There are some things that just don’t belong together.  Like:  Milk and orange juice.  Or:  Bleach and colors.  How about:  Alcohol and driving?

I recall a disastrous yet funny combination.  My husband Ted was crewing on a long sailboat race so there were quite a few provisions packed on the boat.  With a race that keeps you sailing over night, you must have some food and beverages to eat and drink.  Someone had brought a bag of those animal crackers that are rather balloon-shaped.  Makes sense to me – like grabbing a fist full of pretzels, you could easily grab a handful of animal crackers while you continued to trim the sails or ride along on the racing boat.  Well, boats get wet.  And sometimes people drop their cookies.  Put together a good quantity of water in the bottom of the boat and a spilled bag of animal crackers.  Those little animal shapes sucked up the liquid like a sponge and grew into huge bloated balloon animal crackers.  Gross.  And then if you touched the swollen cracker animals, they dissolved into a mass of nasty tan decimated cookie soup.  Animal crackers and puddles do not mix.

I had to see a hand surgeon today for a bump on the palm of my hand.  I thought it was one of those ganglion or bible cysts.  Oh! … fyi … these so-called bible cysts are given that name because the traditional old way of treating them was to smack the thing with the bible or other large book to burst and eradicate them.   After x-ray and ultra-sound I found out I don’t have a ganglion cyst.  I have a TUMOR!!  What the heck??  You don’t get tumors on your hands.  Tumors are in your brain or stuck on vital organs.  I felt like Arnold Schwarzenegger and kept saying “I have a too-mah.  I have a too-mah.”  I get to go back and have an MRI of that little sucker (An MRI of my HAND?  of the too-mah on my HAND?!) and then surgery to cut that thing out.  Hands and tumors don’t go together!

I smiled as I noticed that Amanda promoted my book today on her Facebook page.  I am sure she saw her two sisters doing the same thing on their pages, so she was doing her part.  Sweet.  I got a note from a friend today that said (jokingly) that she would read my book only if Amanda and I autographed it.  I told her, “Of course we would.”  Which brings up the whole issue of – Is Amanda going to read my book?  The short answer?  No. The long answer?  Amanda can read, but doesn’t read books.  She can read short things – like Facebook posts and cards she gets in the mail.  A whole book is too much for her.  She ends up reading words and getting no meaning.  And when there is no meaning in all those words, she loses interest after page one.  To prove my point, she has (her beloved) Donny Osmond’s biography and has held the book close to her heart, drooled on the photos inside, but has never read a word of it.

I have asked Amanda several times how she feels about me writing a book about her.  She just shrugs and says it’s ok.  She doesn’t mind and, of course, will enjoy the added attention it brings.  If you have read the book you will know that there are some things about friends of hers I’d rather she not read.  Amanda and Amanda reading my book just don’t go together.

I wanted all of you to know.

just Laurel

“I have a headache.”
  – “It might be a tumor.”
                – “It’s not a tumor. It’s not a tumor.” (pronounced ‘tumah’)
Detective John Kimble (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to young Lowell (Ben McCreary) in Kindergarten Cop (1990)