Q & A III

My beloved Evil Baritone brushed up his Voulez-vous to inquire:

Madamoiselle,

Si vous avez été abandonné sur une île avec seulement un livre, quel livre voudriez-vous cet être et pourquoi ?

I was so proud to be able to read that! I actually minored in French. And shortly thereafter, moved to San Antonio. Dumb luck, that.

Ok, so I'm pretty sure he's asking me what book would I want to have with me if I were stranded on an island. That's an easy one. HOW TO BUILD A BOAT. Next?


Sophanne asks:

What's the stupidest lie you ever told?

(mine was telling my mom that I had eaten "bad potato chips" after my first hangover)

Y'know, I really don't lie. Honestly. I try not to get into situations where I'm going to have to lie because I have no confidence whatsoever in my ability to deceive. And I guess that's really not a bad weakness to have.

But the stupidest lie I ever told? The only one I can think of really wasn't so much me coming up with the lie but more like going along with it. It was this one time when Beebie, um, walked in on us if ya know what I'm sayin' and I think ya do. She didn't walk in at the worst possible potentially scarring moment, thank God, we were just kinda getting into it. Oh, and we were both stark nekkid.

So real quick we pull the covers up and we say "Oh, hi Beeb!" and she kinda pauses and says, "What were you DOING??"

And because I suck at lying, my tactic was to just kinda mumble as little as possible, so I said something like, "Oh, nuthin... we were just bein' silly...", which may not even have been a lie, come to think of it, we were being kinda silly.

So she gets this big grin and says, "Is it NAYKIE NIGHT?"

And R and I both quickly said "Yes! That's it! It's Naykie Night!" And so from then on, that's what we've called it.

And yes, ED, I know all my stories have some sexual undertone to them.


Moving on, CPurl asked:

PK, What life experience has strengthened you the most?

Wow. That is a GREAT question. There are so many things - most of which I've written about or alluded to at one time or another on the blog - that collectively have made me into the PK you all know and, hopefully, love.

I'd have to say that it was the time many many years ago when I was still working full-time and Beebie was 2 or 3, and our marriage was really struggling (which I'm not going to go into). Within a 4-month span, R and I both lost our jobs when the dot.coms totally imploded. We suddenly had to spend 24/7 together and figure out how to get along. I usually don't talk about spirituality on here, but I absolutely believe that it was Divine Intervention that put us in that situation.

We had to pull together and rely on each other and both step up and work as a team. It was very much a sink-or-swim moment, without question. And we started encouraging each other before we went on interviews, complimenting each other and remembering what we liked about each other, so things started to get better. And what else is there to do for entertainment when you're poor (and married, of course - wouldn't want to encourage it otherwise) and you have no where to go?

I got pregnant. With Pie. And I've told you all about what an ordeal it was, but feel free to click the link to refresh your memory. I just re-read it and I think it's worth your time. Anyway, long story short, shared conflict brings people together and it really made me stronger as a person and definitely made R and me stronger as a couple.


And just yesterday another loyal reader asked:

How was your weekend?

Well, Saturday we went to Grant's Farm to get my free beer on, and I had 2 beers before 10am.



And outside of the Skyview Drive In, it's the best people-watching there is. Check out this family.



The shirt says "I got a new gun for my wife. Best trade I ever made." Clever.

First of all, y'all, no man of mine would EVAH wear a shirt proclaiming that he'd rather have a gun than have ME. But that's not the reason I have zero respect for this family.

See the kid in the stroller? He's like, six years old, I'd guess. I hate when people push big kids in strollers. Kids can WALK. And if you've got a lazy kid who clearly has the ability to walk but just doesn't want to, and who'll whine and beg you to carry him, then the problem isn't that your kid is whiney and lazy, it's that you've indulged him because you don't want to deal with it, and that's a parenting issue, to me.

And here's another aspect of the kid in the stroller - at Grant's Farm it costs like $5 to rent a stroller (!!!) and the distance that you have to walk is reeeeeeally not that far. It's not like Six Flags or anything. The animals are really pretty close together, and then the rest of the place is taken up by the tables in the Biergarten. So basically, if you've ever walked around a mall, you've walked the equivalent of the perimeter of Grant's Farm twice.

R and I where whispering about this six-year-old in the stroller as we walked behind them. Now the story has to split in two so that you can see what happened just seconds after this pic was snapped from my both perspective and R's.

I was looking down and putting the camera back in my purse when R said "LOOK!" And when I looked up I saw the kid on the side of the fence that the animals were on. My initial reaction was that these people were even worse parents than originally thought. "What the hell kind of parents are these people, letting their kid hop the fence to pet the monkeys?!!?" I asked R.

R was giggling his freckled ass off.

What? I asked.

And R proceeded to explain that the in the few seconds that I wasn't looking, the parents had had their back to the kid in the stroller while they looked at the eagles (kid was turned around so he couldn't see what they were looking at - kinda weird, no?). And while their backs were turned, the stroller started rolling down the hill, hit the curb, the kid catapulted out of the stroller, cleared the fence, and landed flat on his face in the spot where he was when I looked up and saw him.

And here is what I imagine it looked like.




Other weekend events included showing my kids Monty Python and the Holy Grail (minus the Sir Gallahad scene, obviously). The kids said Ni to each other the rest of the night.


I'm off to watch the America's Got Talent Finale!!!