Word of the Day: Exposure

My daughter and I made a brief appearance on local cable television. Here’s a bit of advice. Never go on television with your teenage daughter to talk about sex. Just don’t do it. Even if it’s just a little local station. Even if you just wrote a humorous book on parenting and think that  a few seconds of publicity might sell some books.  Resist.

<code The Public Square – Teens and Sex from Josh Lobel on Vimeo.>

Word of the Day: Wing

“I have to make something for my “Chefs” final,” Lewis said.

I remember when they called it Home Economics. I made Snickerdoodles. I got a “D.”

Lewis wanted to make Buffalo chicken wings for his final project – “but without the blue cheese dressing and celery sticks,” he explained. “Just the chicken.”

We found a recipe that called for four ingredients and no frying. “Can you put them in the marinade? I’m supposed to make a poster for the project,” Lewis said.

So, I mixed together vinegar, tabasco and oil and put the wings into a zip lock bag to thaw and marinate while Lewis downloaded pictures of chicken wings, printed out the recipe and experimented with fonts and ink colors.

After an hour, I hollered upstairs .”Hey, Lew! The wings are ready to go into the oven.”

“Can you put ’em in for me?” Lewis shouted over the noise of the printer, “I’m busy right now.”

So I slid the marinated wings onto a cookie sheet and popped them into the oven (400 degrees for 20 minutes). Lewis finished the poster and went downstairs to play XBox.

Twenty minutes later, I ventured into the playroom. “The wings are ready,” I said. “Come take them out of the oven and put on the sauce.

“I will in a minute, ” Lewis said, his eyes never leaving the screen. “Be right there.”

I went upstairs. The wings smelled terrific.

“Lew!,” I called again.

“Coming!” he said.

I waited for 15 minutes, then took the well-done wings out of the oven, tossed them with hot sauce and tried one. Delicious. I ate another – just to be sure. Yep, they were good.

Maybe I’ll get a better grade on these than I did on the Snickerdoodles.

Word of the Day: Stuck

Why are these tiny ships defying gravity?

Because they were on a shelf in my son Nathan’s room. He went away to college and left the little Mayflower and the Cutty Sark on the shelf with a lollypop that had a real scorpion imbedded inside.

The lollypop melted (it must be global warming) and formed a bond so strong that the folks at NASA might want to take note. Freed from its sucrose cell, the actual scorpion corpse (visible just off the starboard side of the Cutty Sark) remained intact.

Ordinarily, I would have just let it sit there gathering dust for another decade or so, but Lewis and Nathan were switching rooms and that meant that the shelves had to come down, the walls had to be spackled and painted, the furniture needed to be dismantled and schlepped back and forth across the hallway, the closets had to be cleaned out and all scorpions were evicted. I brought the shelf with the gravity-defying vessels out to the curb and in 10 minutes a car pulled up and a guy jumped out and put the shelves, the model ships and the scorpion into his car. Maybe he was from NASA.