The Rolling Phone
Yes that reads rolling, it isn’t a misspelled word, an autocorrect, and certainly not a sign of me being uneducated or suffering from the early onset of Alzheimer’s.  Rolling is the word I meant.
Yes this is a bitching session.  My daughter is always telling me she hates my earpiece to my phone.  Even though I have one of the better ones, or so I’m told, it does have its little quirks and it tends to aggravate her when I use the darn thing.  I have tried to minimize its use when talking to her.
What I haven’t done is express to her how I feel about her putting her phone on speaker in her car.  All three of my daughters do this.  I understand the safety issues with this convenience but I also am more than a little aware of the drawbacks to it as well.
First when I call them and they answer via their car, you probably understand now how this little tome came by its title, they tend to neglect to inform me that there is someone in the car with them until way into the conversation if they bother to tell me at all before the next day.  More often than not the other person in the car with them is their other halves.  What if I have suddenly decided I despise the knuckleheads they’ve paired up with and I take that moment to express that feeling.  The possibility that this will have passed by the next day and I am once more happy with my daughter’s choices it makes apologizing problematic and what may have been a great relationship between any one of them is now down the crapper.  The flip side of that is that if I am in the car with one of my girls and their other half calls that tends to be the first thing they do.  They warn those suckers which now makes me wonder what these little darling have to say about me that they have to be warned about my presence.  Not to mention how quickly do these little buggers start in on good old mom.  Bite me boys.
The second issue with this is that my girls may have their little darlings in the car with them, no I’m not talking about the guys, and if I’m having a really hard day I may have something come out of my mouth I do not want them to hear.  The first thing these girls should say is that I have you grandchild or grandchildren in the car so heads up before you say something you don’t want them to hear.  You shouldn’t wait until I have spouted out at least a half dozen four letter words that I wouldn’t have used in front of my mother little on my precious little grandchildren.  They’ll hear enough of that kind of talk when they start preschool.  One already has heard her fair share since she is in the first grade and with two years under her belt she is already bilingual when it comes to street language.  Thankfully if she is using it she is evidently smart enough not to use it in front of the adults in her life so for.
The third little problem is that when you put your phone on your car speakers it picks up every little bump, jingle, gust of wind, or scream your child emits in a volume that would make a deaf person sit up and pay attention to.  The cacophony of racket that is picked up through your phone makes me wonder if the noise was too much for you and you have jumped out the window of your moving vehicle to get away from the one thousand elephants marching in steel toed army boots while they all beat out the nerve racking ditty on bass drums that has been stuck inside your head for the past week.  Another words my dear sweet daughter, I CAN’T YOU.  You then have the audacity to get pissed at me because I keep asking you to repeat yourself.
So I’m asking you to A. not answer the phone when I call if you are in your car whether you’re alone or not.  B. Do not call me back until you have arrived at your destination and you can talk through that expensive little trinket that we are all so damn attached to.  C.  Please, please take all of what I just wrote in the manner in which it is meant.  To be more precise, keep the damn phone in your purse, pocket, console, just make sure that I will not be on the receiving end of the nightmare that is your car connection to your phone.

Mom Was Here
Those of you who have read ‘You Really Don’t Want To Open That’ will understand this tidbit of nonsense while those of you who haven’t it may just pass right over your head.  If you want to correct that here is the link that will take you directly to the story without you having to search for it.  http://www.cathypacematthews.com/a-whole-lot-of-talking/you-really-dont-want-to-open-that
Now that I have given you an easy way to find it I hope you will check it out.
You might be asking why I am bringing it up yet again.  The truth is I’ve been asked several times if the part about me carrying my mom’s ashes, I prefer to simply say my mom is in my purse, so I wanted to clear that question up, is true.  Yes I do carry my mom in my purse.  She goes where ever I go.  Right after she passed away my husband took me to Boston, actually it was a little town about thirty minutes from Boston, just to get me away from home for a week and hopefully help me heal from the loss of my mom.  What Buddy didn’t know was that we were in a place Mom had always wanted to visit but she never got that chance.  In its own way it probably made things a little worse for a short time.  What did help was I realized that my mom was with me on that trip.  She was in that beautiful little cabin with a fireplace with us.  That realization did help me and now I am tickled every time I go somewhere she goes with me.  Yes having your dead relatives right there can make you uncomfortable but she had the decorum not to be seen or heard so we were fine.
My mom has stood on the top of the Rocky Mountains, has sat with me on several different beaches, has walked with me in awe at the beauty of a new place, and been captivated by the kindness of people from all these different place.  Yes it’s sad that I wasn’t able to share these places with her when she was alive but as trivial as this may sound I’m taking her now.
My mom may have been dwindled down to a few grey ashes in a bottle but she is still with me and her presence is often a comfort to me.  Now if I find anything sad in this is because she isn’t seen, heard, not touched during these trips so I’ve decided I’m going to correct that.  I’m going to start carrying an eight by ten image of her and someplace along the trip I’m going to attach it to a utility pole or something along those lines.  On that image will be written her name, the dates of both her birth and death, and the date the poster was put up.  You got it.  People will come along and hopefully read it and see the dates and will either find it funny or it may scare the crap out of them.  If Buddy and I are on a long road trip in our lovely converted 1963 4106 Greyhound bus she could end up with her picture posted in a lot of little towns along the way.
The concept makes me feel a little like Buddy and I are Hansel and Gretel and we are leaving breadcrumbs along our path.
So if you ever run into one of these images stop and say hello to Mom, her name is Emma Catherine Pace.  She would like that but be warned, she is a bit of a Chatty Cathy and can talk for hours.
 

Yes, you read that right.  I’m horrible, terrible even.  On top of that I woke up in a particularly bad mood this morning.  These are not things in me that you want to run into when they happen all on the same day.  It is one of those times when my daughter wants to put a muzzle on me until I can manage my mouth.  She wasn’t around today to even slap a hand over my mouth.
To give you some idea of just how bad a mood I woke up in I turned on the TV about an hour after I crawled out of bed way past my usual time of, well let’s just say the roosters haven’t even started crowing when I usually wake up, and this irritated me right off the bat.  Everything on the stupid boob tube only increased my irritation by tenfold so I switched it over to Youtube and found me a nice thunderstorm to fill in the silence and to if not calm me at least match my mood.
This also means my morning cup of coffee was late and that’s never good.  I have one cup of coffee a day and that is all the caffeine I get to last through the whole day and my body was screaming for the fix.  This is not good ever.
There were a couple of other little irritates that popped up along the way so by the time I responded to a friend who had sent me a message at 12:59 this morning wanting to know if I was there things had gone downhill.  First at 12:59 this morning my ass was asleep so yes I was here you ditz but at that time in the morning my ass was studying absolutely nothing but whatever might have been projected to the insides of my eyelids by my warped, maniacal, plain damn cray brain.
This poor friend is going through some things and had gotten some scary information in regards to an MRI and she wanted to talk to someone.  Maybe at 12:59 this morning that wasn’t the best time to try and talk to me and fortunately I was asleep.  After 11:00 PM my brain goes into shut down mode even if my eyes are still open and heaven only knows what might come out of my mouth then even if I’m not in a bad mood.  She goes to a specialist today to find out exactly what is going on and like I said she just wanted to talk.
Anyway, after explaining to me what was happening and me giving her some sage and yes a bit harsh advice maybe she asked if I wanted her to let me know what the doctor said.  I of course said I do which I meant but here’s where it really gets bad.  I told her that if the doctor told her her brain was turning to spaghetti then she was supplying the forks.  Yeah.
How horrible is that.  This poor woman is pouring her heart out to me and not only do I give her some hard advice but then I come out with that.  Can a person be more insensitive?
Fortunately this is a good friend and she gets me, that’s because she also has a warped, maniacal, plain damn cray brain, and laughed her ass off.  She’s a good friend.

Blood Lines 'The Curse'
When Emma finds out her father’s mother has passed away she has to make a trip back to her childhood home in Missouri.  Emma’s mother had taken her and left when she was twelve years old and swore that they would never set foot on the property again after Emma’s father had died in a tragic accident.  That had been twenty years ago.
Now she was back to put her grandmother’s estate in order when she hadn’t even known that her paternal grandmother was still alive until she had received the notice of her recent death.  She wouldn't have returned even now if it hadn't of been for a notebook left to her by her mother who died a only few weeks before her grandmother.
Emma had inherited the estate which turned out to be quite large but with it came a hundred and thirty year old curse and some unexpected and unwanted family members.  Now Emma has to unravel years of secrets to find a way to break the curse so she doesn’t end up like everyone in the Rodgers’ family bloodline.  Every one of the Rodgers have ended up dead, most before they even make it to adulthood and the one child from each generation that does only live into their thirties and that has always been a male child.  Emma is the only female to make it to adulthood and has been on borrowed time most of her life and the payment has finally come due.

Where you can find it.


Lulu/hardcover   http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/CathyPaceMatthews
Createspace/paperback   https://www.createspace.com/5768667
Amazon/paperback and ebook   http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Lines-Curse/dp/1517571057/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1446574044&sr=8-2&keywords=cathy+pace+matthews
Smashwords/ebook   https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/487345
Barnes & Noble/paperback   http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/blood-lines-the-curse-mrs-cathy-pace-matthews/1122743603?ean=9781517571054
Barnes & Noble/ebooks   http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/blood-lines-the-curse-cathy-pace-matthews/1120651877?ean=2940046369250
Kobo/ebook   https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/blood-lines-the-curse
BooksaMillion/paperback   http://www.booksamillion.com/p/Blood-Lines-Curse/Mrs-Cathy-Pace-Matthews/9781517571054?id=6568745909235