GetYourGoodNews/LauraOnLife

Did you ever take a walk along a stream or lakeside early in the morning
when the sun is still low in the sky? Early morning is not my favorite time of
day either, but the reflection of the rippling water on the breezy foliage
creates a beautiful, shimmering tapestry of bright lights and dark places.
It’s almost worth it to get out of bed.

I have never felt so at peace than when I see one of nature’s presentations.
If you look at it long enough and let yourself become involved in it, you
almost feel as if nature is telling you a secret. You have to listen long
enough to hear something besides: “Go back to bed.” That’s not nature,
that’s your tired body begging for mercy.

The shimmering tapestry I saw is like life. The bright lights and dark places
are all part of it. Together they make something extraordinarily beautiful.

Without seeing this larger picture of life, we can sometimes get caught up
in an individual moment. If that moment is a bright light, you will, hopefully,
recognize it as such, hug it to you, and savor every second of it like a big
piece of cheesecake.

Before long, however, you will come to a dark place. These are just as
much a part of a beautiful life as the bright lights. You should let yourself
feel the pain and anger and utter helplessness… for a time.

Take it all in and then… let it go.

Free yourself to experience the bright lights once again. You are entitled to
be happy. There will be cheesecake again, I promise.

The shimmering tapestry of life is not a tapestry at all if you allow yourself
to dwell on the dark places so much that the bright lights go unnoticed.
When we took my 8-year old to a Lego exhibition - his idea of nirvana – all
he could think about when he got home was how he didn’t get to play with
his friend that day. That’s a dark place for an 8-year old. He didn’t even
recognize the Lego convention as a bright light.

You have many things for which to be thankful. If, try as you might, you
cannot think of any, go somewhere that people need help and share what
you have. Many people have less to be thankful for than you do, yet you will
see a smile on their face when you come to share. For them, the bright
light… is you.

The tapestry of your life is interwoven with the people you spend time with.
Their bright lights and dark places are entwined with yours; in and under,
around and through.

Seeing the reflection of the water dancing on the trees is possibly one of
the brightest lights in my tapestry, because, during the hectic pace of my
life, I have been given a treasure: A secret that nature only imparts when
one is very quiet, very still, and very receptive. If your life is like mine, these
three things do not happen very often.

I have shared the secret with you, however, so now, go and wrap your
bright light around someone who is in a dark place. Give them hope and a
smile. You will find that the tapestry will shimmer brighter still.

Laura Snyder is a nationally syndicated columnist, author & speaker. You
can reach Laura at lsnyder@lauraonlife.com Or visit her website
www.lauraonlife.com for more info.

PREVIOUS COLUMN: Dealing with garage sale angst

When having a garage sale, there are two kinds of people: Those who want
to make some extra money and those who simply want to get rid of their
stuff.

My husband is a hoarder. Not a full-blown, needs-therapy kind of hoarder,
but the kind that thinks if we’re going to sell our stuff, we should get top
dollar for it. Otherwise he can’t bear to part with it.

I was of a different mindset. I thought if I could sell the stuff at a cheap
enough price, I wouldn’t have to muscle it into the back of my car and haul
it to the Goodwill.

There is a certain amount of angst when trying to decide which stuff to
keep and which was good enough to spend money on a few years ago, but
now you realize you must have been on some kind of drug. The cost of the
space it took up in your home, plus the time it took to dust it and reposition
it every few months was more than it was worth. So what is it worth now?

It isn’t new, but there’s nothing wrong with it. I find myself second-guessing
myself a great deal. It works, so… $5.00. But would I buy it for $5.00? No…
okay, $2.00. If I can only get $2.00 would I keep it? Maybe… $4.00. Do I
want to dust it, clean it, or trip over it, ever again? Hmm… 25 cents it is!

I have to set up for my garage sale without the help of my husband.
Otherwise, he’d be walking around behind me saying things like, “You want
to sell this?” or “Why are we selling this so cheap?” or “This gravy bowl was
somebody’s grandmother’s wasn’t it?”

To avoid giving him conniptions, I put him in charge of making dinner. He
was just as happy to do that because he got to use his new grill. We were
selling the old one, which was the only item marked “$5.00”, marked down
to “free to good home.”

I guess he thought if we didn’t get rid of the old one, I’d make him take the
new one back. Not so, but the new grill kept him busy while I cleared out
our house of all the useless stuff taking up space.

Later in the day, he came to me and said, “We used to have a little white
basting brush. Do you know where that is?”

Oh drat!, I thought. “It’s in the garage in a shoe box full of old utensils
marked 25 cents.”

“You’re selling our basting brush?” he asked incredulously, as if I’d lost my
mind. Here we go…

“I never use it. I use a spoon to baste.”

“Still, you shouldn’t sell things we can use,” he said, as if basting was a
diversion in which he regularly dabbled.

“I’m only selling things we don’t use.”

“Well, I need the basting brush for my barbecued ribs.”

I put my salesman hat on and said stubbornly, “Fine, that’ll be 25 cents,
please.” I held out my hand.

“I’ve only got a dollar.”

“I don’t have any change yet,” I said tartly.

He looked at me, and waited for me to change my mind. I looked back
unblinking.

Finally, he broke, “Oh, for crying out loud! I’ll go out to my car and get
some change. Where’s my slippers?”

“Oh… um… no need for change, those are $1.00, but for you… 75 cents.”

PREVIOUS COLUMN: Hey Computer, Reboot THIS!

My computer is on the blink… again. How can it be that the one appliance
in our homes and businesses that we depend on the most, is also the one
that is the most unreliable?

Have you ever had to reboot your refrigerator to get it to cool your food?
Does your dryer take forever to get to the Permanent Press cycle after
you’ve told it to go there? How long would you keep your toaster if it simply
beeped at you after you’ve directed it to crisp your bagel?

If my car randomly decided to shut itself off in the middle of the interstate, I
would have replaced it. Unfortunately, I just bought this computer a year
ago!

My husband is unreasonable when I complain to him about my computer.
“I don’t suppose it occurred to you to reboot it?” he always asks. Has it
occurred to him that I don’t need to reboot anything else I own? He doesn’t
seem to understand that I don’t wish to close everything I’m working on to
give my computer an energy boost. It takes a half hour to close everything,
shut down normally, if possible, and then reboot it. Then you have to get all
the programs back up again to start working. If I had that kind of time to
waste every day, I’d use my treadmill more often. Maybe.

If an office worker was caught organizing her drawers for a half-hour every
day, she’d be transferred to shipping and receiving. If a construction worker
sat on an I-beam thinking about working for a half hour every day, he would
not have a job for very long. So why is it okay that my computer needs to
be rebooted every day?

My husband says I should check my settings. Who would provide a setting
for “Go into infinite loop once a day and shut down for absolutely no reason
at random increments?” Not only that, but who in their right minds would
use this setting as the default?

Now people, I have patience. I have demonstrated that patience through
years of guiding children through thumb-sucking, toilet training, name
calling, whining, and explaining once again, why video games are limited. I
have persevered through hundreds of flash cards, and the infamously
tedious task of making bunny ears to tie their little shoes. All five of my
children lived through this because of my patience.

However, this computer may just make history by being the first object I’ve
ever thrown off a tall building without looking to see where it landed.

In the meantime, at least all my other appliances can be counted on to
work all the time, every day, for years at a time. Otherwise, I would go
stark-raving mad. I might start to reconsider all my life choices from the
time I was able to consider, and my life might be that of a hermit; a very
un-technological hermit.

Is it time for a MAC?

PREVIOUS COLUMN: On Making The Bed...

Making the bed doesn’t seem like a particularly difficult task, but most kids
make it more difficult than it has to be. If you think about it, making the task
seem difficult and whining about it is the only weapon a kid has against
parental authority. If they make it look like they can’t do it, then surely
someone else will do it for them.

I taught my children only one way to make their beds, but from that
instruction came many variations. I swear that a bed-making imp must
arrive in the middle of the night to demolish any thoughts of logic that I
might have instilled and replaced them with some very creative instructions
on how to make a bed. The beds look nothing like what I would consider
“made.”

Now, I’m not one of those army sergeant types that have to see a quarter
bounce on the bed before they’re satisfied. In fact, I’ve never been able to
make that happen. However, I’m fairly confident that the bed should not eat
the quarter after it has been tossed.

My daughter’s bed, like many other young girls’ beds, has a collection of
stuffed animals and pillows on it that really should be removed each time
the bed is made. Apparently, they have taken up a mutinous residence on
her bed and refused to be moved. As a result, my daughter is forced to tuck
the blankets under them. This is an improvement, however. She used to
simply throw the blankets over the top of the animals. Ta-Da! Done!

My thirteen-year old has been developing his theory that a bed can be
made while one is still in it. It is not uncommon for me to see him
squat-jumping on top of his bed while yanking a comforter into place. His
experiments have even extended to hypothesizing whether he even has to
make the bed at all. If he slept on top of the blankets and folded the bottom
half up over his body, he could simply fold it back in the morning. We have
found, though, that even with this ground-breaking theory, squat-jumping is
still required.

My youngest boy apparently does not have the gene that retains
instruction. He does not like to be too warm while he is sleeping, so he has
only one thick comforter on his bed. The top sheet gets stuffed down into
the crack between the footboard and the mattress. Why do they make
sheets for kid’s beds anyway?

The boy is all about low-maintenance. This is evidenced by the fact that
the one comforter he has is not necessarily used to cover the bed, but to
cover up the mess under the bed. As a result, one edge of the blanket
droops to the floor on the side of the bed I can see from the doorway. The
other edge is clinging to the top of the bed for dear life.

Clearly, there are many ways to make the bed. However, if a quarter
bouncing on it is the indicator of a well-made bed, we’ve got a long way to
go.

PREVIOUS COLUMN: The Night The Lights Went Out

It’s kind of cozy, sitting here in the dark and writing by candlelight. The
power went out. For the male sector of our household, this is cause for
celebration.

My son was outside when a sound like a canon roared through our
neighborhood. He charged through the door, not knowing that our power had
gone off, and yelled, “Somebody just got shot!”

We had heard pronouncements of a similar nature before and tended to
take such things with a grain of salt. The chances of someone getting shot
and the power going off at the same time were pretty slim. Therefore, we
concluded that a transformer must’ve bit the dust.

After some investigation, we determined that our house and our next door
neighbor were the only houses with no power. My husband knew it was his
lucky day. He found his magnesium flint stick and enthusiastically
proceeded to try to light a candle with it. I whipped out my handy-dandy
butane fire-lighting tool and took all the wind out of his sails. I apologized for
being such a kill-joy.

He spent thirty minutes trying to coax the propane into our gas fireplace
and was almost happy that he might have to build a fire in our wood-burning
fireplace. Another chance to use the magnesium flint stick!

By the time I had lit all the candles we own, the kids had dragged every
blanket on their beds out to the living room. They prepared to spend the
night telling ghost stories and scaring the bejesus out of each other with
mini flashlights held under their chins.

In true outdoorsman style, my husband pulled out a battery-powered DVD
player and put in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for the kids to watch.

My son, still convinced that he heard a gunshot, thought that the movie
was somewhat appropriately named, but he would have called it Chitty
Chitty Boom Boom.

I was perfectly happy with my pen and paper and candlelight. It felt
somehow familiar to me; like it was supposed to be done that way. The
computer has always been both a blessing and a curse for me.

I remember the last time we had a power outage. We used toothpicks to
roast mini marshmallows over a candle. With Teddy Grahams and
chocolate chips, they made excellent bite-sized S’mores.

That was also the night we taught our kids to play Pinochle. Those kinds of
moments tend to get lost in the high-tech world of today.

When the lights came back on a few hours later, I heard a harmonized
chorus of “Awwww!” from the living room. I have to admit that I was slightly
disappointed as well.

The kids schlepped their blankets back to their bedrooms. My husband put
away his magnesium flint stick because our youngest was eyeing it with
way too much interest. Chitty Chitty Boom Boom was once again
supplanted in favor of Legos and video games.

I sighed, blew out the candles and put them away… until the next power
outage.

Laura Snyder is a nationally syndicated columnist, author & speaker. You
can reach Laura at lsnyder@lauraonlife.com Or visit her website
www.lauraonlife.com for more info.

The Valentine's Day Conundrum

Valentine’s Day is one of those holidays when, if you are in a relationship,
you know something is required of you. The challenge tends to be
determining just what exactly is required.

On the surface, men seem to have the toughest time with this. Should he
get her chocolate? If she’s on a diet this week, she might never forgive him
for it. Is she on a diet? He doesn’t remember.

How about flowers? She’s allergic to some flowers, he thinks, but which
ones? Flowers are lame anyway.

Maybe jewelry? What did he get her last year? That was so long ago.

At some point, he’s going to get hungry from doing all that pondering and
he will smile because he just had the greatest idea! He will take her out for
dinner! ...Wait. Maybe that is what he did last year.

However, women are just as baffled as men. She loves him. She wants to
show him she cares on Valentine’s Day. But what to get him? Flowers are
out for sure. His friends would pick on him. He’d love a box of chocolates,
but she’s watching his weight because he certainly won’t do it.

Jewelry? For a man? Nope. He’d never wear it anyway. Or worse, he’d
wear and it would somehow get caught in the fan belt of his V8 Triton
engine and then… he’d never wear it again.

She could make him a nice dinner, but chances are good that he will be
taking her out for dinner again this year.

Hallmark has made bazillions of dollars because of this Valentine’s Day
enigma. Ever since an imaginary baby with a bow and arrow shot you both
with his pheromone-tipped projectile, a Hallmark card has been the only
“safe” way to express your feelings on Valentine’s Day.

The problem with a Hallmark card on Valentine’s Day is that it’s like the
minimum amount due on a credit card statement. No matter how heartfelt
the sentiment, the card is the least that is expected of you. At its best, it
will merely smooth over any bloopers you make with whatever it is you
decide to do for your sweetheart on Valentine’s Day.

If there were no such thing as Valentine’s Day, we wouldn’t be under such
pressure to deliver. If it was just another ordinary day and you brought home
flowers, she’d know you were thinking about her, and it wouldn’t really
matter that you didn’t remember which flowers send her into anaphylactic
shock. She’d probably forgive you… eventually.

When it’s Valentine’s Day it’s different, though. In essence, this holiday is
designed to remind us deadbeats to do something special for our loved
ones because we are apparently too stupid to remember without a huge,
commercialized holiday with giant red and pink hearts plastered everywhere
to remind us. We might do something special for each other nearly every
day of the year, but Lord help us if we forget on Valentine’s Day, because,
really… it’s not possible. Therefore, we must have forgotten on purpose.

I wish I could help you decide what to get your one and only for Valentine’s
Day, but I’m as much in the dark as everyone else. The only thing I can give
you is a warning: If you, through some strange series of events, don’t see
the very conspicuous pink and red hearts everywhere, forget Valentine’s
Day, and come home empty-handed on February 14th, the rest of February
is going to be pretty rough for you. March and April aren’t looking too good
either.

A spider's eye view on things

Spiders tend to be more active at night. We’re not dumb. We know that a
size 13 boot is likely to ruin our entire day if we scurry about during daylight
hours, especially if your hosts are particularly squeamish.

This boy, though, he sleeps like he’s comatose. I could crawl on his face
and he wouldn’t budge. I won’t though, because I stand a chance of getting
sucked into that malodorous abyss while he’s snoring.

Spiders eat bugs. You’d think humans would like us for that. Unfortunately,
they consider us bugs, too. Helloooo? Eight legs? Not a bug! What an
insult! That’s like calling a human a cheeseburger.

On my nightly forays for food, I usually start in the smallest boy’s room
because he hoards candy wrappers under his bed. If a spider needed sugar
to live, I would be as old as Methuselah under this bed. Sugar doesn’t do a
thing for me, however. All I can hope for is that the bugs were smart enough
to find his stash.

Sure enough, there were two ants noshing on this candy wrapper buffet…
and they were delicious... the ants, that is.

I had hoped for more, but it’s 20 degrees outside, no bugs in their right
mind would be stirring. Perhaps even the ant community would consider it a
public service for me to rid them of two crazy ants.

Let’s see what is in the other bedrooms…

Wow! This one is straight out of a nightmare. There are tiny, plastic people
all over the place! They look so real! They have their own little house with
tiny furniture! Well, maybe they have tiny food being attacked by tiny ants.
Hmm, the food is plastic too. Bugs don’t eat plastic food.

There is a broom in the corner. A broom is used for cleaning and swatting
spiders. Someone must’ve tried to clean this room – perish the thought! –
because there is a strange assortment of objects attached to its bristles.

A wild array of yellow feathers are attached as if a baby chick exploded
somewhere. A pink squirmel is hopelessly entangled in the bristles as well.
If it was edible, it would be toast.

Purple Easter grass is entwined throughout the broom. Tiny pieces of yarn
are attached to the bottom of the bristles. It looks like the broom of the guy
who cleans up the confetti after the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

Looking right at me, I swear, are two orange pom poms with glued on
googly eyes. The broom looks like a gigantic monster with a long tail, but
like I said, I’m not dumb. It’s just a broom, right?

I shudder to think what mad world lies under that bed. I find I don’t have the
courage to find out.

Instead, I will find another room.

The only light in this room is on a desk in an aquarium full of sea monkeys.
If I could swim, they might be kind of tasty. I never did get the hang of
swimming, though. I’m all legs. Seafood was never my favorite anyway.

Next to the aquarium, however, is a known source of spider food. A
microscope! Almost every boy puts a bug under a microscope at some
point in his life. This one would be no different, I was sure. In fact, if I was
lucky, it would be pre-killed and waiting for me on a silver platter. Well,
okay, a glass slide.

Good thing I’ve got some kind of magic in my limbs that allows me to climb
on vertical surfaces. Sure enough, when I reach the top, I see a slide in the
microscope. A squashed figure lay there. I scurry forward to get a better
look at my dinner.

Oh no! It’s Dad! Those ignorant humans! We’re NOT bugs!

The family learns the gift of glue

My two oldest sons are 26 and 22 years old. The next son is only 13.
Regardless of the older boys’ unconscious attempts to place him in the “too
young to mess with” box, the younger son is constantly trying to engage
his brothers in conversation, in play, in harassment. Anything to gain their
attention and ideally, their respect.

His obsession with wanting to be part of the big-boy club has led him to do
some very bizarre things.

He plays practical jokes on them, places his sister’s naked Barbie dolls in
their bed when they spend the night with us, and generally acts like a
lunatic in front of their girlfriends.

He likes to engage his brother, the scientist, in exhausting theoretical
discussions and his other brother, the computer programmer, in
discussions about programming video games. His latest attempt to secure
his brothers’ regard and affection, and one that is likely to backfire on him,
manifested itself in the form of gift-giving.

For Christmas this year, he gave the older boys a themed gift: Meat in a
can. One of them received a lovingly-wrapped can of Vienna sausages and
the other opened his gift bag and pulled out a can of sardines. I will add
here that their preference for either can of meat was questionable since
neither had ever tried Vienna sausages or sardines.

To be fair, he was trying to be funny on his dollar-store budget. Nothing
else in the dollar store was worthy – so they got a can of meat.

His budget was so slim that he supplemented the rest of his family’s dollar
gifts with a more personalized homemade gift: He made tiny glue globs with
my hot glue gun and painted them with our favorite things. My glue glob had
a butterfly on it. In this case, it certainly was the thought that counted. I
definitely won’t be re-gifting this little… um, bead… paperweight… whatever.

For his brother’s birthday, he got even more creative. With his Christmas
money, he bought a bright green and yellow dinosaur piñata and stuffed it
with soup: cans of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, packets of Lipton
instant soup. Yes, that kind of soup. We videotaped the whole thing.

My daughter was no gift-giving slouch either. She gave him a small bundle
wrapped in polyester fiberfill. After he unwrapped it, he was holding what he
thought was an old piece of ABC gum - something you might find on the
underside of a table in a diner.

“It’s a mushroom!” she announced. “I made it with clay.”

“Oh,” he said, relieved. “Thank goodness.”

About fifteen minutes later she brought him another larger bundle wrapped
in a sweat sock. It was another clay creation: a coffee cup, she said.

She whispered in his ear that he shouldn’t actually pour coffee in it or it will
melt. “And don’t put any other liquid in it either.” Here again, you had to
reach to look for the thought behind a cup from which you can’t drink.

How can these types of gifts fail to endear them to their older brothers? I
had always worried about the age gap between them, but as it turns out,
the younger ones know instinctively how to handle it.

A fun clip at yesterday's hair trends

I was looking through some old photographs the other day. The one thing I
noticed, other than the fact that I used to be cuter… and thinner… was that
the hairstyles that were “in” when I was “in” are so… “out” now.

In fact, the more pictures I looked at, the more I realized that nearly every
woman my age has gone through the same phases of hairstyles that I did.

As a baby, you had those wispy little curls of hair that your daughter had:
Those sweet little ringlets of hair that you never wanted to cut.

However, at some point your brother got hold of a pair of scissors and
played barbershop with your hair. That’s how you ended up with the bangs
you always despised.

From about 4th or 5th grade you decided not to put up with those bangs
any longer. They made you look childish. No matter that you were, in fact,
still a child. By the time those bangs grew out you wouldn’t be a child any
longer, you thought.

So middle school was a hair nightmare of barrettes, head bands,
scrunchies and styles that would hide how hideous you looked because
you were trying to grow out those bangs. You knew, though, that once they
grew out, your braces came off, and you sprouted some breasts, you’d look
like a super model.

Except that, by that time, the styles would change again and you were
supposed to look like Farrah Fawcett and Cheryl Tiegs – not Twiggy.

Well, heck. Now you have to cut your hair in layers and learn how to use a
curling iron. If you look closely, in your high school year book, you are
bound to see at least one girl who had to get her picture taken with a
curling iron burn on the side of her face. Maybe it was you.

After they starting filling emergency rooms with embarrassing curling iron
incidents, celebrities, in a rare moment of solidarity, decided to ditch the
curling iron and embrace the curly perm. When the curly perm grew out, the
shag hairstyle was born.

The shag only lasted until the layers grew out in the back and what was
left was the infamous hairstyle called the mullet. Short on top, long in the
back, no curls, no maintenance. The mullet tried to incorporate every
hairstyle to date and failed miserably. It really only looked good on Billy
Ray Cyrus. Of course, Billy Ray Cyrus would have looked good bald. Who
was looking at his hair, anyway?

At some point, shortly after the mullet became popular, someone - some
influential someone - actually looked at themselves in a mirror, from the
side, and said, “Oh…no.” And the mullet was dead.

Here’s where everything gets a little fuzzy. This is perhaps the time when
women of my age decided to find a hairstyle that looked good on them
individually. There was a lot of guesswork. A lot of walking out of a hair
salon having paid a good tip for a style that you were sure you’d grow to
adore, but when you arrived home, your husband invariably looked at you as
if a Muppet had emerged from your scalp. It was every woman for herself.

You experimented with past styles. You let the hairdresser talk you out of
a body wave and turn your head into a Brillo pad in an effort to show you
that, with her expensive products, you can look like you have a body wave
without actually getting one.

You cut it short. You grow it long. You try a rainbow of different shades of
hair color. You gel it, spike it, tease it, and toss it.

Finally, you realize that it doesn’t matter what you do with your hair, you
are never going to look like a super model because the rest of your body is
not cooperating.

Then you do what many older women have done: You tell the hairdresser
to cut it all off so you don’t have to mess with it anymore. This will make it
abundantly clear to anyone who cares to question your decision, that you
are not trying to look like a super model, you are merely being practical.

PREVIOUS COLUMN:
Having a love-hate relationship with my fridge

I have a kind of love/hate relationship with my refrigerator. Some of you may
wonder why I’m nurturing any kind of a relationship at all with my
appliances. Well, if it’s got to be in your house, you must have at least a
working relationship with it, because if not, you have no influence over it
when it goes on the fritz. Not that my reasoning with an appliance has ever
fixed it, but I believe the repair bills could cost substantially more if my
appliances couldn’t tolerate me.

My refrigerator is the one I’m closest to. It shares everything with me even
if I have just committed to a diet. Opening the door is like an invitation to
Valhalla. Maybe I shouldn’t open the door, but it beckons me: “Come on,
Laura, just this once. I promise I won’t make you do anything you don’t
want to.”

So I grab the door and a world of possibilities opens before me:
cheesecake, chocolate pudding, leftover lasagna. The refrigerator whispers
sweet nothings in my ear: “Go on, Laura. You lost 3 pounds this week. You
owe yourself a piece of cheesecake.”

It makes perfect sense, which you wouldn’t normally expect from a
refrigerator. Maybe mine went to an Ivy League school for major appliances.
After I gorge myself on cheesecake, I hate my refrigerator, which doesn’t
make any sense at all, but I was only an average student.

The worst time of the day is when I have to determine what to have for
dinner. I go to my refrigerator and peer inside. Nothing jumps out at me so I
close that door and open the freezer. There’s that box of Swedish meatballs
that’s been in there for almost a year. They were buy one get one free, but
after we ate one box, my husband left half of them on his plate and asked
me if the cat had eaten yet - a sure sign he didn’t like them. I don’t know
why I’m saving them. Perhaps for the day we run out of cat food. I’ll have a
back-up.

There is a crusted-over Kielbasa that was never put in a freezer bag. If not
for the guilt I feel about starving people in third world countries, I would
probably throw that out.

The various boxes of Hot Pockets, Bagel Bites, and Pizza Rolls are not
enough for an entire meal, but the kids love them. Don’t think I haven’t
thought about plopping a Hot Pocket in the toaster oven and serving it for
dinner. However, my husband would be looking around for the rest of the
meal.

There is about six bags, ¼ full, of frozen vegetables that I have saved in
case I make soup or in the eventuality that a random body part becomes
swollen. After a looking around in there for few minutes I’ve finally
determined something: I need to go shopping. My refrigerator agrees.

So, Pizza Hut it is!

My husband is an after-dinner snacker, so he’ll be visiting my refrigerator
later tonight. Unfortunately, he’ll be stuck with a few partly shriveled
seedless grapes and four-day old Hamburger Helper, because I already ate
the cheesecake. He’ll probably be having a little talk with my refrigerator to
try to secure its loyalty. He won’t win, though. You have to spend a lot of
time with your appliance to develop the kind of relationship I have with my
refrigerator. He’s not even close.

Laura Snyder is a nationally syndicated columnist, author & speaker. You
can reach Laura at lsnyder@lauraonlife.com Or visit her website
www.lauraonlife.com for more info.

PREVIOUS COLUMN:
Taking a long stroll in Santa's Boots

I am Santa Claus and, for once, I am going to break with tradition this year
and get a few things off my chest. As the parents of the children who
receive my gifts every year, I was hoping you could tell me what you think
about some ideas I have.

I thought that maybe one of these years I could have a day off on
Christmas. We could give it back to the child whose birthday we are
supposed to be celebrating. I wouldn’t mind having a different day. Maybe a
warmer day? In July, perhaps?

Okay, maybe that’s asking too much. I didn’t consider all the songs that
would have to be changed if, rather than coming on a sleigh in a furry red
suit and snow boots, Santa came on a surfboard in Bermuda shorts. I can
continue to come in the winter with a few changes:

First, I need to pimp out my ride. I need a sleigh cab with central heat and
a hot chocolate dispenser. Also, Mrs. Claus has patched up my red suit so
many times I look like a Siberian refugee. So, I was thinking, how ‘bout you
all pitch in and buy me a new set of threads? I was thinking maybe a forest
green insulated tuxedo. What do you think? I could switch to a lime green
silk smoking jacket when I get to the tropics.

Speaking of the tropics, would it be too much to ask for a tropical vacation
for me and the Mrs., after I do my job? Maybe I wouldn’t get so much flack
from my wife for working so many hours if I could promise her a vacation
somewhere warm.

Speaking of warm, my wife wants a hot tub for Christmas. Those are pretty
hard to come by in the North Pole. I asked my elves to see what they could
do, but the best they could come up with was a cross between a Malibu
Barbie pool and a coffee maker. Instead of milk and cookies, maybe one of
you can put a hot tub out for me to take home. Make sure there is a big
bow on it, though, otherwise she’ll think I stole it.

About that milk and cookies: I want to know which one of you started the
rumor that I like milk and cookies? When I find out who you are, you are
getting nothing but Barry Manilow CD’s in your stocking for the next 50
years! Just once I’d like to see a fifth of vodka and a bag of beef jerky
waiting for me. I’d even settle for roast beef and mashed potatoes. You can
skip the corn on the cob, though. It gets stuck in my beard and the reindeer
will want to nibble.

They like the carrots that some of you put out for them, but they’d move a
lot faster for me if you gave them jalapeno peppers. That’s like high octane
fuel for reindeer. Riding behind them after they’ve eaten jalapeno peppers
isn’t necessarily safe, though. Processed through a reindeer, jalapenos are
highly combustible. If their hooves nick the metal harness, flames shoot out
their rear. Comet is particularly susceptible. Another reason I could use a
cab on my sleigh.

Those reindeer will eat just about anything, though. They are not picky. If
you wondered why Rudolph’s nose was shiny, it’s because I left my vodka
out in the barn. I would have let Lawrence come that night if it weren’t for
the fog. Lawrence is Cupid’s son. He has separation anxiety and his stall
was knee-deep in reindeer crap when we got back. I made Rudolph clean it
up.

If you ever consider getting anything for me for Christmas, here is my list:

A beard trimmer. (Mrs. Claus thinks if I trimmed my beard, I would look just
like Brad Pitt.)

Power tools. (The elves have requested this.)

Flat screen TV and a Blu-ray player. (Do I need a reason?)

A bathing suit. (For the tropical vacation.)

Oh… and world peace.

Laura Snyder is a nationally syndicated columnist, author & speaker. You can reach
Laura at lsnyder@lauraonlife.com Or visit her website www.lauraonlife.com for more
info.

PREVIOUS COLUMN:
My Boyfriend, The Vampire

Vampires are all the rage now, aren’t they? “Twilight” has brought out many
closet vampire lovers even though they are all destined to be very frustrated
and disappointed. Not with the movie, but with the fact that they will never
have a vampire of their very own.

Even if there were such a creature – and many deranged people would
swear there is, citing hemophiliacs and such – it would be a hopeless
romance. People that believe in dead, blood-sucking, unbearably sexy
beings have lost their grip on reality. These are the same people who
believe the used car salesman when he says “Trust me!”

Let’s just say you are a young, attractive girl – someone a vampire might
be attracted to. First of all, one would think that vampires would not be
attracted by beauty. If he was attracted by anything, it would be her rare
blood type. Type AB could be considered a delicacy among his kind.

However, let’s just pretend that this particular vampire has a genetic
predisposition to appreciate beauty. What girl in her right mind would be
attracted to a dead guy with cuspid issues whose only redeeming physical
factor, other than his smokin’ hot wardrobe, seems to be that he sparkles in
the sun?

Try explaining that when you take him home to meet mom and dad.

“When can we meet your new boyfriend, sweetheart?”

“Well, it kinda depends on the weather.”

You’d have to break it to them slowly. They may have questions:

“Does he come from a good family?”

“No. Seriously, they’re all a bunch of bloodsuckers.”

“Oh, that’s too bad, maybe he’ll like us in spite of his dysfunctional family.”

“Maybe. What’s your blood type?”

“O”

“Oh.”

“Do you love him?”

“Yes, I think so. I love it when he sparkles and pretends he’s going to bite
me.”

“Um… okay… strange indicators, but how long do you think love will last
on such a thin reason?”

“It depends. If he ever gets around to biting me, it could last for eternity. If
not, then just until I die.”

“What!? Goodness, child, is he that much younger than you?”

“No actually, he’s 326 years old.”

After that you may have to ask your intended beau whether he could use
any of the random vampirical powers he might possess to revive your
mother from a dead faint and render your father comatose until he forgets
the conversation.

Rather than answering questions it might be best to simply wait for the
next cloudy day and introduce them.

“Mom, Dad, this is my new boyfriend, Gregorio.”

“So glad to finally meet you, Gregorio.”

“Gregorio, this is my mom and dad.”

“It is a pleasure to eat you… I mean meet you.”

You would need to backhand your vampire to keep him in line from time to
time, but how to explain the teeth?...

Your girlfriends would all be dying to sleep with him… literally… and your
older brother would be constructing self-detonating bat boxes to see to your
boyfriend’s belated demise.

In reality, and I use that term loosely, having a vampire for a boyfriend
probably isn’t as glamorous as it sounds. Unless, of course, dead people
with long canines and the ability to light on your roof are your type.

Laura Snyder is a nationally syndicated columnist, author & speaker. You can reach
Laura at lsnyder@lauraonlife.com Or visit her website www.lauraonlife.com for more
info.

PREVIOUS COLUMN:
A vacation without the kids?!? OMG!

My husband and I finally went on a long-awaited vacation without the kids. I say
“long-awaited” because this was the first vacation we had taken alone since we started
having children twenty-three years ago.

We weren’t sure how to act. What do we do when we don’t have to amuse children on a
long ride? What do we say to each other, if we are not interrupted every two minutes?
How do we converse without the usual breaks to scold a child for spitting on his sibling or
throwing her toy out the window? Who will provide the arguing and nitpicking?

Well, as it turns out, we didn’t have to amuse the children, but because there were no
distractions, we had to amuse each other to stay awake. We sang songs that my
husband learned at camp when he was a kid. We made fun of what the people in other
cars were doing. We tried to identify roadkill.

My husband said he saw a dead armadillo twice. I thought he was delusional, because I’d
never seen a live armadillo, but I was smart enough not to say so. I just agreed with him.
At one point, I saw a flattened something that clearly had fur and mused aloud that it might
be a bear. He didn’t disagree with me, but I could see that he thought it was unlikely. Just
to be ornery, I suggested that it was probably a polar bear. Since we were driving in the
Southeast at the time and a polar was obviously an endangered species there, he finally
had to bite and said, “It was no bigger than a bread box and brown, how could it possibly
be a polar bear?”

Since the albino version of white is clearly brown, I told him it was an albino polar bear. A
baby albino polar bear that was having lunch with the armadillo when a Mac truck rudely
interrupted them.

He didn’t buy it, but he never mentioned an armadillo again.

Things went well until the door on the driver’s side of the car decided to take a vacation
as well. Oh, it was still present but it refused to open, no matter what we did to it. The lock
was stuck in a weird position, my husband guessed. So, every time we got out of the car,
the driver had to crawl over the passenger-side seat to get out. This wasn’t such a
problem when I was driving, but I couldn’t drive more than two hours at a time at which
point we had to switch.

While I watched, my husband would haul his 230 pound frame into the passenger seat
kneeling backwards on it. Then he’d throw one size 12 foot between the seats and
annihilate a bag of pretzels and a bag of white-powdered donuts. That bag exploded
causing a cloud of white sugar to fumigate the inside of the car. Then he would try to turn
around while pivoting on the bag of pretzels and the demolished donuts and haul his rear
end into the driver’s seat. Inevitably, said rear end would get stuck between the steering
wheel and the seat because when I was driving, the seat was pulled forward. The
technique he used to contort his body in a way that would allow him to reach the lever
and pull the seat back again would have made Houdini proud.

After he was finally seated and had yanked his legs underneath the steering wheel, he’d
give me a dirty look that said, “Don’t you dare laugh.”

Like it was my fault the door was uncooperative, I thought. Geez.

“You didn’t have to squish the donuts, you know,” I said peevishly.

“They were in my way!” he said defensively.

“Well then, you could have tried this.” I demonstrated by picking up a corner of the donut
bag between two fingers. The bag, of course, was broken, and as a result, small pieces
of demolished donut plopped out and white powder once again permeated the air.

We both looked at each other and broke into gales of laughter.

About that time, we realized that we were behaving a lot like my kids would if they were
with us. Well… I’ll be darned.

Laura Snyder is a nationally syndicated columnist, author & speaker. You can reach
Laura at lsnyder@lauraonlife.com Or visit her website www.lauraonlife.com for more
info.