“I washed your laundry for you. Your cute little thing is on top.” Yep, that was me being coy in front of her father. He loves his girl. He shudders at the idea of her being a teenager.

She sees the look and giggles. “He knows about it!”

Hippie looks up with that crazed half-vulcan thing he does, “The training bra? Yeah…”

Of course, Nugget and I must roll with this. “So,” I asked her, “what are you training them to do?”

Best. Answer. Ever.

“To play dead!”

We all laughed. I said I was gonna blog that. And then we started thinking about other silly, useless articles of clothing. I offered up the dickie—the neck sock with no sleeves version, not to be confused with the canadian escapee that tends to live here on the weekends. The teenage boys—bored because my kids are gone for the summer, so they come and hang when we’re outside—suggested boxer-briefs. “They’re not boxers, they’re not briefs, and they’re stupid looking.”

So for this week’s amazingly random garage talk question: What items of clothing, or for that matter, things in general, do we as society accept…that are just simply useless. I mean really. We have cured most life-threatening diseases of the last century but think we have to “train” our boobs? We have landed on the moon, an amazing achievement, and some bozo decides to sell backwards robes to the hoards not smart enough to just wear their own backwards. What else is out there that makes you stop and think “Really? Why?” Come on… I’m in pain… make me giggle!!

*code breaker for those new to the blog: My girl=George, my boy=Kram, his girl=Nugget, his boy=Sauce. Yes, there will be a quiz later!

Welcome to Thursday. In the Old West this was the day everyone would bathe. Mmmm, smell that? It’s not the Old West, it’s coffee creamer! Where? In the garage, silly…  And today’s chewy goodness is not only a question, but one I hope to spread and keep going, like a new venereal disease. How? Because I’m gonna post the thought here and then take it to Twitter via hashtags and Facebook via a group.

Now if you looked at the picture, you already know today’s deep thought with Jack Tandy, er The Gypsy. Or at least the topic. Yep, the bucket list.

While Alethea begged me not to use that term because she hates it, it’s one that’s well known, so we’re using it. But… for those that don’t know: The Bucket List is the name given to the to-do list that one would like to achieve before they die. Before they “kick the bucket.”

Now anyone can list the obvious—see my kids married with babies, get published, be happy—those are easy and common sense and well, boring. Let’s see something a bit more fun. More adventurous. Such as “save a life” or “create a new flavor of pop (soda)“. Now those are interesting… and opposites in a spectrum of cool that I give “akayla” credit for.

So what’s on your list? What amazing, far-fetched, insane things can you come up with that would be awesome to add to your bedpost-of-life notches? Me? Oddly, my list consisted of “get published before I die” and nothing else for years. Now? Well, there’s a few more.

I was originally going to just start with one here and then add one a day to Twitter for a month to see what would happen, who would play along, etc. Then the hippie and I talked and decided to see what we could do with this insanity. We appreciate the universe for what it’s done, but there are people out there in this mad connection of cyber space that may be able to do what is usually left to the universe to handle. I say, grab the reigns of your own life and see what happens! Or more calmly, what if everyone posted bucket list items… and someone out there could actually help someone else with something on their list? Such as when Alethea mentioned a hot air balloon and Justin knew someone with one… poof, the blog took a turn!

Well… now it’s just a fun experiment gone insane! So not only are we doing a bucket list, and for the love of stinky cowboys everywhere you’d better all play along, but we’re doing it with a pay-it-forward attitude. It’s all in fun, but if something good comes of it for a friend of a friend of a friend, then so be it. Which means that while I asked (above) for crazy things to be posted, feel free to post your basic wish list items as well. After all, you never know when Karma is watching =)

My first Bucket List item: Go to Disney World… in Japan!!

See, garage talk came about in real life because once upon a time I met a princess in a garage. I sat on a mini-trampoline (at left), sucking my coffee, while the Broaddus household slept (and let me tell you, they enjoy their sleep!) and a groggy Greek princess crawled out of bed, grabbed her own coffee and joined me. We listened to the birds wake the neighborhood and then go quiet while they busied themselves with other things. We talked about writing and family, boys and men, life and fantasy. An hour in, Broaddus family still unconscious, you’d have thought we’d been friends forever, or sisters, or something.

We did that every morning that weekend. We dubbed it “garage talk” because it’s where we met, it’s where we continued to dig into each other’s soul and peek under each other’s band-aids, and giggle at the similarities that were too glaring to miss. Our discussions encompassed everything. And nothing.

It came about here because I needed a new category. “Coffee talk” was just a reminder of a friend that isn’t talking to me. The friend that coined the term. Yeah, I needed a new term. New Year, new blog—time for a change. Coffee Talk was usually a question, Garage Talk will be mostly observations.

And then there was mom’s reason…ing. Mom liked “garage talk” because different people see different things. She likened it to the garage sales she goes to with her best friend, where they are in the same garage, at the same time, but see different things. Observations are like that. The more people that see something, the more meanings or reasons that thing develops.

So… welcome to my garage. Everything is less than a dollar, nothing is returnable or exchangeable, batteries are not included, and I promise to tell you the meanings of the things I see… at least as they’re interpreted by my little girl eyes and old woman’s mind.

Traditional gypsies never had garages, but I bet they could have gone garage saling like champs!

I like new. New is shiny and fun and different. And a little scary. But hey, anything worth exploring should be a little scary, right?!

Not only is the skin of the site a little different—which could be a blog in itself but I’m going to sum it up in one sentence, “horror writer” does not have to equal black pages, dripping fonts, etc.—the guts will be as well. First up, the death of coffee talk.

Yep, I said that.

It’s time.

“Coffee Talk” was a term I originally used for two very specific people—in another world, another time, another place. Times change. People change. Long live caramel creamer and flavored coffees, but you’ll have to stop by Starbucks to get your fill from now on. This drive-through is closed.

So what’s the new category going to be called? hmmm… well, it’s going to be about strange little things. So I could go with ‘gypsy magic’. It’s going to include oddities that we take for granted, pithy things seen/heard, silliness in the face of insanity. So I could go with ‘garage talk’. It’s going to be all encompassing, yet not quite serious like the other blogs I post. So I could call it ‘awesome porch’ or as the Princess suggested, ‘from the porch.’ Yeah, it could be anything, and I have no idea what to call it yet. But even though it doesn’t have a definite title, it’s got a direction. What it won’t be is a standard question every Thursday or thick with caffeinated themes and catch phrases. What it will be is new.

And new is shiny and fun and different…

Welcome to the flip side!

Of course, I am interested in knowing if you’ve ever succeeded in the past.

Not just new year’s resolutions, but self-promises in general. It doesn’t matter if it’s spoken aloud, uttered to a small circle of friends, or whispered desperately in the dark to nothing but the starlight, you’ve promised yourself something. It may have been, “I swear, if the tests come back negative I’m quitting smoking now!” It may have been, “I will not eat another dessert until I lose one size.” Or it could be something profane, silly or pertinent, “God, if you get me out of this, I’ll never fill-in-the-blank again.”

I have failed. Repeatedly. To quit smoking. I successfully stopped chewing my nails right after high school. I failed horribly at dieting, then succeeded. I’ve hit self-promised deadlines for change. But I’ve also missed them… sometimes I’ve been so far off the mark, the mark stopped talking to me.

blah blah, new year’s, blah blah blah… yeah, this is the last coffee talk of 2009. It’s been a crazy year. A good year. And 2010 will be even more so—crazy and good. There are changes coming. Reinvention. Self-promises. For the last coffee talk of the year, don’t tell me a thing. Just think about it. Think about your resolutions, your self-promises. Made at year-end or on a Tuesday in June for no good reason. You’ve made them but have you succeeded in them? Which ones? Why did you succeed or fail? And are you ready to make another one? Because the worst kind of broken promise is the one you make to yourself.

Happy New Year—see you on the other side…

*fade to black*