No, no that. Guess again. Nope. One more time. Aw, c’mon! Read the title of this post! Well, okay, maybe the title of this post gave it away. Yes, it’s a big giveaway! You’re so smart.
I’ve teamed up with 55+ fantastic authors [NOTE: that doesn’t mean we’re all 55+ years old—it means there are more than 55 of us participating] to give away a huge collection of Female Detective Mystery series starters to 2 lucky winners!
Oh, and did I mention the Grand Prize winner gets a BRAND NEW e-reader? 👀You can win my novel The Scarlet Letter Opener, plus other first-in-series mysteries from authors such as Hope Callaghan and Traci Andrighetti.
I’m so excited! My humorous (that’s debatable) fiction (that’s also debatable) work, SECRET AGENT MANNY, is finally available in audiobook form through Audible (that’s not debatable)!
I can’t say enough about my amazing narrator,Janice Wright, whose perfect amount of snark had me laughing at my own book as I listened to each chapter. (And I don’t usually laugh at my own stuff once I’ve published it. By then I’ve nitpicked it into the ground so much that I never want to see it again. Kinda like my ex.)
Janice was a CBS news anchor for a bunch of years, and she even costarred with Tony the Tiger in a national TV spot. (That alone won me over.)
There’s one spot where she has to say “BOING!” (because doesn’t all espionage fiction have the word “BOING!” in it?), and she reads it like a Looney Tunes character: “Boing-oing-oing!” I wasn’t prepared for that. I spit coffee all over my keyboard. It wasn’t pretty. But it was funny. So, you know, be prepared and listen while wearing a bib.
You can even hear a snippet from the book! (I didn’t get to pick which snippet, so it’s a tad random.) And, while you’re there, you can also click around and order the Kindle or print edition. Something for everybody! You’re welcome.
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On Monday (June 22), a HUGE promo/contest begins, but I’m going to save that announcement for, well, Monday. Mondays need something exciting, right?
If you don’t own an Amazon Alexa device yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. That’s an obvious statement, isn’t it? Of course you don’t. You don’t own one.
Or maybe you DO know what you’re missing, and you don’t miss it. Some days I can’t blame you.
We’ve all heard the Tales Beyond the Echo Dot! stories of Alexa laughing maniacally for no reason, or mishearing something you said and asking you to repeat it fourteen times, or ordering twelve dozen packages of Oreo Double-Stufs without your consent. (Okay, in my case, that WAS with my consent, but let’s just skip over that minor detail.)
Some of you purposely don’t own these devices because you’re afraid she’s listening to you 24/7, taking notes on your conversations and reporting them to Homeland Security. (Okay, she IS, but let’s just skip over that minor detail.)
You’re perfectly safe, though. Seriously. Quit laughing. Amazon even has this graphic on the pages of their Echo/Alexa products.
I don’t know how the copywriter got through this description without giggling.
Seriously. Quit laughing.
Here at our house, we currently own five Alexa devices: one tall Echo and four Echo Dots. They’re scattered at strategic points around the house (just don’t ask me why we have one in the bathroom), so she can hear us every time we cough or breathe or think. Wait, no… I mean, so we can get the information we need without having to walk across half the square footage of our large Victorian house. Yeah, that’s what I meant.
Plus, they were on sale.
When you buy one of these smart-alec devices—I mean, smart devices—you envision yourself doing all the cool things they suggest:
“Alexa, what’s the square root of pi?”
“Alexa, translate this phrase from Swahili into Olde English…”
“Alexa, teach me how to install a carburetor in a 1972 Chevette.”
You get the idea. Until the box shows up, you can dream of the things you’ll do together once she arrives…
But then the box shows up. And reality sets in. You’re never going to do any of that stuff.
If you’re me, though, you’ll do at least ONE thing: check the weather. I ask about the weather every single day. Sometimes two or three times in the same day. In fact, asking about the weather comprises about 99% of my interaction with Alexa. The irony is that I never go outside. I just want to know what it would be like out there if I did.
Another 1/2% of my interaction is made up of setting alarms (for waking up at ungodly hours) and timers (for cooking food that I just should have given up on long ago).
That last 1/2% of my interaction with dear ol’ Alexa is made of stuff like this:
“What is a bindle?”
“How much is a first-class postage stamp?”
“What’s the humidity?” (Technically, this is a subset of the weather question, but I ask it separately so it counts here.)
“Play notifications.” (These are notifications of packages Amazon delivered three hours earlier and that I’ve already unpacked and started using.)
“Play music on XYZ station.” (This rarely works on the first try because I haven’t enabled the right skill yet or added on the right music app or whatever. I then give up and default to, “Play ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic,” after which she plays the same five or six songs from the 1980s that I know by heart.)
Oops, I forgot that an Amazon Echo is like playing Simon Says. None of those would work because I forgot to put “Alexa” in the beginning. Because, you know, if you don’t, she totally isn’t listening to you.
If you’re new to the Alexa experience, here are some fun things to try:
“Alexa, tell me a Chuck Norris joke.” (This one really works.)
“Alexa, where the heck is my husband?” (Spoiler alert: The answer is, “Home Depot… He’s always at Home Depot. Stop asking.”)
“Alexa, why can’t I lose weight?” (Cue the maniacal laughter I mentioned earlier.)
“Alexa, does this dress make me look fat?” (If she knows what’s good for her, she’ll remain silent. My husband could learn a trick or two from her.)
“Alexa, what should I do for a headache?” (Her answer is usually, “Let me read you a chapter from ‘Brain Surgery for Dummies.’ The Kindle edition is only $2.99. Would you like to order it?”)
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If you’ve been playing along with our home game, you already know that my husband is an electrical engineer. So, he doesn’t give a rat’s patootie about the weather or how much a stamp costs. He uses his Echo Dot to configure (and endlessly reconfigure) our smart-home devices… mainly light bulbs, which he groups into categories with names I can never remember. So, when I want the living room lamp to come on, all I have to do is say: “Alexa, turn on the living room lamp.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t see a device by that name.”
Maybe I got the syntax wrong. “Alexa, turn on the lamp in the living room.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t see a device by that name.”
Maybe I got one word wrong. “Alexa, turn on the living roomlight.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t see a device…”
“ALEXA, just turn on ANY LAMP IN A 50-FOOT RADIUS OF MY VOICE!”
“I’m sorry, Dave, but…”
“Alexa, I swear, I’m going to throttle Jeff Bezos with my bare hands, smash your little plastic face in with a ball peen hammer, and go buy a Google Assistant!“
Suddenly, every light in the house comes on…
“Alexa, go screw yourself.”
“I’m sorry, but you haven’t enabled that skill yet.”
Last time on “Today I Taught My Parents,” we saw Linda teach her mom how to use a webcam.
This week on “Today I Taught My Parents,” Linda shows her parents that she can carry a jar safely.
After months of nothing more than emails, phone calls, and random Facebook messages (my parents still have a flip phone, so you won’t see a post with me teaching them how to text anytime soon), I finally got to SEE my parents—live and in person!— about a week ago. We defied the Supreme Highness Governor Wolf’s orders when my parents invited me to pick up some takeout and join them for lunch.
They’d wanted to come to my house since the restaurant is closer to me (“It takes twenty minutes to get to our house—the food will be cold!”), but I reminded them that my husband works with hundreds of other snot-nosed math brains at the nuclear power plant, making our house a sort of ground-zero for germs. (Well, perhaps I exaggerate, but you get the point. My parents did too. We wisely opted for their house.)
Of course, when I picked up the takeout order, the food was already waiting for me packed up in a bag. That added five minutes to the ticking clock of food-warmth. Then the cashier rang up the wrong order and had to wait for a manager to zero it out on the cash register so she could start all over and ring it up again. That added another ten minutes. I’d be lucky if this food was even lukewarm by the time I got it out of the restaurant to my car.
I took the shortcut to my parents’ house, up the long and winding Wildwood Road. One lane in each direction. No passing zone. Guess who was in front of me? Some woman driving about ten miles an hour with her blinker on the whole time. After four or five miles of this, I was convinced she was headed to my parents’ house too. But she wasn’t gonna get any of our food, no matter HOW cold it got!
After finally arriving and pretending to hug each other—and reheating my parents’ cold French fries in the microwave (“I told you the food would be cold!”)—we settled in for a yummy and fun lunch and gab-fest that lasted three hours.
As I was getting ready to leave, my mom foisted upon me a quart-sized mason jar of homemade spaghetti sauce concocted by my daughter. They loved her sauce (and so do I!), but it was a tad spicy for their delicate, retired, old-person insides. So they wanted to donate their remaining jar to me. I was glad to take it off their hands. (What else would a devoted daughter do, right?)
But then I caught my mother wrapping the jar in about twelve plastic Walmart bags and stuffing it into an Amazon box.
Here’s a picture of the jar, with salt-and-pepper shakers for scale:
[SPOILER ALERT: This picture was taken after I got home.]
“Mom, what’s with the package?”
“It’s the sauce. So it doesn’t break.”
“Mom, I live a few miles away. I think it’ll make it. Besides, with the pandemic, I have my own collection of Amazon boxes in every size.”
“Well, just to be on the safe side…”
“And, with the pandemic, I can’t use my reusable grocery bags, so I have my own collection of plastic Walmart bags too.”
“Well, just to be on the safe side…”
“I’m pretty sure I can carry one quart-sized jar to the car and then into my house without breaking anything.”
“Just. To. Be. On. The…”
“…Safe side. Yes, I know. Please unwrap it.”
She blinked at me. Twice. It was now officially a standoff.
“Mom, I just turned fifty-nine. I realize I’m not QUITE a grown-up yet, but give me the benefit of the doubt here.”
She stared at me and didn’t move. So, I walked to the counter, took the overwrapped jar out of the Amazon box, and started peeling off the layers of plastic Walmart bags like I was peeling an onion. And just when it started to feel hopeless, I saw glass and, through the glass, spaghetti sauce. Eureka!
I physically hugged each of my parents (like the rebel I am) and headed out to my car.
Score: Linda, 1; Mom, ZILCH. I had won.
Or had I?
While standing my ground against my mom, my dad had been outside putting several empty mason jars into my car to give back to my daughter. I didn’t think much of this gesture until I got home and took out the bag of empty jars.
Each one was wrapped in a half dozen plastic Walmart bags and had several more stuffed down inside them.
