I don’t usually post recipes.  I don’t usually cook, either.  But lately I’ve been on a roll, cooking and NOT burning things.  It’s almost impossible to imagine.  I have had an entire song created for me alone based on a chicken I cremated at fourteen.  Poor chicken.  THIS is not poor chicken, though.  THIS is the best chicken ever.  Have at it and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 Lb chicken breast tenders

1 Tbsp chicken broth

1 med onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced (or just smash the cloves, remove the peel and throw em in.)

1 tsp dried cilantro (or more fresh is better, IMHO)

1 tsp grated fresh ginger (oh, yes, you MUST USE THIS… divine heat from the ginger)

1 tsp freshly grated lemon peel (again, do NOT skip the things with strong flavors or you’ll be sorry.)

1/8 tsp ground cumin  (an eighth of a tsp?  Come on!  Go whole hog all the way to 1/4 or even 1/2, you won’t be sorry.)

Pinch of turmeric (I don’t know who wrote this stingy recipe, but give me a break. Try 1/4 tsp. geez)

1 c light coconut milk w no sugar added (this is a SB recipe, so if you don’t care about added sugar, get any kind of coconut milk)

2 Tbsp macadamia nuts, finely ground (okay, for this, I grabbed my big can of party nuts, picked out ten of what looked to me to be macadamia nuts, ate a few cashews while searching, then I smashed them in a baggie with my meat tenderizer.  how do you grind a nut anyway?)

1 tsp sugar substitute (I use Splenda, but again, if your coconut milk has sugar, bypass this one.)

1/4 tsp ground red pepper (Cayenne.  And 1/2 tsp is good, too.  Or a whole, depending on if you like the roof of your mouth as is.)

1 Tbsp tamarind paste (which NOBODY has unless they grew up cooking curries.  I grew up grilling stuff so I have Worcestershire.  use that instead.  No, really, I looked it up.  That’s the substitution.)

2 tsp water

Chopped scallion for garnish (I used green onions… oooh, boy, did I EVER use green onions!)

Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat.  Add the chicken and cook 5 minutes per side, or until browned and no longer pink in the middle.  Remove chicken to a plate and set aside.

Heat the chicken broth in the same skillet.  Add onion, garlic, cilantro, ginger, lemon peel, cumin, and turmeric and cook for 5 minutes, until the onion is tender, but not browned.  (Like you can tell what color the onion is after you dump the spices in there.  Look, it’s not rocket science, just cook it a few minutes and move on, okay?)

Stir in coconut milk, nuts, sugar substitute (if using), and red pepper.  Return the chicken to the skillet and cover, simmering for 10 minutes.  (Halfway through, flop the chicken over in there so you can get that lovely spice on both sides because we didin’t season the chicken at all before frying, did we?  What kind of a goofy recipe is this anyway?) Remove chicken to a plate (AGAIN) and keep the pan sauce on the burner.

In a small bowl combine the tamarind paste (Worcestershire sauce) and water.  Stir into the sauce in the skillet and gently boil until thickened.  (Three, maybe four minutes, tops.  I was starving, so I didn’t really clock it.)  Pour the sauce over the chicken and garnish each serving with the scallions (green onion!).

That’s it!  I ate mine with a green salad and balsamic dressing and I felt so bad my husband wasn’t home to enjoy it with me.  But now the whole house smells like a Thai food place, so imagine the dreams I’ll have tonight!  Enjoy!

Three weeks ago (yes, I do know how long I haven’t posted, thanks) I mentioned how I’d re-upped my workouts, and that my excess weight was going to have to shift itself off my behind.  Or something like that in words close to those.

I know I’ve told you before how very much I loathe to diet.  The D word doesn’t work in my psychology.  I simply want to fight it and be done and then eat some chocolate cake victoriously.  I live for chocolate cake.  And ice cream.  Gahhhh, ice cream.

So over these last three weeks in which I required more of myself, I was wearing myself out attempting two-a-day workouts, whilst still maintaining the idea that I was probably eating well enough without the diet.

And I lost nothing but a tiny bit of self-esteem.

But I did not give up.  I did kind of rest though, going back to only one-a-day workouts whilst then pondering what other changes would be most beneficial.  I know.  Sometimes I am slower than the short bus itself.

Then, over the course of a couple days I kept seeing references to the South Beach Diet.  Now, I did Atkins years ago and it worked but no way in the world could I go back to that again.  It was too hard to keep up with, I kept craving carbs, and when I finally fell off the wagon, I went whole hog (literally) headfirst into a big pile of all the foods I’d been denying myself the entire time.  So that didn’t work.  But on recommendations from people I like, I felt South Beach might just do it.

So, what did I do?  I panicked.  I was only two and a half weeks away from a week at the beach and the first phase of the diet is two weeks of pretty strict eating.  So I dove in the very next day, which was last Thursday.   The basic premise of the first two weeks of South Beach is to wean you from the bad carbs and sugar.  All the over-processed foods, mostly.  It isn’t bad.  I’ve been eating a lot of white meat chicken, eggs and tomato in the morning, and piles of veggies.  Cheese and nuts for snacks.  And it’s been good.  The only time I get hungry is when I forget to eat my snacks.  They want you to eat frequently and I just don’t do that.  But when I do eat, it isn’t like the low-fat diets.  This food is filling.

And in the last five days, I’ve lost nine pounds.

Those are nine very good reasons to diet.  Especially this diet, which seems to have a rabid following and I’m beginning to see why.  It’s just a different way to make your meals.  Avoiding the over-processed white flour, white sugar, potatoes, white rice, etc, causes people to be creative in their food prep.  This morning, because I was tired to death of eating eggs for breakfast, I tried a recipe for ricotta and egg “muffins” that is wonderful.

The whole reason my old diets would fail is that I would miss my comfort food mainstays so badly.  Well apparently, diets have changed somewhat since the last time I tried Atkins.  The cookbooks I bought for South Beach are full of good-sounding and simple foods.  There’s even a good idea for pastries in a later phase.  I also stumbled upon a recipe for brownies made from white beans I can’t wait to try.  Apparently, they actually taste like brownies.  What is the world coming to when beans taste like brownies?

When the first two weeks are up, I can start adding in the carbs I’m missing most.  Maybe have a good chunk of whole grain bread each day, or a couple pieces of fruit.  As long as the weight keeps coming off, you have a wide array of choices, and if the weight loss should slow down, you just go back to Phase one for a few days and get going again.

So, maybe the D word isn’t such a swear after all, anymore.  Maybe this DIET is different.  And in conjunction with my (almost) daily workouts, it ought to get me where I want to go.  I figure it’ll take at least twenty-five weeks to take off the fifty pounds, which puts us into mid-February.  And I’ll do my best through Thanksgiving and Christmas to keep sensible and eat my own goodies, which won’t be as bad as others.  So, giving myself a bit of leeway, By the end of March, I should be at the end of that fifty pounds.

We’ll see.  But those first nine have already come off, and they’re not coming back on this time!

Today I got on the scales and realized I am twenty pounds heavier than I was this time last year.  Twenty pounds.  It’s a lot.  It’s so much that I walked around in something of a daze this morning, trying not to want to eat breakfast.  But I did.

Then I tried to force myself to workout.  And I didn’t.

I think you may begin to see where my twenty pounds came from.

Last November, when I decided to throw my brain a curveball and stop taking my medicine, it seemed like a really good idea.  I was doing great, happy and still working out, my diet has been mostly good for long enough that I don’t worry overmuch about it.  Then, I got the bright idea to step up my workout.  And damaged my knees.  Both of them.  Lucky for me, it wasn’t serious damage, but it turned into three full weeks of no work outs.

I’m a creature of habit and getting into the habit of sitting is suuuuuuper easy for me.  Much, much easier than getting back into the habit of working out.  Three weeks turned into four, which turned into six, which turned into two months of sloth.  Long days when I would tell myself I’d do something active — anything! I have dogs I could walk, it isn’t hard! — and then, just not do it.   But a twenty pound weight gain is, well, significant.  So, what to do?

Today I took charge of my lazy self and decided to require more from me for me.  Look, most women can go whole hog when it comes to their kids, their husbands, their house, their jobs, staying up late and abandoning their own personal grooming in order to get done whatever it is that someone else requires of them.  We don’t tend to do this for ourselves.  So I worked my fingers to the bone on my day job and when it was time for a good break, I trotted upstairs to my sad, dusty, abandoned elliptical machine.

Back a couple months ago when I hurt my knees, I had decided I was bored with the elliptical and needed to step it up a little.  But after two months away, that thing kicked my butt.  I had a level one resistance going (which is sad) and had to face the fact that I  wasn’t going to be able to do more than that today.  But I set a goal of two miles and I talked myself into doing the two miles.  I got off that thing to turn the ceiling fan on, to get more water, to find a book, and it took me a solid forty minutes to go the two miles, but I did them.  And then, just to be stubborn at myself, I did a little bit more.

When I got off the elliptical, I did strength training on my legs and arms, doing more reps with a heavier weight than I used to.  I’m going to be a little sore tomorrow, but if you can feel it, you know it’s working.  By the time I got to my stretches, I was feeling the endorphins.  That’s what I’ve been missing in my life: endorphins.   By requiring more of myself, I got my endorphin rush back.

Tomorrow, I’m going to require myself to do two miles again.  Maybe to do two-a-day workouts again three days a week.  I recall that being a pretty successful routine to trim some fat off.  Whatever I can make work, I will do, but the idea of requiring more from myself is new somehow and seems to have some magic to it.  Magic doesn’t come along every day.  I will not sniff at this magic, I’ll just take it for the gift it is and hang on tight to the idea that if I do more, I’ll get more back in results.

Sometimes I’m a little slow.  I think I may possibly have mentioned that before.  In dealing with authors, I love to find a new one.  A new author with an amazing debut book is my second most favorite thing.

In this instance, what I’ve found is my FIRST favorite thing: an author I’ve managed never to read before who also has a backlist!  Meaning, this first book I picked up out of the clear blue sky was so great and NOW I see there are others to read as well!  Jubilee!

This is how I can convince myself that I’m not out of touch by missing some solid gems for extended periods of time.  Enough time for four, eighteen, or more than twenty-five books to be available to me to read.  In other words, boy did I miss these people for a long, long time.

How authors fly under my personal radar for so long, years and years sometimes, I have no idea.  And if I were them, I’d feel a bit snitty about it, too.  I really would.

But let’s see what I can do to help them along for you now that I know they exist and am enraptured by their talent.

Barbara O’Neal

I just read The Secret of Everything. Wow. What a feel-good piece of women’s fiction.  It was bright, witty, evocative with lots of foods and geographical details since the main character hikes for a living.  Barbara uses emotion in her stories as we all do in real life:  both as a crashing inconvenience and a necessity of the heart.   She’s published for years as Barbara Samuel and I have read and loved her Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue and Lady Luck’s Map of Vegas. When I picked up The Secret of Everything I didn’t realize she was the same author.  Now I have her enormous backlist  of books, at least twenty-five at my best count, to buy and to horde and to dole out to myself on rainy days.

Jodi Picoult

Okay, fact is, I avoided Jodi Picoult simply because I had a notion her books are depressing. Guess what? I was right.  And yet, good lord, she’s fantastic with it. So fantastic I couldn’t put the damn book down once I got started on it.  The one I started with was, arguably her most popular of the last few years, My Sister’s Keeper, a book about a girl who files a lawsuit to stop her parents from making her donate her kidney to her dying older sister.

Look, I do not like a novel fraught with emotional carnage and horror.  I am a reader and writer of romance.  I love me some horror novels, ala Stephen King (he’s the man, in case you are even worse than I am and somehow unaware of him.) but emotional horror, not so much.  That’s what I was afraid Jodi’s books were going to be.  And I can’t tell you how sheepish I feel now for avoiding them for so long.  She’s got about eighteen books for me to scrounge up and gobble down, one by one, and I’m looking forward to every kidnapping victim, every death row heart transplant, every wrongly-accused soccer coach.

Joshilyn Jackson

I picked up Gods in Alabama at my very favorite used book store because I was standing in front of the Southern Writer’s section while my boy was annoying me to buy him Guitar Hero.  Hello?  It’s not even a book.  I was unamused with him and with the back cover copy of Gods, yet I put that book on my stack anyway.  And boy, was I glad I did.  Gods is Joshilyn’s debut novel and I got sucked in, could not put it down, then re-read it as soon as I closed it the first time, astounded how it actually turned out.

I don’t usually go into a book trying to figure out the mystery (if there is one) but I’m not often so bowled over by my incredible wrongheadedness, either.  And upon reading it through the second time, to see how she did it, how she got that structure so beautifully twisted, I figured it out.  Joshilyn is just magic.  That’s all.

In picking up her backlist, I have so far also read Between, Georgia, and have just begun The Girl Who Stopped Swimming. Crazily enough, her books keep getting better.   Backseat Saints has just been released and I’ll be all over it my next trip out to the bookstore.

Share with me, if you will, books you’ve loved, late in the game.  Make me feel a little better, please, about missing out on things others have previously made New York Times bestsellers while you were totally oblivious, reading something else.  And if you pick up anything I’ve recommended, don’t forget to let me know what you think!

Gardening is tough over the hot summer months.  When spring first breaks and you can’t wait for the ground to warm enough to start planting, that’s the romance of the garden.  Then the dirt is ready, the plants go in, and trouble begins.

Six weeks later, you’re sweating buckets and cursing yourself for not using enough mulch to keep out all the weeds.  And if anyone knows how much is “enough mulch to keep out weeds,” please let me in on that little secret, would ya?

Along with the heat and the weeding comes drought.  A couple years back, we had the worst drought season I’d ever seen. No watering allowed without special permits. Neighbors were watching each other like hawks, and a fresh green lawn stood out like a sore thumb, inviting derision and ticketing. This year looks like nothing that drastic, but it’s a chore to drag the hoses out every other day, watering deeply enough to encourage root growth while not encouraging water run-off.

Or maybe watering isn’t your problem, but too much sun. Or too much shade. Or too little fertilizer, or fertilizer burn.

Basically, as soon as things really begin to grow, that’s when it all goes sideways for me.  My hostas are not big enough (need to move them from the deeper shade to the dappled shade).  The daylilies aren’t in enough sun, though some that are in full sun have burnt and stopped blooming.  The hydrangea is sulky in too much sun and needs an extra can of water daily.  The bleeding heart didn’t do as well as I would have liked, but do I move their locations due to lighting or do I not give them as much water when they stretch out again in fall?  Who knows?

It’s all a guessing game, isn’t it?  Because all the research you do, from the notations on the seed packets, on the plant stakes, on the little internet doesn’t begin to cover what happens in your own yard or garden.  Four hours of sun is very different depending on what time of day that sunlight is hitting the plant.  For my vintage yellow tomatoes in the front garden, it’s either way too much heat from the sun, or not enough light from it.  They’re so small and sulky, I can’t even tell why they’re not growing, only that they’re not.

The pansies are frying too close to the driveway, but if I give them enough water, I think they’ll hang tight there, producing through fall.  Though, I have to wonder if I moved them back closer to the sheltering bushes, would they do even better, with less water? I bet they would and I may just move them come September, if they can hang tight that long.

Again, it’s all a game, one you play by moving those plants and tending them until they find their proper homes. But once they are settled and happy, imagine the happy blooms you’ll have. And it’s that holy grail that keeps me imagining and planning and guessing.

Fresh food.

Is there anything better than summertime food? Plucked right off the vine and eaten with no more than a wash and a wipe, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers are summery heaven in your own back yard.

And if you got enraptured by flowers at the garden center and neglected to plant all the veggies you now want to eat (Don’t feel bad. I did it, too.) you just head right on down to the farmers’ market and load up there.

For lunch the other day, I made a simple leafless salad of tomato, cucumber, black olives, and sweet Vidalia onion with only a drizzle of red wine vinegar to put me right with the world.

For dinner, since I was alone and no one would complain about “leftovers”, I had the same again with only the addition of chicken and some cooked zucchini and yellow squash. Again, it’s heaven.

Summer eating is the exact opposite of winter eating. While during the winter all you want is sugars and fats to keep your furnace burning, in the summertime, I can stuff myself all day long with fresh veg.

I hope you’re all enjoying your summer garden as much as I am. And if you keep planning and planting now, your summer garden can last long after the first fall frosts. But more on that later. For now, just enjoy the reddest tomatoes, the purplest eggplant, and the pepperiest peppers and relax into summer eating.

Dismantled by Jennifer McMahon.  I just finished it this morning, read it straight through in a couple days, only putting it down when there were other people around, you know, asking me to live my life.

Everyone has had a friend who changed them, a friend they maybe shouldn’t have hung out with, a friend who did things they knew better than to follow.  Take a group of friends, with one standout as the leader and what happens?  You know what happens.  And to this particular group, more than just a little trouble and chaos happened.

Nine years later, the group long dismantled, two of the key players’ marriage is falling apart, but their nine year-0ld daughter inadvertently stirs the pot, bringing her parents’ lives full circle as they are now forced to face their past.

This book moves like the wind.  More specifically, like the wind in a forest of loblollly trees, twisting and turning and circling back on itself and shaking all the little leaves around in the process.  By the time I got to the end, I was so clearly in love with the nine year-old girl at its center I found myself reading slower, upset to break contact with her at the last page.

Dismantled is a mystery (wrapped in an enigma, ha) but it develops more like a horror story, each new detail layering into the creep-factor until you find yourself sitting in a nest of your pillows in bed with every hair on your arm standing on end and unable to go to sleep until you figure out what in the world is going on here!!!

Or maybe that was just me.  But I bet it wasn’t.  Buy this one for yourself and find out!

What happens when ten adults take out two pontoon boats further loaded with many children into the middle of Smith Mountain Lake on a sunny summer day in Virginia?

Before I answer that question let me tell you this:  pontoon boats are fun.  We are looking around here to see where we might rent one ourselves in the near future.  Also fun?  Family.  Lots and lots of cousins are fun.  Lots of food eaten on a boat in the middle of the lake is also fun.

The cousins kids, all eleven of them, if I’m counting right and including my own, were fun.  Tiny versions of the monsters we all grow up to be ourselves, and isn’t it funny to watch once we realize that?

So the family reunion was good.  Sitting up late and talking around a campfire, eating good food, singing with the guitars and listening to my sweetheart play and sing is always fun.  Actually, the best I found was when he and the boy were playing and singing together, the keyboard and guitar and their voices blending nicely on Mad World, a song which isn’t really what you’d think of when  you imagine sitting around the campfire singing songs.

But back to the boats.  Two pontoon boats, loaded with kids and adults and coolers of food and drink, motoring out onto the lake on a sunny, summer day in June.  The day was gorgeous and as the two boats raced each other down the main stretch of the lake, I spent some time imagining living in one of the enormous lakeside homes, complete with a dock and a sundeck, a speed boat, a Sea Do, and a kayak, for my many varied moods.  I lived pretty happily in that world for about twenty minutes or so.

The boats pulled into a cove with no other traffic already anchored into it, and we puttered around a little, trying to get a good position between us so we could swim and hang out.  Three or four of the kids got into the water to swim.  One of the cousins, who had ahold of her baby, swam for a few minutes.  We ate hotdogs and basked in the sunshine.  I couldn’t wait to get into the water.

Then –

Raindrops.  Big ones.

We all looked up, puzzled, at the sky.  Clouds were rolling in, what appeared to be tanker truck-like clouds, filled in with gray but light around the edges.  Oh, well, a little rain won’t hurt.  It blew in fast enough; it will blow back out soon, too.

Everyone back on the boats and get under the canvas on the end.

At which point, the heavens erupted.  The sky blackened.  The wind tore through the cove and our boats were lambasted from side to side.  Kids shrieked, the cousins shouted to each other, all of us huddled under the paltry canvases stretched over one end of the pontoons.

The rain hardened.

Winds blew rain onto us in sheets.  We couldn’t see across the cove.  The drivers of the two pontoon boats separated and made for docks, ours tying up at a single-family dock that appeared deserted that day.  We all climbed out of the boat, onto the dock, huddling in the minimal shelter offered there beneath the eaves and watched the storm rage and calm.  We stood there for thirty to forty minutes before the lake flattened out again, the raindrops turned from needles to harmless drips, and the wind gentled its lashing.

Back in the boat, each of us soaked to the skin whether we’d been swimming previously or not, we saw our second boat looking for us.  We tied up together again, laughing in that relieved way that all our children were fine, that we’d survived the sudden hurricane-type weather.  I’m not mentioning names here, but apparently one of the cousins (the driver of the other boat) in trying to tie up to shore during the worst of it, had panicked and instructed his sister to swim the anchor to shore to tie it up.  Obviously, she did not.  But she did laugh about him thinking she could have.

We floated there for a few minutes and discussed staying to swim now that we were all wet anyway and the storm was over anyway, but some of the smaller children (and a couple more shaken adults) had other ideas about that.  So we headed back up the lake.   And it was good that we did because that storm was rolling up the lake behind us, chasing the boat almost.  We’d get out from under it and then there’d be a few more raindrops, warning us to keep it moving.

With the boats returned and unloaded of all kids and coolers and towels and stuff, I stood on the docks with Candy (the one who refused to attempt to swim with the anchor to ensure the safety of her family, the slacker….) and she shook her head at me, eyes wide with wonder.  “They said only a twenty percent chance of storms today,” she told me and I giggled.

Two rented pontoon boats, eleven kids, nine adults, two coolers, many lifejackets, thirty minutes of fun and forty-five minutes of terror.  Just so you know, a twenty percent chance of storms is no joke in the middle of a lake!  But it sure was an experience.

My site was taken over by hackers.  It’s a brutal experience, like an assault.  Except my assault fell over a few days when so much was happening here at home that I didn’t even notice the assault for days.  Days.

Which is mortifying in and of itself.

I’m a professional.  And yet, I’m not.  I have no funds to professionally produce this blog.  It’s all coming from my enthusiasm and hard work and a dream that one day I’ll have books to sell.  Lots of books, and I’ll want to sell them to you!  In the meantime, you are my audience, and this is the best I can manage.  So, sorry about the slip in security.  I’m trying to seal the gaps.

Thanks for sticking with me.  Only good things to come from here!

We all love a good fortune cookie.  That yummy almond crunch is the perfect end to Chinese take-out.  And the fortunes themselves are fun when read one by one around the room, sometimes leading to sage nodding all around and other times ending in hilarity.

Last Sunday night, after a nine hour drive back from Nashville and trying to get home before Lost came on TV, the boy and I dashed into the Chinese place for take out.    The resultant meal was delicious, the entertainment on TV even better, but the cookies got short shrift that night as I ate an extra rangoon instead and left my cookie lying on the counter.

The boy, however, ate his cookie.  I know because when I came downstairs Monday morning, his fortune was stuck front and center to the fridge door.  In my groggy trying-t0-make-the-coffee kind of way, I paid it no mind, only realizing once my mug was in hand that he’d never before hung his fortune on the fridge like that.   So I went to check it out.

Seems people like to give advise, but not listening to their own.

Okay, a few points here.  One, the Chinese are hilarious.  These cookies no longer even sound like Confucius.  Which is  a rip-off.   The language here sounds like Jim Bob Lee, multi-generational American of perhaps some long-ago Asian descent who is writing fortune cookie wisdom rather than paying attention during his senior English class in high school.

Two, and more important:  obviously my boy thinks I’m a hypocrite.

What constitutes a hypocrite in this day and age?  If you need a brush-up, here’s the Webster’s:

Oh, yeah, this sounds just like me.  Well, maybe not really.  In fact, perhaps not much at all, since I’m not one to hide who I am from anyone.

But I believe what he’s getting at is all the times his dad and I have to tell him NO to things we’ve both done ourselves in the past.  Or when we have to punish him for doing things either of us may have gotten away with in our earlier years.  In his mind, WE got to do it and WE turned out just fine, so how come  HE must be held to a higher standard?  Unfair, unfair!

Sigh.

Is it true his dad and I did some things we shouldn’t have and got away with them?  If you don’t count hangovers as punishment, yep, it’s true.  Is it true we don’t let our boy do things we ourselves were allowed to do at his age?  Yep, that’s also true.  Here in the days of cell phones and email, it’s ever so much easier to check with the boy’s friends’ mothers to be sure the boys are actually going where they tell us they’re going.  Had our folks availed themselves of all available technology back in the day, we still would have had mighty big windows of opportunity in which to perpetuate our schemes of misdirection.

So as far as I’m concerned, that’s not hypocritical, that’s us being able to cotton on to his wily schemes faster than our own folks were able to.  That’s just bad luck on his part, and I am only too happy to take advantage of it.

Third, and finally, parenting comes with a level of hypocrisy built right in.  At one point, which of us grown-up, civil, responsible human beings were not ourselves teenagers?  We all go through that unrelenting stage of stupid behavior.  We all make stupid choices (to one degree or another) during that phase.  I would have a hard time believing anyone, anywhere who would claim otherwise.   But once we goofballs who lived through our teen years actually begin parenting teenagers ourselves, we’d be lax in the extreme to try to parent without the hypocrisy.

[pair-uhnt, par-]–noun 1. a father or a mother. 2.  a protector or guardian.

Listen to yourself more often.