Sunday, June 22, 2008

 

Giving You... Bobbie Faye!

As promised in my most recent Book Talk post (missed it? You should fix that), I have a spare copy of Toni McGee Causey's debut novel, Bobbie Faye's Very (very very very) Bad Day. Autographed.

You want to read this. You need to read this. You'll never have a bad day again once you read this because compared to a Bobbie Faye day, you're small potatoes.

I promise.

Leave me a comment between now and next Sunday, June 22, and I'll pick a winner. All the usual rules apply: anyone on the planet, previous winners okay, you must be cool, I'll let the kids pick a number and the person who left that comment number wins.

One more thing, though. Since Bobbie Faye has a bad day, what's the worst you can come up with? Tell me in the comments; just saying, "enter me" isn't enough. You gotta work for it 'cause baby, you're still not working half as hard as Bobbie Faye does.




Thanks for the linkage! To Suey at It's All About Books and to myself at Win a Book.




Edited to add: congratulations to Tracy at BookroomReviews for winning this copy! Hopefully she'll read and review it there, too. This really is one of those books that deserves wider attention.

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Comments:
Hmm. You want us to tell you about our bad days...

It happened to me in lat week of May 2008. It was a Saturday. We were undergoing seminars. I had to travel a long way from home. To reach in time at 8:30 am, I had to start around 6: 30 am. In a bus from home to Metro station, changing three metro trains and then again a bus to be in the venue. Travelling was easy. But it was pouring that day, despite an umbrella, I was dripping wet by the time I reached and had to stay that way.

When I got into the second Metro train while getting back home, we heard there was bomb scare in one of he stations, so our train can't go any further for a while. Imagine it, in the underground train, in the middle of nowhere, the train packed to full, I still damp. And literally no place to stand properly. With cacophony around me. Scared is not the word. We are used to bomb scares in Delhi. Our train stood there for more than two hours. People being very philosophical about it. Indians have a lot of patience for such situations.

When it finally moved and I got down, coming out of the station, I was stuck in a dust-storm which lasted for 30 minutes. . Anyway, I reached home somehow only to find, power outages and the water pipelines not working either.

My clothes were not truly yucky with moistness and dust fighting for supremacy. My hair so dirty and no water!

Perfect day, won't you say!

Now wish me luck to win the book!

*grin*
 
How about celebrating your 38th birthday by having surgery, that takes longer, and is more complex than expected? Happened 6-10-08 to little old me. To add to insult, that Thursday the city flooded, including my basement which I cannot help get cleaned up.

Enter me now?
sassylucylootoo(at)yahoo(dot)com
~ Penelope Anne
 
Gosh. I think I'll check this out. Have a gr8 week *lovies*
 
Hmmm.. when was the last time I had a bad day? I'm so sorry, I honestly haven't had that many bad days lately!

bunnybox9 at gmail . com
 
My latest bad day was just last week - thursday. My friend's basement is flooded and I've been feeling guilty for not doing more for her. Found out my teen sitter's car also flooded so all the running around my kids need to be done has to be done by someone else. I had a meeting come up at work but it was at the same time that my dd needed to be picked up from band. So I had to have her wait an hour at the subway down the street because all the folks I called to bring her home weren't home. And I had no money to give her other than a few quarters. Granted not a whole day of bad - I try to forget those - but the mommy guilt was horrendous!
 
Here's one bad day that sticks out - when I was shooting my fourth year film near Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, on a foggy, misty day with the camera wrapped in a plastic bag, my actor wearing nothing but a leather brief and war paint in October. After the long day of shooting, the oh-so-helpful extra drove his SUV off the road into the boggy area to 'help' with loading up the equipment and promptly got stuck.

I nearly popped a gasket. It was Thanksgiving Day, too. But we drove into Peggy's Cove village, knocked on the door of a fisherman obviously eating Thanksgiving dinner, and asked him to pull the SUV out of the bog with his truck, which had a winch on the back to haul boats out of the water. And he did it - no problem. For free. So the terrible, horrible bad day turned around and all was well in Julia Land.
 
No poetry train?
Let me think about that bad day!
 
My last bad day actually was a bad night a couple of weeks ago. After all the rain and flooding my yard was saturated. I had my darling pooch out on her chain and suddenly heard her barking ferociously. Nothing new, she's not a big fan of the stray cats that roam my small rural town. But then I heard the barking moving away. The wet ground had let her pull the metal post up and she had taken off after the cat. I was out with my flashlight, pitch dark, and all I could hear was the clang, clang of the post, barking, and a huge yelp. I tracked down my dog who had discovered her cat was a skunk. So I had to hall an OMG awful stinkin, whining, huge dog home. I guess it was my dogs bad day too.
 
Well, I haven't had one of those terrible days lately, where one thing after another happens and you think it'll never end. My bad days are usually due to my bad attitude, my orneriness (is that a word?) and just lousy feelings. I hate those kind of days!

(I was just trying to gather up contests to link to, so I'll add this one to the list!)
 
A few years ago I was scheduled for a hysterectomy ~ the day before my surgery my Grandpa passed away, I received a phone call and was told there wasn't going to be a position for me at the school were I was working as an aide for the coming year and my dog committed suicide.

hawkes(at)citlink.net
 
I haven't had one of those awful "one rotten thing after another" days in a while. Usually, a bad day for me has something to do with ouchy family dynamics (not my household, but extended family issues), often an interaction which makes me feel bad, inadequate, etc.

I'm better, these days, about letting things like that slide off me; I definitely pick my battles and maintain healthy boundaries. That doesn't mean that some ick doesn't seep in occasionally.

Things that keep me healthy and happy: writing, hiking, hubby, and Ballicai! :)
 
this past year has been filled with very very very bad days

i had to get a restraining order against a neighbor who assaulted me but the local police weren't sure how to deal with it or him when he:

--cut the water off to my house by breaking a waterline

--changed the locks on a pedestrian garage door which we has the use of according to a settlement agreement and when we removed the lock and put ours back on, he cut off the door then he cut the garage door for cars in half and cut it off the wall

etc etc etc...
 
One morning when I was late for work and picking up kids to carpool my garage door stopped halfway and wouldn't budge. That was a bad morning for sure!
 
I think my worst day was my birthday two years ago. I was stupid not to take the day off from work, but I thought everything would be okay. I ended up stuck in the subway tunnel in the dark for 2 hours when the rail lost power. When they evacuated us, the only thing they had to light our path was glow sticks. And I ended up almost 4 hours late for work, but I was too nice to turn around, go home, and call it a day.
 
I'm pretty sure that my worst day was driving home in the rain a couple of years ago from Detroit. I had my eyes closed but wasn't really all the way asleep. I heard my husband say, "Oh my gosh" and then something slammed into the car. I opened my eyes and the car was spinning around in circles. I remember wondering when I was going to feel another thud. Finally we hit the guard rail and slid backwards for what seemed like forever until finally we stopped. The whole driver's side of the car was gone and the wheels were off the car. But we were all ok. My son had been sleeping in the back seat but by the grace of God he had his head in the center of the car and not on the door or he would have been killed. It was the scariest day of my life and then that evening my son had to be rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy which apparently was unrelated to the accident but they were worried that he may have had some internal bleeding. Fortunately it was just the appendix but it had to go. It took a long time for everyone to recover from the trauma of that day and truth be told, my son has never been the same since. He's a much quieter, more subdued person than he ever used to be.
doot65[at]comcast[dot]net
Elizabeth
 
In a moment of complete insanity, I generously offered to look after a friend’s two small children while she and her husband went away on a business trip. In my ignorance I thought how hard can it be and it’s only for a few days.

As it was mid week I had to take the youngest to daycare and the oldest to school on my way to work. So that first night I set the alarm to go off an hour earlier than normal, I wanted to make sure there was plenty of time to get the kids dressed, fed and be ready to leave on time. Well, I slept through the alarm and woke up at my normal time, that should have been my first clue that this was about to become a very bad day.

Instead of getting the kids up in a calm and relaxed manner and getting them ready in a leisurely fashion, they were confronted with a mad woman screeching at them to get up and get dressed. I left them to do that while I got myself showered and dressed.

Big mistake. Came back to find them both playing and still in their pajamas. More screeching from me, “why aren’t you dressed?” Pajamas go flying and a wrestling match ensues as I try to cloth two wriggling bodies, it’s like trying to dress an octopus.

No time to eat breakfast so I cook some toast for them to eat in the car. Grab school bags, toast and herd the kids out the door to the car. Buckle kids in and notice the oldest child has no shoes on. “Where are your shoes??” I get the response of “inside”.

I run back inside to hunt for said shoes can only find one. Start tearing the room apart and eventually find its mate in the bed!!

Tear back out to the car, look at the time; great I’m late for work. I ask has everyone got everything, last chance as we are about to leave. I am assured we are right to go, so we head off. Half way down the street a small voice pipes up to say she doesn’t have her coat – AHHHH. Turn the car around, go back and get coat.

Drop the kids off without further delays; however I am now very late for work. Arrive at work to discover I was supposed to be at a meeting, a meeting I thought was scheduled for the following week. Turn up to the meeting extremely late and unprepared.

Later on discover that I have left the project file I had been working, which had to be submitted today, at home. I had to drive home to get it and on the way back became ensnared in a traffic jam for an hour. I think to myself what else can go wrong?

Arrive back at work, hand in the project file and settle down to begin researching the next project. In the middle of scoping the project, the phone rings and a voice says “Hi, we wondered if anything was wrong. Its 5.00pm and ‘youngest child’ is still here waiting to be collected”.

CRAP, forgot to pick up the kids.

Some days we shouldn’t get out of bed.
 
I'm not going to top most of these, but one of my worst days recently was when I fell off my bike. I scraped my knee and limped around for days. It still hurts when I try to bend my knee too quickly. The moral of this story is not to try to pass elderly gents on a grassy slope.
 
Wanna hear bad day. Last week I was given an ultimatum after being tricked to believe that my boss was hiring me help.

Work full time for part time pay or leave.

I quit this week. He doesn't want me to quit. I called his bluff, but frankly he's not changing his stance on paying.

That was my day or days just recently and that's why I've been MIA.

Work full time hours for part time pay.

*sigh* As of July 25th, I'm writing full time for a living and I'm scared out of my mind.
 
It actually has been a while since a HARD day... I think I had a bit more when we first had our daughter. IT was hard adjusting to staying at home and her not sleeping well.
 
Thank goodness I don't have many. But I have a little book that talks about leadership---and it says that you should "eat your frog" first thing in the morning. the frog is the worst thing you have to do all day. So, do that first, and everything else is smooth sailing.

kayroney(at)gmail(dot)com
 
Here's a really bad day for you:

First you must understand that my nana was my best friend, and I was her little shadow.

I was in college and she had been in the hospital for some time in an ICU room. She was allowed limited visitations. Anyways, it was finals week and I had forgotten my lunch at home, commuted 1.5 hours into Boston, to catch the subway. The train broke down, and I barely made it to my first exam. I had not eaten breakfast, had no money, and was struggling through finals even though I studied hard.

It was friday, my last final was over, I got onto the subway, drove another 1.5 hours home. Normally, I would have went right to the hospital with my mom, but that day I insisted we ate before we went. We ate quickly and headed up to see Nana. We got to the hospital and my grandfather waited for us in the hall. My nana had just passed away two minutes before I got there. I was so heartbroken that I didn't get to say goodbye.
 
the worst day i've had recently was the day that my dog died. my husband went out in the afternoon to feed them (we had two at the time) and found my dog (who was only 3) laying on her side already gone. :(

katylinvw (at) yahoo (dot) com
 
I've been getting by on 2 hours of sleep for almost 2 weeks now thanks to my toddler who has his nights and days turned around. Insane doesn't even begin to cover it!

Thanks for stopping by my Thursday Thirteen! It was my first one today :) I'll also blog your giveaway tomorrow.

Best,
Rashmi
 
oh more to add to my list! Thanks
 
Actually, my most recent "bad day" began yesterday morning (Friday) I was outside on my front porch shaking the rug that goes in front of our kitchen sink area. As I was coming up the two steps that lead back inside our home. I felt and heard something strange happen in back of my right knee. I have osteo arthritis in both, but this pain shot me down. I crawled inside and yelled for me two sons. They came running down the stairs to help me! The oldest got ready and took my almost 90 year old dad on our weekly breakfast/Walmart outing and the other got me to the sofa. Other than going to the restroom, I was there all day. Today, I am in bed with the knee pain. I can't put any pressure on it. It will get better. Thanks, Cindi
jchoppes[at]hotmail[dot]com
 




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