Stacey Gustafson – Guest Blogger

Author and good friend, Stacey Gustafson, is guest blogger today! She shares an excerpt from her latest hilarious book, Are You Still Kidding Me. Scheduled for release on September 18, it is currently available for pre-order on Amazon for $.99.    https://amzn.to/2uPeqZX

I Netflix Cheated on My Husband

I tried ways to end my deception, but nothing worked. To protect my indiscretion, I routinely deleted my Internet browser history, shredded phone bills and swore my friends to secrecy. I Netflix cheated on my husband.

How did this begin you ask? I blame it on the old-fashioned dinner-and-a-movie routine. Our choices had boiled down to The Lego Batman Movie and Fifty Shades Darker. Why were we wasting our money on this crap? So, we traded a night out for a night in.

            It all started so innocently.

Cable television options are limitless. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, the list goes on. No need to go to the theater when you can indulge in more than fifty hours, or five seasons of thirteen episodes. Intriguing shows like Shooter, Stranger Things, Dexter, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and House of Cards sucked us in faster than a fur ball to a Dust Buster.

            Netflix, where’ve you been my whole life?

We clicked through cable channels and realized we’d only scraped the surface of the Netflix barrel.

The Princess and the Placeholder

My brother thinks he’s a writer. Gary got the notion after receiving positive feedback for his letters to the editor of a hot rod magazine. Now his favorite line is, “I can’t not write.” Whatever.

You see, I am a writer, and he knows this. I’ve taken countless creative writing courses, entered contests too numerous to mention, placed respectably in a few, and have indeed been paid for my work.

Gary has had his nose in one auto monthly or another for as long as I can remember. But I’ll bet he’s still more entertained by the pictures of all the pretty cars painted in crayon box colors, with shiny chrome blowers protruding from flame-striped hoods, than he is in the actual articles.

Confessions of a Germaphobe

It’s that time of year again – when strangers indiscriminately share their most intimate bodily organisms. That’s right. I’m talking about flu season. Germs are everywhere. Name a surface, the pesky little microbes have taken up residence.

When I visit the guest bath at friends’ homes this time of year, will I be greeted with a fresh, germ-free stack of single-use paper guest towels decorated with festive shamrocks and leprechauns? Or am I expected to dry my hands on a damp terry cloth rag hanging askew from a hoop on the wall above the toilet? How many before me simply ran the tap over their bacteria-ridden fingers before wiping them on the nasty fabric? Yes, I will judge you.

Salad Daze

My primary role during holiday food prep is to stay out of the way. Jerry does most of the cooking – OK all the cooking. Once, a few years back I got inspired to whip up a batch of homemade cranberry sauce. But just that one year. It seemed like a lot of work when an equally satisfying version is available on the shelf of any grocery, pharmacy, or dollar store this time of year. Since then, my list of duties includes setting the table, and scouring the cupboards in search of the gravy boats that we use twice a year. We never manage to store them in the same place during the frenzy of post-holiday hazmat cleanup.

That’s why the hubs’ request to make green salad shocked me. Indeed it sounded more like a command.

“And you’ll make the green salad.”

Wha- what?

Living the ’60s – Survival of the Fittest

I watched an interview with Sully co-star, Aaron Eckhart. He’s working on a movie based on his mother’s memoir about her hardscrabble life growing up on the Montana plains. It got me thinking about my memoir and whether my daughter would appreciate the grueling torment that embodied growing up in the ’60s in the unforgiving San Francisco suburbs.

• Hygiene horror. The one and only bathroom option in our cracker box domicile consisted of an indoor toilet, small wash basin, and a tub. Sparse at best. That’s right. One lavatory for five people. Oh, the humanity. When dad had to go, he grabbed the sports section of the Oakland Tribune and announced his intentions to the rest of us. His attempt to fend off the requisite pounding of the door and caterwauling of my older brothers and me to “Hurry up!” was, alas, futile. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the 19^th century claw-foot tub had – wait for it – no jets. Imagine wallowing in flat, motionless, non-jetting water. Oh sure, we had bubble bath, a pathetic substitute for a frothy whirling whirlpool.