Thanks to snow and ice falling off the roof, which she sees as a sign the sky is falling (it is pretty loud), she spends a lot of time under the coffee table.

If I do convince her to ignore the impending Armageddon and sit with me, she refuses to look at the camera.

And let’s just say Taz isn’t all that helpful.

Though I do love Mini’s expression in that last picture all to bits, I’m determined to get a “birthday portrait” before her birthday—one worthy of Mommy’s Pretty, Pretty Princess. (Yes, I am that frou-frou dog owner.) (No pink sparkly outfits, though, and I don’t carry her around Walmart in a little tote, so I’m not too far gone.) (Yet.)

We haven’t had a lot of snow—heck, we’ve barely had winter—so last weekend my husband finally went snowmobiling, which I’d been dreading since starting this endeavor. Husband away equals fast food for lunch and his least favorite restaurants for dinner. Like Uno’s. I’d been promising the short kid Uno’s for two months, but they make my favorite dish in the whole world. Deep dish macaroni and cheese. *cue the diet funeral dirge* They have their nutritional info on their site, so I sat and made a plan before we left since the macaroni and cheese, as served to you, is 56 points. Fifty. Six. (I get 32 for the whole day, for those not familiar with points.) Many of Uno’s menu items have nutritional info for two servings, so what’s on your plate is twice the numbers. Tricky. I had the steak tips, which aren’t super fabulous, but aren’t fifty-six points, either. Mashed instead of fries. Broccolli instead of double fries. Over the course of the weekend, I only dipped into my weekly points a bit and I weighed myself on Monday morning just to see if I’d gained over the weekend. I hadn’t. I stayed the same, which was a victory for me. Big hurdle…hurdled.

The weekdays, though, bit me in the butt. I fell back into my regular habit of not eating breakfast. And my teen had mid-terms which meant he could leave at 12:30 every day. I’d pick him up and we’d go out to lunch but, because I hadn’t had breakfast, I was starving by the time I ordered. And I wanted comfort food. Badly, which was probably a combination of stuff going on for me, plus my body saying “Wait…what? You mean this salad thing wasn’t temporary? We want a cheeseburger!“. And I had to guess the points for a lot of what I ate this week, cobbling meals together from “kinda-close” items in the WW database, which I’m probably not very good at.

So I had to take a pretty glass stone out of my Pounds Lost jar and put it back in the Pounds To Lose jar, which made me incredibly sad.

This week: 1) Don’t let this discourage me as I head into the weekend and 2) eat breakfast and remember to snack on fruit so I don’t hit 1pm ravenous and looking to carbo-load because I am not putting glass stones back in the Pounds To Lose jar next Friday.

How are you all doing?

The absolute worst is forgetting to set the carafe in place, which means waking up to runny grounds and brown water drowning everything on the counter and running onto the floor. I’ve done that three or four times, but in the grand scope of how often I screw it up, that counts as rare. My most frequent error is forgetting to add the water, which means waking up to nothing more than really hot glass. That’s followed by forgetting to hit the delay button, but at least then everything’s ready and my husband only has to hit the ON button.

This morning’s wasn’t really my fault, other than the fact I grabbed the first package of coffee filters I saw and they’re cheap, flimsy ones. It folded over, which allowed half the grounds to run down into the pot. Yum. My husband was putting on his coat to take Taz out when I stumbled into the kitchen, and he said, “You might want to grab a fork with your coffee this morning.”

Cranky man.

His mood wasn’t improved any when I just fired up the Keurig and brewed myself a hot, ground-free mug of coffee in less time than it took for Taz to do his business, but he was leaving for work anyway, so whatever.

Screwed-up coffee’s not the best way to start a morning, though!

“This is the perfect contemporary romance!” — RT Book Reviews

Print Cover

HQN paperback edition now available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and Book Depository and most places your favorite romances are sold.

Can a one-night stand turn into happily ever after?

Bar owner Kevin Kowalski is used to women throwing their phone numbers at him. Even if lately he’s been more interested in finding Mrs. Right than Miss Right Now. Enter the intriguing Beth Hansen.

Kevin and Beth may have started out all wrong, with an impromptu passionate encounter at a wedding followed by a walk of shame. Yet Kevin knows there’s more to their relationship than a one night stand. Especially when Beth turns up pregnant!

Kevin may be ready for the “next step,” but Beth doesn’t want a relationship with a former playboy, however irresistible he might be. And it’s going to take a lot to convince her to go on a second date with the father of her child…

Also available digitally from:
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Books On Board | Diesel eBooks

I came inside, made more coffee, and fired up the computer. But that box was calling to me and I just couldn’t stand it being out there, so I put on my husband’s snowmobiling boots and went to haul in my shiny author copies. Luckily, I managed to get it inside without breaking any bones or dumping the whole shebang in a snow bank. Which means…pictures!

Oh, and Yours To Keep is available for pre-order in paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and Book Depository

I do not think that George Washington was a good leader for a few different reasons. On page 216 his soldiers were dying, and he sat there on his horse, watching, while the rest of his men fought back at the camp and died! Also, on page 210, while his men climbed ashore, bloody, soaked, and cold, he stood there draped in a cloack, basically “living the good life”. Another thing is that if he hadn’t made those plans, they wouldn’t have died! Finally, those men were in pain, and [he] didn’t stop to give them a break. Don’t you think he wasn’t a good leader for those reasons?

And the teacher’s note:

An interesting opinion for sure! It is well supported.

It’s obvious the short kid shares my love of the comma, though I’m totally blaming the exclamation points on his father’s side of the family.

And I’m pleased to report he got full marks for this assignment. We’ve had great luck over the years with teachers who let kids buck the party line if they fulfill the technical requirements of the assignment and can back it up. Whether it’s history, politics or anything else, we love a rowdy debate at home and we’ve raised our boys to not blindly drink anybody’s Kool-Aid, even the flavors we serve, so they could have run into trouble with a rigid teacher. Luckily, with the exception of one (and she was just dim-witted, not rigid), we’ve had great teachers every year, and with a high school junior and a fifth-grader, that’s a lot of teachers.

Epiphany was the word of the week.

Epiphany #1: I’m turning forty in September and, because I think my forties are going to be my most awesome years yet, I want to enjoy them. That means being healthier than I am now and not walking a few steps behind my family because I get winded trying to keep up. I plan to hit my fortieth birthday being far more fabulous than when I hit my thirtieth.

Epiphany #2: I’ve spent the last dozen or so years cleaning my kids’ plates. Maybe it started when the teen was a tot and I was lucky if I got his PB&J crusts for lunch. I don’t know. But we were out to eat the other night and, when I had to stop myself from finishing off the fries the teen didn’t want, I realized I always do that. The following day I made the short kid a turkey sub for lunch and he ate about three-quarters of it. On my way to the kitchen, I grabbed his plate to throw away and caught myself picking up the rest of the sub to finish it off. I threw it away instead. When I was telling my mom about it, she said she has a friend who, if she’s at a restaurant and can’t control the plates being taken away immediately, will douse all the leftover food on the table with pepper so she won’t eat it. I’m hoping just identifying the behavior will be enough, but I’ll do that if I have to.

Anyway…so far, so good. According to WW, the healthy weight range for my height is 120-150. I don’t know about that. I mean, I’d love to hit 150. But my end goal, the one that will result in me buying myself a fabulous pair of Fluevog heels, is 170. One, I think it’s achievable. And, two, I’ve always weighed “heavy”. Back when I was sixteen and totally rocking the cheerleading miniskirt, I weighed 130. I know I can hit 170, which would be a 55-pound loss, and be very happy with that.

Now I’ll take two weeks in a row of shed pounds and let it carry me through the weekend, AKA “restaurant time”. (Which is why I weigh in on Friday. I need the boost.) And I know I said I didn’t want this to be the Diet Blog of Doom, but I’ll probably check in on Fridays. One day a week’s not bad.

With airports. We’re not really thinking about that part yet. Yes, I did try to convince my husband that driving would be awesome because we could pick one super-cool thing to stop and see on the way out and one for the way back. Sadly, that stretches one week into three weeks and he seems to think that’s crazy. I would totally do it to avoid having to navigate an airport.

Back in December, the Short Kid won the school geography bee. Again. Which means taking the qualification test to see if he goes to the state competition. Again. He took that test yesterday, so now I deal with his nerves while we wait for the results. Again..

This time around, though, the stakes are even higher. His teacher (who I think is pretty awesome) told SK that, if he makes it to the state round, he can sit at the teacher’s desk, in the teacher’s comfy chair, for an entire week.

Between the contemplation of airports and the possibility of sitting in the teacher’s chair, nerves are jumping at Casa Stacey!

Starting Monday January 16th and ending Sunday, January 29th at Midnight, US Eastern Standard Time you will have two weeks to send in your ballots for books published for the first time in 2011. So it’s time to start thinking about what books and characters attracted your attention this past year — either in a good or bad way.

It’s a fun ballot to fill out, which you can do here, and I’ll just very casually mention that Yours To Keep and Mistletoe and Margaritas were my 2011 releases. (I guess novellas go under the “short story” category?)

I’m so glad I started tracking my reads at Goodreads. So much easier to fill out ballots like these!

Of course, tomorrow is the day I’m supposed to drive down to the southern part of the state for some award luncheon with the Short Kid being put on by the ginormous investment company who sponsored a mock stock market competition. Thanks to Amazon’s unexpectedly not-awesome numbers (he was anticipating a Fire-induced surge), SK’s team didn’t win the stock market portion, but they won a part of the competition sponsored by the state’s largest newspaper. They had to show how the news affects the market and his team did an excellent job, including showing not only how the passing of Steve Jobs made a difference, but the breaking news of the sold-out status of the iPhone 4S.

Enter the wintry mix. I never, ever drive to the southern part of the state because high-traffic areas give me anxiety. And if the schools have a two-hour delay, the teen would have to walk TO school, which he’s never done. And in a wintry mix, to boot. But I’ll make it work, even if it becomes a two-hour trip down in four-wheel drive. Unless they postpone it. Or my husband says not to go.

But the Short Kid is checking his weather app every ten seconds to see if there’s been a meteorological miracle.

I picture those three pounds like the little bit of snow you pack in your hand to start a snowball. It’s going to keep rolling and rolling, getting bigger and bigger. Someday, instead of those pounds being on me, they’re going to be a big-ass snowman I can keep at a distance.

Anyway, moving on because I don’t intend for this to become the Diet Blog of Doom, this morning the Short Kid needed a little help with his spelling homework early this morning. (Yes, he had Wednesday evening, but he gambled on the snow day, then he had all of yesterday to do it. He gets his procrastination skills from Mom, apparently.) The assignment? Use spelling words to form tongue twisters. He’d already done a few, but he was stuck on the last one.

This is what we came up with:

Nonvenomous nefarious nematodes nick nifty knickers.

(Nonvenomous being the word from the spelling list.)

Me: “Your teacher’s probably going to guess I had a hand in this one.”

SK: “I’ll probably be the only kid with underwear-stealing parasitic worms.”

Probably.