By SHARON RANDALL, Scripps Howard News Service

Here's to the Bad Girls, bless their hearts, who make all the Good Girls look good.

There's one in every family. You know who she is. She's the topic of conversation at every family table where she shows up late, or not at all, peddling some excuse nobody will buy.

Warning: The following contains a recipe you should not try, unless you are hoping to be banned from cooking, in which case, be my guest.

For the record, it was not the recipe's fault. When I cook, it is never the recipe's fault. I have no one to blame but myself.

When my children were small and wild at heart, they loved Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are."

OK, I asked for it. I needed a costume to wear to a big wing-ding Halloween party where my husband is going to be the bass player in the band. So I asked you to send me your ideas.

And boy, did you ever, bless your little helpful hearts. In fact, you are still sending them. Even as I write this, e-mails keep arriving like the steady drip of a faucet at 4 a.m.

When you grow up in a small town, you get to know and be known by most everybody who lives there, distant kin and incarcerated cousins alike.

But if you leave that town to live your life anyplace outside of "God's Country," coming back to visit can be daunting.

Just before I flew to Texas to speak at the Institute for the Humanities at Salado, a storm camped out over the town and flat-out refused to budge.

Within hours, it dumped about a foot of rain, flooding a creek that runs through the center of Salado, damaging homes and washing out the Main Street Bridge.

It's not often that she asks for my opinion. So when my daughter said she wanted to show me something to see what I thought of it, I would've pretty much gone to hell and back to see it.

Life finds interesting ways to bring people together.

My oldest, for example, met his wife in a bowling alley shortly before he landed a part on "Ed," a TV series that was set, I swear, in a bowling alley.

My youngest met his wife over a fence. She was visiting her grandmother, who lived next door, and he was playing basketball in our back yard.

It was a rare, rainy weekend in the desert with lightning crackling across the sky and wind whipping the palm trees until they reared like horses.

My husband and I had just finished cleaning up the debris from the last storm when out of nowhere, another storm struck.

On my mother's birthday -- her 84th, had she lived -- I called my brother to remind him that he's still her favorite, though he is hopelessly pigheaded.

As if he needs reminding.

Joe never forgets anything. Our mother used to say it was because he was born blind, that God gave him a great memory to make up for his loss of sight.