Plot Monkeys

Next Thursday is Thanksgiving, and I’ve been thinking lately, and anticipating, all the great food that comes with the holiday. It’ll probably be a splurge day for me, and I plan to sample everything. I figure one day won’t hurt my weight loss, because I’ll get back on track the very next day. That’s my plan, anyway!

One of the things I love about Thanksgiving is that I don’t have to cook. In all my twenty years of marriage, I’ve never cooked a turkey or hosted a Thanksgiving dinner. And you know what? I’m okay with that! (I confess - - I hate cooking!) Each year we trade between my family and my husband’s. Last year we spent the holiday with my family and my sister-in-law did the bulk of the cooking - - though I did bring appetizers and side dishes. This year, we’re heading out to my husband’s Aunt’s house where his family will be gathering. Again, I’ll be assigned to bring something (rolls, a pie, appetizer, etc), but all the really good stuff his mom and Aunt’s will prepare and cook. And they make everything from scratch, and it’s all just so darn good!

Of course we’ll have the traditional turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, pumpkin pie, etc. Those are the staples of any Thanksgiving dinner. But most families also have other traditional dishes they’ve added to the table, and my husband’s family is no exception. And that’s the theme behind today’s blog — special family Thanksgiving dishes that have become favorite “must-haves”, as well as an expected tradition over the years.

For me, one of those dishes is one that my husband’s mother makes - - candied yams. These candied yams go above and beyond that basic yam-and-marshmallow dish and is more of a dessert than side dish! She takes yams and adds real butter, brown sugar and pecans (and a few other things that will remain a “secret”) and bakes the dish, then at the very end tops it off with marshmallows. Oh, yum. The butter, brown sugar, and pecans, mixed in with the yams, makes this a to-die-for dish! Unfortunately, I don’t have the recipe, or else I would share it with all of you! But it’s one of those dishes that we anticipate at Thanksgiving time, because we only get it once a year.

So, what is your favorite Thanksgiving dish (other than the traditional spread)? What is that one dish you only get this one time of year that you savor and enjoy? Oh, and if you have a recipe for that dish you’d like to share, feel free to add it here!

And I say this with love…

My parents left Thursday for a Mediterranean cruise. My mother sent me an itinerary by email that I assumed (mistake #1) would have all pertinent information. This morning, I started looking it over to determine when they were returning so I could pick them up from the airport. It isn’t clear…could be Saturday, could be Sunday…so I use the cell phone number (international) that they got for the trip.

It doesn’t work.

I try again.

Do-do-do…We’re sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number…blah, blah, blah.

I figure I’ll call my brother later and try and see what I have wrong and forget about it.

1:32pm. (Keep in mind that I leave my house at 1:30pm to pick my daughter up from school, but I am running late.) Phone rings. I stop to check the caller ID, figuring I can call whoever it is back from my cell phone on my way to school. No number. Hmm…elections are over, let me see who this is.

Hello?

No answer.

Hello?

No answer.

I’m about to hang up…there’s a pop.

Then my mother’s voice, “Julie?”

“Ma? I tried to call–”

“Call me back. This is costing me a fortune.”

“No, Ma, wait. I can’t call you back. I’ve been calling you all morning and the number is–”

“We’re having trouble…call me back.”

“Trouble with the phone? Ma, I can’t call you back.”

“Call me! This is expensive.”

I know this is a conversation heading for disaster. I mean, I know I can’t call her back, but she won’t listen.

“Ma, when are you coming in? Saturday or Sunday?”

“Sunday. Call me.”

She hangs up.

So I try to call. It’s now 1:37pm. I’m running later and later.

The call doesn’t go through.

Duh.

I grab the itinerary and go by the door, waiting to see if she’ll call me back since I can’t call her. I wait. 1:40pm. I have to go. I’ve made a solemn vow to NEVER pick my daughter up late from school, for reasons that are directly related to my beloved mother’s less-than-stellar punctuality rating from when I was a child.

I go. I take my cell phone. I call my brother.

Now keep in mind that my parents and my brothers all work together all day, every day, in a family-owned business. This means that my brothers, all three of them, have not only access to my parents for about eight hours a day, five days a week, but they also have a financial stake in the company that you’d THINK would make them want to, I don’t know, keep in touch with each other.

I start with the older brother, because the two youngest (as much as I love them) are normally clueless about stuff. I’m not even sure they realize my parents are out of the country. Here’s my conversation with my brother:

“Hey, have you heard from Mom and Dad?”

“No, have you?”

I tell him about the conversation with my mother.

“Has anyone from the office heard from them?”

He checks. “No.”

“The number they left us doesn’t work.”

“I’ll try from here. I’ll call you back.”

To his credit, he does both these things. He said he couldn’t get through with the number until he dialed 011, which apparently is the code to call out of the US, a fact I had no way of knowing since I’ve never called out of the US. (Not true, I did once call a hotel in Paris to ask a research question for my book, UP TO NO GOOD, but apparently, they had an 800 number.) Anyway, he said he left a message.

This sounds fishy to me. I try calling with my cell phone using the 011 code and learn that my phone isn’t authorized to make International calls. It must wait until I get home. In the meantime, I call my aunt, who is my mother’s sister. I figure if they are having some kind of trouble, they would have called the office, right? But let’s say the complicated phone system there was keeping out International calls…they’d call my aunt next. She’s home a lot. Makes sense.

She hasn’t heard anything. I tell her I’ll call her back.

I collect my child and head home. I have a voicemail. Now keep in mind that I have VOICEMAIL and not an answering machine. I haven’t had an answering machine for three years, a fact my mother knows.

It’s a voicemail (time stamped 1:43pm) from her that says:

“Julie? Julie? Pick up!”

Well, even if I was home, I wouldn’t have heard this. I have VOICEMAIL.

No other message. No “the ship is sinking and we want to tell you all we love you.” No “we’re having a great time and wanted to see how you were doing.” No nothing.

I try the number again, this time with the 011 code. Now the signal is busy. I try again. Busy. I get suspicious and call the operator, who tells me that to get the International operator, you have to dial 00.

I try this three times before it works. I read the number to the operator.

“What country are they in?”

“They’re on a cruise all over the mediterranean. They started in Greece.”

“What’s the country code?”

“What?”

“The first two or three numbers.”

“423″

“That’s Lichtenstein.”

“They’re not anywhere near Lichtenstein.” (I’m guessing all this…I’m assuming that Lichtenstein isn’t anywhere near, relatively speaking, Greece.)

“The number is wrong. And it’s short a number, too. They gave you the wrong number.”

Nice.

I call my brother, who is now getting annoyed because he’s trying to run a multi-million dollar business while his crazy sister annoys the crap out of him. No one has heard anything. I order him (because I’m his sister and I can do that because he loves me) to alert all the secretaries that if my parents call, they are to tell them I tried to call them back and couldn’t. He assures me this has already been done.

I get off the phone. And I stew. I pour over the itinerary to try and find out more information and there is nothing.

I try to be sly. I call my dad’s secretary to find out the name of the tour company they are traveling with. Surely the Chairman of the Board would leave this information with his secretary, right?

She doesn’t know. She transfers me to my mother’s assistant. He, without answering (because he doesn’t know the answer) transfers me to my brother.

“I wasn’t calling you! I was calling Abe!”

“Abe didn’t know. I don’t know. Why are you worried?”

“I’m not worried. If they’re in trouble, they’re in Italy. They pretty much speak the language and we’re not at war with them. But I’m wondering why you let our parents, who pretty much run the company, out of the country without finding out what travel agent they used.”

“Don’t call me back unless you’re cooking dinner.”

“I am cooking dinner. Lasagna. You’re NOT invited.”

End of call.

But alas, not the end of the story. Because, you see, I’m more tenacious than that. The one piece of information I have is the name of the hotel they stayed at the first night they arrived in Athens. Armed with the knowledge of 011 and with Google, I get the phone number to the hotel. I call. I explain (briefly) that I would like the name of the travel agent that booked my parents into the hotel. The nice Greek lady transfers me to the reservations desk. The nice man there helps me (though why he can’t spell Leto when it’s a Greek name is a little disconcerting) and gives me the name and phone number of the travel agent.

Then he says, “You realize it’s 10pm here. You’ll have to call in the morning.”

I have, of course, no idea that it’s 10pm because I wasn’t thinking that far. But now I have the number to the travel agent and this morning, I will call and try and track down what is wrong with the cell phone that this travel agent sold my parents as part of their travel package.

And I hope they’ll call back. Because Lord knows they wouldn’t have the sense to use the ship’s Internet service (you know they have it!) to check my blog and leave me a message that they are okay. I can’t imagine that if anything were seriously wrong, my mother wouldn’t have been concerned with the cost of the call and she would have left a message. Right?

Parents. You can’t take your eyes off them for a minute. Guess next time they go on a mediterranean cruise, I’ll have to go with them.

UPDATE: As I was taking my daughter to school this morning, I checked my messages. This is what I get from my Dad:

I’m going to kill her. I can say that now that I know both of them are alive.

Update #2

They are found! They are fine. The phone was the problem. But now I can stop worrying!

My dog, Buddy, is a funny boy. He’s a soft coated Wheaten Terrier and most of you know I talk about him. A lot.

Indulge me because I’m about to talk about him some more.

Buddy has one toy that he loves and one toy only. I can buy him new things, but he wants nothing to do with them. He only loves his huge bone and he will only chew on this bone on the end of my bed. The bone seems to give him security because often he will seem like he’s asleep and if I move the bone off the bed, he will immediately jump up and demand it back.
He has a routine that is like a game. He’ll jump on the bed and I can tell when he’s looking for his bone. He’ll sniff and paw at the Afghan blanket that lays at the foot of the bed. He’ll tip his head over the edge where there is a bench but a bedspread lays folded so he doesn’t fall off. That’s usually the point when I’ll obediently (trained!) stop what I’m doing and go get him his bone. Why is it if my kids ask me for something that’s an interruption I’ll get annoyed but if the dog wants his bone, it’s a cute game? Anyway, if I don’t immediately do his bidding, he jumps off the bed and goes looking for it himself. On the floor, under the bench, if he can’t find it, he gets up on his hind paws and starts sniffing around the top of the dresser (because that’s where I’ll put it if I’m trying to nap and he’s chewing on it, keeping me awake).

The other day, I noticed the bone was starting to chip off at the ends. I ordered a new one, but I hadn’t caught the problem in time. He started to choke and I had to throw out the two bones of his we had in bedroom. Buddy was distraught. The first time he jumped up on the bed, he pawed at the blanket looking for his bone. Of course I tried to explain it to him (like he’d understand!) but he jumped off, sniffed around, stood on his hind legs at the dresser, hoping for his toy and when he couldn’t find it, he jumped back on the bed and looked at ME.

I was his answer and not only couldn’t I help him, I couldn’t make him understand. He was depressed. He was sad. And I felt so guilty!

Two days later, his bone arrived. Thank goodness, he didn’t care that it wasn’t the old one. He was so happy, he immediately began to chew. And chew. Then he got tired and he fell asleep … with his bone in his arms, safe and secure.

And now in pictures:

WHERE IS MY BONE? It’s not on the bed, so I’ll check the floor!

NOT THERE. MAYBE IT’S UNDER THE BENCH:

DUH … WHERE COULD IT BE?

I AM SO SAD. I DON’T UNDERSTAND. THEY TOOK MY FAVORITE TOY. WAAAH!

DEPRESSION SETS IN. DO THEY REALLY THINK THIS UGLY YELLOW THING WILL MAKE ME HAPPY?

I’M IN HEAVEN!

SECURITY EQUALS MY FAVORITE TOY. SIGH.

Why did I tell this story? I have no idea, LOL.

P-word as in: penis.

Got your attention, didn’t I? Happy Monday!

Okay, back to my topic for today. Penis. Ewww. :wallbash:

No. I’m not giving up men (or, man, to be more accurate. Hi honey! ) But I am officially declaring the word penis to be yucky and I’m throwing it out of my dictionary. You guys know I’m a word person–we’ve talked about the ones I like. Now here’s one on the list of words I hate (not as much as I hate words like: diet :evil: …but close!)

Anyway, I’ve always hated the word penis…it’s just so silly. The kind of word that makes little kids snicker and draw out the first syllable in a long peeeeee and the final “s” in a lengthy, suggestive hiss.

I particularly hate penises in books. Okay, it works in some books–like John Irving’s The World According To Garp. It just wouldn’t have worked as well for Garp’s wife to have bitten off Michael Milton’s manhood when Garp crashed his car into the back of theirs. Penis was okay in that instance. (Though, of course, not for Michael!)

But in romance novel love scenes? Just don’t like it, as a reader, or as a writer. I mean, we don’t read a lot of romance novels where the heroine’s private parts are called by their most clinical terms. (Well, yeah, there are lots of clits flying around but you don’t read a lot about vaginas, cervixes, and vulvas…oh my!)

I have a husband and a brother and nephews and brothers-in-law and male friends, and not a single one of them refer to or think of it in that term. (I did a survey.) So when I see a romance novel hero thinking of it in that term–particularly in a sex scene–it always pulls me out and makes me lose the feeling that I’m really inside a guy’s head (puns intended.) I’m immediately reminded that I’m reading something written by a woman who is trying to think like a guy. (Having a heroine in a book think of it in that terms is different. I still don’t like the word, but some women do think of it that way.)

There have been lots of terms used in place of penis over the years. I remember my first romance novel experience–Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Flame And The Flower–which I read when I was twelve. In that book, it was called a “manhood” and I didn’t know what a manhood was. When I asked one of my older sisters, she told my Mom what book I was reading and I got in trouble. (To be fair, at that time, I might not have known exactly what a penis was, or at least what it was used for.)

Manhood seemed to fall out of favor somewhere along the way. It was too soft (another pun intended) too flowery, too safe. Rosemary Rogers types started pushing it a bit and throwing rods and staffs in there (boy, the puns are flying today.) Or manroots, velvet lances, turgid shafts, etc. Manroot always made me think of parsnips. Lances sounded painful, plus I have a cousin named Lance. Turgid sounds kind of nasty, like regurgitated.

My sister and I (another sister…not the one who told on me for reading Woodiwiss) used to come up with names of our own. Her “purple-headed warrior of passion” was a favorite.

Stiffies, woodies, wee-wees and ding-dongs are silly, too, and not at all useable in a love scene. Prick makes me think of Sleeping Beauty and that needle. I’ve used Johnson, but not in a love scene, only when a hero was thinking coarsely about himself, a kind of “locker-room” type scene. Not when he was actually, ah, using it. Member is okay–though it automatically makes me think of Members Only jackets for some reason.

Moving on…There are entire websites devoted to the subject, in case you’re ever interested. And I’ve checked them out, always interested in new terminology I might perhaps be able to use in my writing. But when it comes right down to it, there are only a few that feel right to me. (Okay, there’s a naughty joke there about only one feeling right to me, but I’m going to rise above it.) :o

So, what do I like…I mean, what WORD do I like? Erection, sex and arousal are pretty good :thumbsup2: and I’ve used them all in my books. They’re commonly accepted in just about every type of romance novel. In my Blazes and single titles, I’ve also pushed things a little further…so there are some cocks and dicks floating around out there. Shaft is okay even though when I see it I always hear the theme song from the TV show. Heat seems like a pretty good, universal term to use either for him or her. One rule, though: you can’t use that one word for both of them in the same scene. (His heat + her heat = confusing for the reader.)

The point to all of this? Well, let’s just say I’m curious about what romance readers think. What do you like…WORDS, I mean, what WORDS do you like…when it comes to this particularly prickly () topic? Any penis prejudiced persons perturbed by its presence in our particular genre? If not that…what else do you prefer? Any absolute turn-offs?

Curious minded…okay, dirty-minded …writers want to know!

PS: Notice the lack of pictorial accompaniment to this piece? Trying to keep this all professional and PG-13. Besides, I don’t even want to think about the kinds of “cookies” my computer would have on it if I had to do all that internet searching for appropriate (or inappropriate!) pictures.

ONE MORE THING: When you comment, the spam filters will probably kick anything out with particular words. So, umh…be creative and we’ll get your drift, okay? We all know I’m the only potty-mouth around here, anyway. :oops:

My friday winner is:
Jennifer K!
Email me at carlyphillips@mac.com with your mailing address so I can get your prize out to you ASAP! And now for my Sunday funny. (Why do I think of Julie when I read this? )

Once upon a time in a land far away, a beautiful, independent, self-assured princess happened upon a frog as she sat contemplating ecological issues on the shores of an unpolluted pond in a verdant meadow near her castle. The frog hopped into the princess’ lap and said: “Elegant Lady, I was once a handsome prince until an evil witch cast a spell upon me. One kiss from you however and I will turn back into the dapper young price that I am and then, my sweet, we can marry and set up housekeeping in your castle with my mother, where you can prepare my meals, clean my clothes, bear my children and forever feel grateful and happy doing so.”

That night, as the princess dined sumptuously on lightly sautéed frog legs seasoned in a white wine and onion cream sauce, she chuckled and thought to herself …..

I don’t f***ing think so!

Thanks to Gigi for the next round of Holiday themed questions!

Do you take off time from writing during the holidays or do you just do it when the mood hits?

JD: Every year, my intention is to take time off from writing around the holidays, but it never, ever happens! I always get stuck on some kind of deadline and I’ll be writing while trying to fit in holiday preparations. When that happens, I’ll sit down and write whenever I have the time — or force myself to MAKE the time. That usually means a lot of early mornings and late evenings at the computer!

CP: Ironically I am probably most productive around the holidays because every year we go to my parents’ house in Florida and I always get so much more writing done when I am away from home. Odd but true!

JEL: Every year, I say I’m going to finish up all my deadlines and take the holidays off. It never, ever happens. (Jinx, Janelle!) Seriously, I end up doing a lot of online shopping and the time is very, very stressful. I had great intentions this year, too, but I’ve already blown it. I’ll be working a lot…same as always!

LK: I am just like Julie and Janelle! I have the best intentions of planning my schedule around holidays, vacations and family events, but I always end up with my nose touching the tip of every deadline (or going just beyond it…sigh… and I end up having to work no matter what.