We've been giving out pink plastic lawn flamingos to the bookstores for displays, and some of the stores said the flamingos were hard to assemble -- the metal legs would not go easily into the plastic bodies. I knew this was true when I found myself on the floor of a bookstore, pounding the legs in with a hammer, and nearly impaling myself in the gut.

Anyway, I decided to "prep" the legs by heating them on the stove. My husband came home and found me in the kitchen with a stove full of hot flamingo legs and said, "Couldn't we just mortgage the house and take out an ad in the Sunday New York Times?"

Elaine Viets