Uncategorized

We want to thank everyone who played! There were some awesome ideas…very creative…and My Captain and I enjoyed going through them all!

For a first-ever Mama Boe contest, we did okay.  Not great, but certainly okay!  We’ve been experiencing some kind of technical difficulty with Word Press in that many people’s suggestions/entries never made it past Word Press’ servers to the page.  Some people ended up sending me their entries via Facebook, both via the wall, and through private messaging.  Very few actually got through to the blog page after all.

My Captain looked at me and said, “I can fix this before the next contest.”

I don’t doubt he will, because he loves all things technical, he loves a challenge, and he really, REALLY wants me to grow the blog past 100,000 readers so I can actually bring home some income, and stop being such a bloodsucking, nagging harpy.

(I don’t want to burst his bubble but we all know that money won’t change the nagging harpy part, but the bloodsucking it might help.)

And so are you ready for the winner?!  First, the Honorable Mentions!

Paul G :  “Ice Cream Sandw…holy $%#&, are those cookies?”   That name really shows the excitement! We felt it too!

Lisa: “Dreamwich”  This one just felt so happy….like a promise that eating this baby would take you to your happy place.

Kelly H: “Ice-choco-cream-chip-sandwich-cookie”  We liked this one because this is a woman who clearly likes to hedge her bets.  Kelly wasn’t taking any chances!

Gwen C.:  “The Triple D: Downright, Decadent and Delicious” with a special Guffaw to Kathy T. for asking if that was a “size” thing.   We loved the name, and Kathy’s spin on it.   But mostly we loved Gwen’s name, which is also the name of my beloved Varmint.  Look, I never said this contest would be fair.

Sue L.: “The SO-NOT Southbeach Diet Cookie”   We liked the sassiness of this one!

Bryan S: “Dialysaurus!”  We had to give Bryan special mention for cluing into the Diabetes reference.  Our readers are so daggum smart!

These were among some of the great ones.  I can’t thank you guys enough for playing!  Such fun ideas!  But the one that rocked me on my heels with laughter, and the Grand Prize Winner of The First Ever Mama Boe Name That Bad Boy Contest is……..

Elise W., who nailed the name of this dessert with:  “CookieGasm”

That name is so stinkin’ funny!  Thank you so much, Elise W. for playing, and here, my friend, is your prize from Mama’s Junk Drawer:

A genuine, ENORMOUS honkin’ Hershey’s Chocolate Coffee Mug!

Seemed PERFECT for the topic, no?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to go have a Cookiegasm!

Love,

Mama B.

My Captain often admonishes me to be more disciplined and consistent about writing to you all on the blog.  He informs me that people LIKE uniformity. I inform him that I like to keep people guessing.  I like to mix it up a bit.  Be the wild card.

He tells me I’m full of crap.

But I’m adamant that REALLY, my blog friends love to wonder:

“WILL she get up in time to get the kids off to school, her chores at home done, AND write, or will she wake up late and spend the whole day catching up, not even having time to fix a decent dinner, let alone blog?”

“WILL she be funny or won’t she?”

“WILL she embarrass the family again, or won’t she?”

“Will she realize she’s spelled several words incorrectly only after 300 people have read a post, or won’t….wait, of course she will.  That’s her trademark.”

I try to be consistent, I really do.  But this blog isn’t written in a vacuum!  The kids, the animals, the ding-dang daily chores all require energy and attention.  Sometimes at the end of the day it is all I can do to shower and turn on my alarm!  But some nights, like tonight, I manage to get my shower done early, and can plop into my chair to begin to write.

But even then, Cat Butts happen.  And who can work around a cat anus?  No one, that’s who.

“WILL she use her cat’s ass as an excuse, or won’t she?”

Eyup.  She will.

After weeks of walking only the paved, horizontal, oh-my-gosh-you-shouldn’t-even-call-that-exercise road between two overlooks on Sugarloaf Mountain, today I decided to…hold on to your hats…go a little bit vertical.

This was entirely brave…you could even suggest foolish…for the following reasons:

1. I went alone!  Neither my punks, nor My Captain accompanied me. This means I had no one to encourage me, hold my water, hold my car keys, hold me, offer me assistance on the steep drops, or promise me cookies at the end of the trail.  What the heck was I thinking?
2. I didn’t even take my cell phone.  If I had twisted my ankle, I would have been stranded until a bear, or a banjo-playing redneck, or bouncy college co-eds (who would pity my age, girth, and frailty in their taut, energetic supple youth) came along.  THAT was risky!
3. I was going to be frightfully far from anything resembling a potty, and I stink at peeing in the woods…it always ends up down my legs and in my shoes.
4. Did I mention no one would be there to hold me?

I pushed on, locking my car, glancing at the time, and confidently crossed the street to the trail.  I looked at the trail map, and it showed that from my current position, I could go UP, or I could go DOWN.  Either way, I’d have to turn around and do the opposite to get back.

I took the downside trail, figuring it would be a good warm up but also knowing that it would entirely suck on the way back up.

1 minute into it, I came across an older man with a dog who slimed me.  (The dog, not the man. Geez, people!)

2 minutes into it, my butt muscles hurt.  My thighs hurt, too.  All of those steep step-downs over rocks and uneven trail were KILLING my atrophied bottom half.  But eventually I got about 3/4’s of a mile down and decided to turn around.  It was a beautiful morning and I only walked into roughly about 3000 spider webs.

I began the ascent.

1 minute into it, I ran into the older man with the dog who slimed me again.  He asked if I had stopped to rest, probably because he had lapped me on the trail, and HE was going up, while I had been going down.  I told him “no” I had not rested, but that this was my fifth lap on the trail this morning.  I don’t think he bought it.

2 minutes into it, my butt muscles were SCREAMING.  On the way down, they hurt, but going up was ENTIRELY different.  I stopped and envisioned all the reasons why I shouldn’t have attempted this alone this morning. I actually pictured a bear chasing me, and I would just stop and say, “Dude, whatever.  My butt hurts.”

But I made it, obviously, up the trail and back to the car and my cell phone and my water and civilization in general. I wept with joy! Of course, by the time I crawled back to the parking lot, my everything hurt.

Be sad for me about that, because I WILL whine until someone pats my head about it.

On happier news, I’m excited to say that my first contest is off to a screaming start!  I’ve had three entries so far, and we only have until tomorrow afternoon before it’s over! It’s a contest to name my newest dessert (aka breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack) idea, which is pictured in the contest post.  The winner will be receiving something VERY special from my kitchen junk drawer.  And if you’d ever seen my kitchen junk drawer, you would realize only treasures are found in that stash!  Honest!

So if you are creative in finding names for cool food, and intrigued by the notion of what might be in my drawers (wait, what??), go to the previous post, and leave your idea in a comment box!  Good Luck!

I needed a break.  I’ve been running too hot for too long, and signs were starting to show that I just needed to step back and breathe.  You know, regain healthy perspective, stop chewing my nails, stop chewing out my children, stop chewing my cud, that kind of thing.

But relaxing does not come naturally to me.   Being wound around the axle comes naturally to me.  I have to fight an intense mind battle with myself to make a semblance of cool happen in my spastic world.

My good friend, Cupcake, understood this, and took us out for a day of sailing on the Chesapeake Bay.

I climbed out onto the bow and laid my head on a folded towel, prepared to just relax, to meditate, to possibly sleep to the wonderful, rhythmic lapping sounds of water on the hull of the Windtrip V, Cupcake’s 36′ J-World club sailboat.  The sun warmed me while the gentle breeze made it comfortable.  The sound of far-off seagulls reached me and all was right with the world.  I could feel the muscles in my shoulders begin to ease.

And then the wind picked up.

Which of course made us tilt.  List.  Lean rather alarmingly….

…with Mama up on the bow.

Did she fall off?  Nay, nay!  She gripped the side rail of the deck with a viselike clamp that bespoke years and years of figuratively holding on for dear life.

Did she get up and yell at Captain Cupcake?  Did she curse the wind?  Did she cry and wail and gnash her teeth?

Nope.  And you know why?

Pure, Intense Determination.  Now maybe some people might not pair the concepts of intense determination with relaxation. I realize that.

But that is how I roll.  Only I wasn’t rolling.  I was solidly on the bow, gritting my teeth, refusing to not relax.

Look, it makes sense to me.  Just go with it.

With love,

Totally-relaxed-in-a-completely-tensed-up-sort-of-way Mama