Ever since I was a child and first saw the after-school creature features on Channel 61 interrupted by a Pert Plus commercial, I have been a shampoo addict.

It’s an impulse I’ve never been able to control. I can scoff at the lies politicians, diet plans, and car salesmen tell, but I’m an absolute sucker when it comes to the empty promises of coconut-scented shampoo peddlers. When I was younger, my allowance was saved up for Twinkies and Tootsie Rolls. By the time I was twelve, I was saving my babysitting money for bottles of Aussie Megashampoo with Papaya. When I was old enough to get a job after school at the local pharmacy, one of my managers recognized my addiction immediately. That clever bastard used to have me straighten and restock the shampoo aisle every payday—and every payday, I’d spend half of my earnings on that aisle.

I don’t know why this addiction continues to plague me. I’ve tried all sorts of products—from hot oil treatments to curl revitalizers, split end repair kits and volume boosters—and not one of them has ever given me the wavy, silky locks that bounce and shine merrily on the crowns of models in the Herbal Essences commercials. So why do I continue to waste money on these products? Can’t I just use the cheap V05 stuff and be done with it?
Perhaps I’d let it go if I hadn’t seen these beautiful waves, whispered of in the Pantene halls and magical Garnier springs, in person.

Unlike unicorns and werewolves, I’ve encountered these glossy locks promised by Paul Mitchell and Bed Head out in the wild. Maybe you could argue that Helen at American Ambulance was an anomaly of nature, a woman blessed with naturally luxurious hair through a rare mix of good genes and luck, a genetic jackpot never to be seen again. But then I met Catherine at MetLife, and she had the same silky, bouncy waves. This was no fairytale: both of these real-life women have hair fit for a superheroine. It was all the proof I needed: perfect hair does exist, and it is obtainable.

So I continue to seek magic in a bottle like a crazy woman on the hunt for a genie. I’ve managed to make my hair flat, sticky, frizzy, dry, and on a few occasions, straight. Full disclosure: there have been periods in my life when my naturally curly hair has lost its curl, and is more likely to be blamed on stress and the water on Block Island than on Avon’s Banana Hair Repair Deep Conditioning Treatment. But I still spent a fortune on shampoos, conditioners, mousses, and sprays that promised to restore those curls, to no avail. I have yet to find a hair treatment that doesn’t make me feel like a dowdy fuzzhead when I’m standing next to Helen or Catherine.
I learned about a decade ago that a good haircut makes all the difference when it comes to curls. One trip to my hairdresser is usually all it takes to bring the bounce back to my locks. But they’re never glossy or shiny. My curls don’t slide through my fingers like silk, like I imagine Helen’s hair does but she slapped my hand away the one time I tried to find out so I don’t know for sure.

Deep down, I know I should stop. There is no magical formula in a bottle that’ll give me the glossy waves I so desire. Logically, the Spock side of my brain whispers this whenever there’s a sale on Suave. Just buy the cheap stuff, Spock advises. It smells like coconut. Won’t that be fun?

Okay, Spock, I get it. I know. I’ll just buy the stupid, sensible Sua—but wait. Pantene’s on sale, and look! Now they make Pro-V Curl Perfection Dream Care Shampoo and Conditioner! This could be the answer I’ve been looking for all along!
That’s right, folks. Ten dollars later, and my hair looks like this:



 






I’d like to say this has convinced me. But CVS has their TRESemme Keratin Smooth collection on sale this week.
Let it not be said that I am a quitter.

I have a couple of friends who like to dream big, but always fail to follow through. I’m not criticizing them for this: it’s great to have grandiose ideas. I’m sure it’s a lovely way to live. But it’s a character trait that I just can’t do. If I promise something, I deliver. The key to doing this successfully is to promise small. Sure, I can chip in five dollars for that birthday gift. But I won’t promise to pick up the perfect gift: I know my limitations.

Last Saturday, I’d promised to bake homemade baguettes. This may sound like a bigger promise, but really, it’s mixing flour, water, and yeast, and the largest obligation involved is the time spent waiting for the dough to rise. I could handle that, though it led to another promise: I’d clean the living room while waiting.

This baking was mostly something I told myself I’d do, mind you, but I’d said it out loud to a few people (Jason, my mother) so therefore I was obligated to follow through. I kneaded the dough, let it sit, started dusting the end tables next to the couch, returned to the kitchen to punch down the dough, and moved to preheat the oven. Here is where I realized the folly of my actions.

It was close to 90 degrees by 10:00 a.m. that day. Now I was going to crank up the heat.
But a promise is a promise. I turned the dial to 450 degrees and retreated outside to cool off.

Once the dough had rested sufficiently, I loaded the bread into the oven, then looked around the kitchen. If I opened the window over the sink, and the door leading to the side deck, maybe I could create a cross-breeze to cool the room (and house) down. I tried it, then returned to the living room to sweep and wash the floor.
I’d forgotten about the bread in my heatstroke-inducing cleaning frenzy, so when the timer went off, I was pleasantly surprised. Returning to the kitchen, the first thing that hit me was a wall of heat so thick it singed off my eyebrows. The second thing I noticed was the hornets. Apparently, they’d built a nest in the window, between screen and glass, and when I’d opened it, I’d given them free access to the entire house. They’d set up shop under the cabinet above the stove, and were busy building a new nest that already hung down low enough to just touch the top of the back burner.

I had three choices: I could grab the hornet spray in the basement and try to get close enough to soak the hive without getting stung; I could turn the burner on and hope hornets’ nests were flammable; I could move, leaving no forwarding address.

But the bread. I’d promised to make that bread, and I was so close to being done!

Armed with the spray from the basement, I stepped back into the kitchen. With a war cry, I shot an arc of poison at the nest, then let my aim dip as I tried to shoot down some of the little bastards midair. The spray had no effect, except to make them buzz louder. Now they were mad. I checked the label. I’d grabbed the ant and spider killer, which clearly had zero effect on flying, stinging insects. Crap. I made a mad dash for the oven, ignited the stovetop burner, and backed away.

Ant spray, it turns out, is highly flammable. The hornet’s nest exploded in a ball of flame, as did my cabinets. The hornets I’d soaked midflight also exploded, their wobbly flight paths taking sharp turns into things like the kitchen curtains and the garbage can. Soon, the whole kitchen was ablaze. I crawled to the cabinet under the sink, retrieved the fire extinguisher, and once I was sure all the hornets were good and dead, I put the fire out. The stove and cabinets were a smoldering pile of blackened soot. A moment of swelling pride washed over me (and some extinguisher foam). The stinging demons were dead, and now, I could relax and enjoy a slice of fresh-baked bread.

When I pulled the loaves out of the oven, they resembled charcoal bricks. (That’s not quite accurate: more like charcoal baguettes.) They were hard as bricks, however, and completely useless. I stepped back out on the side porch and threw the steaming blackened loaves into the bushes.

Perhaps you think I’m upset: after all, my kitchen now needs remodeling, the hornets in the window nest are still alive and well, and my bread was ruined. You’re missing the point. I said I’d bake bread, and by golly, I followed through on that promise.

So to all you who criticize the big-dreamers-little-doers out there, I’d advise you to knock it off. Imagine what would happen if they actually followed through?

It can’t have been easy for my father, being a part of our family. He was, for many years, the only man in a matriarchy of headstrong women: my mother had two sisters, and their mother had two sisters; on Dad’s side, among his five siblings, he was close to (you guessed it) two sisters. When I was growing up, most of these sisters were either divorced or widowed. Mom and Dad, in turn, had two daughters, both who came out of the womb wanting to dress like Wonder Woman for Halloween. We had a lot of women in our family who were perfectly capable of taking care of themselves.

A word of clarification here: my father, by the way, is Superman. He can fix any piece of equipment from a rototiller to a Mack truck; can walk through a yard and identify every single plant growing there, from the choking Japanese bittersweet vines to the black dragon lily you had no idea could even survive in Connecticut, much less who the heck planted it there; he makes his own sausage and builds his own sheds. He once gave a Ford Explorer three extra years of life by replacing a metal plate in the back end with what looked suspiciously like an old pie plate.

So imagine this man among a family of women who could take care of themselves, thankyouverymuch. What’s a superhero to do?

If you’re my dad, you adjust your cape and teach.

So, okay. My sister and I can replace our car batteries and take care of a garden from sowing to reaping and strip and paint rooms with ease. Both our parents raised us with the mentality of “if it needs to get done, roll up your sleeves and do it.” But there are some things we need guidance with. Like when my water heater gave up the ghost last winter. I suspected I shouldn’t pay a plumber/electrician to install a new one. But I also knew it wasn’t a one-Longo job. So I called Dad.

After some good-natured grumbling (as he gets older, he sometimes points out his cape is getting a bit tired) Dad came over with his tool chest. As he measured, eyeballing connector hoses and pipes, inspecting gaskets and screws, he patiently explained everything he was doing. “This fitting’s got a slow leak. See it there? We’ll need to pick up a new one. And an elbow joint. Just in case.” We headed off to Home Depot, where we stared at tanks while Dad enumerated the many benefits and flaws of the average warranty. (I’ll admit I hadn’t thought to look at this closely, but since this was the second water heater I’d needed in a decade, when he told me to check to see if the warranty covered high iron content in the water, I did.) Unfortunately, this Home Depot didn’t have the tank size I needed: Papa Bear and I needed to drive to Manchester, which in actuality was only, say, twenty-five miles from where we were, but to hear the way Dad was talking, might as well have been halfway across the country. (“We have to go on the highway? There goes the afternoon!”) We made it just fine, found the right tank, and headed home.

As mentioned, this was not the first water tank I’ve had to replace, so when we got back to my basement, Dad realized I’d already heard and mastered some of these lessons (soldering, for instance, has become old hat). He looked a little ... sad. Like maybe there was nothing left to teach.

I hated seeing him so blue. After all, this was the man who’d carefully explained the difference between artificially inseminating a cow versus a sow, in case his daughters ever found themselves in a situation where this information might mean the difference between life and death. (No, I can’t imagine what that situation would be, but it was an interesting lecture just the same.) Here he was, probably wondering if his work molding us into self-sufficient adults might be done. If it was time to retire the cape.

I couldn’t let that happen. I tried to think of something Dad had yet to impart knowledge on. Financial investing? No, he’d covered that pretty thoroughly. How to skin a deer? Check. How to properly sharpen a scythe? We’d gone over that last summer.

But there was one topic—one thing his daughters have never grasped his views on, though he’s espoused on it time and time again over the years. One lone subject in which my father has continued to be unsuccessful in showing his kids why he’s right, and we’re wrong.

He looked so sad, sitting there, pipe wrench in hand, blinking at the (slightly messy, but still sufficient) soldering job I’d just finished. I had to take one for the team. I heaved a sigh and straightened my shoulders.

“So, how about that election?” I asked.

Dad’s whole face brightened. His cheeks flushed as he began to wax poetic on why, for the sake of all things reasonable, Republican politics just made more sense. I sat, gritting my teeth into a smile. The reds and blues of his superhero outfit seemed to shine with renewed purpose as he explained trickle-down economics. His cape waved in a nonexistent breeze as he detailed how the Affordable Care Act was failing. Tears glistened in his eyes as he debated the existence of global warming.

I had tears in my eyes, too (for very different reasons). My inner Wonder Woman was railing to bring up pictures of drowning polar bears and shrinking ice caps on my phone. But this was my dad. He’d spent all day driving across two towns to help me find a dependable water heater with a decent warranty. He wasn’t going to let his daughter go without hot water, no matter how much of a pain it was to unhook and roll out the old heater. He loves me, Republican or no.

And I love him, too. Republican or no. I settled in for a lecture on how school vouchers reflect all that is right with free market economics, deciding now was not the time to remind him both his wife and his eldest daughter were public school teachers. He was happy. That was all that mattered.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad!

I think we can all agree that the tick is best known as the most widely hated bug in the entire arachnid kingdom. Don’t even try to argue that spiders are worse: most spiders don’t seek you out to suck your blood and give you horrible diseases (the exception, of course, is Shelob, the great spider in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but she’s it--and spoiler alert: she doesn’t exist in real life). Ticks are creepy, bacteria-filled vampires that serve no purpose in the circle of life except to instill a heart-stopping case of heebie jeebies in all that encounter them. Listen, I can justify the existence of just about anything in this world. War, famine, giant wasps the size of Buicks (for you spider haters out there, those Buick wasps help control the Buick tarantula population, so perhaps you should start thanking them now). But I cannot justify ticks. Sure, maybe they’re a main staple of the guinea hen’s diet, but otherwise, they’re pointless and rotten. And guinea hens could surely find something else to eat, right?

We’ve all heard that the tick population is especially bad this year. One website even likened it to a George Clooney movie, stating, “Health and insect experts are calling it a perfect storm of conditions coming together to create a tick population explosion.” That’s right, people: the ticks are so bad this year they’re expected to swarm our fishing boats and sink them to the bottom of the ocean floor, drowning all aboard before the hapless sailors even have time to whip out their fine-tipped tweezers.

Or something like that.

About a month ago, Jason had the misfortune of waking me up in the middle of the night. All who have done this know it is dangerous and unwise. I curse (I don’t just mean I say bad words: I utter curses proven to bring about cases of the pox, boils, and my favorite, leaky bowels), I cry, I scream, I throw things. I do not like being woken up. But he had no choice: he had a tick on his shoulder, and having grown up on a farm where tick removal was a part of everyday life, I’m the designated tick-puller in our house. It’s a job title I’ve never aspired to, but it turns out when you develop a pattern of cursing people with leaky bowels, karma tends to throw it right back at you by making you the tick wrangler of the house. So there I was at three a.m., pulling a tick off my husband. I was not amused.

Full disclosure: though I hate the darn things, I’m kind of proud of my tick-removing abilities. I can usually get them out quickly, getting head, pincers, and a bit of flesh in one tweezered tug. Maybe two. This was a two-tugger, then we burned the little parasitic demon, and I went back to bed. I was not yet worried about the predicted Tickageddon. Ticks happen, right?

Except they keep happening. They’re all over, and we’re finding them in the house—hanging on the front door, knocking with their nasty pint-size pincers, or on the shower curtain. I found one on Pugsley last night, and both he and his sister are indoor cats. We’re bringing them in on our clothes—and it’s been too rainy to work in the yard the past two weeks, so they must be hitching a ride on our socks and pants when we’re walking from our cars to the door. Either that, or we’ve got mice in our house that are bringing them in (in which case, Pugsley is to blame for his own tick: it wouldn’t have happened if he did his job and acted like a cat).

I have to work for a living. I can’t be spending every day yanking out ticks. I asked Jason to look into a tick lawn treatment service. He did, and quoted me a price. Apparently, the explosive tick population has also caused an explosion in lawn service treatment costs.

You know, I’ve always liked guinea hens.

Insanity Tales III: Seasons of Shadow is being released June 6 (you can preorder the Kindle version HERE, if you’re so inclined). The Insanity Tales anthologies are a series of collections put out by The Storyside writers’ collaborative, of which I’m proud to be a member along with David Daniel, Rob Smales, Vlad V., and Ursula Wong) but to be honest, it’s not always easy to come up with stories before the deadline for each book. This time around, when the group decided the theme would be seasons, I was stumped. I mean, I jumped on spring, because nobody else wanted it, but then I realized why: there’s not a lot going on, horror-wise, when things are starting to bloom.
I whined to my BWF (best writing friend), about being fresh out of ideas. Our conversation eventually devolved to both of us complaining about how much we weighed, expressing a general aversion to vegetables, and discussing our hidden talents—of which mine is being able to identify, with one sniff, the type of animal that produced the manure I am smelling. It was a fabulous conversation, and from this, a story began to take root.
So with no further fanfare, here’s an excerpt from “Eat Your Vegetables,” one of ten fine tales in Insanity Tales III: Seasons of Shadow.

Eat Your Vegetables
By Stacey Longo

“I’m off to my meeting,” Annie called out.
“Meeting?” Doug was planted in the La-Z-Boy, watching reruns of NCIS.
“Remember, I told you I was joining Weight Watchers? They meet on Thursdays at the senior center. Tonight’s my first weigh-in.”
“You look beautiful,” Doug said as she pulled the front door shut behind her.
Annie didn’t feel beautiful. She felt like a waddling, middle-aged blob with bad knees and no chin. At her last physical, her doctor had announced that her body mass index now officially put her in the obese category. That was six months ago, and she’d tried to be good. Had salads for lunch for almost a week. But then someone’s granddaughter was selling Girl Scout cookies, and shamrock shakes were back at McDonalds . . .
Spring was just around the corner, and bathing suit season would be here soon. She’d caught herself practically wheezing at work when she’d had to lug the donated books to the library basement. She was only fifty-one. Enough was enough. She needed to lose weight.
And Doug was one to talk. In the twenty-five years they’d been married, he’d put on his fair share of weight, too. He liked to joke that he was always ready for the beach—“got the beach ball packed and ready to go,” he’d say, patting his belly. Had she laughed at that? Probably. His growing girth had made it more acceptable that she’d been putting on pounds, too.
She drove the ten miles with butterflies in her stomach. She was afraid of how far the needle would climb when she stepped on the scale. Of what the woman weighing her in would say. Annie hoped the woman wasn’t perky. She didn’t think she could deal with perky tonight.

“Good news: you’re at 181. That’s a great place to launch from!” the perky weigh-in woman announced. Annie wanted to punch her in the face.
“How so? I’m fatter than an entire kindergarten class. That’s twelve five-year-olds, with one to spare.”
“Aren’t you funny? Just think—you’re right around the corner from a lower decade! Seventies, here we come!”
Perkalicious had a point. It would be a nice ego boost to see the 170s again.
Annie scooped up her coat and an armful of materials—recipes, directions on how to download and sign in to the Weight Watchers app, and a free sample of two-point brownie bites. In the room, people had begun to arrive and take seats. Annie sat on an uncomfortable gray folding chair and waited for the meeting to start.
“First time?” A rotund woman with long black hair and Harry Potter glasses settled in next to her.
“First time in years. How’d you know?”
“You look terrified. Most people talk a friend into going. You don’t have any fat friends?”
Annie let out a nervous laugh.
“Well, now you do. Name’s Dee.” She held out a hand, and Annie took it gratefully. “I’ve been doing the program for three months now. Down fifteen pounds. It’s slow, but it works. Slower after menopause, but what the hell. If Oprah’s willing to stick it out, so am I.” A thin woman with curly chestnut hair moved to the front of the room, waving her hands. Dee eyeballed her and kept talking. “If you need tips on low-point sugary snacks, I’m your gal. I can calculate the points value of anything on sight. Here’s Michelle, our group leader. She’s so bubbly I want to stick her in a soda bottle and shake her up ’til she pops, but she’s motivating, I’ll give her that.”
Annie smiled. It felt good to make a new friend.
After congratulating all the audience members who’d hit milestones (including one man who’d hit the 100-pound loss mark—“men always lose faster, the lucky bastards,” Dee whispered), Michelle recapped her story. She’d lost seventy-six pounds of “baby weight” on Weight Watchers after her third child was born, and had kept it off for six years. Tonight’s motivational speech was on incorporating exercise into everyday activities. “You can do aerobics while folding clothes,” Michelle enthused, miming a ridiculous bend-and-stretch with an imaginary towel. “And gardening is a great activity! It’s seed-planting time, people, and when you do all that hard work of tilling and planting and weeding, your garden will reward you with a bounty of zero-point foods. See? It’s win-win!”
“Except for corn,” someone piped up from behind Annie and Dee. “Corn costs points.”
“Killjoy,” Dee hissed, but Annie wasn’t paying attention. Michelle was right. For a couple of years when they were newlyweds, Doug and Annie had put a vegetable garden in the back, just past the shed. She’d had fond memories as a child of picking snap peas with her mother, and had wanted to continue the tradition as an adult. But they’d had no kids of their own for her to share the experience with, and maintaining it was hard work. They’d let the garden fall by the wayside, and over the years, the weeds had taken over as the rototiller sat rusting in the shed. But she’d enjoyed gardening. Hadn’t she?
She exchanged phone numbers with Dee and left the meeting full of hope and energy. She could do this plan. She was ready to commit. And this weekend, she was going to hit Mackey’s for supplies and get her garden in.

That’s it. That’s all you get today. To read more, pick up your copy of Insanity Tales III: Seasons of Shadow on June 6!