Well, I’m here to tell you all that your going to be seeing a lot less of me over the next month or so.

     Evidently, my dear husband has gotten tired of not seeing my name in print.  He says if I don’t start sending my stuff out to be considered for rejection again, he’s going to shut off my blog access.  My guess is, he wants payback.

     See,

     I never did anything like this to him, but I have friends who don’t have to live with him who have picked up my irreverent, lighthearted attitude to his natural reticence, humility and sense of personal dignity.  Not having to live with him, they have used this lighthearted irreverence to publicly humiliate and embarrass him.

     Sue, for instance.  Sue is the lady who decided that my kids were too serious and that it wasn’t healthy.  She decided they needed to learn how to be goofy, and set out on a campaign to “goofy them up”.  Several years worth of despairing phone calls from teachers will stand as a testament to her success.

     Anyway, Rocky’s first publisher made the decision to start plastering huge honkin’ pictures of their authors on their books.  The very first book out after this decision was Rocky’s book…which caused a number of people to comment on how he must be the most self-aggrandizing ego-maniac on the planet.  These are people who have evidently not heard of Harlan Ellison (one of the finest writers on the planet, and also rumored to have an ego of epic proportions)

     This irony was not lost on Sue.

     We went to Barnes and Noble, and she said to Rocky,

     “Take me to the computer section.  I want to see your book on the shelf.”

     He reluctantly did so, where upon Sue pulled his book off the shelf, looked around and scoped out the three or four people standing in the isle, and said:

     “Oh my God!  It’s him!  It’s Rocky Lhotka, the guy who wrote this book!  Look! Wow!  It’s him! He’s standing right there!”

     And then she fled while Rocky was stuck politely fielding questions and curiosity from people who had by-and-large no real interest of knowledge of Visual Basic or business objects (the topics of his book).  If I recall correctly, one guy he ended up politely talking to for the better part of an hour was clutching The Complete Idiot’s Guide to DOS or something like that.

     Or Barb, who did several very amusing bits like walking up the stairs and doing a Kramer-esque startle-take upon seeing his picture staring at her from the spine of his book.  Then there was the time she took the book and set it up on a table, and walked around the room, saying stuff like “His eyes follow you wherever you go…creepy!”

     Anyway, suffice it to say, he wants me to put my stuff out there and get published…even if just once…I think he is living in hope that one day there will be a book out there with my name on it, and…well, let’s just say payback is a bitch.