(Oh come on… if that title doesn’t suck you into the weird little world of my blog, I just give up… I don’t know what else I can do)…

Okay, during our Christmas at my mom’s house in the Bay Area my younger daughter, Mollie, hurt her back trying to save the planet. She went on a beach cleanup with her mom, and Willie and his mom. She pulled a muscle trying to lift a freaking tire out of the water… yeah… you heard me.

Anyway, it was painful and she was depressed that they had to come home from the beach early. So Jessica, my older daughter, to cheer her sister up, told me that Mollie said it would make her happy if Jessica could use their new Christmas makeup kits to give me a makeover… I know, but don’t judge us unless you raised at least two daughters…

The thing is… and this is the thing that makes me a good dad… I would have done it anyway. Because I love my kids. But you can’t really blame me for trying to get the best deal out of it that I could… because my brothers were there…  and nieces and nephews… and cousins… and I know this will go down in the family legends.

So I held out for two things.

1. No pictures would ever be put on Facebook or anywhere else… Oh, they took pictures alright, but so far so good.

2. Jessica had to promise to read at least the first book of my science fiction series.

No, she hasn’t read them. I know, she is the one who compiles them and sends them to the publisher. And her boyfriend has been designing all my book covers. But she hates science fiction. She just can’t take it seriously… even though she claims she thinks about aliens and what will happen when they show up here…

So, to make a long story not too much longer… I learned that no amount of colorful makeup is ever going to make me look like anything other than the world’s ugliest drag queen trying to look like a geisha… (It might have helped if I had shaved first)… But Jess, who has almost finished the book, told me that of all the alien characters she was ever forced to read about, she liked my three little Helper-Friends the best… or maybe she said she hated them the least… but that sounds like the same thing to me…

Also, she totally loved my murder mystery set in World War Two London… the one that I wrote a lot of you into as characters… the one that Trent is editing up in Canada as we speak… (although she does want me to have the girl survive until after she actually goes on her first date with the detective, so there is a small rewrite coming)…