CHRISTMAS LIGHTS

As I blogged last December, I am more of a Grinch than a holly jolly kind of person.  But I do love Christmas lights!  Whether they are on the Christmas tree in the house, on the outside of the house, along the walkway, on the fence - I love them!

My husband is never thrilled about the prospect of putting up the lights this year.  Of course, it can be a royal pain - even more so with his back, neck & knee problems.  But he usually does it because the kids and I love them so much.  When he surprised my daughter and I by putting them up while we were out, my daughter nearly squealed with delight - not the thing you get to hear very often from a surly teenager!  She proclaimed our decorations as "legit."

I am in charge of getting the lights on the tree and getting it decorated.  And no one else is allowed to set up my village but me.  My husband has named the village "Tiny Town."   The village started with my mother-in-law.  She gave me my first piece the first Christmas after my husband and I were married and would give me a new piece each year.  When Mervyn's Department Stores closed, where she had been getting them, I had to find another outlet.  Luckily, I have been able to secure pieces from Walmart and even Dollar General.  

Our cats, especially Thomas, think that they belong in Tiny Town.  Thomas has taken to swatting the skaters off the ice rink.  This isn't the first invasion that Tiny Town has endured.  A few years ago, my daughter placed small ceramic wolves and Pokemon characters in Tiny Town.  The good townspeople have yet to complain.  I have been known to give them a few speeches, too - after all, I feel that I am mayor-for-life of Tiny Town!

One of my favorite things to do in the holiday season is to ride around and look at Christmas lights.  I draw the line at going places where you have to pay to go in to see the lights - it just feels wrong to me.  When we lived in the New Orleans area, we would usually make the yearly pilgrimage to the home of the late Al Copeland, the founder of Popeye's.  He had a huge, lavish, outrageous, gorgeous display in front of his house near Lake Ponchartrain.  The neighbors hated the traffic and tried to have him shut down every year.  But many people - me included - loved the over-the-top display.

This year, on the weekend before Christmas, my husband, our daughter and I went for a drive to look at lights in our area.  Of course, my son would rather stay at home online than share this experience with us.  I must say that we have become what you could call "light snobs."  Some people look like they put less than minimal effort in their lights.  We felt they should have saved that two minutes it took to put them up.  And I like displays that aren't like everybody else's.  The year that everybody had white icicle lights made a rather dull one.  The inflatable snow globes have become rather passe'. I have gotten to really love nativity scenes - but I will never be good with Santa kneeling by the baby Jesus - don't get me started.

It seems like the lights are up for such a short time.  I haven't mentioned it, but I feel there should be some sort of punishment for people who put up lights before Thanksgiving!  As soon as Christmas day has passed, a lot of people get lax about even turning their lights on.  Mine will still be on...probably until Epiphany.  Then it's king cake season!

Happy New Year!  May 2013 be a fabulous one for us all!

YOUNG LOVE

I have addressed this topic once before...but it has reared its ugly head at our house once again, so here I go again.

Young love can be a beautiful thing.  So many times, we have said how much nicer things were at home when my son had a girlfriend - because he was nicer!  And that is good and fine until that relationship goes down the tubes for whatever reason.

This past summer - after being without a girlfriend for quite a while and professing to not want one, my son decided to make a friend into a girlfriend.  It seemed okay at first.  She helped him realize his passion for physics.  They had a lot in common.  Since neither one drove and neither had a job, they mainly stayed at her house or ours and watched movies or played video games.  But as soon as he went off to college about an hour away, things starting turning sour.  She had nothing else in her life but Tyler.  She lived for him coming home on the weekends when they spent every second together.  That didn't set well with me - we felt like there should be some family-only time.  I tried to tolerate things, biting my tongue except with my husband.  But I turned Momma Bear when the girl started calling him late at night, guilt-tripping him for being at school, keeping him on the phone ALL night fighting (which made him oversleep and miss classes!), and generally mess with his head.  Happily, he was ready to shut it down.  Case closed on that one.

Now my 15-year-old daughter has gotten to see the good, the bad and the in-betweens of love.  She has spent the last four months "dating" a boy a year older than her.  I say "dating" because they didn't go hardly anywhere without an adult with them.  I have to say that he is a very nice young man - smart, talented, polite and funny.  And that's what Jess thought, too - and I think she still feels that way.  But she came to that point in a relationship where she realized that she didn't feel the same way about him that he does about her.  It just about killed her to break up with him.  I was honored that she sought my advice and we talked a lot.  Her biggest fear was in hurting him and destroying their friendship.  As much as it hurt her to break it off with him, things seemed to be okay to some degree when he said he still wanted to be friends.  She wasn't sure that he would feel that way.  They will still have to see each other at school.  That was last night.  This morning - maybe after having time to think and mope - he wanted her to feel some of his pain...telling her that she had said she never loved him.  As she said, "He was in her head!"  I tried to assure her that he was just lashing out, but he would calm down.

We talked more about the situation.  I told Jess that I have been on both sides of breakups - and both sides hurt.  She has a VERY busy weekend ahead of her - and that is probably a good thing.

I told my husband that this made me sad.  He asked, "Why?  Did you think they'd get married?"  No, of course not.  I hate two nice kids who had a sweet first love both in pain.  I hate seeing a good friendship on the rocks.  I want to wave my magic wand and make them both feel good about themselves again.  This is already a tough time in their lives with school, issues at home, extracurricular activities, and more.  They aren't comfortable in their own skin yet - how can they possibly understand love and relationships.  I have always talked to Jess about girls who will hang onto a boyfriend at any cost and that I never wanted her to be one of those girls.  I told her that I only want her to be with a boy because she wants to be with THAT boy at THAT time...not to settle just to have a boyfriend.  I guess she listened....

HURRICANES

If you are from the Gulf South, you are more familiar with hurricanes than you care to be. As a child, our family went through Hurricane Betsy in New Orleans.  I was pretty young, so I just remember bits and pieces.  I remember taking a bath in the dark because the power had gone out, and sleeping on a cot to make room for relatives whose house by Lake Ponchartrain might have been in danger.  I remember the sound of the wind outside, and walking through the neighborhood after the storm had passed, surveying the damage with my parents.  And I remember having to go to school on Saturday to make up time missed due to the storm.

My husband and I had only been married about four months when Hurricane Andrew was a threat to New Orleans.  I worked nights on a radio station on the tenth floor of a building that overlooked the lake.  The night before the storm was due to hit - projected to hit New Orleans - my husband kept me company while I was on the air, providing updates to those listening.  We could feel that building sway in the strong winds, and we made plans as to what to do and where to go if we needed to evacuate.  As hurricanes are known to do, this one by-passed New Orleans for the most part and unleashed its fury on Baton Rouge.  I had an appointment for a interview for a job at a Baton Rouge radio station that had to be postponed because of Andrew.  So many people in the Baton Rouge area had no power for weeks after the storm.

Of course, everyone has heard takes of Katrina.  I blame that storm as the turning point in my mother's and mother-in-law's health.  No one with any ties to the Gulf will ever be quite the same post-Katrina.  That storm changed everything I had once loved about New Orleans.  But that's a story for another day.  Up near Baton Rouge, we lost power for only eight hours.  I can remember reading an American Girl book to my daughter while we ate the ice cream in the freezer before it melted.  I also remember hearing about the flooding in New Orleans.  I knew my mother, who was too hard-headed to evacuate, lived in a high area by the levee, but since I couldn't get her on the phone for a few days, I could do little but worry.

Four years ago on Labor Day, Hurricane Gustav decided to pay Louisiana a visit.  My husband and my kids - then 11 and 14 - lived in the suburbs of Baton Rouge.  The winds were horrendous - we watched out the window as the next door neighbor's trampoline rolled over the 6-foot privacy fence and came to rest against a tree in our yard.  Our power went off mid-morning and stayed out for the next eight days.  As you may know, Labor Day in Louisiana is hot and humid.  Think about that muggy day with no electricity, two outdoor dogs inside, and two kids with no TV or Internet.  Now multiply that by eight.  

We had a gas water heater, so I could still take showers and wash dishes.  If someone had told me that usually just the electricity goes out and not the gas, we would have gotten a gas stove instead of the electric one.  But we still cooked a little on the barbecue pit.  We had chips, cookies and peanut butter, so we didn't starve.  Of course, first thing in the morning, I would have killed for a cup of coffee!  One day, we drove to one of the designated areas to get ice, bottled water and MRE's.  MRE's are so nasty that they make school lunches look like a gourmet meal.  Even the drive was awesome - air conditioning, a phone charger and the radio! Plus, it meant a change of scenery!

The daytime wasn't too bad.  Yes, it was hot.  But at least during the day, there was light and I could read.  And I read a lot.  To escape from that place and time, I read book after book.  We also played games like UNO.  But the night was a different story.  We had no generator and in the total silence, neighbors' generators emitted the loudest, most obnoxious sounds I have ever heard.  And once the sun was down, the dark was just that - dark!  It was pitch black.  We had a few flashlights, but we didn't want to wear them down.  I would stare out the windows in all directions, looking for any sign a light was on somewhere since that might mean that power would be back soon. We slept a lot once it got dark...though it was almost too hot to sleep.  I would get up as soon as I saw light.  Those nights were unbearably long and miserable.

There are so many things that you miss in eight days...being able to blow dry your hair, doing laundry, cooking something to eat, baking cookies....  It's like a prison sentence.  You can't just run to the store or the mall because they don't have electricity either.  You can't get money out of the ATM.  You can't put gas in your car.  Even when the stores and gas station started to reopen, lines were long and patience and supplies were short.

The power came back just about the time we all thought we were going to lose our minds.  We resolved to never stay for another storm and to but a generator - though we didn't keep either resolution.

This year, on the same fateful date of Hurricane Katrina - August 29th - we had another unwanted visitor named Isaac.  We watched its path, stocked up on batteries and water, picked up lawn furniture and trash cans - all of the usual hurricane preparation.  The only thing that seemed terribly wrong is that my son came back from college and chose to spend the hurricane with his girlfriend and her mother, playing the role of protector.  

Luckily, Isaac did not wreak a lot of havoc at our house.  Our electricity blipped a number of times and went out for about 10 minutes, but came back on.  We did lose our cable TV and Internet for 12 hours or more here and there.  But we fared much better than others we know who are still without power a week later or who lost everything in flood waters.  

Once again, we say that we will get a generator, and we may or may not.  We say that we won't stay at home, but I refuse to go too far from my cats.  We have until November 30th to keep watching the tropical weather outlook to see if anything else is brewing that might be a threat.  And we chalk it up to life in the Gulf South.

MUSIC....

I have always loved music.  That may be part of the reason that my first career was in radio.  I know that having teenagers can test your musical fortitude, but the truth is that I like a lot of the same music that they like.  My musical preferences are pretty diverse.  I like everything from classic rock to country to modern rock and hip hop.  Of course, I love to listen to my kids play in concerts in the school band!


On a day when I am working at something rather mundane on my computer, I love to listen to whatever suits my mood that day.  One day it may be my all-time favorite Elton John...or it could be the Moody Blues...or Josh Groban...or Green Day...or Linkin Park...or almost anything in between.

While I will never be a huge fan of rap, I try not to judge the music my kids like.  I know that is a sign of getting older - when you don't feel that what your kids like is really music, but even if I don't necessarily love what they do, I respect their tastes.

I went through lots of phases in music.  A high school English teacher turned me on to Cat Stevens and Simon and Garfunkel by using their lyrics as examples of poems.  I still appreciate her to this day since those songs still speak to me. 

I will always remember concerts I have been to.  I had the great fortune in radio to get to go backstage and meet a lot of big names in their prime.  I have never really been one for becoming star struck - except when I got to meet Elton John.  The meeting lasted about ten seconds, but it will always be etched in my brain.  I have loved his music since I was 16 years old. 

I remember how much I loved The Monkees as a kid.  I bought all the albums.  I got the latest magazines with their pictures, trivia about them, and lyrics to their songs.  I remember wanting to tell my father facts about them and having him brush me aside because that subject held no interest for him.

My daughter is very passionate about her musical tastes.  When she falls for a group, it is their music, their demeanor, their stage presence - everything about them.  She becomes almost obsessed with these groups and their music.  She wants to share their music with me - and I will listen and try not to judge.  I usually like the music - not to the extent she does, but that's okay.  When she tells me all the facts she found online about these groups, I will listen - really listen.  I remember what it felt like to not be listened to.

What I really love is when I find a group or song that I can introduce my kids to.  It makes me feel so good when I hear something before they do and can share it with them - and have them like it as much as I do.  Of course, I will still play "Name That Artist/Group" with my kids while we listen to a classic rock station.  It's a game that they aren't always in the mood for.  But my daughter - who just recently fell in love with The Beatles - is pretty darned good at it!