No phone, no Internet… no life

A few weeks ago, a stint without hot water was like living in the dark ages. If only I’d known.
I was dashing through e-mails late Wednesday night after covering a Town of Delaware Board meeting when a bright yellow triangle appeared in the corner of my screen.
Hmm, message didn’t send. I wrote another and hit send. Same thing.
Before I could yell for my computer guru husband, he was standing behind me in the office.
“TV’s out,” he told me, reaching for the phone to check for a dial tone. “Phone’s out too.”
Taking this as a sign I should just call it a night, I shrugged, shut down the computer and headed for a shower.
By morning when I flipped on the TV so Jillian could take in an episode of Blue’s Clues with her French toast and blueberries, I was ready to write off our little outage as a blip.
Then the e-mails started pouring in. “Tried to get ahold of you, but your phone’s not working.”
I called home. “You’ve reached Jeanne, Jonathan and Jillian’s house . . .”
I hung up, convinced people were trying my house during the outage and everything had been righted.
Until I got home. “Cable’s out,” Jonathan reported.
Sighing, I pulled out the cell phone. Hiding in the one spot of our house that gets some sort of reception – even if it’s limited to odd Thursdays and even Sundays when you’re balancing on one foot – I placed my call.
“Please wait for an operator…”
I listened to hold music and listened to hold music and listened to hold music. I listened until my cell phone died in my hands.
I could have waited until morning, I suppose, but I was feeling helpless. No phone, no Internet, no TV. I have a pile of books to read – it’s true – but what about the pile of work waiting for me on the computer? What about the list of calls I had to make?
I wasn’t waiting. So I went next door and dialed again. “Please wait for an operator . . .”
I listened to hold music and listened to hold music and listened to some more hold music. Until finally an operator came on the line. “So, your phone and Internet are out? Well, we’re going to need you to unplug the modem…”
“OK,” I explained, “but my phone’s out. Which means I can’t call you from my house, remember?”
“Well then I really can’t help you,” he responded. “Can’t you call me from a cell phone?”
I explained the cell phone had died – waiting for him to answer my call. What I should have reminded him is that I live in Sullivan County. Cell phones work here on odd Thursdays and even Sundays.
That’s why I subscribe to regular phone service.
Instead I sighed and sent the neighbor back over to my house. What ensued was a game of telephone with Jonathan running inside to carry out the operator’s instructors, relayed by me to our neighbor and then from the neighbor to him.
No dice. No phone. No Internet. No TV.
No writing e-mails. No making calls. Not until a repairman could arrive the next day. I waited for the cell phone to charge and balanced on one foot. Jillian and I were going to need entertainment after 1,001 readings of “Goodnight Moon,” and I was calling in reinforcements.
Thank goodness it was an odd Thursday.

Just Remember Where They Came From

They’re like those flashing neon signs on a dark night.
For the people who can’t see how a country kid can make a success out of a simpler upbringing, I offer exhibits A and B – my most recent “Hollywood” interviews.
The one kid used to sit next to me in home economics. We had to make thumbprint cookies and devise a lunch menu together.
We got the same education. We were offered the same opportunities.
And we took different paths.
He’s an aspiring actor whose moments in television shows and an Old Spice commercial garnered him a spot on Extra TV’s America’s Most Eligible Bachelor list.
I’m a writer with a home, a daughter, a husband.
We’re writing small town success stories as we walk down two separate planes.
Because, let’s face it, I got a case of the giggles rewatching Thelonious Johnson’s Extra TV clip on YouTube a few days after it aired. He’s not the sexy young thing with the six-pack abs to me – he’s the pain in the butt boy who I had to cook with in home economics.
And I’m proud of him.
Proud because he’s doing well. His star is ascending. Just as I’m writing, writing, writing, he’s acting – and he loves it.
I’m proud too because he gets to represent the rest of us. TV, movies, the bright lights of Hollywood are their own form of success – they’re not better or worse than what the rest of us have – but they’re easy to recognize. A clip on Extra is real, watchable proof that “he done good.”
So too has Risa Machuca, the Liberty girl who admits she’s not doing what the other Class of 1994 grads are doing these days. She’s not settling down, raising a family.
Ironically, to her that is success – what so many of us take for granted. But Machuca linked her star to one of the brightest lights in the music biz and rocketed into the atmosphere.
Now she’s out on her own and smashing down barriers right and left. She’s a success story if we’ve ever seen one – a self-made success story at that.
My pride for TJ may be muffled by the giggles that he himself admitted would come from the people who “knew him when” as they watched the cameras panning his stomach as he climbed out of a pool soaking wet.
We can’t see him the way the world apparently does.
But I look at Machuca without the lens of familiarity, and I’m proud of her. I’m proud that she’s tackling her dreams. I’m proud that she embraces her past and has made it a part of her future.
That’s what makes her, makes TJ signs for the non-believers. Two kids raised in the country who’ve “made it,” they have let me write their stories in their old hometown paper.
They haven’t forgotten where they came from, because the country makes something out of all of us – even the big stars.

Sweet and tart - the best lemonade

There are two groups of people in this world – the one who can pass by a child’s lemonade stand and the ones who come screeching to a halt.
I’m the sucker on the latter end.
I blame my parents.
Growing up on a dead end street, I never had a lemonade stand.
Oh, I had dreams. I remember drafting a plan for a full-fledged snack haven with my cousin one lazy summer night.
We were going to bake cookies with giant chunks of chocolate and mix up pitchers of Country Time for an Army.
We planned to split the money right down the middle and buy, well, I don’t know what we would have bought. But I’m absolutely sure it was something good. Maybe the dolly with her own bathrobe that you could take into the bathtub, the one I marked in the junk catalogs my mom received month after month?
I’ll never know. Because my parents got wind of our plans. They came to the defense of their pantry – about to be raided to outfit our first foray into business.
They laid it out for us – back road, dead end street. No cars. No customers.
Those parents – always thinking.
Our dreams died on that hot summer’s evening, a pain eased by orange creamsicles devoured out on the lawn where we couldn’t drip on the floor.
When I see a little table and chairs set up on the roadside, a little boy or girl holding up a hand-lettered sign, I hit my brakes and flip my blinker.
Sunday, I’d gotten only a quarter of a mile down the road on my way to my parents’ house when I saw it.
A boy with his sign, a tent behind him.
I pulled over. I checked my rearview mirror. I did a U-turn.
“Where are we going, Mommy?” Jillian asked from the backseat.
“We’re going to get you some lemonade,” I told her.
Together we hopped out of the car and walked over to a family set up on the sidewalk.
The boy, I soon learned, wanted a remote control car. He had a yearning like I had for that bathtime dolly.
And thanks to a trafficked road and a fierce determination to hold that sign sky high for every driver, he was going to get that car.
I watched him carefully pour out Jillian’s huge cup of lemonade with a grin that got wider still when he handed it across the table and said, “thank you.”
“No, thank you,” I said. “But you didn’t tell me what I owe you yet. Don’t thank me until you get the money for your work!”
“Oh,” he said, sheepishly. “It’s $1.”
I shook my head.
“How are you ever going to get that remote control car if all you charge me is $1?” I asked him. “How about $2?”
The little boy’s smile made up for crushed dreams of decades ago better than any orange popsicle.

What's bugging you

Product reviews have taken off . . . and although swag is fun, it comes with certain responsibilities! First of all, I have to be honest. Which can be tough!

And with my most recent work - for Babble I'm only allowed to pick the five absolute best. With tons of products on the market, it's testing me more than Jillian and I ever test the products!

So here's the deal, to ease my conscience, I'll be posting the "losers" on here - at least the good ones that I wish I could have included on the list. Meanwhile, buzz on over to Babble to check out the BabbleBest: Insect Repellants!

And I didn't write it!

Now that my freelancing sideline is finally getting moving - check out the list at left of some of my most recent work on the Web - I feel like my hands are glued to the keyboard.

Thank goodness for Jillian! Even when she's being a nudge, she makes me take a few seconds for a cuddle.

But I weighed in on some of her antics for a story that . . . for once . . . I didn't have to write! Keath Low wrote a great article for iparenting - so check it out . . . Crash, Boom, Bang.