The Coupon Queen

When I was a little girl, I loved playing paper dolls. Do little girls still do that? It took lots of time and concentration to cut the doll out just right. (Fingers and feet where so easy to snip through). And then the clothes, pages and pages of clothes with those paper tabs that held the outfits in place.

So what happens to little girls who cut out paper dolls when they grow up and get married? They turn into Coupon Queens, trading paper bike shorts and evening gowns for fifty-cents off on a bottle of mayonnaise and a dollar fifty off on cases of diapers.

With the recession hitting so many of us below the belt, coupon clipping has become all the rage. Here in my county, the local newspaper has embraced this fad by hiring a coupon clipping expert to help guide her readers through the always confusing, but sometimes profitable world of cut out money. She instructs her readers to purchase binders and fill them with plastic sheets used to organize trading cards and load them with the coupons they collect. It is not an unusual sight on a Saturday morning to see a focused shopper with a binder full of coupons open in her cart and more coupons fanned out in her hand analyzing the volume of a box of cereal to make sure the product and the coupons match.

Never one to be left out of the current craze, I decided to jump into the coupon madness with both feet. I signed up to receive FIVE Sunday newspapers, each the size of a large chunk of firewood. The purpose of the FIVE Sunday papers is, of course, to have five times the coupons to choose from, but there are other benefits as well - everyone gets their own copy of the comics, and there's even an extra copy to leave in the bathroom for those who need entertainment while using the facilities.

Once the papers have arrived and are hauled into the house and dumped on the kitchen table, the real fun begins. Among the colored ads for popular clothing, hardware and office supply stores are hidden the real treasures. The coupon booklets - one, two sometimes three different ones. It's better than an Easter egg hunt.

Once the coveted booklets are found, we get to scan through them, searching for prizes beyond our wildest imagination. Like a dollar off of the bathroom cleaner with the tiny bubbles that cleans a toilet while singing Just A Spoon Full of Sugar. You've seen the commercials. Even as you watch, they makes quick work of the grossest stains.

"Can we really get it?" ask my children in wide eyed wonderment?

Normally, I stick with the bargain brand of toilet cleaner myself. It doesn't actually clean, but it makes the water so blue that you don't even notice how the bowl is still dirty. But with a dollar off coupon, the sky is the limit.

There are other coupons as well. Shampoos of every color, scent and bottle size just waiting to be purchased at forty cents off when you buy two. And frozen foods you wouln't give a second glance in the store, but are suddenly irresistible when you can buy one and get a bag of frozen french fries free.

And the dog food. You know, I have a hard enought time coming up with meals that my kids like beyond the basic Mac and Cheese and Hot Dogs in a bun. Why would I worry about variety in my dogs meals? But there must be people out there who thrive on purchasing little cans of gourment meat chunks seasoned with oregano in a red whine sauce (whine... dogs... get it? But I digress).

So after a lengthy conversation with my family, the coupons we want are chosen and the cutting begins. Hours of cutting, piles of newsprint tossed into the garbage and the painstaking process of finding just the right place in my coupon binder for each coupon. Do cookies go in Breads and Grains or in Misc? And if I have a catagory called Junk Food, can I ever save enough money on it to make the purchase worthwhile? These are the philosophical questions I face each week. It's no wonder I never have time to actually read any of the FIVE Sunday newspapers.

But at last, the coupon are filed away and the newspapers are in the recycle bin (the least I can do after killing all those trees to save a few cents on yogurt that comes in a rainbow of colors and can be used as finger paint). Then the real work begins.

Sure you can save forty cents on a bag of hamburger buns, but the big money comes when you combine your coupon with a sale!!! This is where the true coupon queens really shine. You get an ad from a grocery store that is selling its Marshmallow and Chocolate Sugar Crispi Cereal for $1.50, a 50% savings off retail. Then you add your forty cent coupon on top of that. Well, I don't have to spell it out for you. Big BIG savings!

(Disclaimer - Savings does not take into account the cost of the dental bill incurred from your children eating too many bowls of Marshmallow and Chocolate Sugar Crispi Cereal.)

You may be laughing out there, but truthfully, this stuff is addicting. (The coupon clipping not the sugary cereal). I actually embarrassed the life out of my son by picking up coupons that someone had dropped in the grocery store parking lot, and yelling, "Eureka, I struck Gold!"

Granted it's not always feasible to use coupons, and sometimes, no matter what, the bargain brand is just a better deal. But other times, despite all the craziness involved, coupons can actually save you money.

My son got tired of his electric razor and wanted a closer shave so he decided to buy a straight edge razor.

"Don't go yet," I called to him as he headed out to his car. "I think I have a coupon for that."

Sure enough, I did. Four dollars off, in fact.

An hour later I got a call from him."So the razor was normally ten ninety-nine and the store had it market down to six. After the four dollar coupon I only paid two bucks. Is that great or what?"

I could only smile. My son's a coupon queen.

Garden Plants - Beware

It’s that time of year again when the days are long and sunny; the earth is warm and inviting. The time of year when gardeners both young and old head out to the local nurseries to select the plants that will grace their yards for the next few months. I love to admire the little baby flowers and the supple young tomato vines and dream of growing carrots and radishes that rival the pictures on the front of the seed packets. But all I can do is admire from afar, because my thumbs are not green – they are yellow grey the color of dead plants

With the possible exception of weeds, I seem destine to drain the life out of every piece of vegetation I encounter. My first garden produced a roaring harvest of tall brown grass, prickly weeds, an incredibly tall dandelion and three cherry tomatoes buried down underneath.

Houseplants are even worse. My husband won’t let me grow them anymore after that herbicide massacre thing. It was an innocent mistake! If one tablespoon of fertilizer in a gallon of water was good for my plants, imagine what half a cup of fertilizer in a cup of water would do. I had visions of huge vines of English Ivy wrapping itself around my kitchen while the kids had to push aside long fern tendrils to make their way to the dinner table.

Instead I got to watch my houseplants whither and dye right before my eyes. One minute they were green and healthy, the next they were brown lifeless piles of fibrous debris. Even the little cactus that the lady from the nursery had assured me could withstand almost anything, actually imploded right there in its pot.

The thing is that I do love working in my yard and the beauty that comes from a wide variety of plants and flowers. So this year, I had a plan.

First, I bought a garden statue and placed it in one of my flowerbeds. I figure, no matter what else happens, the pretty little swinging angle was guaranteed to make it through the summer without dying.

Next I spent several hours on the Internet and more hours consulting with experts in the field, searching for the strongest and toughest plants available. Shrubs that could accidentally be backed over by a minivan and still come back to life. Flowers with plenty of blooms for those times when my kids are inspired to surprise me with a bouquet of blossoms. Vegetables flexible enough to deal with a flood of water when the wading pool gets turned over on them, and drought resistant enough for those times I forget to water.

Believe it or not, I now have the perfect garden! My astro-turf is always the perfect shade of green, and I never have to mow it. Rock gardens are more exciting than one would imagine and fake flowers come in a wider variety of colors than the real thing. Best of all, if I prop the hose over the dog’s metal food-dish and turn on the water, it sounds just like a fountain.

Singing the Mother’s Day Blues

Recently my siblings and I received an email from our mother, announcing that she and her best friend (another mother of a bunch of grown children) had decided they no longer wished to receive gifts for Mothers Day. Her reasoning was that she already knew how much we all loved her and didn’t require any additional proof. Instead, she said, we should simply bask in the gifts and attentions of our own families.

This from the woman who never stopped celebrating Mother’s Day with her own mother until Grandma finally passed away.

Although I have not attempted to take on Mother’s day, I did try a few years ago to cancel my birthday. After about twenty-five, no one really wants to be reminded about the ceaseless ticking away of the life clock. Not that there is anything wrong with being thirty, forty, fifty, sixty etc… but who wants to have to have it thrown in their face on an annual basis. But, despite my best efforts, I still am forced, once a year, to celebrate my slowly declining body, diminishing eye-sight and the fact that there is no chance I will EVER have a body like Demi Moore.

But then Mother’s Day isn’t really about mother is it? This holiday was originally established by a daughter as a way for her and other children like her, to remember and honor all the years of sacrifice and effort her own mother had made in bringing her into the world and raising her.

As I look back on my own life, I know I didn’t really understand the depth of my own mother’s love or the challenges she faced raising me until I became a mother myself. As I held my first born baby daughter in my arms a few hours after she’d been born, I had this sudden understanding of my own mother’s life.

How can a child or teenager really get the immense weight that comes with caring for the every need of a helpless infant? Or the fear that freezes a mother’s heart when her young child wanders off in a department store? Mom’s knows from day one how vigilant they must be to protect their young from the evils of the world such as child molesters, pornography, or the tragic accidents are so often reported on the news. And oh, how long the hours of the night seem when a mother is up worrying about her teenager’s choices or waiting for him to get home safely from a late date. And despite her best efforts, every child will still go through heartache or suffering.

Over the course of her life, a mother spends countless hours washing dishes and clothes that never stay clean for long. They purchase cart load after cart load of food and make thousands of meals (about a third of which are met with less than stellar approval). They cleans toilets they didn’t dirty, mops up dirt they didn’t track in and live with the constant guilt that they still arn’t doing enough.

As I stood by my daughter’s hospital bed last July and watched her labor and deliver my beautiful baby grandson, I was reminded again of the chain that turns daughters into mothers. Tears ran down her cheeks, first from the pain and effort it took to deliver her son and then from the joy and trepidation of the responsibility she and her husband would now carry in raising that precious little child.

We children, whether adult or kids, need to take the time to celebrate Motherhood in general and specifically the Mothers in our lives. We need to give them gifts and take them out to dinner. We cannot forgot the efforts they made to bring us into the world and/or cared for and raised us through those trying adolescent years.

Okay, so I know that Mother’s day gifts are often cheesy. But sometimes, just the effort to think beyond oneself, if only for a few minutes, is an important experience for a child. One year my son bought me a bottle of French perfume from the dollar store that smelled like really strong moon-shine. I dumped the liquid out, and filled the bottle with water and blue food coloring. (My son never knew the difference when I dabbed a little on my wrist and told him how much I liked it.)

Our children learn to honor us as they watch us honor our own mother and my mother-in –law in May and through out the whole year. Not because either woman needs gifts, or because they have any doubt of our love for them. But because we need to do it, and our children need to see us do it.

Life is too short not to take every opportunity to show our love for our parents and to in turn accept the honor and love of our children. So Mom, I love you, but you’re just gonna have to deal with it!

Fear of Facebook

It all started, interestingly enough, with Morry Roach. Morry Roach was a kid from Pleasant Hill Junior High in California. We were both in seventh and eighth grade together and if memory serves we both took the same Spanish class with a teacher who looked something like a combination of Pee Wee Herman and Tiny Tim. I don’t know if we were friends, and I don’t even remember what he looked like so I dusted off my Jr. High yearbook. According to his picture Morry was an average size kid with that long shaggy hair style so popular with teenage boys in the seventies. I can’t explain why his name has stuck with me all these years, but it has.

So, anyway I was playing around on the internet a few weeks ago, doing random google searches on people’s names. I searched myself, my kids, a few people I remember from high school, and I noticed that the chances of pulling up information on the right person increased dramatically if the name was a bit more unusual. There are hundreds of John Smith’s and Bill Browns, so locating my high school buddy and first kiss Mike McMahon in this manner is next to impossible.

After running through all my families’ names, I searched through my memory for a name that was more unique and low and behold, Morry Roach came to mind. Sure enough, Morry showed up in google as a member of the online community, Facebook. Clicking on the link I was shown a microscopic photo of a man in his mid forties who may or may not have been my long haired classmate of yesteryear. However when I tried to gather more info, I was informed in no uncertain terms that Mr. Roach and his information were part of an elitest community that could only be approached by signing up with Facebook and then requesting the honor of being on his list of legitimate friends.

Yeah, like I was going to do that. I’m sure Morry not only doesn’t remember me but would find it strange if not a little stalker-ish to know that some kid from his awkward adolescent years was trying to look him up. In fact, the whole point of the internet is to gather information from the safe position of an anonymous outsider not actually make contact. So I left the computer for a more wise use of my time, and turned on the TV.

Then, yesterday a really amazing thing happened. Out of the blue, I got an email from a good friend I’d known in college. She said that her son was recently married and that there were pictures of the event on Facebook.

OH NO, NOT FACEBOOK!

But what choice did I have. I was willing to live my life without knowing for sure if the Facebook Morry was my Morry, but I really really wanted to see those pictures. I would have to bite the bullet and get on Facebook.

It was strange and surreal experience. I entered my personal information and then suddenly I was bombarded with toenail sized pictures of people I knew and people I didn’t. Relatives and neighbors popped onto the screen as if somehow the program had crept into my brain and accessed all my memories. The boy who takes care of our dog when we go out of town, was right there next to my sister-in-law in California and my daughter who lives upstate. And intermixed were people I never even heard of from places I’ve never been.

Then Facebook asked me if I wanted to look up any people from my past. I thought again of Morry Roach. Sure I was curious as to where life had taken him in the thirty plus years since Jr. High but I didn’t want to actually make contact. No, all I really wanted to do was see my friend’s son’s wedding pictures.

At last I was an official Facebook member, and happily, I entered my friends email and waited with anticipation. Sure enough, up popped a tinsy tiny photo of four itty bitty people, and a note that if I wanted a better look, I’d have to apply to be my friend’s friend. Ahhhhh

As of this writing, I still haven’t seen the pictures, but the kid down the street just asked me to be on his friend list. So I guess that’s something.

PS I've decided I'm just not a facebook kinda girl and have taken myself off. Oh well

Tebo my Life – Please

We live in a day and age where technological advances verge on the magical. I can flip open my cell phone and talk to anyone anywhere on the earth at the push of a button, (that is of course if they are awake, choose to answer and I am within my calling area). I can send and receive emails at the speed of light to anyone I choose. That means my daughter can tattle on her husband to millions of people all at the same time, and those poor Nigerian Bankers can solicit help from every shmuk who owns a PC. (See blog from last week). And last but not least, I can core and slice an apple into eight perfectly shaped wedges all in one firm push. (That may not be a technological devise, but I think it’s pretty cool).

Other amazing advances make our lives longer and healthier. Tiny cameras assist with heart operations, medicines cure diseases we thought we’d never cure, and of course laser hair removal which is a marvel in and of itself. But perhaps the biggest boon to the average American was the invention of Tebo.

Can you imagine going back in time and running into Benjamin Franklin, the great statesman and inventor? Imagine his shock as you explained things like microwave ovens that allow people to create nacho’s in almost no time. Mp3 players that allow people to record more songs than they even know and watch full length movies on tiny little thumb nail sized screens. And then you could tell him about Tebo.

Granted, Tebo wouldn’t make a lot of sense to him at first, being that the founding fathers hadn’t invented TV yet, not to mention the TV station. And the idea of having the leisure time to sit in front of a screen for hours at a time might also seem strange to people who had to cut their own fire wood for warmth, carry water from a well to drink and if they over did it on the beans and bacon, they’d be trotting back and forth from the outhouse all night. But Franklin was a smart guy and eventually he would get the idea.

Then you’d spring it on him. In the twenty-first century we don’t miss a TV show, not even when we aren’t home. Our TVs can watch multiple shows all at the same time. We can be asleep but old Tebo never rests recording hours and hours of The Simpsons, Law and Order and Cooking with Emile. In one day, Tebo can record more television than we could watch in a month.

Of course technology doesn’t come without a price. We are much wider and lumpier than our counterparts in the seventeen hundreds (thanks in part to the microwave nachos). And TV does become so addictive that people put them in every room in their house, including the bathroom. But those are relatively minor compared to what I like to refer to as the Tebo snapback syndrome.

You’ve all experienced curling up in front of the tube, and scanning through the channels till you find something really good to watch. (like an old movie starring a very young Pierce Brosnan and Twiggy). Then about forty-five minutes into the program a notice comes on the TV telling you that American Idol and Sponge Bob Square-pants are scheduled to record in five minutes and you either need to cancel a recording or turn off the TV. What a moral dilemma that puts one in. Which family members TV viewing tastes are more important, and what are the repercussions of choosing one family member over another. It’s mind boggling, and I suspect that even old Benjamin would be stumped.

I've given this issue a great deal of thought I think I've come up with an answer. It is that...

Whoops. I just looked at the clock and I only have a forty minute window in between I Love Lucy recordings to catch last week’s Wheel of Fortune, so I’d better run. Bye!

My Junk Mail Folder

Imagine the scenario. Two techno nerds watching TV when the host announces the invention of the World Wide Web.

“Oh wow Earl, do you know what this means? People like you and me can send information around the planet at the push of a button. What profound information can we email to the world?”

Earl scratches his head, “Tell ‘em about a cream that you can rub on any part of your body and it will make it grow bigger in two weeks.”

Lo and behold, junk mail was born.

I often wonder who these strange people are that have nothing better to do with their lives but sit at their computer and create spam. Perhaps, like myself, they are frustrated authors looking for an audience. Or maybe they‘re all part of a club competing for the world’s worst con-person.

Like everyone else, my junk mail file fills up twice as fast as my inbox, kind of like how the price dial on the gas pump always goes faster than the gallons pumped dial. And usually I just delete the whole thing without even looking at them. But today, just for the heck of it, I decided to read my unwanted emails and share the results with you.

I was excited to learn that I had won the consolation prize of Microsoft’s Email Draw. Did any of you know that Microsoft was giving away prize money to lucky emailers throughout the country? What’s even more amazing is that the Washington based company is awarding it’s monetary prizes in English pounds. Yes folks, just for opening my email I have won 1,000,000 (one million) pounds. WoW! That’s nearly 2 million in American dollars. Gosh I wonder what the winner got?

In a strange twist of fate, I also won a million pounds from the United Nations Development Program.

My next email tells the sad tale of poor Col. Hosam Hassan and his wife and daughter who were killed in Iraq leaving eighteen million dollars in a Hong Kong bank, and on the verge of being claimed by the Chinese government. But dear Marvin K.T Cheung the branch manager has a plan and I’ve been chosen to be a part of it. But what Cheung doesn’t know is that I already won two million dollars from Microsoft and another from the UNDP.

I got another email from Nigeria today. Boy that poor country is just floating in unwanted money. I always feel bad turning my back on them, but a person can’t be expected to save the whole world now can they?

As if that wasn’t enough, the Republic of Benin has been trying to wire me my consignment for weeks now but with one thing and another they just can’t seem to get it through. Apparently they are using Western Union because Western Union is also struggling to wire me money as well. Perhaps if they fired all the foreign employees who can’t write proper English, they could get that cash through in a timely manner.

And lest you think my junk mail is all about the money, let me tell you. There are a lot of kind people out there concerned with my health and happiness. There are offers to clean my colon, improve my intimacy, get rid of my stretch marks, buy my gold and get me a job – like I need a job with all the free cash on the way.

Ah well, just another day in Spam World.

Cherry Ames is Back

Cherry Ames is back! After originally being published between 1945 and 1968, the series is being reprinted so that another generation of young girls can enjoy the exploits of Ms. Ames, nurse extraordinaire. In the 27 books she stared in Cherry completed three years of nurses training, and then went on to work in every possible nursing related field. This woman was bandaging knees at a kid’s camp in one book and was reattaching limbs in a war zone in the next.

I was a huge fan of the Cherry Ames series as a preteen, and I am still an avid reader. A therapist recently diagnosed me as reading addicted. And I have to say that I totally agree with his observation. I love fiction, and I can actually tract my growing up years by the genre of books I was reading at each phase of my life.

In elementary school I had rather eclectic tastes. The Mrs. Pigglewiggle books were a favorite, anything written by Beverly Cleary, and if it featured a horse I was all over it. A great uncle who raised horses use to give me his back issues of Western Horse Magazine, and I would pour over the articles. I didn’t actually own a horse myself, but I knew everything about training, breeding and that pesky hoof fungus that was going around in Montana.

As a preteen, I moved on to serial fiction. Nancy Drew, Trixie Beldon, the Bobbsey Twins and of course Cherry Ames. I missed multiple flirting opportunities with boys in my neighborhood because I preferred to curl up on my bed with a good story.

As adolescence hit, I moved into the world of Harlequin Romance were I fell in love with a different guy every other day. This messed up my head in so many ways and it took years to realize that real men weren’t anything like guys that populated those romances. These fantasy men, created in the overly imaginative minds of female writers, were always breath takingly handsome, rich and/or sophisticated, and could actually read the minds of the women they loved, often understanding thier thoughts before the females understood themselves. Real guys require real communication. And sometimes that doesn't even work.

In high school an English teacher introduced me to my next genre love. Gothic fiction. Okay, Gothic is predictable as all get out, I know, but I was fourteen at the time and it was fun to have a little scarey intrigue and suspense thrown in with my previous diet of all romance all the time. I think what I enjoyed most were the creepy old houses and mystery shrouded mansions with secret doorways and hidden rooms. Plus the most attractive guy was usually the murderous maniac and the more stoic and confused guy was always the hero.

Since then, I’ve developed a taste for mystery. I set a goal when I first got married to read every Agatha Christie book she ever wrote. She wrote a ton of books and I’m still working on that goal. But I love the whole English feel of her stories. Every house no matter the size had a name like The Paddocks or Little Styles. Granted, they were strange names, and often not very pretty, but every house had one.

Which brings us to today. I read quite a few contemporary writers now. Amy Tan and Mary Higgins Clark are two of my favorites. I recently discovered Dean Koontz. He has a series about a guy who sees dead people, has a dead girlfriend and a dead dog, so I guess that kind of fits back into my gothic past doesn’t it.

I find myself wonder what type of books I’ll be reading when I’m old and decrepit. I know I will have to wear huge magnifying glasses (my eyesight is already on the fritz) just to read the words. And the books themselves will have to be light so that my little bony arm's with saggy skin hanging down to my waist, will be able to hold them.

Actually, I can see myself and the other old broads in the rest home, sitting side by side in our rocking chairs, ipods attached to our hearing aids, listening to our MP3 books and occasionally laughing out loud at a joke that no one else can hear.

Hmmm that doesn’t sound half bad.