And now for something completely different

I am very disappointed today to find out my representative doesn't even really live in Florida. I think U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler has been a pretty good guy, but when you find out he's listing his in-laws' address and doesn't actually own property in Florida, it just creeps me out.

Apparently, members of Congress have to live in the state they represent. But Wexler really lives in Maryland, outside of D.C., and his children even go to school there. I know many politicians have homes in D.C., where they spend a lot of time because of their job, but they are also supposed to, oh, actually be from the state they're representing. Seems like a no-brainer.

Frankly, I don't want someone from Maryland representing me. If you don't:

- drive on the streets I drive on
- experience the same weather
- know what people are talking about at the mall, Publix or the beach
- get hit with the same property tax and home insurance increases

then how can you be representative of what I'm experiencing as a Florida resident?

Please, politicians, don't turn your job into a virtual-reality game. Get real, and get in the trenches with the people you're representing.

Learning from others' mistakes

For the past couple days, my husband has been extremely interested in the news about the Ft. Lauderdale police chief's wife shooting at the chief. Like, more than any other news story I've ever seen him be interested in. He told me about what he heard on the radio on his drive home. He came home and flipped through the channels on TV. He went online to look for video. This morning, he read the latest in the paper. (News is everywhere, isn't it?)

I think my husband is just taking notes so it doesn't happen to him....

A good deed gone bad

I'm afraid I sounded kind of mean in my post yesterday, even though I am not trying to be mean. Just for the record, I really don't have a reputation as a beyotch. I try to do the right thing, but sometimes I fail horribly, as I did this week.

Let me just say right up front I didn't intend to risk sending a woman to jail.

This is how it happened.

It seems like every week, another church is in the South Florida news for encouraging its members to go out into the community and do something nice for others. Inspired, I wanted to do something nice too -- a deliberate act of kindness.

So when I saw that flower bunches were buy two, get one free at Publix (just how many of my dramas happen at the supermarket?!), I thought I'd spread a bit of cheery love in my little corner of the world. Just call me Little Miss Sunshine and sprinkle some rainbows on top. I got three flower bunches with the idea of giving one bunch to a friend who is stressed out over work, one bunch to my neighbor about to have her third son and one bunch to a random person I passed as I was leaving the store.

As I left Publix with my flowers, I had a bouquet ready to hand to the first woman I passed. While a bagger pushed my son in the shopping cart, I looked for my target recipient. There she was -- a largish woman about my age in shorts and swingy, curly hair.

"I'd like you to have these," I said, extending the bouquet toward her.

"Oh, really?!" she said. "Thank you!"

And I kept walking out the door, following the bagger and my son, feeling like maybe, just maybe, I had made someone's day a bit brighter.

By the time I reached my car in the parking lot, though, the full effect of what I had just done gripped me and nearly gave me a seizure. That woman was going to get to the checkout and claim I gave her the flowers! And the cashier wouldn't believe her! And the woman would either be arrested for shoplifting, or she'd fling the flowers to the side and refuse to pay for them when faced with a suspicious cashier.

Go, me!

I explained the situation to the bagger, who had seen me give the flowers to the woman, and he said he would make sure everyone knew the flowers were paid for. Whew.

Maybe I should leave good deeds up to the more experienced good-deed-doers .... Or is it true it's the thought that counts?

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming

Almost three years ago, I lived through Hurricane Wilma. Most people outside of Florida don't remember Hurricane Wilma because Hurricane Katrina's devastation overshadowed Wilma's. (Most people also don't realize Katrina hit us first in a one-two punch that affected South Florida severely.) After Wilma, we didn't have power for 10 days and my husband lost a week of work. Gas was scarce, lines for generators were long, and only a few people were allowed inside the supermarket at a time (when they finally opened). Trees blocked roads, and there were no working streetlights for a week. I cooked on our grill or propane camp stove, or not at all. The showers were cold, which was miserable even though the days were hot.

I also lived through Hurricane Andrew in 1992. And that was just horrible devastation. Not so much for me, but for many people to the south and many people I knew at school.

Everyone here has interesting hurricane stories, but that really isn't the point of this post -- it's to highlight how to help recent victims of another disaster, the tornadoes in Iowa and Minnesota, as suggested by Iowan Surrender Dorothy.

Seeing images like this


Parkersburg, Iowa

Reminds me a lot of this


Miami-Dade, Florida

And it's just chilling.

Hurricane season starts on Sunday.

Wherein an electrocuted iguana ruins my lunch

The scene: yesterday, in the kitchen. I have just returned home with my son from a fun outing. It's lunch time. No sooner do I set down the diaper bag than the power goes out.

No power means no cooking.

No cooking means a cold lunch.

And you don't want to open the refrigerator too much, because you don't want the warm air to move in. You don't know how long the power will be out.

So I scrounge around and come up with slices of deli turkey and ... um ... I think that was it.

By the time my son declared he was done eating by threatening to fling the remains of his turkey (at least he only threatened this time), the power came back on.

I didn't think anything more about it until I saw this headline today:

Iguana causes power outage for 20,000

So 19,998 other people had a cold lunch too? I'm thinking.

Seems an iguana wandered into a substation and got jolted to death, causing the power outage.

This is one of those times when you shake your head and say, "Only in South Florida."

I am soooo lucky to be broke

I am cracking right the heck up over an article I found in the New York Times about parents and their high-design decor clashing with babyproofing and children in general.

The article highlights several parents who have either given up on their fancy decor or made a compromise. One parent was "distraught" over putting tape around a high-end table, saying, "It transformed this beautiful modernist piece of furniture into a piece you'd find in a '70s rec room." Can't you just hear the tears in his voice? Another parent said she thought she would die when her child carved her name in a cherry dining table just arrived from France. Cha-ching! Still another parent said, "Looking at what the room used to be was the visual equivalent of listening to Bach or Mozart. Now it's the visual equivalent of listening to Barney." Uh, wait -- maybe you are listening to Barney, wafting in from the next room?

Lucky me, I have no idea what it's like to "have a room finally done" or to have a table shipped from France or to put an 18th-century "piece" in storage until the children are older. In my house, there's nothing made with handmade silk or teak. I have no idea what Noguchi is. So I will never experience the distress these parents have.

Heck, when my husband and I bought a sofa from Carl's, we thought we were hot stuff. We thought buying a $300 Pottery Barn chandelier made our room so important. When we had real stone delivered for a patio redo, boy, we were really living it up then.

After reading this article, though, I am just humbled.

But at least you'll never hear me say, as one of the parents in the article did of child-safety gear, "That stuff is just gross. . . . We couldn't bear it. It was too ugly."

Welcome to my world, friend!

You gotta love a place where sharks cause traffic jams

How cool is it that the week I start Tropic of Mom (which has a spiffy new look, no?), the Miami Herald sends me an e-mail saying it has a brand-new online forum for South Florida parents called MomsMiami? Oh, those reporters are good. Too good -- it's like they're going around inside my head! Sorry, reporters -- my boy takes up enough of my mindshare. You'll have to get a scoop somewhere else!

Speaking of the Herald (or the Hrelad if you can't spell), I loved its article about how a shark caused a traffic jam on Lower Matecumbe Key. A fisherman was doing a catch-and-release deal with a lemon shark, and apparently hordes of people driving by just stopped their car on the road to go over and see what he was doing with the nine-footer! Sadly, though, the people trampled some native plants that was a poor Eagle Scout's now-ruined project. If that was my son, I would be so mad!