I recently used the phrase “until the cows come home,” and I got to thinking, which is always dangerous… Do they actually come home on their own? When do they come home? What prompts them to come home? What are they doing out so late? Are they hangin’ at the Justin Bieber show? Eatin’ some grass together? Of course, all these questions can apply to teenagers as well.  Except maying the eating grass.  I hope. What’s the funniest phrase you’ve used in the past week?  Leave it in the comments and let’s laugh a little!!

Do you remember lying in the dark, eyes glued to the clock, your 7-year-old arms and legs trembling with anticipation?  Waiting for the moment you were allowed to get up on Christmas morning? For me, the Year of the Atari stands out. But I also remember socks.  The Lipstick Years, my mom named that era.  The time when things were tight, when we chopped wood to heat the house, and she bought herself one lipstick in two years. As I grow older, I understand more and more the sacrifices that both sets of my parents made for me and my […]

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Our house was an ugly duckling. Looked like it popped right out of That 70’s Show.  Antique brass everywhere.  The fake kind. Instead of popping a champagne bottle, we popped a paint can. But we didn’t stop at paint…. The kitchen ceiling, for instance, was lower than everything else by about nine inches.  It was covered with a textured wallpaper to mimic an old-fashioned tin ceiling.  Then it was painted cream. A 3×4 hole in the ceiling held a fluorescent light fixture that you’d expect to find in a dungeon.  The whole thing was “trimmed out” with strips of some […]

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Speaking of the Chicken Dance… …following a recent Newsboys concert, the first song played as exit music was, in fact, the Chicken Dance. As the crowd herded out of the arena, I very subtly flapped my wings and twisted my shoulders along with the music. The girls watched in horror. I wondered if they were even familiar with the Chicken Dance; Americans seem genetically predisposed to perform the Chicken Dance whenever the music hits their eardrums.  Like the YMCA…you just gotta do it. Is this one of the things that we take for granted until the terrible day we learn that […]

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Imagine you are….. abandoned at three days old found in a trash can raised in a Soviet orphanage abused repeatedly by an adoptive father found freezing on the winter streets of St. Petersburg thrown in jail beaten and abused by peers forced to carry the body a young friend to the outskirts of town for burial institutionalized If I had experienced only one or two of these events, I’d break.  Fall apart.  IF I survived it, I’d need years of expensive therapy to recover even slightly. My friend Alex lived through all of this before he reached fifteen. Today, Alex […]

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