Written by Judith Blakley
This story is also published on: www.lovelaceway.blogspot.com

Saturday afternoon, I took my very ill 22 year old daughter, her newborn baby and 23 month old toddler to Walmart to get groceries. Bad move.

Liz, my daughter, lost a lot of blood during her delivery and her hemoglobin count is below anemic stage. She is not allowed to do anything - nothing. She can hold and feed the baby, that's it. She has been having nosebleeds, headaches and dizzy spells. When researching online how to deal with her symptoms, I learned that a hemoglobin count under 10 is lifethreatening. I already knew that she could easily and quickly bleed to death if she fell and bruised herself or tore something that was still healing, but now I had more to worry about. The more I learned about her condition, the more worried I became.

This is what happens when you turn your back on a two year old. Eggs splattered all over the kitchen floor. Only one survived the carnage.

She must have had fun because she seems to have carried a few to other parts of the kitchen prior to dropping them on the floor.

Yolks and milk everywhere. At least she got most of the milk into the pitcher of tea. I think she was playing at cooking. She poured half a gallon of milk into the little bit of raspberry tea that was left in the pitcher.

My guess is that when she pulled out the carton of eggs, it fell out of her hands and when she saw what happens when an egg breaks, she decided to break more.

Only one egg survived the carnage.

If you are reading this, you are probably aware of the fact that there is a diminishing handful of wayward Luddite souls who are nothing like you: They do not share your electropurian addiction to all things digital. They have no idea of what RSS is, they don't give a rat's knuckle about Joost, or the iPhone, or the new iMac, or Ruby on Rails, or new Linux distros. They couldn't care less about Gmail, they have never seen Chocolate Rain on YouTube, and they certainly have no use for Web 2-point anything.

Wikipedia sounds less like an informational site and more like one of the following:
A) The definitive guide to pagan worship
B) The science of weaving bamboo strips into Herman Miller chairs

Written by Judith Blakley

Yesterday, we took a shortcut through the Army Base and found ourselves somewhere that civilians never should be. We were scared out of our minds.

My daughter and I decided to go antiquing for the afternoon and I found a little town online that had about seven antique shops within a few minutes of each other. I used mapquest to plot out the route across the Base so that we would not have to go all the way around the base to get to the other side.

Never do that! Mapquest shortcuts are dangerous!

Needless to say, it was quite the adventure, and one I would never wish to take again. We found ourselves in a desert no-mans land with warning signs on each side of us, designed to scare the living daylights out of us.

Written by Judith Blakley

After reading a friend's humor article, I found myself reflecting on the time that my adult daughter attempted to place two Kool-Aid packages on layaway at our local Walmart. An odd sense of pride welled up inside me and I began to reflect on how she came to become the type of person who would play such a practical joke.

I have come to the conclusion that practical jokesters run in families. My daughter learned from me; I learned from my father. I never knew my paternal grandfather, but I assume that must be where my father and his siblings learned this behavior.

Written by: Judith Blakley

If you live in South Carolina and you do not have any police officers in your immediate family, I apologize for what I must say about your home state. Police officers, yes, police officers. Having lived my life not only obeying the laws of the land, but also supporting my local police departments it comes with great distress that I must blame the police for my feelings regarding an entire state. Besides driving through South Carolina to get to Georgia or Florida, I have only visited this state one time in my life. That was all it took.

Basic Background Information:

Having worked in door-to-door sales, prior to visiting South Carolina I have only had the police called on me once. When I was working in Maryland and the police officer only wanted to know what I was doing; then he left me alone.

Dark forces of the universe conspired against me.

Not that long ago. Four more surgeries. All required to repair problems of each earlier cut, left me with all the side effects of the first, second and third. On the last one, the evil surgeon Tom Lieu eviscerated my manhood entirely. Doctors and the IRS. My fixed income, broken.

My prior life as a mildly successful television director, gone. Divorce swept away up last wife. Now she awaits my death ...so that she can marry a Catholic. A Catholic!

My current twenty-something transgender, prostitute, girlfriend decided that she needed to add addiction to the mix. And while I was recovering from another surgery to repair the unintended effects of the first four, sold everything of mine that wasn’t held down.

I noticed in the news recently that the Romanian family that own's Dracula's castle is putting on the market for a quick sell. Now, if I had the cash to purchase such a lovely piece of real estate, I believe that a good idea would be to turn it into some sort of celebrity jail (I was going to say PENAL colony but Paris Hilton may get the wrong idea of what it actually is and show up without commiting any type of crime).

With the current spate of young Hollywood divas getting in trouble with the law, the only real problem I see is overcrowding.

We could have the drivers wing where the DUI girls could come straight from the Billy Joel Driving School and take up residence, given nothing but standard issue panties (these must be worn at all times), and a blood-red jumpsuit.

Then there would be the drug wing where the inmates spend all day cleaning dusty mirrors and unrolling and ironing $100 bills.

There's a bird in our store; his name is Earl. Sabrina named him when she realized he wasn't intent on leaving. He lives in the ceiling or lack thereof, and flies down to eat the crickets that have been plaguing us of recently.

I like Earl, but he can't stay. Some customers like him, but others are frightened by him. And I'm worried that he'll get stepped on. So today I go to by a net.

Wine gets better with age. I made an amazing discovery: so do women!

When I became aware of myself as a woman I immediately began to dread getting older. My mother was a disgruntled older mom who had long ago given up her once girlish figure and traded it in for an alcohol-and-sweets-impacted waistline. I was living in Germany at the time. In the United States, youngsters may laugh at the Florida generation with their striped shirts and plaid shorts. But at least they are colorful, as to say, “Hey, I may be old, but I am not dead!”