The long and winding post . . .

You know you've made some wicked good soup when you can eat it cold. Like candy. No spoon required. You just can't stop putting your fingers in the pot. And stirring it.

It's just that finger licking good.

I know I've said this before, but I think I've found the ancient Chinese secret ingredient to soup, and it's not cheese or applesauce.

Alls you need is . . . drumroll, please . . . (stewed tomatoes with green chili peppers).

If you're going to try this ancient Chinese secret at home, BEWARE! This soup's got sass. It's edgy. Like a Pablo Neruda poem. (Without the romance.)

Completely unrelated, but does anyone have a plunger?

Anyone? Anyone?

I need to unblog my brain. I'm seriously backed up. There are at least a dozen stories all squished together on the tip of my tongue.

Where do I start? With the story of me grabbing my high school cheerleading skirt and Pom pons to shout YAY as my flamingo daughter scored 10 points and made a buzzer-beater, game-winning shot at her last game?

Or should I start with the story of me trimming the tree. Over and over and over. Trimming and trimming and trimming. Not the first tree. The first tree was easy, being fake and all, and being that it was already trimmed and lighted. Alls I had to do was move it downstairs and photoshop our old ornaments onto it.

It's the second tree that gave me so much trouble, being as it was a special tree--and not in the handicapped sense of the word. Special, as in meaningful. But that's a long, messy story, which I promise to spill as soon as someone gets me a plunger to dislodge all the photographic evidence.

I could tell stories about my silly goose MIL. Oh, my goodness, oh my goodness, she is so entertaining. Which is why I invited her to my Christmas Eve slumber party. Soooo excited! If anybody wants to come over and stay up late watching It's A Wonderful Life and eating homemade fudge and drinking fresh Cali OJ slushies and watching my MIL spend 10 minutes opening her packages so as to save the wrapping paper, which she never uses because why wrap presents when you have perfectly good grocery bags available? then give me a call because, hey, the more the merrier!

My silly goose mom is coming to the slumber party too. She's going to sleep on the couch to see if Santa really does come down the chimney. My MIL says she knows one thing for sure--Santa never came down her chimney. But how can anyone really know that for sure?

She also knows for sure that she had a Santa sighting. She doesn't remember how old she was, she just remembers that she was in a crib with metal bars. (hmmm)

My twins did not believe her. "It was probably your dad," they said, but she was certain she would have known if it was her dad.

"How would you know?" they said. "You were just a baby!"

As it turns out, she says she slept in a crib until she was five years old.

(Do you think all that Golden Corral food is going to her head?)

I can't believe I just spend 15 minutes telling you THAT story, when it wasn't even one of the stories blogging up my brain.

I should have told the story about how I ran into someone at a party who freaked out when she heard my maiden name because apparently my dad was her Sunday School teacher 35 year ago! And she still has a thank you card that he made for her with a picture of jet plane, plus a million stories about what at wonderful teacher he was and how I look just like him when I smile.

Gulp.

That was kinda surreal. You get me? Because sometimes I feel like a fatherless child.

Plus, the only Sunday School teacher I remember was what'shisname who regularly talked about the joys of showering with his wife, (nekked), and who washed my mouth out with soap for calling him the d word that sounds like ildo. (In my defense I was 13 and thought it meant dork.)

Or maybe I should have told you the story about how my boys came home from school on Friday and said, "How come everyone has a bigger house than us?"

Good grief! In Hawaii life was so junk because everyone had bigger sack lunches than them. Now the poor dears have to endure the humiliation of living in a one-musubi house. So to speak.

I told them that it doesn't matter how big their lunch is, or how big their house is, what matters is how big their heart is. And then I dropped my thirteen-year-old off at his friend's--the house with the ballet studio and the basketball court and the outdoor pool and the indoor Sobe fountain.

"Hey, at least you're good looking," I yelled after him.

OMGOSH! Can I just tell you one more story? You will never guess what my hub planned on getting me for Christmas before I (THANK GOODNESS) caught on to him! Fo' real, he was hatching a secret plan in the back of his noggin, until one day we were at Shopko, of all places, and he couldn't contain himself any longer. He directed me to a display and grinned and said, "so which one do you want?"

I looked.

I mean, I stared--with that half stupified, half dumbfounded, half perplexed look I get on my face whenever I do things like try to park the car without turing off the ignition.

At first I thought it was a joke, but he was seriously, so serious.

He was going to get me a Snuggie.

I did my favorite acronym--LOL--and said "I DON'T WANT A SNUGGIE!"

He was shocked. "But you're always talking about Snuggies," he said.

Do you think he thinks he's married to Kristina P.?

Oh, peeps, I feel so sorry for you today. I just regurgitated my entire weekend all over this post, and now you have to clean it up.

I feel so much better though.

Thanks for the plunger.