F16’s Don’t Kill People, 500 Lb. Bombs Kill People

I am now the proud owner of 32 episodes of My Favorite Martian on 8 videos for which I paid the absurd sum of seven bucks. It was still sealed in the original box. I also bought some used VHS tapes of Lost in Space. I would have stopped there, but I just found out that you can buy the boxed set of Shindig. Come on, I have to own Shindig. You know you want it too.

In other news, I achieved the Holy Grail of home baking-my own Twix bars. When I made the Jaffa Cakes, I thought I’d managed the impossible, but the candy I made yesterday surpasses pretty much anything I have ever, or could ever hope to create. I should just hang up the apron now-game over. It will never get better than THIS.

Hell yes people, that’s why I’m the mama.

I can’t help but feel sad reading THIS article. I understand they were attempting to be funny-giving guidelines if a costume is too racy-except they didn’t say "racy", they said "slutty". which has a completely different connotation. It is also limited to women.

It should be noted that one of the contributors to this piece is the "parenting expert" that writes family centred articles for the paper. I guess I find it surprising that an editor didn’t reign them in. Isn’t that what editors do? Did they sack all the competent editors with their last remaining decent journalists? I’d say it reads like a High School newspaper, but honestly, that would be insulting to High School papers.

Our local newspaper has a columnist that is known for dreadful, one sentence paragraphs. She’s a pretty awful writer, but at least she’s concise. No one could ever accuse Cindy Lange Kubick of overwriting a paragraph. We can’t say the same for Lynne Ireland.

Before you pen off angry posts calling me a pretentious ass, keep in mind that I am not collecting a salary to write the rubbish I publish here. What’s more, I could never, on my worst day write a paragraph that included both, "Bee’s beneficence", and "salubrious stickiness". I couldn’t. Really.

You should read the whole thing (OK you probably can’t get through the whole thing, but go have a look anyway-you don’t want to miss out on the "tawny translucence" and "ambrosial nectar."), if only to reinforce the sense that we are, as a society, completely doomed.  

The joke around here is that I don’t need to spank because hearing me scold is a million times worse to endure. I can probably count on one hand the actual number of times I’ve raised my voice into anything approaching a scream, but I do think I manage to get my point across well. Still, a well-timed yell can emphasize a point in a way not soon forgotten.

Well everyone, here’s some bad news: the er…experts have decided that isn’t OK. No screaming, no spanking and we’re not supposed to lie to them either.

Believe me, I’m not some superior parent, but I also don’t need to scream at my child to get him to do what’s expected. He’s had exactly two tantrums in four years and still remembers having all of his toys taken away. I didn’t scream, I didn’t stand there negotiating-I grabbed a roll of garbage bags and started dumping toys into them. It was a good month before he saw many of them again. You know, the silent treatment and a very stern look work well if you’re consistent.

I’m not sure what these articles hope to accomplish other than make parents feel even more inadequate than they already do. How awful that parents are being made to feel guilty for disciplining their children. For heaven’s sake, that’s nothing to feel guilty about. Letting them run wild and do whatever the hell they want should elicit guilt. What an incredibly screwed-up world we live in. Look, I’ve seen some amazingly bad parenting over the years that is deserving of scorn. My mother used to tell my sister she was supposed to be an abortion. That’s bad parenting. I seem to remember a fair amount of door slamming, though that kind of slacked off after we moved to the new house with the less well constructed doors/walls/etc. Coming from solid plaster, who knew you could actually kick through drywall…? The best was when my parents got a second phone line put in so they could call us on the phone, in the next room, to scream at us. That was sort of the precursor to emailing the person sitting next to you.   Screaming at your kid to pick up their shit kind of pales in comparison, no?

I don’t want to extrapolate based on my own experiences, so I won’t. I will say that I have to seriously wonder if something else is going on with people who spend so much time thinking about how they were yelled at/spanked/punished as children. Wouldn’t this sort of thing be cumulative? I mean, if you get treated fairly decently but mummy completely loses it because the linen closet isn’t colour coordinated the way she likes it-well, isn’t there room for that sort of thing over the course of twenty years? Honestly, all joking aside, sometimes we really did deserve to be punished. We were terrible children. Oh goodness, if Danny ever pulled half the crap I did at his age, I don’t know what I’d do. Seriously. These articles never acknowledge that children can be horrendous little beasts.

At some point we started expecting perfection of ourselves in respect to parenting. I wonder what that teaches the little ones?

Living waaaay out in the country, I’ve had to adjust the way I do things and learn to improvise. My favourite recent discovery? You can make your own brown sugar-and it tastes better.

Here’s what you do:

Place granulated sugar in a large bowl. Stir in either mild or full flavour molasses (I wouldn’t use blackstrap) and start stirring. Taste once in a while until you get the strength you like. Mush it up really well with your hands to break up any blobs of molasses. Place in a tightly sealed plastic bag. Store in fridge. There, you just saved a couple bucks.

Speaking of sugar:

Buy the 10 lb bags which are cheaper and then using a funnel, pour into washed and dried plastic juice bottles or 2 litre soda bottles. This is also an excellent way to store large bags of rice. I find it easier to pour sugar or rice into a measuring cup when baking than to scoop it out with the cup. You can keep one bottle on the counter and store the others in the pantry until needed.

Still speaking of sugar:

Giving granulated sugar a quick whirr in the blender will make caster/superfine sugar. Don’t go too long or you will have confectioner’s sugar (unless you intended to make