This is not the greatest post in the world...This is just a tribute

Last night Steve and I were laughing about the things we got away with as kids, but our parents probably aren't aware of.  Sometimes parents catch you in the act and occasionally appear to in fact have two eyes in the back of their head.  But sometimes those eyes are legally blind.  Here are two stories to illustrate my point.

One day I got really angry at my mom.  I don't remember why, but I sure remember what I did.  I got into the coat closet by the staircase and stood straight up inside my dad's trench coat.  Because it was so long you couldn't see my legs.  The point was to make my mom worry enough to think she was a bad mom, but not long enough to warrant calling the cops.  So, I hear my mom asking my siblings where I was and then telling them to look.  One of my sisters opened the closet and said, "No, she's not in here."  I almost burst out laughing.  After a good 10 minutes or so when I could tell no one was nearby I slipped out of the closet and pretended like I had been there the whole time.

Growing up my parents would literally lock the TV up if we were watching too much or if we all got into trouble.  The entertainment center had two small handles that they slipped a chain through and put a padlock on.  But we were motivated to figure out to bypass this system.  At some point we realized that if we pulled the handles out there was enough give for me to slip my arm up and turn on the TV.  Eventually, we got tired of having to hold open the doors while watching through the small crack and we soon discovered that we could push the entertainment system away from the wall and flip the TV around as there was no back to it.  This maneuver required more time as it was heavy.  We would wait until my mom would leave and then listen for the car to pull up so we could quickly push it back into place against the wall.  To my knowledge she was not aware of it...until now.

And so to all you moms out there, Happy Mother's Day.

Dream Hunters

It's been awhile since I wrote anything.  I've been trying to get motivated to do a post for about 3 weeks and every time I sit down to do it I think, "Awww, screw it.  I'm going to watch Cupcake Wars."  True story.  That exact scenario has happened at least three times and the only reason it did not come to pass this week is because there were no new episodes of Cupcake Wars on Hulu as I have now seen them all.  And there's still another two days until Psych comes to Hulu.  Boo.  So here I am.

When I married Steve I knew he wasn't super into old movies.  And by "not super into" I mean not at all.  I really thought I could change Steve of his ways, but no such luck (you would think that if I was going to try and change Steve that I would choose something more worthwhile, but no).  More recently I've been getting Hitchcock movies from the library and Indiana Jones (Not an old movie, but Steve had never seen Raiders or the Temple of Doom all the way through.  I still can't believe we'd been married almost two years before I found that out).  Last weekend's feature was "Rear Window."  So I am sitting there reminiscing about how much I liked this movie way back when and Steve has to make one of his comments (that, FYI, make everyone but his wife laugh and I think you would all agree if you had to live with it 24/7).  It went something like this: "So, this movie is basically about Peeping Toms."  Thanks for killing a good childhood memory.

So, here's the thing.  I am a dream-killer.  I rain on people's ridiculous and far-fetched parades all the time (not to their faces, but in the privacy of my own home).  And this was no surprise to Steve when we got married because he had heard me do this long before we actually got married.  Plus, I had already informed him that I would probably kill our children's dreams (Let's just stop telling people to shoot for the moon when we all know they have no realistic shot).  But did you all know that Steve is a closet dream-killer? (I should be more specific.  It's my dreams he kills.)  Yes, it's hard to believe, but it is in fact true.  He doesn't do it on purpose, but that doesn't make it any less effective.  I keep telling him that there is only room for one dream-killer in this marriage and I already called dibs.  This did not keep him from almost ruining a perfectly good movie (even if we all know that what he said is true).

But the one dream he can't kill is being a chili cook-off champion two years in a row because it has already happened.

P.S. Steve was not offended by the publishing of this post.