I regularly follow Carol Brammer Blotz’s blog My Heart Goes Out, and I continue to listen and be touched by the music of Ray Boltz. It’s been ten years since I heard Thank you the first time and dog gone if it still doesn’t get me. On her blog today, Carol explained why she’s willing to promote Ray’s new CD, True. Be sure to jump over to her blog and read what she has to say in her own words. Words spoken by a woman of honesty, compassion, and understanding.

After reading that Ray had released a new CD I fast tracked over to Amazon to order a copy, and upon arrival I found rather interesting and certainly amusing. At the top of the order page for True is this photo of the CD’s cover with a ruggedly handsome Ray Bear. Personally, I think he’s looking way more adorable than in his mustached and fuzzy perm days but then, aren’t we all? I’m referring of course to the fuzzy perms. The mustache, not so much.

Now this is where it gets both interesting and amusing. At the bottom of the Amazon page for True in the usual section highlighted “Customers Who Bought Related Item Also Bought…” were recommendations for 5 different fingernail polishes ranging in color from barbados blue to neon whimsical, and an easy dozen knitting books including Fairy Tale Knits: 32 Projects to Knit Happily Ever After and Son of Stitch ‘n Bitch: 45 Projects to Knit and Crochet for Men.

Okay, so I thought it was funny anyway.

• Dyke Dating: Reconciliation Before Relationship
• Dyke Dating: Reconciliation Before Relationship – One More Thing
• Dyke Dating: Coming Out Before Going In (to a relationship)
• Dyke Dating: Online Courtship Caveats
• Dyke Dating: God’s Girlfriend Guarantee
• Lesbian Relationships: Preparing for Love
• Lesbian Relationships: Postscript to Preparing for Love
• Lesbian Relationships: Finding Love
• Lesbian Relationships: Is She the One?
• Lesbian Relationships: Nurturing Love

This morning before posting the final installment I read it to D since I wanted her to be okay with the bits and pieces I shared about our relationship. She liked what I’d written and offered a few additional thoughts that I added before I hit the “publish” button. A few minutes later I told her I’d go start the bath water for her and as I got up to get it started we had a funny little exchange that went something like this:

My funnypants wife:

Now that you’re done writing about loving relationships on your blog, you’re probably just going to stop doing sweet things for me.

Me:

So I’m wondering if you want to take that back now or wait until later.

Funnypants again:

I’m going to go with right now.

Me again:

I thought so. Good choice.

And for the record, I told her even before I reached the hot water faucet that I was soooo going to post what she said.

On my toes. I always have to be on my toes with this wife of mine.

Just one more thing I love about the girl.

I do apologize for being slower on my end with getting you the results but last week was all but lost to the flu. As it stands today I’ve read through most of the 20+ entries (a treat, not a chore) that were submitted by the deadline and have selected a diverse panel of women from among the congregation at Peace Lutheran Church to serve as the reading panel. By this weekend I’ll be handing off the submissions to them and asking them to notify me by the following weekend as to their individual picks. This should allow me to announce the final results no later than Monday, March 16 and the best part of all is that within a few days after I’ve contacted the writers with editorial details I will be able to begin sharing some of these remarkable stories with you.

Now in closing and for your amusement, here is a list of the Top Seven Bizarre Google Searches from last week that led people to visit this blog. Scratch your head along with me if you will.

1. Was Eve a lesbian in Genesis?
2. Looking for a fat lady for marriage
3. Sister of the bride speeches
4. Hairy lesbians and sticky friends
5. Pumpy umpy umpkin
6. Lesbian bride licking feet
7. Accidentally washed dark clothes in hot water

Ahhhhh. Time slowed down and returned to focus. I called up to D to gloat over my good fortune and she muttered something back that small children and dogs should never hear* and then I sat down with coffee cup in one hand, remote control in the other, and my laptop waking up at a more leisurely pace than anyone else in the house had enjoyed this morning.

A few minutes ago I put D’s lunch in the front seat of her car, opened the garage door for her departure, and stood holding car keys to be exchanged for a kiss with the blur of a woman that flew by and now here I am again in my designated chair, sipping and flipping and clicking away clad in flannel, the fabric of the gods. And just now, to make life all the sweeter a little black kitty boy came and curled up on my lap to lick my arm clean eliminating my need to get up and shower. Ahhh…life is sweet indeed.**

I’ll blog at you later.

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* Even bloggers get literary license with the truth but lest I encounter the ire of my beloved I should come clean that she never muttered anything. That was a total projection of what I would have done had the situation been reversed.
** Oh, settle down! I’m going to take a shower.

So apparently there was a big whoopty do football game this last Sunday.  I know this because I did the preaching gig on Sunday and suffice it to say, attendance was a wee bit on the light side. This is something else I don’t get since the game didn’t start until later in the afternoon and church is over by noon. Do people really need three hours to prepare themselves emotionally for the start of the game? Is there some kind of required football foreplay I don’t know about? Secret handshakes to learn? A quota of cold pizza and buffalo wings to ingest before kick-off?  Superbowl Sunday is just another reason why I’m grateful to my bone that we have a hundred cable channels to choose from and that God in His divine grace and mercy choose to bring a woman into my life whose apathy for football is equal to that of my own.

Sigh. This post is really going to wreck havoc with my normally devoted dyke readership base, isn’t it? Before you judge me too harshly I want you to know I’ve tried to get it. In high school I was on the pep squad. I sat in the bleachers at the 50 yard line in the cold and rain dressed in a white blouse and a green and white plaid pleaded skirt (for green and white we’ll fight fight fight and all that) among 125 similarly clad pimply girls with the smell of wet wool permeating the air screaming and applauding everytime the cheerleaders signaled our cue. It took me the first half of the season just to figure out we weren’t actually cheering for the cheerleaders remarkable hand springs and splits but for the boys who ran back and forth across the field before falling into piles on top of one another. It took me the second half of the season to figure out that the team with the most points won. How they earned those points was unclear. The team with the dirtiest uniforms by the end of the game perhaps? Was the score determined by a mathematical equation involving the collective total of their team numbers? I don’t know for sure though I suspect the Goliath-sized croquet wickets at either end of the field had something to do with it since one color-coordinated team of boys, followed by their cheerleaders, and in turn we, the sheep-smelling herd of shivering freshmen girls, went batpoo every time one of our players carried the oddly-formed ball through the wicket. That was the last time I watched any football games from start to finish. Not because I was so much interested in the game as I was trapped there having ridden to the game in the yellow school bus assigned to the Pep Squad. Even now, some thirty-eight years later my nostrils can recall in a some what traumatic repressed memory sort of way, the smell of our soaked wool skirts on the bus ride back to the school parking lot.

When I initially started writing this post I was going to share a little from the sermon I preached on Sunday. Given the direction this post took it seems I might actually have unresolved issues around all the football fanaticism. Or could it be that this is nothing more than a desperate sub-conscious cry for help in understanding the lunacy of lesbians who love football and the women who love them.

Whatever it is, I’ll save the sermon summary for another post. It would just seem so wrong to mix a message from the life of Jesus with the abhorent practice of group groping of an unclean animal skin. It’s a sin you know. Leviticus 11:7-8.

If you’re a sports-dyke please help me understand the lifestyle you’ve chosen for yourself and if you’re a non-sports dyke then with closed fist up in the air I say to you “In solidarity we stand my sisters!”

[Unable to recall original source]