Angie Kinghorn

Have fun storming the castle!

Writer’s workshop prompt: What was it about that movie?  Describe a movie you once had memorized.

To this day, I don’t know what it is about The Princess Bride, but a small kernel of my brain has devoted itself to maintaining the movie on constant re-run status.  So much so that the hubster suggested (only half kidding) that I donate my brain to science so they can find and study this particularly annoying cluster of cells after I’m dead and gone.  
It all comes down to the fact that this movie is just so damn quotable.  Anytime I snarkily say “As you wish,” all I can think off is Buttercup hurling herself down the steep hill after Westley when she’s just realized that it really is Westley and not the Dread Pirate Roberts.  Likewise, when I’m feeling particularly melodramatic, I tend to drop into Buttercup’s, “You mock my pain!”  (I try not to remember The Man in Black’s reply: “Life is pain, Highness.  Anyone who says differently is selling something.”)  
Every time I think of a wedding, in the back of my head, I can hear my friend Christine from law school, reciting the clergyman’s speech at the beginning of Buttercup’s truncated wedding to Prince Humperdinck.  We spent most of our 3L year planning our weddings, and she had this thing down pat.  “Mawage.   Mawage is wot bwings us togeder tooday.  Mawage, that bwessed awangment, that dweam wifin a dweam …”
Seriously, people, this is not the stuff of Citizen Kane, but it is catchy.  Who among us didn’t spend a sizable portion of middle and high school Spanish classes muttering in bad accents, “My name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my father.  Prepare to die.”
Anyone?  Bueller?  Bueller?  Oh, wait, different favorite movie.
Again, TPB is never going to win an Academy Award, or even a Razzie, but how can you not love it for lines like Vizzini’s, “You fool!  You fell victim to one of the classic blunders – the most famous of which is ‘Never get involved in a land war in Asia’ – but only slightly less well-known is this: ‘Never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line!’”
And lastly, a classic from Prince Humperdinck: “Would you at least consider me as an alternative to suicide?”  

Awesome post of the day

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One of the most amazing things about blogging is that you become part of a community, and as you read other blogs, you realize how much amazing work is being published.  Today, I ran across something I simply have to pass along.

Rebekah from The Virtual Wife is guest posting over at Scary Mommy today, and boy, did she hit it out of the park.  If you’ve ever logged onto Facebook and looked over your Top News feed only to sign out feeling like everyone you know has a better, thinner, more fun life than you could ever imagine, then you need to check out her post.

She calls Facebook the new “Keeping Up With the Joneses.”

So true it’s not even funny.

So get yourselves over to Scary Mommy and read Rebekah’s thorough dissection of Facebook.  Tell them I sent you.

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Here there be dragons

Our yard harbors many things.  Two small tornadoes (um, I mean, children), one spastic yet elderly bichon frise, more ants than I care to count, barred owls, the occasional hawk, a great blue heron, and now … dragons. 
I had no idea we had a dragon until Friday afternoon, when the twins came racing in from the back yard, shrieking, “Mommy, there’s a dragon!”
My immediate response: “Well, what are you doing in here?  Get out there and slay it!”  (You would have said the same thing, right?)
So, with no planning and much intensity, the twins commenced Operation Slay the Dragon.  What they lacked in organization, they made up in imagination.  First, they marched around the yard looking very purposeful.  Then they both picked up sticks, chased the dog for a moment, and then began sword fighting with the sticks, pausing occasionally to yell, “Arrr!”  This prompted my Inner Mommy to start screaming that someone was going to lose an eye.  
(Let me add here that my Inner Mommy is waaaay too uptight, so I shut her up by tweeting about the incident.  I mean really.  What are the actual odds of someone losing an eye?)
The twins tend to lose interest in their imaginary games quickly (see transition from Operation Slay the Dragon to Operation Pirate, supra), so I assumed the dragon would be gone after their afternoon nap.
Instead, the children awoke and ventured into the yard, only to return, screaming, to announce that we now had five dragons.  I sent them back out to slay the beasts, figuring that five dragons should buy me at least half an hour to write or read in peace. 
Silly Mommy.
It took less than a minute for my son came running back into the house, and I made a feeble attempt to shoo him back outside to slay the rapidly multiplying dragons.  “But Mommy!” he screeched.  “These dragons are friendly!  Can we keep them?” 
“I don’t know,” I said, warily.  “How big are they?” 
By this time, his sister was at the door as well.  “Mommy, they’re so cute!” she squealed.  “And they’re red.  And there’s a mommy dragon, and a daddy dragon, and baby dragons!”
And that, dear readers, is how we found ourselves out at our favorite Friday night pizza joint with our two children and three imaginary (red) dragons.  As if we weren’t weird enough.
Neither of my children could be called shy, but my son is particularly outgoing (read: physically incapable of keeping his mouth shut for more than ten seconds).  When our waitress got to the table, the first thing he did was order water.
For his dragon.
I don’t know what triggered it, but in the past month, it’s as if God flipped the switch on my kids’ imaginations from “nonexistent” to “on.”  It’s wonderful to watch them pretending to bake cupcakes out of plastic cups, playing policemen or pirates in the back yard, or carrying around pretend baby animals.  Well, except for the week they carried around imaginary baby crabs, and my son loudly announced to everyone he saw at church, “I got crabs!”
The whole thing reminds me of ancient maps.  When the map reached places uncharted, it was assumed those places were dangerous, and the maps were often marked with the phrase, “Here there be dragons.”  
We are in uncharted waters.  So far things are fun, but I have no idea what’s going to pop up next.  My first thought is that quote from Jaws, “I think we’re going to need a bigger boat.”
My second thought is, “I wonder where I can get one of those ‘Here there be dragons’ signs for the front door?”
Until then, I think I’ll go to bed only after saying the old English prayer my parents always had hanging on their bedroom wall:
“From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggitie beasties, Good Lord deliver us.”

This cannot end well

So, tonight the hubster was preparing the twins’ dinner, and decided they would be dining on meatballs.  
“Yay!  Meatbulbs!” our son shrieked.
“Yes, these,” he said, shaking the frozen lumps of meat into a casserole dish, “are called meatbulbs.”
“Wow,” the twins said in unison.  (Not kidding.  Unison.  The effect is very horror-movie-ish.)
“Yep, they’re meatbulbs.  You know, if you go out in the yard and plant these in the dirt, it’ll grow into a meatball tree!”
“I wanna be a meatball tree!” 
“Me, too!  I a meatball!”
“Maybe someday, when I bigger, I can be a meatball tree.  They’re so pretty…”
So I’m saying this here in a public forum.  When, in about three days, our yard stinks to high heaven and the soil has been gouged into jagged ruts by various rodentia, keep in mind–he started it.  It was the hubster that planted the seed for this sure-to-follow misadventure.
I had nothing to do with it.
And roughly five minutes later….the hubster takes the empty paper towel roll (known in preschool circles as a telescope, fyi) and demonstrates its use as megaphone.  Have I mentioned that our kids are already on the *extraordinarily loud* end of the spectrum?  
Conclusion: the hubster’s ego was inflated overmuch by yesterday’s post.  Situation will be rectified posthaste.