I’m back from Cozumel just in time. A day or two before we left, we started receiving scary weather reports. They started boarding up all the beach side rentals in preparation for the storm. We got out before the mad evacuative rush of people trying to escape Hurricane Dean. I know people who were stuck in Cancun during the last hurricane, and they spent four days without power or running water. They lived on cookies and warm soft drinks, and I’m glad we don’t have to go through that. I’m concerned about all the people who live there, however. We’ll just have to see what we can do in the aftermath.

Isn’t that a terrible feeling? Knowing something bad is going to happen but there isn’t a thing you can do to stop it? All you can do is be there to help pick up the pieces. If you have kids, you’ve probably had this feeling before. They aren’t real big on taking advice. Most of them seem to think their parents aren’t too bright, and we couldn’t possibly have learned anything worth knowing, right? Like Mark Twain said,

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he’d learned in seven years.”

Don’t you just wish you could take ‘em and shake some sense into them? Not babies, mind, but the kids who’re old enough to give sass-mouth and not old enough to think better of it. But most of them prefer learning the hard way, which is so painful to watch. We hate to see our kids get hurt when we could’ve told them, if only they’d have listened (not that we did either), that it was a knob-head thing to do.

And so it goes.

C’mere, I have a confession to make. I find myself doing this to TV shows and movies I watch on DVD. Stupid blond girl decides to go check out the scary basement where she heard a noise. ALL ALONE. When the power goes out. Well, of course she does. I start talking to the TV, and my husband Andres gives me that out-of-the-corner-of- his-eye look. You know the one — it says, if I didn’t love this woman, I would so have her committed for the crazy shit she does. And then he says, “You know they can’t hear you. Right, honey?” But it never stops me from advising TV characters that they’re acting like dipshits.

I’ve noticed myself carrying it into books as well, when hero or heroine are about to pull some bonehead move. “Well, you’re not smart enough to screw in a lightbulb,” I’ll catch myself muttering. My family gives me a wide-berth when I’m reading. They peer into my office and then run off, like it might be catching.

People just never take good advice when it’s offered. But that never stops us from offering good advice to other people, does it? Even fictional ones. Sometimes I think humans are the funniest animals on the planets. If only we threw poo, there would be a place for us next to the monkey house. Am I right?

Anyhow, I have a couple of winners to announce as promised.

QB(Bev) — you won the re-draw of the Speshul Sekrit prize, after the initial winner failed to contact me. By the way, it’s a beautiful pearl pendant with matching earrings from Huatulco. Maybe she’ll send me a picture of her wearing the new bling!

Stacy S. — you won an ARC of my novella Seven Days to be released on Sept 3 in the antho Boundless with the delicious Bonnie Dee and the delectable Dionne Galace.

Email me at ann.aguirre at gmail.com so I can hook you up.