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While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

Land of Hives and Honey

September 13, 2017 by heidi 2 Comments

Lakewood Ranch land planner Bob Simons is single-handedly keeping East Manatee County’s bee population buzzing.

**DSC_0347

The air in Lakewood Ranch is thick with afternoon rain and stifling heat. Creatures everywhere are running for shelter. In The Lake Club, a luxury development east of Lorraine Road, residents are coming home from work, their wipers on high and their lights on low, steam rising up from the concrete. It’s 5:30 and everyone wants to be inside and dry, even the bees.

Bob Simons waits for a break between showers, steps out of his truck and into his bee garb. The ensemble is a cross between Hazmat suit and auto mechanic’s uniform: Dickies coveralls, white hood, requisite bee veil and goatskin gloves that don’t protect against stingers when they’re wet. He moves toward a four-foot-high bee box, a nondescript white dresser obscured by faux Tuscan scenery and a few rows of novelty grapevines. He lifts the lid. The bees come in drips and drabs.

“The girls aren’t too pissed,” he mutters through his veil. “I’m surprised. They don’t like rain or low-pressure weather.”

Like a dairy farmer talking about his cows, Simons refers to the bees as his girls, which is largely accurate. For every one male drone in the hive, there are 100 worker bees –– all of them female and none of them pleased about having their roof ripped off in the rain.

With the ease of an office worker pulling a manila folder out of a filing cabinet, Simons slides a hive frame out of the box and holds it out in front of him. The frame is dense with capped honeycomb in perfect hexagonal cells that took thousands of bees thousands of hours and thousands of flights to and from nearby wildflowers to collectively build. “Hold this,” he says, brushing off a few hangers-on. “You wont believe how heavy it is.”

[Read more…]

By now I’d have two kids

May 25, 2015 by heidi 6 Comments

FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHY  BACKDROPS uk

That’s me up there, four months pregnant with the baby I lost in December. I remember feeling way further along when I took the pic. It’s one of only two belly pics that exist from that ill-fated pregnancy.

They say by the time you sprout your second or third or, if you’re Michelle Duggar, your 19th kid, your wrung-out stomach “pops” early, making it doubly or triply or quadruply harder to resurrect your abs. This is the sad truth for all gestating women, except Heidi Klum.

I read a description somewhere that likened the bellies of women who’ve had babies to balloons that have already been inflated. New balloons are a bitch to blow up. They don’t give. You have to pre-stretch them and blow like a mother to fill them with air. Your face turns red and the tail can be difficult to knot.

Twice inflated balloons are another story. They swell immediately.

With my second pregnancy, I quickly inflated, then quickly deflated – both physically and emotionally. When it became apparent that I couldn’t repress my way back to feeling normal, I did the only two things I could think to do at the time: I ran and I blogged. More accurately, I ran a lot and blogged just once.

This miscarriage wiped me out. Running made me feel strong again. Blogging – as heavy as that last post was – helped me compartmentalize my thoughts and articulate things I couldn’t in person.

The thing is: I’m a lighthearted person. I cry NOT AT ALL in front of people. Prior to this miscarriage, few people outside my family and BFF of 20 years have seen me cry. In the last five years, I can count two: the veterinarian who euthanized my dog and my friend Kim, who watched me break down over breakfast when my son’s off-the-wall behavior became too overwhelming to handle. “I can barely parent one,” I tearfully confessed. “How will I manage two?”

[Read more…]

Christmas contest winner :: Ali’s story

December 25, 2013 by heidi 8 Comments

At the beginning of the month I set out to see past the commercialization of Christmas, past the insanity of Christmas shopping, the bombardment of Christmas advertisements, the glut of Duck Dynasty merchandise, the $30 Elf on the somebody else’s shelf and the siege of angry holiday traffic.

I didn’t have to look too far to see beyond the racket. Everything I needed to see was “invisible to the eye,” as my favorite children’s book author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry so eloquently articulated in The Little Prince.

{“Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.” In English this means, “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”}

At the start of the month when I posted a storytelling contest I had no idea this one would come my way. As the author of this wacky blog, I expected to receive wacky stories ripe with sarcasm. I expected at least one reference to the Griswold family and one reference to the frozen flag pole in A Christmas Story.

Instead I got a story that began with a phone call at the end of November from a young woman in Kentucky named Ali. She wanted to know if I was available the week after Thanksgiving to take photos of she and her 20-month-old son. They would be on vacation for a week on Longboat Key. She wanted beach photos of just the two of them.

“Nothing extravagant,” she said. “Just an hour or so of me and him doing our thing.”

She seemed a little scattered, a little distant. As a journalist, I wanted to know more. As a photographer, it was none of my business. Were these Christmas portraits? Your basic mom/son portraits? She didn’t say.

I penciled her in for a Saturday just before sunset, which was how we got on the subject of lighting sky lanterns.

[Read more…]

Why does everyone seem so perfect on the internet?

September 24, 2013 by heidi 5 Comments

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Let’s call it the real reason my knees are bruised and torn up in this picture.

It’s something I’ve thought about for years, something I once got so passionate about I pitched it two years ago as a cultural think piece to a magazine that didn’t quite grasp the concept. It’s since been articulated by other writers in important magazines and newspapers all over the globe, which hurts my writer’s ego, but let’s not dwell. (Dear Editors of Publications I Pitch, I have good ideas.)

Here’s what I’ve been thinking: social media has created the maddening illusion that everyone’s lives are perfect.

Facebook is the virtual equivalent of your high school yearbook. Everyone is vying for space on the page and no one wants to look like a loser. So what do we do? We post pictures of our lives at their most exciting. Jet skiing in the Bahamas with my bestie! Front row at Jay-Z! Climbing Kilimanjaro. The view is auh-mazing!

Even the boring stuff seems exciting when photographed from the right angle. Shopping for bananas! The laundry is done! Look it’s my belly button lint!

We upload our best photos. We broadcast our most joyful news. Sometimes, despite our compulsion to put only our best face forward, we share our miseries. Why? Because misery loves company and eventually you need your virtual friends to provide virtual support.

[Read more…]

Kids. Plural.

July 6, 2013 by heidi 9 Comments

 Photography Backdrops -Newbor&Children

I ran across a fellow mommy blogger yesterday at my neighborhood’s July 4th bike parade. She mentioned that she never has time to write despite her valiant attempt to carve out solitude.

Why? Because she’s wrangling THREE KIDS UNDER THE AGE OF SIX from sun-up to sun-down.

“Never mind blogging,” I said. “How the hell do you find time to shower?”

Anytime I meet any woman with kids PLURAL, I want to bow before them, hand them a beer and possibly a joint. As a woman at home with a kid SINGULAR, I spend a lot of time immersed in the natural habitats of stay-at-home moms: parks, libraries, children’s gyms, public pools, science museums, Target and Chick-fil-A, to name a few. In these environments I’ve observed many women with kids PLURAL performing their motherly duties on a scale of EFFORTLESS to EXHAUSTING.

[Read more…]

On 31

May 4, 2013 by heidi 6 Comments

Quick disclaimer: April was a crazy busy month. I had a ton of work to complete, a triathlon, a visiting sister, visiting parents and a brief family vacation on Daytona Beach. I apologize for the two-week hiatus. Here’s what I should have posted on April 24 to commemorate Lance’s FIFTH BIRTHDAY, a milestone I let slip by with little acknowledgment.

Hey! The Lance turned 5! 35 in pug years! That’s like a big accomplishment for an easily distracted, moderately busy mommy blogger. Woop woop.

ANYWAY. I read this piece April 19 before a small crowd at CL Story Time: Birthday Edition in Tampa’s Ybor City. I wrote it nine days after my 31st birthday and 45 minutes before the start of the event. At 31, I’m finally making peace with my procrastination pattern, among other things.

AND in case you missed it, this is how I coped with last year’s 30th birthday woes.

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¶  Last year I spent my birthday curled into a fetal position, sobbing quietly into a pillow. The voices in my head, sounded, on this particular day, a lot like Marge Simpson’s sisters crossed with my husband’s 95-year-old grandfather.

True to form, they were none too pleased with my despondency.

“You’re pathetic,” they rasped. “I’d give my left titty to be 30 again.”

As I sobbed, my infant son napping in the room next door, I glanced down at my left titty. It was visibly TWICE the size of my right titty.

Why? Because my breastfed child preferred the left boob to the right boob and because I subconsciously offered him the left more than the right so my stronger hand would be available for such important tasks as operating a remote control, reading an issue of Vogue, swigging from a bottle of Vodka (just kidding) or in some cases conducting a phone interview for work (not kidding).

After 10 months of exclusive breastfeeding, I was taking back my chest, which among some circles of mothers is considered sacrilegious. The healthiest, smartest, most benevolent children wean themselves. Didn’t I know that? Cutting my kid off early would cause irreversible damage to his psyche. Our bond would suffer and he’d grow distant and resentful. Formula would give him cancer, lead poisoning and cavities.

[Read more…]

Storytelling live tonight in Ybor

April 19, 2013 by heidi 2 Comments

 

Everyone and everything is celebrating birthdays this month.

On April 10, I turned 31, as did my beloved pen pal in Toronto with whom I’ve exchanged snail mail for nine years. (Wait. Nine years? Is that right, LZ?)

Two days prior, my Irish twin, Heelya turned the big 3-0.

On April 24, this little blog turns FIVE. FIVE. Yeee haw, Lancelots! I stuck it out for five years, during which time I received more fan mail than hate mail. Success! Thank you for your loyalty, kindness and honesty. I plan to commemorate the milestone by turning the Best of Lance into a book. I’m putting this goal out there so you hold me to it. You guys are good at keeping me on track.

I’m an Aries to a fault: fiery, quick tempered, spontaneous and hyper. I start things and fail to see them through.

My blog however, is a Taurus. And like a true Taurus, it’s stubborn, sensible, down to earth and determined, which is perhaps why it’s still around.

For five years I’ve used this space to air confessions, fears, accomplishments, and of course stories.

Which brings me to tonight.

Tonight I’m stepping up to the mic (again) for Creative Loafing’s Story Time event in Tampa. The theme is birthdays in honor of the newspaper’s 25th anniversary. (You noticing a pattern here?)

I’ll be reading something new, that is IF I can sit still long enough this afternoon to write it. I’ve been swamped with work these past two weeks, so I can’t totally blame procrastination, though without pressure I fail to work to the best of my ability. Typical Aries. Lance would have written a story two months ago and immediately laminated a copy at Kinkos in preparation for the event. I’m not even sure if I have printer ink.

Anyway. Special thanks to Mothership, who’s in town this week and currently at the library with Henry. They’re at a different kind of story time; the kind that involves dancing to Raffi with bean bags.

Oh, and about the picture. That’s me up there, running amok in Colorado on a hot summer day. I was 25 and on the brink of making major life changes. I’m posting it because it kind of, sort of, ties into the theme of the story I haven’t written yet that I plan to read tonight. Hell, I’m such a fickle Aries, it might not tie in at all. ♥

CL Story Time: Birthday Edition starts at 8 p.m. at the CL Space, 1911 N. 13th St. #W-200, Ybor City.

Hope to see you tonight!

A hapless blogger grows up

March 10, 2013 by heidi 12 Comments

There once was a time when I kept things to myself. I wrote short stories and poems in a journal that I kept hidden from the rest of the world. It sat in my underwear drawer between the thongs I never wore and the granny panties I couldn’t live without. In it I’d write nothing of note, nothing scandalous and nothing hyper-intellectual.

For years I filled these lined pages with the usual crackpot observations, foul-mouthed sarcasm and melodramatic longing. Self-serving dribble if you ask me, sometimes cleverly articulated, oftentimes not.

From my 8th grade diary: Life already feels like a traffic jam, just ridin the ass of the person in front.

Then one day (five years ago) I started blogging.

At the time I all but ignored advances in technology, including social media, smart phones and online banking. Hell, I still considered books on tape to be blasphemous. But like many 20-something curmudgeons, I warmed to learned to tolerate social media. Peer pressured into joining Facebook in 2008, I denounced it quickly as a mindless fad, a time suck for people who spent too much time nosing around other people’s business. I uploaded an image of two greasy chicken wings and saved it as my profile pic.

My real friends already know what I look like. Na-na-na-bo-bo.

The first few times I left a comment on somebody’s page, I signed it with my name.

You look cute in this picture. – Heidi Kurpiela

Then someone told me I should join Twitter. So I joined Twitter. True to form, I let the account sit inactive for years.

[Read more…]

I told you Scandal was good

February 12, 2013 by heidi 3 Comments

Duh to you, Entertainment Weekly’s Mark Harris. So I was totally on target last year when I interviewed Kerry Washington about her new show Scandal. (Thanks Creative Loafing Tampa.) Sure I gratuitously used the word juicy during my chat with the actress, but how could I not? Her character is sleeping with the president and the relationship is hella steamy and … you guessed it – scandalous.

Now the chick is everywhere and rightfully so. When Michelle Obama debuted new BANGS at her husband’s inauguration the ‘do was touted as “The Kerry Washington.” Oh, and what’s this about Michelle banning Kerry from the White House because she flirts with Barack? I know it’s just celeb gossip, but it sort of explains the bangs doesn’t it?

Rumors Plausible political drama aside, I’m just saying the girl’s got momentum and I called it. So take that, Magazine I Wish I Wrote For.

At the time of our interview Kerry was still filming Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained in Louisiana. She was pretty mum about the movie, though it was obvious that her role as Broomhilda (a slave in the pre-Civil War South) would bare no resemblance to Scandal’s Olivia Pope (a high-powered Washington D.C. political fixer). I knew Django would catapult her status in Hollywood and draw (much deserved) attention to her work on television.

My favorite part from our brief phoner: when a dude drove past Kerry, yelled to her that she was driving with her car door open and upon recognizing the actress audibly freaked out. Apparently I’m not the only Season One fan.

(BTW: The reason Kerry was doing press last spring was because the show was pulling in mediocre ratings and ABC, which had just released Scandal’s Season One box set, was looking for a boost in positive coverage – ie: get Kerry to talk sweetly to reporters.)

NOW, onto ABC’s Nashville, also a guilty pleasure of mine that opened to pitiful viewership. Who wants to hook a girl up with a Connie Britton interview?

Mr. Big Deal Package

September 8, 2012 by heidi 2 Comments

When I was a senior at Buffalo State College I attended a frat party at nearby SUNY Geneseo, where my best friend Ro was studying speech pathology. I was less than a year away from earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism.

In between keg stands and the Beastie Boys’ greatest hits I met a guy who started our conversation by bragging about his package. Uh. Wait. I mean his degree in packaging.

“PACKAGING?” I asked.

“Packaging engineering,” he replied.

I was incredulous. Frat boys are expert bullshitters, especially condescending drunk ones.

[Read more…]

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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

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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

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