"If the women don't find you handsome..."

He actually said that when I happened upon this.

"If the women don't find you handsome..."

We had to carefully and judiciously edit the photos 'cause it's against his company's policy to have their logo associated with asinine behavior.

Yes, that is a wet/dry vacuum dangling 30 feet up.

"...they should at least find you handy." --  Red Green

Happy Labor Day everyone!

Beautiful Children's Books

Once upon a time, a long time ago, one of my Utah neighbors wrote a book and her husband illustrated it and it was beautiful. It was a fanciful little tale of Fanny (another neighbor sat as the model) whose fairy godmother always showed up late. So while she waited, Fanny was talked into marrying Heber and she set about making a life. When the Godmother finally showed, Fanny had to decide whether to leave Heber and her little boys to go live her dream.

I won't spoil the ending, but to hear my neighbor retell the signing with the publisher, she said that one of the editors at Dial books in New York recommended a total rewrite--with the opposite ending, because one should always live one's dream.

My neighbors were Caralyn and Mark Buehner and now they have a website. Visit their site for me as a favor so their blog will begin to move up the list on google. (hits means placement).

Buehnerbooks.com P.S. Scholastic published a book of top illustrators for children's books and Mark was on the list!! WOW! I just checked it into my school's library. Another famous Mormon, cool huh?

Their other books are wonderful too, but my little girl was raised on the reality of this fairy tale and it's one of our favorite.

Max the Taxi Dog, Escape of Marvin the Ape, Balloon Farm are some of our favorites. Snowmen at Night is about our neighborhood in Salt Lake and the neighbors who would go out at night and move people's snowmen around. Look for them at the Library.

These books have some of the most entertaining illustrations I've ever seen in children books and the dialog teaches great values. Oh, PS, there are spotters on every page for the kids to search for.

Chim, chimminey, chim chimminey, achoo!

Ian is so handy around the house, and on the house. This was his job this summer and he did it marvelously.

Who knew that chimney sweeps really got that dirty--completely unintentionally.

Darcey Push Mowers - Summer 2010

Darcey Boys idea of push mowing:

Farewell Ian

We were at a party and while leaving, we noticed a foreclosure house next door and went by to snoop. Aidan said, "Why are you looking at that? Are we moving now that Ian's leaving for college?"

Ian responded, "Yeah, they're moving, cause you've been bad, to someplace with a really, really small, nasty room just for you."

Aidan shot back, "Like a dorm?"

Ah, I'll miss the witty reparte between those two!

College Guy

Farewell Tulsa photo.

Dia packed the van to bursting and it took three days to move her into her dorm. No so for a guy. Ian's done in a day of packing and into his dorm in 15 minutes. Which is good, because we have to go clean Dia's dorm. It takes two days to clean it!!!!!

Women's Conference

Last speaker, first day, I giggled 'til I split.
The Ugly Truth About Beauty
by Dave Barry

If you're a man, at some point a woman will ask you how she looks.

"How do I look?" she'll ask.

You must be careful how you answer this question. The best technique is to form an honest yet sensitive opinion, then collapse on the floor with some kind of fatal seizure. Trust me, this is the easiest way out. Because you will never come up with the right answer.

The problem is that women generally do not think of their looks in the same way that men do. Most men form an opinion of how they look in the seventh grade, and they stick to it for the rest of their lives. Some men form the opinion that they are irresistible stud muffins, and they do not change this opinion even when their faces sag and their noses bloat to the size of eggplants and their eyebrows grow together to form what appears to be a giant forehead-dwelling tropical caterpillar.

Most men, I believe, think of themselves as average-looking. Men will think this even if their faces cause heart failure in cattle at a range of 300 yards. Being average does not bother them; average is fine for men. This is why men never ask anybody how they look. Their primary form of beauty care is to shave themselves, which is essentially the same form of beauty care that they give to their lawns. If, at the end of his four-minute daily beauty regimen, a man has managed to wipe most of the shaving cream out of his hair and is not bleeding too badly, he feels that he has done all he can, so he stops thinking about his appearance and devotes his mind to more critical issues, such as the Super Bowl.

Women do not look at themselves this way. If I had to express, in three words, what most women think about their appearance, those words would be: "not good enough." No matter how attractive a woman may appear to others, when she looks at herself in the mirror, she thinks, "woof." She thinks that at any moment a municipal animal-control officer is going to throw a net over her and haul her off to the shelter.

Why do women have such low self-esteem? There are many complex psychological and societal reasons, by which I mean "Barbie." Girls grow up playing with a doll proportioned such that, if it were human, it would be seven feet tall and weigh 81 pounds, of which 53 pounds would be bosoms. This is a difficult appearance standard to live up to, especially when you contrast it with the standard set for little boys by their dolls . . . excuse me, by their action figures. Most of the action figures that my son played with when he was little were hideous looking. For example, he was fond of an action figure (part of the He-Man series) called "Buzz-Off," who was part human, part flying insect. Buzz-Off was not a looker. But he was extremely self-confident. You could not imagine Buzz-Off saying to the other action figures, "Do you think these wings makes my hips look big?"

But women grow up thinking they need to look like Barbie, which for most women is impossible, although there is a multibillion-dollar beauty industry devoted to convincing women that they must try. I once saw an Oprah show wherein supermodel Cindy Crawford dispensed makeup tips to the studio audience. Cindy had all these middle-aged women apply beauty products to their faces; she stressed how important it was to apply them in a certain way, using the tips of their fingers. All the women dutifully did this, even though it was obvious to any sane observer that no matter how carefully they applied these products, they would never look remotely like Cindy Crawford, who is some kind of genetic mutation.

I'm not saying that men are superior. I'm just saying that you're not going to get a group of middle-aged men to sit in a room and apply cosmetics to themselves under the instruction of Brad Pitt, in hopes of looking more like him. Men would realize that this task was pointless and demeaning. They would find some way to bolster their self-esteem that did not require looking like Brad Pitt. They would say to Brad, "Oh YEAH? Well what do you know about LAWN CARE, pretty boy?"

Of course many women will argue that the reason they become obsessed with trying to look like Cindy Crawford is that men, being as shallow as a drop of spit, WANT women to look that way. To which I have two responses:

1. Hey, just because WE'RE idiots, that does not mean YOU have to be; and

2. Men don't even notice 97 percent of the beauty efforts you make anyway. Take fingernails. The average woman spends 5,000 hours per year worrying about her fingernails; I have never once, in more than 40 years of listening to men talk about women, heard a man say, "She has a nice set of fingernails!" Many men would not notice if a woman had upward of four hands.

Anyway, to get back to my original point: If you're a man, and a woman asks you how she looks, you're in big trouble. Obviously, you can't say she looks bad. But you also can't say that she looks great, because she'll think you're lying, because she has spent countless hours, with the help of the multibillion-dollar beauty industry, obsessing about the differences between herself and Cindy Crawford. Also, she suspects that you're not qualified to judge anybody's appearance. This is because you have shaving cream in your hair.