- and by 'fact' I mean 'I'm just making this up as I go along' -- that contraband Diet Coke has been spirited onto that campus in blue tote bags and giant purses for years!

No demand? What were those poor, deprived BYU students and teachers supposed to do -- stand at the cafeteria soda dispenser and demand that Diet Coke squirt out of it immediately or there would be heck to pay? Goodness, they're all so wan from lack of caffeine they barely have the energy to ignore the fact that "Cougar Eats" is a silly name for a food court.

(Note: I don't know if it's actually called 'Cougar Eats' any more on accounta I've only been on the BYU campus a handful of times and I never ate there because -- wait for it -- they didn't sell Diet Coke.)

One year Elisa Scharton and I were at a conference at BYU, and we stopped at a Chevron station on our way to the campus to purchase junk food and Diet Coke (which, no, is not in the junk food category, thankyouverymuch. It has diet right in the description).

When we got to the conference, another conference attendee caught us with our drinks. I was astonished at her powers of observation, as I had cunningly hidden my bottle in plain sight on the counter where they were handing out name badges and (evidently) 'judging other people' day-passes. And she asked the poor kid working the registration desk whether we were permitted to have that on the premises (she said it in italics and everything). For what it's worth, I hadn't given it a moment's thought. But then I'd driven up from Vegas and was just happy to see that everybody involved was dressed. It was therefore entirely likely that my moral compass required a bit of recalibration.

But back to the hapless undergrad at the registration desk, who said -- and while this is a direct quote it is not necessarily a comment on the quality of education at BYU, though it does cause one to raise an eyebrow -- "We are not affiliated with caffeine."

I had heard that BYU did not affiliate with terrorist groups or human traffickers. But I was shocked to learn that they had severed all negotiations with caffeine.

Anyway, back to the riot. Sit down again, this gets hairy.

A young man who can not be identified because I don't feel like searching Google this late at night, took 200 cans of Coke and Pepsi to the BYU campus, and began handing them out for free.

He was only able to distribute 50 of the cans before campus police brutally -- and by 'brutally' I mean 'quite pleasantly, all things considered' -- requested he vacate the premises before they called down fire and brimstone upon his head as per university policy.

So, like ancient messengers bearing unpopular news before him -- Jonah and Elijah spring to mind -- that brave boy scooped up his caffeinated beverages and wheeled his little cooler off the campus as fast as anyone can travel when dragging those stupid wheeled coolers behind them.

That was it. That was the riot. Hey, I never said it was Kent State.

But though he'd been banished, he'd made his point: Despite the efforts of the BYU propaganda machine, there was obviously an incredible demand for free soda on the BYU campus. Boy, were campus officials' faces red, which was even more annoying because they were caught at BYU sporting the University of Utah's colors right there on their foreheads.

I for one am proud of Mormons in the News these days. Mitt has learned to look earnest, Brandon Flowers said, "Oh, yeah?" to a stuffy Norwegian atheist before performing with his band The Killers of Anyone Who Mouths Off About Mormons, and Glenn Beck ... well, give me a minute on that one.

But I'm mostly proud of that young Cougar and his Cooler of Righteous Indignation. Nothing like raising a frosty, frothy Ebenezer in defiance of zealotry everywhere.

And I am so relieved we have the official go-ahead to affiliate with caffeine again. I always enjoyed their peppy little meetings.

And by 'peppy' I mean 'buzzed.'

It's This or Cold Pizza

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 22:49:00 +0000

Hallooooo!

I know, it's been a while, huh? And I'm sure you've missed me something fierce. You've probably wandered through your life, achieving things and stuff like that, and all the time you were thinking, "Something's not right. I can't put my finger on it, but the world is just off."

And then you went on to think, "What is this giant gaping hole in my pants?" at which point you remembered that you'd caught them on a fence at the fair last weekend -- a fair you wouldn't have gone to if you'd had something interesting to read on the Internet -- and BAM! It hit you like a mallet on the stun line:

DeNae hasn't blogged for a couple of weeks.

My question is, did you get dressed in the dark or just what?

Anyway, your sartorial dilemmas aside, I'm back to help you waste seven minutes, so you can stop accomplishing things for a while. You. Are. Welcome.

What's been going on in DeNae land? Well, since you asked so nicely, I'll tell you:

A lot.

First, I finished the ninth version of the first draft of my novel, and this time I just flung it across the Internet to three very patient, very willing, very in need of shock treatments beta readers, who I'm certain will send super helpful suggestions like, "DeNae, have you considered a career that doesn't involve typing or even the most fundamental grasp of the English language? Like, is 'Mimes R Us' hiring?"

And I'll appreciate their feedback, because as I have observed here before, the only self-esteem problem I suffer from is that I have too much of it.

Second, I landed a gig as a regular contributor to Meridian Magazine, something that I'm very excited about but have a hard time announcing to people. Like my high schoolers' relationship with gainful employment, I have always assumed that my sheer awesomeness will just radiate out the windows of my house, and acknowledgement and recognition will start pounding on the door, demanding to be let in so they could offer me a Pulitzer or at least a lifetime supply of Leatherby's caramel.

In short, I just don't like self-promotion. I'm completely serious here. Really, you should see me. I'm practically frowning, that's how serious I am.

But it does occur to me -- often in fever dreams -- that if I write something and no one reads it, eventually it will lead to a career in the pizza delivery industry. This is terrible news, especially for people expecting to receive their pizzas. I get lost in my driveway. Heavens, I get lost in my garage. Finding your house in 30 minutes or less is simply not going to happen.

So, yay for me and my new opportunity! And if you click on the link up there, where I say regular contributor to Meridian Magazine, it will take you to my first column. THEN, if you enjoy it, or you're just happy that someone with an ounce of sense is working for Domino's and you'd like to keep it that way, click the little Facebook 'share' button. You may have to push the ctrl key on your keyboard, or in lieu of that, hit your computer with a mallet.

By the way, when you went to the fair, did it occur to you that the stun line was next on those cows' agenda? No?

You. Are. Welcome.

Of Ledges, Winners, and Royal Entitlements

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:42:00 +0000

Want this, but didn't win because, like me, you never, ever win anything

even though you give and you give

and you're not bitter at all but have every right to be?

Click here!

We have two winners, boys and girls! One who is terribly deserving, and one who is terribly lucky because he never reads blogs any more and comments even less frequently, something for which I might resent him ever-so-slightly were it not for the facts that

I've been derelict in the same area, to wit, I ain't read a blog since Shep was a pup,
which is something I intend to remedy as soon as this weekend is over,
and yes, I know I keep saying things like that and it's rather unkind of you to point it out in public,
wait, where was I?
Oh, right. The facts of non-resentment.
He is a true blue friend who took the time to read all these old posts I sent him when I was having a panic attack of Woody Allen proportions,
and he helped me choose a couple that were worthy of the hours of re-write they'll need before I submit them to ... well, we'll save that one for later,
and then he helped talk me off the ledge by employing one of two tactics that have always worked for me,
truckloads of flattery.
(The second is promises of cash or other negotiable currencies like M&Ms and Diet Coke.)

As for our first winner, I'm unbelievably jealous of her because she's spent the last two years in England. I have a story about my English ancestors which convinces me I am the rightful Duchess of Little Farthingumberlandhamptonsheepshire (pronounced "Fizz"), but we'll save that for another post.

So, without further ado or shameless fabrication, I announce the winners of the Book of Jeremiah giveaway contest extravaganza soiree wing-ding dealio:

Cyd B, who has kept nieces and nephews entertained all summer long by making construction paper crowns and teaching them the real words to 'My Country, 'Tis of Thee.'
And Braden Bell, who very brilliantly chose to be born a guy, thus opening him up to the option of marrying a lovely woman who cared for the children while he talked his friends off ledges. Wait, no. I think there's more to that story. I think his parenting tactic of choice was was to say 'yes' to everything his kids asked, then run off to work before the cops arrived.

Send me your addresses, winners, and I'll get this DVD set off to you post haste! (That's Latin for 'fast mail,' like Mr. McFeely of Speedy Delivery will swing by your place on that 2,000 pound bike of his and fling it through your window. See? I know stuff.)

I'm (Not) Terribly Concerned About This

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 20:34:00 +0000

I promise, I'll get to my giveaway winners next week, after school starts and I'm not doing Lamaze breathing just to get through an afternoon with a house full of bored teenagers.

But right now I have two things on my mind. One is that I'm afraid I'm doing exactly what the guy in this article is talking about.

And the other is that I realized this morning that I've become rather spotty. (See scientifically obtained proof below)

Considering that I get less sun than bats, moles, and people who live in disused subway tunnels, I can't in good faith call these 'freckles,' a description I would love to employ because it suggests a certain 'youthiness.'

Nor am I worried that they're cancerous; if they were my mother's hands would have dropped off years ago.

No, I'm just spotty. And for the next week, while I hide in my office and finish my novel, I'm going to use my breaks to ponder on just what this little development means.

Maybe it's what happens to your hands when you write something so breathtakingly awesome, even the Pulitzer committee can't come up with enough hyperbole or zeroes on a check to adequately describe their rapture.

Yes. I'm going with that one.

I'll Use My Powers for Good

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 20:49:00 +0000

Sorry all you los--I mean, non-winners.
You can still order one of these babies here.

With just one week left in July, summer is slogging its way to the final roundup. I say this mostly to keep the three voices that live in my head distracted long enough for me to finish the laundry. If I listen to them too much, they drag me into the petty squabbles that summer ennui has always sparked around here, and knowing that they're imaginary voices doesn't make it any easier to get them to share the remote.

Besides, there is still puh-LENTY to do to keep everyone happy or at least neutralized until school starts in four weeks, and I've got the power to completely transform the next month for you. What have I always said? That's right: I give and I give. Also, please hand me the Diet Coke. I've always said that, too.

The winner of the giveaway of my cute pal Lela's book is ... KASIA COOK! Miz Kasia, who made no secret of the fact that you were commenting SPECIFICALLY to win the giveaway, you need to email me with your mailing info so I can come to your house and sit in a tree and watch you sleep ... wait, that's the one voice in my head that thinks it's Edward Cullen.

Ignore that last part.

I need to know where to send this beautiful, autographed book. (At least I think it will be autographed. Now it will be for sure, because I will NOT tolerate Lela making me into a liar just because I promised something I wasn't sure I could deliver.) And congratulations! My favorite essay is on page 67, where Lela thanks her mom for giving her child a very special variety of Barbie.

Now, on to MORE giveaways! I know! Who am I??

My good friend Jeff Parkin produced this uber cool web series called "The Book of Jer3miah," which was picked up by Deseret Book last fall and turned into a DVD. I've seen the series; it's well written, awesomely filmed, and has a twist that I did NOT see coming, even though I knew well in advance of the denouement that the killer was everyone in "Murder on the Orient Express."

Oops. Retroactive spoiler alert.

This is a thriller that is entertaining for everyone, and received rave reviews in the New York Times and on Amazon. And I'm giving away not one but TWO copies of the DVD!

Just comment on this post, telling me one way you've kept from locking your kids in the basement with a freezer full of Popsicles and a promise of release on the first day of school, and this DVD could be yours!

Can't wait for a giveaway? You'll find "Jer3miah" right here.

Stay cool, mah peeps!

Kindly Light

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 23:05:00 +0000

Just before we left Puerto Rico, we took a canoe trip to a bio-luminescent bay -- 'luminescent' meaning 'all lit up' and 'bio' meaning 'a class you will fail if you don't make at least one appearance during the semester.' Everything I really needed to know I learned in detention.

Now, the best way to experience a bio-luminescent bay is to go on a moonless night. It needs to be crazy dark in order for you to see the lights created by millions of micro-organisms in the water.

It's also advisable to take a guide, but when we rented our boat the 'guides' all said, "No. Is too dark," which of course led me to question their grasp of the finer points of supply-side economics, namely, 'if you don't supply a guide, all but the stupidest of gringos will spend their hard-earned economics on suntan lotion.'

So, we decided to go to the bay on our own, our reasons being we were moving away soon and we already had very nice tans.

To get to the bay, however, we had to paddle down a winding tributary that was covered on both sides with mangroves, which also formed a thick canopy above us. Between the absence of moon and the presence of mangroves, it was insanely dark. Uber dark. The kind of dark that SpongeBob is referring to when he says, "This is advanced darkness, Patrick."

You with me? Dark.

Fortunately, friends had recommended we bring a powerful flashlight, and contrary to our basic natures, we took their advice.

So there were the six of us: Brett manned the oars, the older kids took turns sitting in the bow ('front' or 'scary spot') and holding the flashlight, and I navigated.

We have since learned that things go better when I drive and Brett navigates.

My job was essentially to say, "Go left, you know, a teeny bit," and other complicated nautical stuff you landlubbers wouldn't understand. And I was really good at it, in a retroactive sort of way. A typical exchange went something like this:

Brett: "Hey, Vanessa, shine the light over there."

Vanessa: "Why? We're just going to die out here anyway."

Brett: "David, please relieve Vanessa of her flashlight duties and lock her in the brig."

Vanessa: "Waaaaah."

Me: "Honey, I think there's something ..."

Canoe: "Crash, wobble, tip."

Me: "Yep. That was sunken boat or perhaps a crocodile. Probably shouldn't have run over it."

Brett: "Assorted recriminations against the navigator."

All other children: "What Vanessa said."

And then we'd do it all again three feet later.

This went on for ... hang on, I'm trying to remember how it felt ... yes, this went on for six years as we bumped and splashed our way through the dark, stifling tunnel of mangroves. Kids were bawling, I was swearing, and Brett was paddling with the bloody-minded determination that has possessed husbands and fathers for millennia, the sort that says, "We'll have fun, dammit, if it kills every last one of you."

And just when we were at the end of our tether, just when we were certain we'd taken a wrong turn and were now rowing down the river Styx -- the mangroves disappeared behind us and we emerged into the bay.

At first, it seemed like the flashlight had gone out; without the trees bouncing light onto the water and back to us, we were suddenly left in complete darkness. There was still no moon, and the flashlight had dimmed to near uselessness. We always knew the flashlight was all that made the trip possible in the first place, but it wasn't until the light was gone that we realized how vulnerable we were.

But what could we do at that point? We paddled on.

We were just a few strokes into the bay, beyond which the black, open ocean stretched forever, when a strange and beautiful thing happened. The water all around the canoe filled with thousands of tiny lights. The light clung to the oars and trailed behind us.

The kids dipped their hands into the water, thrilled with how the light traced each finger. Finally, Cori the Brave and Brett the Forgiving dove into the bay, leaving the rest of us awestruck at how we could make out their bodies perfectly, even in the dark, moonless night.

It seems that the micro-organisms in the water light up whenever they come in contact with anything else. Once we knew what to look for, we could see fish, and the movement of water plants, deep at the bottom of the bay. Sometimes it was a flash, sometimes a soft glow.

I've never seen anything like it, before or since. It was pure magic.

One light got us to the bay, and while it took a few moments of darkness where we just had to keep moving, it wasn't long until we could see for ourselves that the light was all around us.

In the deepest, darkest places, everything, everywhere we touched, there was light.

Retirement Dreams for Homemakers

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 19:40:00 +0000

I told you I used to have only one chin.

See that cute guy up there? He's the one not wearing a hat. I am totally in love with him, and he's totally in love with me.

That needs to be clearly understood.

That cute guy will be 50 in September. Which, in the weird world he inhabits, means 'eligible for retirement.'

Now, that's not going to happen, not in September anyway. There are a lot of reasons: We've still got kids in college, all three of our younger kids have said they'd like to serve missions, we have a house to pay off ...

... oh, and if he retires in September, we'll both be in prison by October.

I once wrote how my kids don't do 'time off' very well. And I'm here to tell you, they come by it honestly. The years that our church meetings go from 9:00 to noon are the most trying years of our marriage. Brett simply can't handle all those hours of uninterrupted Sabbath-ing. Give him a 3-day weekend, and by Monday night he'll be kicking holes in the walls just to have a new project to occupy his energy -- an act I fully support, by the way.

Why? Because otherwise, he notices me. And not in that, "Hey, there's my beautiful wife of 27 glorious years" way that comes at the end of a normal work day. It's more in the, "Have you always brushed your teeth with your left hand? We've really got to do something about that" way that is the trademark of the terminally bored.

Just once, before he calls it quits for good, I'd love to wake up one morning and announce that I was taking a 'day off' and spending it at his office. No warning, no chance for him to gracefully bow out -- just, "I'll meet you in the car, right after you change, because seriously? Why would you strap your gun to that ankle?"

Of course, my husband's being a federal agent precludes my really doing this, but a girl can dream. I'd follow him around, making loaded observations like "Gosh, you're really typing fast. Is that report late or something?" or "You sure do spend a lot of time talking golf with your co-workers, huh? Good thing no one's out there robbing banks or plotting terrorist attacks."

My favorite would be just hanging out in the same room with him, waiting to be entertained. I wouldn't really say much, just smile at him and look expectantly while he tried to read my mind. "She's hungry. She wants to take a walk. No, wait. A movie. That's it. She wants to see a movie."

And when he finally broke down and asked what I'd like to do, I'd say, "Oh, you know, whatever you want to do." Because it's no fun if you have to be the party planner, too.

So then, when he suggested we go out and get something to eat, I'd say, "Hmm, not sure we can really afford that. Why don't you just whip up something here?" And when he admitted that it's a lot easier for him to just drive to Wendy's and buy a salad and a large Diet Coke every day, I'd just nod my head and say, "Huh."

"How can you work at such a cluttered desk?"

"Aren't you going to return that guy's phone call?"

"This mail's been sitting here a long time. Seems like someone would have opened it by now."

Oh, the lovely, productive 'day off' I'd have, puttering around the place where my husband works, helping him be more efficient and pointing out all the ways that I'd do things differently.

And he'd appreciate it! Having me close by, auditing his every move, second-guessing his every decision, rifling through his stuff and muttering, "How does anyone find anything around here?" -- all of this would help him relax and feel good about the changes I'd made to the routine he's worked out for himself over the last three decades. It certainly would not have him grinding his teeth to the gums and ordering contraband Valium off the Internet.

Oh, well. We all know I'll never get to share a special day like this with my beloved. At least not until he retires. At which point, I'll be sure to join him in his workshop for some quality time together.

"Hey, honey?" I'll say. "Come over here and let me show you how I'd kick those holes in the wall."

Little Drops of Oil

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 19:11:00 +0000

Hey, gang! As you all know, because you think about me night and day, I have a music degree and was a private voice and piano instructor for thirty years. When I tell you that this kid's story is astonishing, I'm coming at you from decades of experience.

15-year-old Kuha'o Case, blind from birth, discovered just two years ago that he had a natural gift for the piano. Click here to watch a video that, for whatever reason, I couldn't get to embed onto my blog. When you get to the end, you'll learn that Kuha'o doesn't even OWN a piano; he practices on weekends when he goes to visit his grandparents, and he plays the organ in his church.

The boy is a true prodigy. He has perfect pitch (which means he can identify whatever pitch you're playing, or he can 'give' you the pitch for whatever note you need. "Hey, Kuha'o, hum a G for me." And he, you know, hums the G. Out of his head. With no instrument nearby to tell him if he's even close.) He's taught himself to play, and he can play anything after hearing it just a couple of times. I've had maybe five students in my career whose abilities matched this boy's, and they all could see.

Let's help buy this boy a piano, and fund his first CD. Good grief, he can't even go to high school because the only programs for blind students on the big island of Hawaii are private and expensive. The boy deserves a chance. And while none of us could provide everything he needs, each of us might be able to do a little.

Inidentally, Kickstarter is this awesome website that allows small projects to collect donations in order to get the necessary funding. Whether you're trying to launch a performing career, create a community garden, make an indie film, or self-publish your books, Kickstarter makes it super easy to do so.

Just one more thing I love, and which I intend to support.

xoxo,
DeNae

(comments are off :D)

Happily Blacklisted

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 22:19:00 +0000

Yep. Those are my legs on that cover. Also my shoes.

Also the shopping cart I stole from the Piggly Wiggly.

Also, I have really long hair, and I can do the splits.

Also, some people have called me a shameless liar,

but they're just jealous about the whole 'splits' thing.

So, hey! How's yer summer? I never know how to answer that question myself -- 'senile?' 'flaccid?' No adjective seems appropriate beyond the obvious ones, and you say things like 'homicidal' to the wrong people and suddenly you're getting all sorts of unwelcome attention.

So instead of thinking about how much I loathe -- that's right, I went there -- summer, I'm going to reminisce a little.

When we lived in Puerto Rico (see 'loathe summer,' above) my friends and I staged a major coup. We completely hijacked the PTO at our kids' school, Antilles Intermediate, at Fort Buchanan in the heart of San Juan. Our reasons were simple: We were bored, and we wanted an excuse to boss people around. Nations have fallen for less.

So we did epic things like stock the school store with massive amounts of junk food -- intended to keep the shopkeepers, namely 'us' -- so hepped up on Sour Patch Kids we didn't notice that it was eleventy billion degrees with twice the humidity and we were sitting outside in a concrete box selling Sour Patch Kids.

We also hosted a talent show, securing for ourselves the coveted "Most Neurotic Talent Show Directors" award when we insisted that third graders wear actual human clothes to perform their Spice Girls numbers. Moms hate it when you point out the "made by Mattel" label on their eight-year-old's belly shirt.

One of our major triumphs was the time we made gigantic nativity scene pieces out of poster board for the Christmas program. The artwork wasn't the triumph. We'd been sitting in the heat for so long we led ourselves to believe that painting the scenery with fingernail polish was a good plan. Oh, how I wish I was kidding. I mean, we were talking ACRES of poster board here. Fingernail polish? Really?

Thank goodness one of our friends -- fresh from her air-conditioned car and therefore still lucid -- walked past in time to say, "Crayons." Don't know why she said that; maybe she was speaking in tongues and just wasn't very good at it. Whatever the case, it led to the aforementioned Major Triumph.

So needless to say, when my darling friend Lela Davidson published Blacklisted From the PTA last year I ordered one, like, immediately. I have since ordered at least one more, and given it to my sister, who claims it is the only book she's read in 25 years. OH, and you can win a copy, just by commenting here!

I love Lela. She once Tweeted the question, "Hey, @DeNae, why are Mormons such lousy bartenders?" You know, in 48 years of being a card-carrying Mormon, no one had ever asked me that question. I found it brave and incisive, and gave it the thoughtful answer it deserved: "@Lela, it's because it's difficult to pour booze and flog yourself at the same time."

We talk polygamy ("opposed, unless the other wife is ugly and loves to scrub toilets"), push-up bikinis for children ("opposed, and now everyone at Abercrombie and Fitch is grounded until further notice"), blogging ("in favor, especially each other's"), kids ("in favor / opposed / grounded until further notice" -- essentially all of the above) and generally dig one another's vibe.

So Happy Birthday, Blacklisted. And congratulations, smart, sassy Lela, on your success.

You can borrow my legs any time.

DeNae: YouTube Star

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 23:57:00 +0000

Brandon Mull and me. He's thinking,

"This is the first time that woman has shut her trap since we arrived at the studio."

Oh my goodness. I keep forgetting to tell you cool things. We'll chalk it up to the clinically documented condition known as Summertime Brain Leak.

On my birthday, Kristina Pulsipher Facebooked me and said I should dedicate myself to being a shameless self-promoter. I assume she said this because she knows how much I hate doing that, and also because she's a pill. Think I'm kidding? When Jessica Bern wished me a happy birthday "to the sweetest woman I know," (something I get ALL the time), Kristina commented and said, "You must not know DeNae very well."

I'm having lunch with Kristina tomorrow, and I intend to sneeze on her hamburger to restore balance to the universe. If that doesn't work, I'll probably burn her house to the ground. One way or another, balance will be restored.

But this was one of those fun things that I didn't get paid to do or anything like that, but was a complete gas and something I wanted to share with you all.

DISCLAIMER: You're about to read a disclaimer.

DISCLAIMER: This is a super-Mormony post. Seriously. I'm about as Mormon as I can be in this post without actually tripping you all into my pool and baptizing you, which wouldn't take anyway but would get my numbers up on my Straight N' Narrow punch card.

DISCLAIMER: There is no such thing as a Straight N' Narrow punch card. Totally made that one up.

Anyway, without further ado, here are Brandon Mull (the author of 'Fablehaven'), Elisa Scharton, and me talking about being a Mormon writer and how we use social media in our writing. We also examine the question of whether it's possible for me to talk so much with my hands flapping that I actually take flight.

This will be broadcast live this Saturday, the 23rd, at 3:00 mountain time on the Mormon Channel. Or you can watch it right now. (I'll be yapping at the Teen Writers Conference during the broadcast, so yay for YouTube!)

Teen Writers Conference & How Awesome I'm Going to Be

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 19:07:00 +0000

Hey! Hey! Read this! Seriously! No clicking 'next' I TOTALLY mean it!

I forgot to tell you about the Teen Writers Conference happening at Weber State ... um ... College? University? Empire of Higher Education? (they've all changed their names eleventy billion times since I moved 22 years ago, and yes I could Google it, but I don't have time to do anything that bores me today) in Ogden, Utah.

That's right, Utah County-ites. Cleeeeear up in Ogden. I told my writing partner, Jana Parkin, that her daughter would have to drive from Provo to Ogden, and she said-- I'm not making this up --"I'll have her stay overnight at her grandma's house in Salt Lake."

Yep, those Parkins are quite the pioneers. Hon.Est.Ly.

Anyway, there will be some awesome speakers including (she said modestly) ME!

This is me at another conference. I think I'm saying,

"Putting his hands like this helped Napoleon get Pedro elected class president.

It will make you a success, too."

I'll be speaking on writing post-apocalyptic dystopian pop-up books, the idea being you really should start kids early on that bleak outlook on the future of humanity. These books are geared toward pre-readers, although no worries--with pop-up books those zombie vampire werewolves literally LEAP off the page.

Ha! I kid. Which is, in fact, what I'm really speaking on. Writing essays and humor. These are not your History teacher's essays, as I found out in Mr. Madsen's AP History class the time I got a big fat ZERO on my groundbreaking masterpiece, "If You're Not a Puritan, You're Just Not Doing It Right."

Anyway, here's the link. And the thing you MUST know is that besides the likelihood that I will include some form of interpretive dance in my class, THE DEADLINE FOR POSTMARKED REGISTRATIONS IS THIS FRIDAY, JUNE 15, 2012!!

(Which, by the way, is just two days before my birthday. So you've got a lot to do in the next week, gang!)

See your ba-RILLIANT kids at Weber!

And Parkin kid 2, please remember that you can only pack 17 pounds of personal items on your handcart.

All Right. That's IT!

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 02:13:00 +0000

If you are new to this blog, please note that I rarely write these kinds of posts. I'm a real believer that as long as everyone is just playing nice or - and this is important - selling their brand of snotty somewhere else, then all is right with the world. Come here on any given day and you're likely to laugh a bit, meet some swell readers, and develop an inexplicable craving for marshmallow fudge. And who knows? Maybe I'll whip up a batch of that fudge tonight, and by morning I'll be relaxed and patient and all 'make fudge not war' like I usually am.

But today...

Today I'm annoyed. With that guy in the middle there. Him. Right. There.

That guy is named ... um ... Andreas Farfegnugen. Yes, I'm sure that's it. The Andreas part is right. Maybe his last name is Konmeineditor. Because that's pretty much what the guy did. He's a German newspaper reporter who told his editor he needed to go to Utah to find out once and for all what those kooky Mormons were really, truly up to, since it was apparent at least one of them might be running the U.S. some day soon.

So to Utah he came, at his newspaper's expense. All to get to the bottom of this Mormon business.

Now, let me tell you about Mr. Farfegnugen. First, his real last name is Ross.

Second, he came from a little town in Germany called Frankfurt. And by little I mean not little at all. In fact, the Mormons have very conveniently placed a temple right there, where anyone who wished to know anything at all about the LDS faith could go and just collect info like ca-razy.

And young Master Andreas had no idea it was even there. A 20-minute train ride from his home, and this guy who hopes to be the political correspondent for his newspaper, stationed in Washington D.C., couldn't be bothered to Google "Hey, is there any Mormon stuff in my hometown?" For that lack of basic research alone, I hope his editor takes away his key to the staff latrine.

Andreas interviewed Elisa Scharton and me a few weeks ago, something I think he did primarily to get a free bottle of water and a peek down Elisa's shirt. Its 'tightness' is the first thing he mentions in his article, which is a good thing, because now Germans are that much better informed on Mitt Romney's foreign policy and economic recovery plans.

Meister Ross -- who admitted to having been raised Catholic but given up on all organized religion -- had evidently written his article before arriving in the states. We concluded this when he asked us the same three questions seventy-two thousand times, and we (in our bleached blond obtuseness, something else he referenced for reasons attributable to a mini bar and an expense account) kept giving him the wrong answers.

Bleached blonde, tight bloused Elisa.

She was also wearing the cutest yellow top siders you ever saw,

but of course Andreas didn't mention that!

Poor guy. He really, really wanted us to say that the Church dictates what we Mormon bloggers say, and what we Mormon women think, and how we all feel about ourselves on any given day.

And dingbats that we were, we just kept telling him the truth. Nope, the Church doesn't have anything to do with our blogs, nor with Mormon Mommy Blogs, which Elisa owns and runs. One quick read of my blog and and even the most suspicious reporter would have to admit that the Church could not POSSIBLY be overseeing the nonsense that shows up here every week or so. And we're happy, or sad, or grumpy, or kinda nauseated, all due to circumstances that almost never involve the Church. Summer television schedules -- yes. Church micro-management -- not so much.

So, then he was all "well, how come you never talk about your temples?" at which point I texted his editor and suggested he confiscate his parking permit and roll-ey chair. I mean, for heaven's sake, what more is there to say? I spent a good 15 minutes telling him everything I could about the temple, and do you think I'm even mentioned in the article? Pfft. Don't make me snort.

Then he wanted to know about our history. Polygamy. Blacks and the priesthood. The current issues about gays and the Church. We were frank. We admitted that we didn't have all the answers, and that sometimes we're not entirely comfortable with the answers we're given.

Think that made the article? (See "snort" above.)

He interviewed a guy who has joined the Church of Not Being a Mormon Any More, and his stuff was all over the place. You know, that's fine. I have no problem with opposing viewpoints. But given that we spoke with this guy for an hour, you'd think we'd get as much play as the other people he interviewed.

But the worst thing about all of it was, there was nothing in the article that would help Germans understand Mitt Romney any better. If they were looking for salient information about the possible future leader of the free world, they weren't going to get it from Andreas Ross.

So.

Dear Andreas,
Thank you so much for the chance to sit across a table from you and absorb all of your very strange little tics, your flagrant rudeness as you gazed out the window while we were speaking, and your obvious disinterest in really getting to know anything worth knowing about the Mormons. I'm sure your readers appreciate the thousand words o' drivel you provided. Even now pet birds all over Frankfurt are putting your article to good use.

And I'll tell you something else, Mr. Ross: You want to go head-to-head with unusual belief systems, questionable historical human rights issues, and bizarre attitudes towards minorities?

We'll gladly put Mormons' bad behavior regarding polygamy, blacks, and gays up against annexing most of Europe and massacring six million people for practicing an unpopular religion -- any day of the week.

Until you're ready for that fight, stay home and pray that your editor doesn't take my suggestion that you be demoted to car wash attendant.

Or better yet, peel your arse off the couch, hop a train, and learn how to do your job.

Did I Tell You This One Already?

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Thu, 24 May 2012 22:04:00 +0000

He's saying, "There's no reason to go home yet.

My sources tell me your drug dealer neighbor is still hiding under the pool scum."

I was getting my hair done today (don't hate me because I'm beautiful) and I was on my eleventy billionth story (because Sharon is very patient and didn't stuff a towel in my mouth) when she said, "Have you written that story down?" And I said, "Huh? What? You were listening to me? What kind of very patient kook are you anyway?"

But she was right -- both about telling you all the story of the dentist and the police and the drug dealer neighbor, and also about the patches of gold she wove into my hair.

Sharon is really good at her job.

So, one day, when we lived in Puerto Rico, I took all four of my kids to see the dentist. That's an adventure tale all its own that started with the traditional 'fake language barrier' and the 'pretend lost appointment booking,' and ended six hours later with my pantomiming the act of keying the car which had been deliberately placed behind my van by the snotty beautician in whose spaces I had apparently parked.

She had no idea who she was trifling with. She's lucky I didn't just drop my kids off in her lobby, tell them it was free hair gel day, and take a cab home.

At any rate, the hostage situation was finally resolved, and we dragged our exhausted and novacained kiesters away from there.

As we pulled onto our street, however, I saw several people wandering around the area, all dressed quite smartly, as though they had just attended a funeral or perhaps been grocery shopping. Puerto Ricans always dress smartly. We would go to soccer games wearing our shorts and t-shirts and sporting the standard American hairstyle of "shoved into a giant clip and ordered to behave itself," and the moms of the little Puerto Rican players would invariably show up looking as though they had just arrived from the Oscars.

One of the problems created by these well-dressed street people was that someone had parked at the foot of my driveway. Sheesh. Keying two cars in one day? This was getting old.

So I rolled down my window and beckoned to one of the women. She came over, and I asked her if the owner of the car would please move it. She found them, and they did.

Then they all did more well-dressed wandering while I unloaded four kids and the umpteen bags of paraphernalia that had stood between me and throttling the living daylights out of the dental receptionist who refused to check our insurance coverage on the grounds that she was busy chatting on the phone with her sister. I probably should have told her I spoke Spanish, and that from the sound of things her sister's husband was a dud.

As soon as we were all on the driveway, there was a flurry of activity in front of the neighbor's house. Suddenly the well-dressed funeral guests morphed into well-dressed police officers, who drawing their weapons and rushing the house, shouting menacing police words like, "Policía! Don't make us key your car!"

The woman who only moments earlier had bypassed the opportunity to invite me to leave the scene before the bullets started flying was now screaming at me to get my kids and myself inside the house. She backed this up by showing me her Dunkin' Donuts punch card, which she evidently thought was her police badge.

Ha! That was funny, huh? She didn't really do the donut thing.

Well, I will be the first to admit that I'm not real good in a crisis -- I'm more a second wave, 'drop off a casserole and tell you to call me if you need anything' kinda gal -- but even I knew that the last place my kids and I should be was inside the house that shared a wall with the drug dealer next-door neighbor.

So I hustled everyone back into the van, and drove off in the opposite direction of the drug raid. That's always a good direction, by the way. If you're lost in some inner city barrio or my quiet suburban neighborhood in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, and you stop to ask directions and they say, "Well, just down the street there we're hosting a lovely drug raid," my advice is to thank them and then head the other way.

On this occasion, I drove around the corner and parked. Once out of immediate danger, I was, of course, profoundly curious, and not a little hopeful that someone would lock that guy up -- not for peddling the snake oil he'd tried to sell us when we first arrived until he learned that my husband was a federal agent, at which point he went with the questionable marketing strategy of diving into the bougainvillea every time we pulled into the driveway -- but for letting his pool get all green and manky. Honestly, if you're going to spend a large portion of your time on the lam, assuming false identities to stay one step ahead of Interpol, then hire a pool guy for heaven's sake.

So I called my husband and asked him to call the local precinct and find out what was happening with the cops and the drug dealer neighbor, and then I drove around the rest of the block to see if I could watch him being dragged out of his house and arrested on chlorine violations.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that everyone was gone. Gone! Evidently my drug dealer neighbor was nowhere to be found, which is just shocking considering how stealthy the police had been, hanging out in front of his house for 20 minutes, fingering their guns and polishing their badges and perpetrating other sneaky cop stuff. So I assumed they'd trekked up the road to get their Dunkin' cards punched and brush out their mink stoles, and I headed for home.

When I was maybe two houses away, David pointed up and said, "Hey, what's that guy doing there?"

Sure enough, they'd left a spare policeman, holding a rifle and waiting on our roof in case the drug dealer neighbor returned and had been struck blind while he was gone. The cop certainly wasn't making any secret of being on the roof; at one point I'm pretty sure he had a pizza delivered.

What could I do? I sure wasn't sticking around until Johnny Sniper decided to come down and borrow my bathroom -- or, in lieu of that, engage my neighbor in a high-octane gun battle.

So I turned around, drove back to the dentist, parked in the beautician's parking space, and got my hair done. And while I was there, I told her eleventy billion stories, starting with the one about the dentist and the police and the drug dealer neighbor ...

Ha! That was funny, too, huh? I didn't really do that last part. I think we went for donuts.

Lotsa Reasons to Smile

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Mon, 07 May 2012 01:23:00 +0000

Hello!

I'm back. Cheerful me, not wind-sucking me. You know how it is, right? I thought so.

I don't have a ton of time (I always say that, and then I write War and Peace: The DeNae Years) but I wanted to just brag a little on my family. I'm allowed!

So, this weekend, we went to Logan to attend my son's commissioning as a 2nd Lieutenant in the United States Army. He's planning on law school soon, but for now he gets a break.

This picture also celebrates Vanessa's brilliant photography skills. She really is so talented.

Pretty handsome kid, no? It was a great day.

Here he is with his cute wife Karyn. They both graduated from USU this weekend;

he in History, she in Music.

Ever the sentimental fool, Brett gave David a set of Pez dispensers with the first five US Presidents' heads on them as a graduation gift. As is often the case when dealing with Brett's sense of humor, David is taking a minute to process the tenderness of such a special gift, and Brett is being amused enough for both of them.

I'm so proud of all my kids. Every one of them is just rising to occasion after occasion.

This is Vanessa. She's been made a director over the student ambassadors at BYUI. So if you have a new freshman up there in Rexburg who needs a little extra help or encouragement or a good wedgie (in case your family normally did that sort of thing and your kid is feeling homesick) he or she can find this beautiful girl and ask her for help.

That's the girl who believes she's going to die alone because she's almost 22 and not married yet. What kind of gibberish are they teaching at those religious schools, anyway?? I mean, LOOK at her! Okay, stop looking. Seriously, knock it off. You're making her uncomfortable.

Cori is home for the summer from BYU-Hawaii, and is making noises about staying home and finishing her degree at MY alma mater, LaVernia's School of Utah Scone Making. It's a great school, it really is. I just wish the diploma hadn't been dripping honey for the last 25 years.

Ha, isn't DeNae the humorous one. Actually, my alma mater, which would make it Cori's mater's alma mater if my made-up Latin is correct, is the University of Utah. She's so smart she carts her brain around in a little wagon, which may also explain why, to this day, she never remembers to take a towel into the bathroom when she showers.

Here she is, in Hawaii. Have I mentioned that I have never, not once, been to Hawaii?

And now my kid has lived there for months. Not that I'm bitter.

I'm used to sublimating all my hopes and dreams for my children.

And Jake has been a Wickersham Brother in Seussical these last few days. The Wickersham Brothers are essentially monkeys, and since teen-age boys are essentially monkeys, too, it's practically type casting. He's had so much fun, and I gotta say, all grousing aside about -- well, all grousing aside -- our move to Utah has absolutely saved this boy. He's found his smile again, and more friends than he can shake a stick at. Truly. He's exhausted with all the stick-shaking.

He's 2nd from the left, pointing menacingly at Horton. I think.

Jake's the one with his hands in the air.

You're not having fun with your sisters unless you're wiping sweat all over them.

In the next shot they're both barfing.

And I did have one other thing I wanted to mention. This is a picture of my baby sister, Amber, at the temple. We had just been inside. Together. Those of you who know her know what a wonderful day this was. I know my dad was close by.

Isn't she so dang cute?

You really need to click on this link and read her story. And then spend some time reading her archives, because she is bar none the funniest person in our family. Honestly, I'm a monk with hemorrhoids compared to her. I don't like that image either, but hey, I'm just the messenger.

So that's what's happening with me and mine! See? I can just put up a blog post without whining or insisting you buy our book or promoting one or another of my eighty billion projects.

Have an awesome week, mah peeps!

Altitude Sickness

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Wed, 02 May 2012 07:27:00 +0000

These are my mountains. That's my city, in front of them. The city in which I grew up, and to which I've returned after twenty-one years.

We left Utah in 1990, and moved to these mountains.

Those are the Olympic mountains, and I have wonderful news: All the vampires were eaten by the werewolves, who were then loaded onto a submarine and sunk to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Which means the infestation of bad acting on the Olympic peninsula has been eradicated.

Anyway, after seven years in that beautiful place, we moved to this beautiful place, and this became our mountain.

This is El Yunque in Puerto Rico, and it includes a real, live tropical rain forest that very courteously does all your sweating for you.

And four years later, we moved to Vegas, just a few miles away from these mountains.

Las Vegans are very proud of Red Rock, because most of their mountains are brown and bare naked. And not in a Coppertone way, either.

Once upon a time, I told you about visiting these mountains.

These are the Andes, in Cuzco, Peru. I'm married to that cute guy, but that's not really the point. You may recall that Cuzco is 10,000 feet above sea level, and the village where our humanitarian group was working was another 4,000 feet higher. That's nearly three miles up, you know.

Cuzco was the only place where I'd ever had trouble breathing because of the elevation. I joke about it in my 'Sheep' post (and essay in our book), but we really did have an oxygen tank in our hotel room, and every night Brett and I took turns re-inflating our lungs and trying to oxygenate our brains enough to remember how the shower worked.

It was interesting to see how our group handled the altitude thing. Most of us were from Las Vegas, which is about 2,000 feet up. A few were from Salt Lake, which is maybe 5,000 feet.

Some rolled with the elevation just fine. No problems adjusting. Others were so sick they were vomiting and hyperventilating and swearing in Ketchua.

The thing is, there's almost nothing you can do for altitude sickness. Oh, there's this tea that some of us drank, and which I blame for much of the vomiting. And there are these pills you can take. But by and large, your body either handles the altitude or it doesn't.

Well, after twenty one years away, during which the highest elevation we ever lived at was 2,000 feet, we've returned home. Home to our mountains, our city. Home to those heights.

And I think I'm suffering from altitude sickness.

At this elevation, looking down is just so easy. It practically comes naturally. And from peak to peak, one can see just what everyone else is up to. My friend Deb would say I've moved from sea level to see level, because she's cute and smart and she's kind of feeling the same way. For those of us who have been living in the lowlands for a long time, it can be hard to breathe up here. My heart keeps pounding. I feel anxious, and I'm pretty sure my brain isn't working like it's supposed to. I say stupid things. I'm too casual about stuff that people around me take pretty seriously. I find things funny that probably aren't funny. But it's because the oxygen isn't making it all the way to my judgment center like it is for others.

Oh, how I love my mountains. How I love this place. And yet, some days I worry that I'll never catch my breath, that in this thin air I'm much too easy a target, my failings and shortcomings seen much too clearly.

It wasn't until I was in Peru that I learned how differently people 'do' mountains, depending largely on how well they adapt to the altitude. And the remarkable thing was, despite the elevation, every single person in our group got up each morning, boarded the bus, and headed up those Andes to work as hard as they were able. Some felt pretty cruddy, and had to sit down a lot. Others could really go to town on a project for a couple of hours, only to suddenly run out of steam and collapse on the bus. Still others had stamina to burn long after the rest of us had curled up with the llamas to take a nice, woolly nap.

Yet no one complained that the others weren't doing their part. No one said they were doing it wrong. No one held anyone else to their own personal standard and found them lacking. We were just glad for the help, and proud of everyone who struggled and suffered and didn't let it get in the way of contributing whatever they could.

The view from the top can be spectacular. It can feel like the sun shines just a little brighter, just a little warmer, just for you. And gazing into the valley, it's easy to imagine that everyone down there is as tiny and insignificant as a bug.

They're not, of course. And you never know how hard it is for them to keep plugging along, doing their level best, making a sincere, honest effort to get things right.

Especially while they're struggling to breathe.

Nobody Knows the Truffles I've Seen

noreply@blogger.com (DeNae / SHP) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 23:40:00 +0000

Me, Keith and Jake Cavanaugh

in Truffle Heaven

You'll have to excuse me if the screen is covered in chocolate. I've been enjoying my souvenirs from the best grown-up field trip north of Vegas.

Yesterday, I visited the Utah Truffles factory. And while I was disappointed that there was no Gene Wilder to take me on a psychedelic boat trip along a chocolate river, I had the next best thing: Jake Cavanaugh.

Cavanaugh. Name sound familiar? This guy was totally born to run a chocolate factory. In fact, that's him up there with his dad -- Keith Cavanaugh, the guy who started it all.

I know, right?

Guess what else is cool about Jake Cavanaugh? His wife's name is Denae. NO LIE!

So, why was I hanging out in Truffle Ground Zero? Well, first, because it's a totally fun place to be!

When this guy wasn't looking, I jumped up on that table and made a chocolate angel.

Oh, please. Like you wouldn't have done the same thing in my position.

Those are truffle bars in front, and baby truffles in the back.

They're so cute, in their little baby truffle bassinets.

Utah Truffles goes through 15,000 pounds of chocolate every month,

which is just under my personal average.

And the other reason I was there was to arrange to have creamy, divine, melt-in-your-mouth Utah Truffles included in a very special gift package, just in time for Mother's Day!

You can't see it, but that book is signed

by at least three of its contributing authors!

We've had the most wonderful response to our story collection "Tell Me Who I Am," and now it's available in a gift set which includes a pretty bookmark and -- that's right! -- a box of Utah Truffles! All for just $20, which includes shipping.

But you'll want to order quickly; quantities really are limited, and the last day we can take orders and guarantee you'll receive your gift is Tuesday, May 8.

The 'Add to Cart' button on my sidebar makes ordering easy and painless.

I can think of all sorts of reasons to have a good book and a nice bookmark to keep track of where you're reading while you indulge in Utah Truffles, starting with "Because I feel like it" and working through "What if the Mayans were right and I never did that book and truffle thing DeNae told me was so awesome?"

That would be such a shame.

(comments are off so you'll have no distractions from ordering your yummy chocolate gift set!)