• Motherhood
  • Love & Marriage
  • Roots
  • Writing
  • Best of Lance
  • Pregnancy
  • Photography

While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

Pug worries, or what to do when your dog starts having seizures

August 6, 2013 by heidi 36 Comments

When Cubbie was a younger pug, I took him everywhere I went. He was my constant companion, a rotund, game-for-anything, kindhearted creature with an infectious grunt.

I took him to bars. I took him to restaurants. I took him to stores that were cool with dogs. I took him to ice cream shops that were cool with pugs. Each week for four years, I took him to the bank to make a deposit and get a bone. At the mere mention of the word bank, he’d pounce off the couch, run for the door and hop into the passenger seat of my car. It was our Monday morning ritual.

I took him to our wedding. I dressed him in a tuxedo and a top hat. I tied a little white pillow to his back and asked him to carry our rings. He obliged, as he obliges to most things most of the time.

I took him to the top of a mountain in Colorado and to the bottom of a valley in Idaho. I took him to Graceland. I took him to Chicago. I took him to the Oregon Coast and let him run without a leash into the Pacific Ocean, the memory of which is so fresh in my mind I can still smell the salt on his fur as I smuggled him past the front desk in a no-dogs-allowed hotel.

I can still see the wild look in his eyes when, after spending three weeks on the road, sleeping in a tent with me, I let him crash on a pillow in a queen-sized bed. King Cub.

[Read more…]

The little yard that could

November 26, 2012 by heidi 3 Comments

This is Henry’s little red chair. I’ve got a thing for Adirondack chairs, no? Now my boy can sit in style next to his mother, who when she does sit, likes to sit in style. (Hello Sky Chair.)

The picket fence in the background was something of a neighborhood project. Without the help of family, friends, neighbors and virtual strangers, I’d still be sulking around St. Pete, grumbling about my fugly front yard.

Oh, but I love my house.

Well. Let me rephrase that. I’ve always loved the inside of my house. It’s got a cozy bungalow feel. It’s filled with comfortable furniture, meaningful art, an adorable toddler tyrant, a handsome husband and a fat, happy pug. What more could a gal want?

The front of my house, however, has always been a sore spot. Up until last month it had zero curb appeal. Our lawn was balding. Our once valiant attempt at a vegetable garden had become an angry bed of weeds, littered with bent fragments of metal fencing and forgotten plant markers. Our porch was about as inviting as a parking lot. With the exception of an overly shellacked manatee statue – a gift form my Oma – the entrance to our house was, in fact, off-putting.

We did try to jazz things up. Or rather, well-meaning family gardeners tried to jazz things up.

Two years ago, Oma took pity on us and came over when I was at work to lay down mulch and plant flowers in the sad beds by our front door. Despite diligent watering, her landscaping eventually gave way to weeds. Fed up with these failed attempts at beautification, we decided to let the one thing that wouldn’t die continue to grow – a frail Jacaranda tree in the center of our circular driveway that resembled a stooped-over geriatric.

[Read more…]

Pregnancy Confession No. 4

March 5, 2011 by heidi 10 Comments

[I've always loved dogs more than babies.]

I'm an unabashed dog lover.

When I see one, my heart leaps. I get younger. My mind quiets.
My instinct is to nuzzle the dog. To let the dog nuzzle me.
I know not all dogs are people-lovers, as all people are not dog-lovers.
But it doesn't matter. I turn to mush. Dog putty.

I want to curl up in a ball on the floor,
surrounded by fur and paws and dog saliva
and not communicate with people.
I know this sounds disgusting to non-dog lovers, but it's how I feel.

Give me a yellow tennis ball and a chocolate lab
and I'll be out of your hair for hours.

My affection for dogs is pure and addictive.
I'm like a boy at a monster movie,
cupping a supersize Coke, guzzling and burping.

No need to come up for air.
In the presence of dogs, I boil down to my purest self.

Most four-legged animals make me feel this way.

I wish I could say the same for babies.

Babies and I operate on a different level.

My insides don't turn to apple sauce and cherry cobbler
in the company of babies.

It's an honest admission from a pregnant woman.

I'd rather watch a two-hour Discovery Channel documentary
on the mating habits of otters
than tune into some TLC reality show
about 25 screaming kids and their tummy-tucked mother.

[Read more…]

Over the meadow and through kitchens

November 14, 2010 by heidi 10 Comments

Phantom truck on road in the Redwoods

I had what I call a dreamer’s dream Friday night.

When I woke up I felt younger and lighter. I woke up with twitchy toes and messy hair. I woke up craving apple pie and hot chocolate with small marshmallows.

I tried to dream it again last night. I closed my eyes and breathed as deep as the ocean. I remembered giant falling leaves and twisting roads, green hills and amber sunsets. I remembered the way the wind felt, the smell of strangers’ kitchens. I remembered plaid curtains and blue tiled countertops. I willed these things back into my head thinking I could create a sequel last night.

But dreams don’t work that way, which is what makes them so seductive and intoxicating.

You can’t buy your dreams on iTunes. You can’t press repeat, or burn ’em on a disc and listen to ’em on your way to work. They happen and then they’re gone.

Like a fire in my head, they spark and sizzle and pop and crackle.

Usually, I wake up feeling like a film reel is burning in my brain. Pictures and people start vanishing. Scenes start unfurling and disintegrating. Feelings I felt so intensely in the dream linger like an ember and then flicker out.

Regarding this, I say, appreciate your subconscious. It’s a fascinating galaxy. For some of us it’s the only place where we lose control. I’m addicted to dreaming, in particular lucid dreams, of which I have many.

Like a sinner who becomes a born-again Christian, I was an insomniac before I became a lucid dreamer.

I’m not sure if Friday night’s dream was lucid. I don’t recall directing it or realizing (as I often do) that I was dreaming. I only recall the wild ride, the hills and the kitchens.

I was on a bicycle.

I was riding with a a group of unidentifiable girlfriends. I feel like two of them were my sisters and one was my best friend, but I’m not sure. I know they were all women I was comfortable with and that we were all on bicycles. The bicycles were connected. Picture a freakishly long tandem bicycle. A bicycle for eight.

We were riding in what appeared to be Upstate New York. The leaves were changing. We were in the country. The sun was an hour away from setting, casting everything in a warm red glow. The wind was at our backs. The terrain was rolling and looked insurmountable, but we rode it effortlessly as if uphills were downhills.

We were all laughing.

The road was twisty and topsy-turvy, endless in its curves and lined with the tallest trees you’ve ever seen.

Maybe we were in Oregon.

As we continued on, storybook houses began to crop up on hilltops.

The houses were perfect triangles with red brick chimneys billowing smoke that smelled like pine logs. They had cobblestone driveways and well-tended gardens. They had bird feeders and painted mailboxes.

Some houses were white with blue shutters and others were blue with white shutters.

Upon approaching each house, the front door would swing open and we’d ride straight into the house, right into the kitchen.

The kitchens would smell like cakes and cookies and pies. Plump women in aprons would feed us as we pedaled past as if there were no obstacles at all, as if the road cut a path clear through the kitchen and out through the back door.

We never got off our bicycles and we never stopped moving. And as quickly as we entered the house, we just as quickly departed, our wheels hitting the pavement outside, sending us into a valley and up another hill, where we would enter another house, the front door flying open on its hinge.

Each house would smell better than the last.

Sometimes we’d come across children dancing, or a couple sitting at a table talking, or a woman bent over a sewing machine or a man adjusting his tie in the reflection of his microwave. Sometimes the house would be empty.

We were welcomed like old friends in each house we entered, as if the homeowners had been waiting for us. We were spoon fed sweet potato yams and wrapped in knitted scarves. If there was music on, we boogied on our bikes. If we interrupted a game of Trivial Pursuit, we played and always won.

Yet we never stayed for very long. After we’d taken in all we could take in, the back door would swing open, our bikes would jolt forward and we’d heartily wave goodbye.

Even though it was pointless, we never stopped pedaling. There was no tension on our bike chains. We were powered by some otherworldly force, as if we we were airborne, like Elliot riding with E.T. in our basket, flying by the light of the moon.

I wish I could tell you when we stopped moving, but I don’t think we ever did.

I don’t think our bikes had brakes.

—

PS. Photo by Howard Ignatius.

A maiden changes her name

July 30, 2010 by heidi 20 Comments

I didn’t know I was attached to my last name until it came time to change it.

It’s this way with most things, isn’t it?

I’ve been married for 318 days, 315 of which I’ve been Heidi Kurpiela, a name that I’ve pronounced two different ways my entire life: Ker-peel-ya and Ker-peel-a.

I always give people these two options when they ask me how to pronounce it. I’m not sure which is right and which is wrong and it doesn’t much matter as long as you spell it with a “pie” and say it with a “peel.”

Kurpiela is a German name with Polish origins, the result of blurring boundaries between two countries from which my people hail. Other than my Dad’s immediate family, I have no known relatives with this last name in the United States. Three years ago, Facebook introduced me to a whole new brood of Kurpielas in Canada, but after sending a series of messages back and forth with one of them, I’ve yet to find a common ancestor.

This is unfortunate considering how much I love Canada.

[Read more…]

The skinny on my wedding…

July 24, 2009 by heidi 19 Comments

wedding dress by Sarah Seven

I’m incapable of writing about every bitty detail of my September 12 wedding. I do however love pictures and I wanted you guys to know that despite my bridal aloofness, I did not boycott all frivolities. I embraced many of them with an open and girlie heart. I love throwing a party!

So for those of you who have asked me to share wedding details and the wedding bridal veil, here’s a picture play-by-play.

(FYI: I’m not wearing this lovely Sarah Seven dress, but I do think her designs are wonderful. Visit Sarah’s website. She lives in Portland, Ore., where I imagine her life is endlessly hip.)

1196208066_ace47f38fd

Today I was inspired to add blue to my wedding. (See above collage by Blissful Mama.) It wasn’t until I walked past my bathroom and saw Joe’s orange towel draped over the shower curtain that I realized why my brain has been swimming with turquoise, brown and orange. I see it as a homage to Florida and New York, though I haven’t settled on it yet. Who knows, by tomorrow I might think it’s awful.

IMG_0391

 My mother thinks I’m nuts, but you can see now where the color combo came from.

I’m in the middle of making personalized birds nests. While these will function as placeholders and favors, they are not the only wedding favor. Joe blew my cover on the nests last week when he announced on his Facebook status that he was, “sitting on the couch working when the UPS man arrived with a box of 120 bird’s nests. You never know what the day will bring.”

bird-feeder-Robin-eggs

[Read more…]

The tent diaries 6

June 12, 2009 by heidi 5 Comments

“On such a trip as mine, so much there is to see and to think about that event and thought set down as they occurred would roil and stir like a slow-cooking minestrone.” – John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

I was wrong about Wednesday’s post being my final tent diaries entry. I remember I wrote this kind of sloppy epilogue after I returned to Sarasota.

People who had followed my journey in the newspaper said I ended things so abruptly with no tidy conclusion or rewarding epiphany. Of course by then it was too late. I had hogged full-page spreads in the newspaper for six weeks. So for myself and my friends I wrote this, a little thank you note.

I was feeling pretty sappy and as usual, verbose.
—
[Read more…]

The tent diaries 5

June 10, 2009 by heidi 8 Comments

Just before I left Florida, my friend Ricci gave me a dragonfly, with this message written on the wings:

“All that glitters is not gold. All who wander are not lost.”

I’m sleepy now as I write this. Uninspired for the most part, sneezing in an auto repair shop, where I’m getting the oil changed in Joe’s car. It’s 9 a.m. on a Wednesday and I’m drinking Timmy Ho’s out of a plastic travel mug. Mechanic’s coffee is always too black and too dank for my taste buds, so I usually bring my own.

[Read more…]

The tent diaries

May 27, 2009 by heidi 12 Comments

In the summer of 2007 – less than three months after I started dating Joe – I took a road trip from Southwest Florida to the Oregon Coast. I was gone for a little over a month. Just me and the pug in a borrowed tent. With a loose plan, and a 1997 Honda Civic stocked with jars of peanut butter and cans of vegetable soup, the pug and I camped alone in state parks from Asheville, N.C. to Klamath Falls, Ore.
It was, to be brief, the most amazing and fantastic adventure I’ve ever taken. It’s been almost two years now and I was thinking today about how inspired, how bold and how awe-struck I was at the time. How utterly fearless.
I didn’t have a blog blog then. Instead I chronicled the trip in a series of newspaper stories that I emailed to my editor by ripping off wireless Internet connections in Holiday Inn Express parking lots.
In addition to that column, which Joe so aptly named “Heidi Go Seek” after I called him in Osceola, Arkansas to pick his brain for headline suggestions, I also wrote these rambling MySpace “blog” posts. Here are the first four – unedited, un-tweaked, grammatical errors and all:
—
[Read more…]

My pug gets better mileage than your SUV.

March 14, 2009 by heidi 11 Comments

An ode to my pug’s paws:

I haven’t met a dog fanatic who hasn’t expressed joy over their pet’s exquisite paws.
My pug’s paws are works of art. The black pads, all circular and button-like, get so rough I want to exfoliate my face with them. They feel like the old upholstery buttons on my parent’s scratchy couch. 
Whenever we go for long walks, I’m grateful for the pug’s durable pads. They can endure sticks and stones and random sharp sidewalk debris. Honestly, the pug’s paws are better equipped for outdoor traversing than the shitty flip-flops I wear every day.
Sometimes he will get a thorn stuck between his pads, and rather than howl and whimper with his paw in the air, he will soldier on – 27 pounds of pug marching onward into the neighborhood with a limp so slight passing dogs barely notice he’s lost rhythm. 
The paws themselves smell like corn chips. Many dog’s paws smell this way. I know it’s disgusting and you may think me vile for it, but I love to sniff the pug’s paws. Like a kid with a runny nose seeking out his favorite germ-drenched blanket, the pug’s paws fill me with a fuzzy warmth that coats my heart in cashmere and aids in the flow of serotonin. 
And the fur! The fur looks like wood grain on a two-by-four leg of lumber cut from an ancient oak tree – so straight and so smooth when you pet with the grain, and so course and so stiff when you pet against the grain. 
But it’s the pads that impress me most. It’s the pads that I envy when I look at my own fleshy feet. 
When the pug and I camped across the country, he stepped on many a wicked thorn, nosed around in many a pricker bush, popped a squat on many unforgiving cacti, but no pointy plant was too sharp for his dime-sized paw pads. 
His paws shatter toy breed stereotypes. They are as rugged and rigged for outdoor adventure as the paws on a Bernese Mountain Dog. 
If it weren’t for my pug’s vacuum-sealed face, he’d have soared over sand dunes in Bandon Beach, Ore. with the ease of a heron.  
If it weren’t for his asthmatic lungs, I’m certain he would have combed the The Rockies like a mountain lion hunting elk at dusk.
If not for his diesel engine pulmonary system, combusting externally in the North Carolina heat, I’m confident the pug’s muscled legs would have carried him up the Blue Ridge Mountains to the top of the Grove Park Inn, where together we would’ve sipped tea in high-backed Adirondack chairs facing the sunset.
And perhaps if his sausage roll body had been a little less eggplant-shaped, we’d have frolicked the Ozarks like Maria and Captain Von Trapp. 
If the rest of him would keep up, my pug’s paws would outperform Firestone Tires. 
—
PS. Photo of my courageous pug after he lumbered his way to the top of a red rock formation in Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs. 
PPS. When the pug is not ascending sedimentary beds of sandstone, he slumbers on top of Joe’s head in a queen-sized bed in St. Petersburg, Fla.
PPPS. Note: I purposely did not mention the pug’s trifling dewclaw. 

Why do I even blogger?

If you really want to know why I continue to write here, read this post.

Lance lately

  • Old School Values
  • Land of Hives and Honey
  • The Happy Camper
  • Truth Bombs with Henry [No. 2]
  • Truth Bombs with Henry [No. 1]
  • By now I’d have two kids

Social commentary

  • Crystal on Pug worries, or what to do when your dog starts having seizures
  • heidi on Land of Hives and Honey
  • Roberta Kendall on Land of Hives and Honey
  • Jane on Pug worries, or what to do when your dog starts having seizures
  • reb on The Happy Camper

Back in the day

  • December 2017 (1)
  • September 2017 (1)
  • May 2017 (1)
  • June 2015 (2)
  • May 2015 (1)
  • February 2015 (1)
  • September 2014 (1)
  • February 2014 (1)
  • January 2014 (1)
  • December 2013 (6)
  • November 2013 (3)
  • October 2013 (5)
  • September 2013 (7)
  • August 2013 (2)
  • July 2013 (3)
  • June 2013 (2)
  • May 2013 (5)
  • April 2013 (2)
  • March 2013 (6)
  • February 2013 (6)
  • January 2013 (4)
  • December 2012 (1)
  • November 2012 (3)
  • October 2012 (3)
  • September 2012 (3)
  • August 2012 (5)
  • June 2012 (5)
  • May 2012 (1)
  • April 2012 (4)
  • March 2012 (5)
  • February 2012 (6)
  • January 2012 (3)
  • December 2011 (1)
  • November 2011 (2)
  • October 2011 (6)
  • September 2011 (6)
  • August 2011 (5)
  • July 2011 (3)
  • June 2011 (4)
  • May 2011 (7)
  • April 2011 (7)
  • March 2011 (6)
  • February 2011 (6)
  • January 2011 (5)
  • December 2010 (7)
  • November 2010 (4)
  • October 2010 (4)
  • September 2010 (11)
  • August 2010 (6)
  • July 2010 (4)
  • June 2010 (6)
  • May 2010 (7)
  • April 2010 (8)
  • March 2010 (5)
  • February 2010 (6)
  • January 2010 (6)
  • December 2009 (10)
  • November 2009 (6)
  • October 2009 (8)
  • September 2009 (4)
  • August 2009 (4)
  • July 2009 (8)
  • June 2009 (8)
  • May 2009 (11)
  • April 2009 (5)
  • March 2009 (14)
  • February 2009 (7)
  • January 2009 (6)
  • December 2008 (3)
  • November 2008 (3)
  • October 2008 (3)
  • September 2008 (5)
  • August 2008 (11)
  • July 2008 (10)
  • June 2008 (13)
  • May 2008 (9)
  • April 2008 (4)

Oddities

Reading material

Wild by Cheryl Strayed Travels with Charley Home Game bossypants just kids the time travelers wife Boys Life The-Liars-Club My Uncle Oswald Stephen King On Writing

Me.

Heidi K

Joe.

Joe on guitar

Henry.

henry as werewolf

Chip.

Chippy in a cupboard

Buzzy.

Buzzy

Why Lance?

This blog is named after my old friend Sarah's manifestation of a dreamy Wyoming cowboy named Lance, because the word blog sounds like something that comes out of a person's nose.

About me

I'm a journalist who spends my Mondays through Fridays writing other people's stories, a chronic procrastinator who needs structure. I once quit my job to write a book and like most writers, I made up excuses why I couldn't keep at it.

My boyfriend fiancé husband Joe likes to sleep in late on the weekends, but since we have a kid now that happens less than he'd like.

Before Henry and Chip, I used to spend my mornings browsing celebrity tabloid websites while our dog snored under the covers. Now I hide my computer in spots my feral children can't reach because everything I own is now broken, stained or peed on.

I created Lance in an attempt to better spend my free time. I thought it might jump start a second attempt at writing a novel.

It hasn't. And my free time is gone.

But I'm still here writing.

I'm 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 and I've yet to get caught up in something else, which is kind of a big deal for a chronic procrastinator.

How I met Joe

If you're new here and looking for nirvana, read this post.

And if that’s not enough…

heidikurpiela.com

Join the fan club

Subscribe

Copyright © 2022 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in