This corn casserole is so delicious. It is easy to make and a great side dish that kids love and is perfect to serve if you have company for dinner.

• 1 can of cream corn
• 1 can of sweet whole corn, drained
• 1 large onion, chopped fine, even grated to hide from picky kids
• 1 red pepper, diced
• 1 beaten egg
• 1 cup of cracker crumbs. I used Town House Toppers Garlic & Herb-these are great!
• 1 cup of grated Cheddar Cheese
• 1/4 cup of butter
• 2 Tbsp sugar
• Salt and Pepper

Preheat oven to 350. Place the butter, onion, and red pepper in a sauce pan. Melt butter and soften the onion and pepper. In a bowl combine the corn and sugar and add the buttery mixture. stir in the cracker crumbs (reserve some for topping) and grated cheese (reserve some for topping). Add the beaten egg, stir to combine and season with salt and pepper.

Pour corn mixture into a buttered (I used butter spray) 9x9 casserole dish. Bake for 1 hour. Ten minutes before time is up sprinkle reserved cheese and top with the remaining cracker crumbs, this is optional.

After cooking let casserole set up for 5-10 minutes and serve. This serves 8. Yum!!

Every single time she doesn't get her way she shuts down, pouts and is just downright hateful (if she was older I would call it what I really think it is, bitchy). Ignore her? Send her to her room? Take Webkinz away? No TV? what? How do I instill respect when I can't respect myself for how angry her arguing and attitude makes me?

If I can't get an attitude, respect for authority, or honesty under control at seven what chance to I have when she is a teen?

I feel so pathetic as her mother. Somedays I feel like the parenting thing is rockin and rollin. Then something happens and it just sets me in my place. So many times I just want to give up, knowing I can't but it still crosses my mind. Maybe my standards are too high or too controlling?

It really bothers me when I drop my daughter off at school after reading her the riot act for her attitude. This is beginning to happen more and more. I can't give up and just say Oh, well! she will grow out of it. What if she doesn't? Don't I have a responsibility to parent her?

I know this, her arguing with me is stopping today(100th time I have said that). It has become such a habit I don't even realize I am participating until my blood starts boiling. But starting the day griping at her is not good for either of us and I just can't do it anymore.

I have always loved getting a tan. I come from a long line of sun worshippers. My grandmother and grandfather on my mom's side would take their RV out to the dessert and lay out while my aunt and her friends would ride motorcycles. While growing up in California we would spend almost a month in the summer on the beach in either Mission Bay or Balboa. My mom's side of the family were always really tan from playing golf or laying out and I thought they looked great.

But then there is something called genetics and heredity (are they synonymous?) and I am also an offspring of my father. His side of the family is lily white with dry skin. Skin cancer runs rampant through my aunt, uncles, cousins, and my dad. My grandpa lost part of his ear and nose and my dad had an operation that made him look like a face lift gone bad for a couple of months. No one has ever died from skin cancer on his side, probably because emphysema played a bigger role and kicked skin cancer's butt at the finish line.

My love of the tanning bed and entire afternoons of laying out from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. are catching up with me. Actually they caught up with me a few years ago. I had one dermatologist tell me that the sun on my skin is like gasoline on a dry field of cornstalks. He must have been from Illinois. Even after that analogy I still continued to purchase a tanning membership every February so I would be ahead of the game when the pool actually opened. I did make some concessions. I stopped adding iodine to baby oil and bought a regular, though no SPF, tanning oil to use instead.

Fast forward to today. I have an appointment at the Dermatologist at 10:30 a.m. I did not go tanning this winter nor did I go last winter. My husband tells me that he cares too much about me to allow me to lie in a tanning bed. I still lay out in the summer but I tend to cover up and I now use sunscreen on my face. But the damage is done. I have a couple of spots that will need to be scraped off, lovely huh? and I am sure I will have to have some excising done, even lovelier-and grosser.

When I saw my dad at Easter he is using this cream on his face that burns off the benign skin cancer spots. He face looks like it is on fire in spots, or was on fire and is now healing. I cannot, no way, no how, do that. Today I am just hoping that my mother's genes will outweigh my father's genes. I am so much happier in the sun and I need to believe I have Seasonal Affective Disorder, or whatever, to justify my desire for a tan. Not just because a nice healthy tan makes you look thinner, duh!

The gene pool bracket is down to the final two: sun-kissed oily skin vs. lily-white, dry skin. Wish me luck. I will also be asking for a Rx or Rentin A, Hydroquinone, and Spironolactone because if my days in the sun are over I at least want smooth glowing skin. Is that too much to ask?


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Edited to add:

The spots on my face I was concerned about are minor. The Dermatalogist does not want to do a removal process because it could leave scarring. Instead I am to use Retin-A and hopefully it will slough away the cells without scarring.

She did prescribe me Spironolactone but I need to have a blood test first to make sure my kidneys are operating correctly. She said that she has seen very positive results from this drug and thinks that I should be happy. All is good! Too bad they don't give samples of Botox shots I could use one between my eyes...........

I am a loud talker, always have been. My sister's tried to get me to talk quieter my whole life, mostly by shaming me. It didn't work. My daughter is loud, very loud just like me and my ex-husband. I sometimes cringe at how loud she can be and I try to instill an "Inside Voice" into her repertoire. It's not working.

But today, her voice was used to her benefit.

She was picked to do morning announcements. Normally, the 5th graders have this responsibility, but for some reason the first grade classes were asked to do the Weekly School Kickoff.

She did great! It was in the gym with the whole school there much like a pep assembly. There was a microphone set up in front of the gym and she grabbed a hold of the mike and brought it up to her mouth and with a loud but clear voice welcomed her elementary school to Monday, March 31, 2008.

Maybe if I had known it was going to be in the gym in front of the whole school instead of in the library over the PA system I might have insisted she not wear her favorite tennis shoes. The front of the toes are completely worn thin with gray fibrous string and netting barely covering her toes. Wonder if that look will prompt a lice check today?

Have I mentioned my car? The inside door panel on the driver's side has pulled away from the actual door. One of these days I will go to shut it and I will be holding, by the handle, the inside door panel but my drivers side door will remain wide open. When that day happens everyone will hear my mind snap because I will NOT be using my inside voice, not at all.

My twenty year high school reunion is quickly approaching, too quickly if I want to look ten years younger by July. I didn’t attend my ten year reunion because the weekend before I had moved from Chicago to Redondo Beach and I just couldn’t fit the reunion into my anxiety ridden schedule.

I was looking forward to the twenty year reunion. Seeing Ree’s pictures of her class which graduated before me was pretty cool. Some of those people in her pictures looked exactly the same as they did when they harassed and intimidated us because we were lowly juniors. There are some girls that went way beyond the scope of a small town inflicted “Rush Week”. They had a few issues with juniors dating their the guys in their senior class.

"Hands off sister or we will kick your a** at McDonalds Friday night!" (Izod, Add-a-bead, harachi wearing puny self)

Our own class of ’88 had its share of problems. Those stupid, beer chugging, womanizing boys and the girls that thought that going out once to a movie or Seekers teen club meant they would be a couple forever. They would settle down, buy a trailer on some land, build a house, and coach their kid’s softball team.

"Back off sister, he’s mine we talked to each other at the Youth Canteen!" Oh yes! The days of Cherry Vodka and the Silver Bullet, good times good times.

Everyone has memories of high school. Some people wish they had never left and I swear some might actually have had their wish granted when you see them on a visit back home. Others are proud or ambivalent of their high school class and either keep in touch with classmates or sporadically play catch up when they run into a each other.

Then there are the classmates that wish the Silver Wand Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith used in Men in Black was real.

I am not one of them. Sure there are many things I am ashamed of and would hate to have anyone re-tell or to re-live especially in front of my husband or my daughter. But there are some pretty funny things that happened too. Like riding to school with LouAnn the day she drove her car into the parking lot and hit five cars at once. We didn’t have to go to class that day! Some days I felt like I owned the world other days if I made it to the end of the year I thought I would be lucky.

But what about the classmates that can’t think about high school without thinking they played a starring role in a SAW movie? What if they can’t forget being threatened everyday when they walked down the hall? What if their family was even threatened? And what if they carried that burden by themselves and couldn’t explain the crazy to their parents when asked why they are getting hate mail at home or terrorizing phone calls? (The ‘80s equivalent to cyber bullying)

Do you shame that person into going to the reunion? Because My Gosh! it has been twenty years, everyone had hard times and you should be over it by now. Personally, I don’t think so.

Each person out there knows when they graduated. If they did in fact graduate from high school and hadn’t been hit in the head in the twenty years since graduation day then they know there will be a twenty year reunion. There are many ways to get information about an upcoming high school reunion i.e.: Chamber of Commerce, Convention and Visitors Bureau, School Administrative office, press releases, classmates, newspaper announcements/classifieds, etc. Unless you actually live under a rock, and I bet I have old classmates that do, if you equate Meth and Prison to living under a rock, you know when it has been twenty years since you have graduated.

Apparently my high school reunion is being headed up by the very dedicated volunteers. They are hiring a private investigator to find lost classmates. Not just for the reunion, they stress, but for a directory. I had already received a call from a volunteer looking for me and I had given her the info for people I was still in contact with. It seemed like it was going to be a blast to see everyone after so long.

Let the drama begin! Initially I thought Wow! How cool for our graduating class to have a MySpace page to help locate lost classmates and disseminate information. I feel like I am in high school all over again. The MySpace page has now been set to private so those of us that are not "friends" of BHS 1988 can no longer keep up to date and peek in every once in a while to see who has been added. Too many people were just looking and not joining and coming public. How dare we they?!

Sure, I could join MySpace but I have reasons not to. I have been interested but thought it was a little risky, riskier than a blog among gazillion-trillion other blogs. I have an ex husband who has never seen or spoken to his daughter and I really do not want to open that potential can of worms. My step kid’s mom has a MySpace page and she would love to know all the ins and outs of my life. However, since she tried to have my husband's kids taken away and potentially mine for filing a false abuse charge with DHS I just do not want to make it easy for her to know anything about me. Yes, I can set my profile to private but if I comment then I would want my comments to be private and what is the fun of that?

There have been some ugly emails between the BHS class of 88 reunion organizers and a couple of my friends. The organizers are committed, I give them that, and they did have about 500 people to locate. But to have to “out” yourself, even to just a select few withint the organizing committee, and possibly expose your family to potential problems does not seem the correct way to handle this. Sure it might not be physical harm but possible hassles and headaches that you have avoided by keeping and paying for your information to be private.

Apparently, the Reunion Gestapo has a mandate that if you do not give them all the information they require they will have no choice but to publish what the private investigator finds out even if you have notified them you want no contact. Hope we don't have any battered wives, or abused children in our class of 1988.

I am thinking of posting the emails on my blog to capture the Gestapo-esque handling of gathering information for the absolute, directive of God, commanded by reunion organizers everywhere, complete, without error, class of 1988 directory. However, it is a little embarrassing and it has made my husband say repeatedly, “Now, who are these people? Do you really want to go to this reunion? You grew up in such a small, dinky, one horse town.”

This posting is already way too long and should be edited so I will post more some other time.

(And I just wanted to see what we all looked like without Aqua Net. Waaaaa!)

I had planned on making Beef Stroganoff but I didn't want to stand over a stove tonight so I put the Round Steak into my Crock Pot and made up this recipe. It was so good and the meat was so tender and full of flavor.

• 2-4 lbs of Eye of Round Steak
• 1 Onion Sliced
• 2 tbls of Beef Base
• 1.5 cups of water
• Garlic Powder
  
• Lawry's Season Salt
• Cracked Black Pepper
• Montreal Steak Seasoning
• Worcestershire Sauce

Place thick sliced onion on the bottom of the Crock Pot. In the water mix the beef base (can use beef broth) and pour into the Crock Pot. Season one side of meat with Garlic Powder, use a lot, Lawry's Salt, Pepper, and Steak Seasoning and then place the meat season side down. Season the other side while in the Crock Pot. Sprinkle the Worcestershire Sauce over all and cook for 6 hours.

I used small Russet Potatoes washed and coated with Kosher Salt that I cooked for 1 hour at 425.
This was a delicious meal and Anna just loved it and wanted more. The meat really shrinks so if you have a big family please adjust. We have enough for one leftover meal.

When I went home for lunch I threw together this meal in the Crock Pot. It turned out delicious and very tasty.

• 3 frozen boneless chicken breasts
• 1 can of Cream of Chicken soup
• large handful of roasted red peppers
• 1 onion sliced
  
• Garlic Salt
• Dry Ranch Dressing Mix
• Wide egg noodles
  

I dumped the can of soup into the crock pot. Placed the chicken breasts on top and generously sprinkled with garlic salt. I had a jar of roasted red peppers so I placed them on top and took just a bit of the juice and poured it in. I sliced up the onion into chunks and placed on the chicken breasts and then I covered it all with a sprinkling of Dry Ranch Mix.

Placed Crock Pot on Low for 6 hours (12:30 and we needed to eat at 5:30).

When I got home I cooked the Egg Noodles per the instructions. I carefully took the chicken breasts out of the crock pot (they tend to fall apart because they are so moist) and placed them on a plate.

I used my immersion blender and blended the soup, roasted red peppers, and onion. Plated it up with noodles, then chicken breasts, and spooned the soup mixture on top.

Delicious!! Everyone loved it and it was so incredibly easy. I completely made this one up.