I apologize, faithful readers. My blog is late this week, but it was for a very good reason, I promise. My sister and I had tickets to see Duran Duran last night. For the seventh time.

The first time Kim and I ever saw the fab five, she was fourteen and I was eleven. Back then, the pre-conversation went something like this:
"I'm going to marry Nick Rhodes. Who are you going to marry?"
"John Taylor. Missy in my math class thinks she's going to marry him, but I'm going to tell John what a dirty skankbag she is, so then he'll marry me for sure."
"Look. There's Simon Le Bon. AIEEEEEEE!"

Times, they are a-changin'. As I looked around at the audience last night, I wondered why the woman three rows up was still trying to rock the Pat Benetar look when Pat's been hawking Metamucil on TV lately. At least my sister and I were still fabulously young. This was our pre-concert talk:
"Those are cute jeans. JC Penney's?"
"No, Jen at work is on the divorce diet and gave me her old 'fat' jeans. Don't you love the embroidery?"
"I hope John Taylor started dyeing his hair again. He was too gray the last time I saw him. Who do you think he uses, Lady Clairol?"
"I'm guessing Nice 'n Easy. I've found it does a much better job on the roots."
"Look. There's Simon Le Bon. AIEEEEEE!"

I have to admire the guys for rocking on stage for two whole hours without gasping for air and clutching their backs, like my sister and I were doing after thirty minutes of semi-dancing in the aisle. Sure, Nick Rhodes looks a little pudgy and Roger Taylor has a few crow's feet around his eyes, but they still looked and sounded great ... as did Kim and I and every other forty-something woman in the audience. Because trust me, every person in that audience was a forty-something reliving her fantasies of youth.
Once the show ended at 10:30, Kim asked me if I wanted to gamble. We were at the casino, after all.
"Heck, no. It's way past my bed time. Let's go to the hotel and see if we can catch a 'Brady Bunch' rerun."

Okay, so a few things have changed since 1984. But our love for Duran Duran remains the same.

f you're overdue for your annual physical, my advice to you is to never go back to the doctor again. As long as you feel fine, there's no reason for those pesky blood tests and prostate exams. Because if you do feel fine, and you go because you figure 'what's the worst that can happen?' your doctor will be happy to give you a laundry list. And it will be much, much worse than you imagined.
When I went for my physical back in May, I felt fine. Sure, I was coughing at night, and my knee ached a little, but I figured things would improve once allergy season was over, and we stopped having rain every other day. Not so, my doctor warned. I was probably about to keel over. She sent me to an allergist, an orthopedic specialist, and a pulmonologist. Apparently, I was falling apart and I didn't even know it!
It turns out I'm moderately allergic to dust mites, to the point where I now have dust mite-induced asthma. I packed my informative pamphlet and my brand new inhaler in my purse and moved on. While waiting for the orthopaedist, I read my pamphlet, and found out it's dust mite feces that contains the allergens, which doesn't say much for my housekeeping, since I've been coughing my brains out for months. The orthopaedist called me in, took a look at my knee, and told me I needed kneecap replacement surgery. But not yet, because you can only get three in a lifetime, and they only last for 15 years. So I would have to live with the pain and wait until it got so bad that I couldn't climb up a flight of stairs on my own. My dreams of setting off metal detectors every time I went to the mall vanished. Feeling pretty low, I went on to the pulmonologist, forgetting that I didn't need him anymore since I already knew why I was coughing.
The pulmonologist felt that it would be ridiculous for him to waste a good co-pay, so he sat me down, confirmed that I shouldn't be breathing in microscopic spider poo, and then tested my cholesterol for fun. After eating nothing but oatmeal and produce for three months, I'd managed to raise my cholesterol by 10 points. He called the orthopaedist, who conferenced in the allergist and my primary care physician, and they all agreed on the same diagnosis: I'm fat. THIS is what's causing my knee, lung, and cholesterol issues. 
I felt like whipping out a picture of myself from 2004 and saying "you want to see fat? I've BEEN fat!" but I restrained myself. I smiled, thanked him, and left the office, tossing my dust mite pamphlet in the trash as I left. Two weeks earlier, I had occasionally had an achy knee before it rained, coughing because of ragweed, and most importantly, I was skinny.
It's clear what the source of all of my problems is. I never should have picked up the phone when they called to schedule my annual physical.

I think (I hope) that everyone has a movie that they hold near and dear to their heart; that they remember watching it and thinking oh my God, that right there is impossible. This is movie magic. For me, that movie was Jurassic Park.
I'm not sure what normal kids are afraid of when they're young. I grew up on a dairy farm, so you'd think my nightly prayers would include "please don't let a herd of cows stampede our house, please don't let the bull get out, and please don't let the geese corner me near the pig sty tomorrow and peck me to death." Strangely, I was afraid of none of these things. In my mind, these things were ludicrous. The cows were too content to stampede; there were solid iron bars and cement around the bull pen; those geese may as well have had a restraining order against me, because I would never get within 500 feet of them. No, what kept me up at night was this one thought: what if a dinosaur comes along and eats our house?
In my mind, it made sense. First of all, look at the coelacanth. Everyone thought it was extinct, and then BOOM! Someone caught one. It seemed logical to me that a dinosaur could live quite happily in the woods behind our house, undetected. Until he ran out of deer and other woodland snacks, and started hankering for some human treats.
So when Jurassic Park came out, my sister, father, and I sat in our seats, jaws hanging open and eyes popping out of our heads. I don't know what they were thinking (Dad was probably thinking about how much he hates uncomfortable theater seats) but I know I was thinking Oh. My. God. That right there is a REAL dinosaur. We're all going to die. And I was no longer even a teenager when the movie came out, so clearly, the velociraptors were scary enough to give an adult nightmares.
I'll admit Jurassic Park still gives me a thrill when I watch it; that occasional that's so cool! moment. I get that it's CGI. I get that that lawyer wasn't really eaten by a dinosaur as he sat on the toilet.
But to this day, whenever I see ripples on water, I think uh-oh. T-Rex.
Now that's movie magic.

We are deep in the dog days of summer, which begs the question: why do dogs get all the glory?  

Think about it. There’s the dog days of summer, three dog nights in the winter, letting sleeping dogs lie, and, of course, dog tired.  All of these terms conjure up images of sleepy, happy, tail-thumping black labs (that’s what I picture, anyway) giving the canine nation an unfair advantage in the whole cats vs. dogs debate. All of the phrases about cats, for instance, have negative connotations. Letting the cat out of the bag. Curiosity killed the cat. Raining cats and dogs, as if to  imply that if it was just raining dogs, it would be a warm, gentle sprinkle, but throw some cats in there, and you’ve got an out-and-out Nor’easter on your hands.

I’d like to suggest some new, feline friendly sayings for some of these old adages. For instance, instead of the dog days of summer, why not the lazy cat cooling off on the basement floor days of summer? See? It practically rolls off the tongue. And instead of a three dog night, why not a thirteen fuzzy kittens night? (Simple mathematics dictates that one would need considerably more kittens than dogs to warm up on a cold winter evening.) I think it’s excellent advice to let sleeping cats lie, unless you want a claw to the eyeball. And why do we always have to be dog tired? Can’t we be more tired than a cat chasing a laser pointer?

I have decided to personally head the Elimination of Canine Adages Committee, in an effort to gain more positive recognition for our feline friends. We could hold sit-ins at Nathan’s Hot Dog chains and boycott episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter.

What’s that, you say? They've already cancelled Dog the Bounty Hunter?

It seems to be working already! I’ll be doggoned.