You only annoy the ones you love.

In 1994, Counselor Shelley and I scratched one major thing off our Lifetime To Do list.

We spent a week in Paris. Granted, we were on a starving student budget – youth hostel accommodations, no five-star restaurants – and there was a language barrier to overcome, but we caught a ferry from Dover with high levels of excitement.

We hated Paris. With a passion you wouldn't believe. It held the record as worst trip ever for a long time (our 30th birthday trip to New Orleans finally displaced it). I know many people think it's equivalent to heresy to hate Paris, but by day three we were on the phone home begging our parents to change our plane tickets and get us the hell out of there. (They wouldn't.) The other kids at the Youth Hostel were begging their folks for more money, claiming they were never coming home while we were at the airport six hours early for our flight just so we wouldn't miss it.

(A tangent – there's a reason the word “Hostel” and “hostile” are pronounced the same way. Staying in the one is guaranteed to make you the other.)

We haven't been back, and at this point, we don't plan to.

However, if you've ever been in my office, your confusion at my feelings for Paris would be understandable. Most people think I must have loved Paris and end up with furrowed brow when I tell them otherwise.

My collection of Eiffel Towers confuses them. It's an odd collection of Towers, and every last one of them was given to me by Counselor Shelley.

That's what friends are for, right?

Shelley, of course, has an equally as impressive collection.

It's a tradition, now, in a way. A private joke, if you will. Dog knows if anyone else gave me an Eiffel Tower anything, it would be in the Goodwill box before I even got the Thank You note written.

Last year, I gave her a four-inch, rhinestone encrusted Eiffel Tower paperweight. It was fabulously tacky. This year, though, Shelley hit a new high (or low, depending on how you look at it) with these:


Yes, Playfriends, those are hot pink toe socks with an Eiffel Tower and “Oo la la” on them. That's also a chicken you see on them, but I'm confused as to why anyone would tie a chicken to the Eiffel Tower. They're hideous, but I must wear them with proper reverence. Hey, at least they are warm (even if the toe things drive me a bit batty).

Nothing like opening a box with a beautiful cashmere sweater and horrific toe socks in it and trying to keep a straight face at the incongruity of the set.

We only torture the ones we love, right?

So are Shelley and I just weird? Anyone else give gifts just to annoy the snot out of the recipient – even if it's done with love? I think some families have traditional “bad” presents – like a fruitcake from 1984 that gets passed around. But this is different somehow. I don't get to give these socks back. I must accept them with the love and joy (and evil glee) in which they were given. I must appreciate the (evil) thought behind the gift. I must remember the (evil) shared experience.

I must start shopping for next Christmas's Eiffel Tower horror now.

Can't let Counselor Shelley think I don't love her anymore, you know.

PC

*No offense to any French readers. I also spent a week in the Trois Vallees – Courchevel, specifically – and adored it. The fabulous food, the great people, the amazing scenery. I'd go back in a heartbeat, even though my skiing skills have not improved. It was just Paris... I didn't particularly care for Minneapolis either – but at least no one put egg on my pizza...

Random Tuesday Ramblings -- and a SQUEE!!

I have a book to write and I’m so behind on Christmas preparations it’s not even funny. Coherent, logical, interesting blog posts may be more than I can manage at the moment. Bear with me.

COUNSELOR SHELLEY UPDATE: You may remember this blog post, and my total amusement at Counselor Shelley’s decision to repeat dorm life after the age of 30. We were taking bets on how long she’d last. Well, if you put your money on one term or less, you’re a winner! I gotta give her props, though. She survived middle of the night fire alarms (where she had to go outside in the hurricanes), the college-kid parties, RAs who didn’t appreciate the fact that she had a good ten years on them and therefore wasn’t going to obey their silly edicts (like evacuating the building for the third friggin’ time that night to go stand in the rain), a mold problem that had her running dehumidifiers 24/7, and living with thin, perky people who still run up the steps. However, the cockroach infestation did her in. The proverbial straw, so to speak. (Not that I blame her. Roaches would send me over the edge as well.) Counselor Shelley is no longer a dorm dweller.

(But otherwise, she’s doing very well. Good grades, good research, and the respect of her professors. PhD, here she comes!)

PC’s NaNo UPDATE: I suck. That’s about all there is to say. Okay, so maybe not completely, as I did get some words on paper, but it wasn’t nearly as much as I’d hoped for. Darn people who insist on being fed… My status meter now shows progress on the book as a whole. I’ve got to get this thing finished.

SQUEE MOMENT: The Secret Mistress Arrangement is on sale now on the Mills and Boon website!! It’s real!! It’s official!! It’s time for lots of exclamation points!! Look over there in the sidebar – I have a cute little widget where you can read the first chapter. This is very exciting, and a real time-suck as I spend too much time on Amazon UK looking at my ranking on the Pre-Order lists.
(I’ll be on sale in the US in a couple of more months, and we’ll have a release party on the blog in April.)

PC

PS: AmyS is the winner from Maven LJ's blog. Send your smail mail to smartypants@writingplayground.com to claim your prize. Remember, you have seven days to claim or we have to give the prize to someone else!

PPS: KimmyL – today is your last chance to contact me to claim your prize from Christie Craig. We’ll have to pick another winner if I don’t hear from you! (problemchild@writingplayground.com)

Random words

Well, I turned in book #2, which will (hopefully) be a Spring/Summer 09 UK release. Now, I’m waiting to hear back from my lovely editor on whether or not she likes the changes (no, my friends, revisions aren’t just for first books…).

So, I’ve been running around, trying to catch up on the forty thousand things that got left undone while I was in my writing hole. While I was doing all these things, I’d think of something and say “wow, that’ll make a great blog for Tuesday.”

Alas, now that it’s time for me to write that blog, all of those cool ideas have fled for the beach. Yes, more organized people would have written down those great ideas when they arrived (or at the very least, used that digital recorder DG bought for me. Hmm, wonder where it went…). But I didn’t.

So now I’m watching Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America (nothing else is on) waiting for inspiration. Or blog fodder, at least.

Nada. Law and Order is on now, and I’m still blog-less. It’s a bit frustrating.

Smarty Pants says that after she’s been around us, she runs out of words and can’t talk to people. I think I run out of words after I finish a book. Hence the blog blank.

Oh, I know. Since I’m out of words, why don’t you give me some? What’s your favorite word? It can be your favorite for any reason—the way it sounds, the way it’s spelled, the memory attached to it. It doesn’t have to be big and fancy… And listing random words are much easier than stringing them together into books or blog posts, right?

A couple of my favorite words — mellifluous (I like the way it sounds), flippant (because I often am), and asinine (because so many things are).

Okay, what are your words?

PC

***robertsonreads---you are Heidi Rice’s winner from last week. Email me with your snail mail addy and I’ll forward it to Heidi.

Juie Cohen guest blogs tomorrow...

I may be young at heart, but I'm not stupidly so...

Let’s brainstorm some things that are best left to the young. Say, those under 25 years of age:

Cartwheels

All-nighters.

Keg stands.

Raves.

Twister.

Dorm life.

Ah, dorm life. Communal living with strangers. Sharing space with people who, in turn, annoy you, disgust you, bother you, and steal your food. Without fail, these people stay up too late or get up too early, listen to horrifying music (usually too loud), borrow your clothes without permission, and hog the bathroom. If you’re really lucky, they’ll have a love-of-their-life that spends a good portion of the time in your room, often meaning that you’re stuck in the rec room until the wee hours of the morning while they do the horizontal limbo—hopefully, not in your bed.

Dorms are no place for adults.

So, it is with utmost amusement (and shock and horror and much disbelief) that I learned that Counselor Shelley will be moving into a dorm soon.

Yes, you read that right. Not graduate student housing. Not an on-campus apartment like they used to have for married students. A dorm.

See, Counselor Shelley is going back to school to become Dr. Shelley. Unfortunately, her PhD program is over an hour away from her nice suburban home on the golf course, and between gas prices and the workload piled on doctoral students, it just made sense for her to have a place near campus. Now, practical miss that Shelley is, she figured why not take advantage of the fact the University has living quarters right on campus?

Ummm, because it’s a dorm. Students live there, for goodness sake.

Now I know many of you don’t know Shelley all that well, but let’s just say that Shelley makes me seem very low maintenance in comparison. Can you envision me in a dorm? Now multiply that by about a thousand, and you’ll understand why I burst out laughing at the news and didn’t stop until I needed DG’s asthma inhaler.

She’s tried very hard to convince me of the soundness of this plan, but if you have to go buy a memory foam mattress (because you know those matresses are crap and dog only knows how dirty), a decent desk chair (because the standard issue ones will irritate your bad back) and some lamps (because you need the extra light to read), then sorry, you’re too old to be in the dorm.

I have visions of Shelley storming down hallways at 10pm, reminding everyone that it’s Quiet Hours and therefore time to turn that music down. It’s bedtime, people!

Thank dog she has a private room or she’d be short-sheeted (or worse) every single night.

I admire Shelley’s decision to get her PhD. I’m in awe of her determination and scholarly aspirations. I’m so proud of her because I know how hard she’s worked and how hard she will be working.

I’m also taking bets on how long this dorm thing will last. I see a off-campus studio apartment in the near future.

Or I would if I could stop laughing long enough.

Stay tuned. I’m sure this is going to be one fun semester…

PC

*** So, did you live in a dorm? Did you love it or hate it? Think you could handle living there now? (Heck, I've decided Youth Hostels are just as bad...)

Uh

I got nothin at the moment. I think I've used up all my words on the writing challenge I'm doing with SP. It's going really well. I wrote more last week than I probably did last month. SP has the ability to whip out 20 pages a day when she gets on a roll. That's really good incentive to keep my butt in front of the computer.

A couple weeks ago I asked for inspiration ideas for my hero. I thought I'd share what I came up with.

I think he looks like an intense Air Force pilot. What do y'all think?

Instigator