Hula-gen Family Fun Fact #18

While there is no photographic evidence of it, it is well known within the family that Hubby's favorite method of containing his baby twin brother and sister wilst babysitting was to turn the play pen upside down in the floor and cage them underneath it.  Fortunately, he figured out a better way to control toddlers before Teen Angel was born.  He never used that method on her while I was at the grocery store.  As far as I know.

Party on, Garth

It seems like every Monday I rattle on about how busy the weekend was, but I seriously think the Hula-gen's broke a personal record this past weekend for how much we can squeeze into one weekend.  A record for the post college years anyway.  And when I woke up yesterday morning, it felt a little like college.  I think it was the dry mouth, which was probably due more to talking than it was alcohol, although I will say I found a keeper of a sangria recipe.  Thank you, Bobby Flay.  We have now determined that the maximum number of parties we can host at our house in one week is three.  We managed three, counting Hubby's regular poker get together.  A great time was had by all, and I wouldn't have changed a thing, but I definitely think four parties would have put us over the edge.  It would have at least decimated our paper plate supply I stockpiled last winter.  Thank you, Kroger clearance aisle.   

As soon as I left work Friday, I ran home and set up the man cave for a mini reunion with a few of my old elementary school buddies.  There was also a grocery store/ bakery/liquor store run squeezed in there prior to the party.  As a side note, did you know they'll carry your purchases to the car for you at the liquor store if you buy enough?  Who knew.  My school buddies arrived precisely on time, and we spent about five hours yakking and laughing and talking about old times.  They stayed so long, one of them got texts from his teenager wanting to know when mom and dad were coming home.  I love how our kids always assume we never have a social life that doesn't revolve around their activities.  It was a great visit, and I can't tell you how much I enjoyed reconnecting with old friends like that.  And we haven't changed at all, except for a couple of gray hairs here or there.  And weaker eyes.  Good times.

Before I went to bed, I made banana pudding and sangria for the next day, and Saturday morning we loaded up and headed 45 minutes north to our family reunion.  It was a good time with family.  And ham.  A lot of ham.  And dumplin's.  And desserts.  We raced back home, set up our patio furniture as we had disassembled the patio the day before when the concrete man suddenly called after weeks of phone tag and said he was coming to stain the concrete.  Thank you, concrete man.  Then my cousins came and swam and drank and ate and talked.  And talked.  And talked.  We had another great time.  By the time we finished cleaning up, it was late, so Hubby and I dropped into bed and arose in time to go to church yesterday morning.  Yesterday went like this:  Church, lunch, photo shoot, change clothes, set up for second photo shoot, second photo shoot, clean up mess, pop popcorn and plop down onto the couch.  Finally.  At 9:07pm.  It was a blur.  A good one, but a blur nonetheless.  Which brings us to today.

I'm so pooped I didn't even run at lunch.  Of course it was 92 degrees outside, so it didn't take much to kill my motivation to exercise, despite the fact that my body is begging to be purged of all the grease and fat and alcohol I had over the weekend.  Is it possible to feel puffy and dehydrated at the same time?  Of course, the swelling in my feet could be from standing on them so long this morning at the county fair.  I stopped by there to drop off a couple of photos for their arts and crafts competitions and was met with the line from hell and back.  I was right behind the valedictorian of crafts who literally brought the maximum number of entries for every category they had.  The line was as constipated as my Aunt Tilly.  I waited and waited while she filled out a card for every stinkin' item and then left her husband in that line with her stuff while she jumped to another line to clog it up with sewing items.  Her daughter was in a third line with her seasonal crafts.  I slowly watched my lunch hour and break times for the day slip away, and after the third time of taking a deep breath and counting to ten I figured I should just leave and come back.  Besides, the mean part of me was on the verge of screaming, "I've seen bible school kids make better candles than you!"  An hour and a half later, when I dropped back by there, she had just finished registering all her entries.   Let's hope she gets a blue ribbon for SOMETHING.  I, on the other hand, want a blue ribbon for waiting on her arse.  I suggested to the organizers that they consider a three items or less line or online registration for you see, I am the valedictorian of offering my personal opinion. 

Lots of water, a good night's sleep, a trip to the grocery store and a few loads of laundry should get me caught up, and then we'll be ready to go again.  Hubby said this morning that he thought this coming weekend might be a little slow compared to this last one.  I said that was okay.  That will give us a little time to catch up.  For the Fourth of July party we have planned.

Photo Friday Challenge-"Words"

Taken in New York City last year.

For the other entries this week, hop on over here.

A Little Rough Around the Edges

Do you ever look at Mother Nature and say, "What on earth happened here?"

Falling Behind

My butt hates me.  How do I know this?  Because it's trying to rebel against me in every way it possibly can.  It doesn't want to stay in place anymore.  It's resistant to exercise, and it doesn't want to follow me around like it used to.  It drags around like a sack of potatoes tied to my ankles.  In fact, I think it wants to BE with my ankles because it's always reaching for them.  Gravity is a b*#%$. 

I feel like I fight the battle against the sag every stinkin' day.  Even things that aren't heavy start to sag after a certain age.  I carry no excess weight in my arms and yet the skin between my armpit and my elbow jiggles like hospital Jello.  We all have our body issues, but sister mercy, they get harder and harder to fight after age forty.  I battle it as best as I can, but it takes so much more effort as you get older.  The techniques that used to work don't.  I have put on and taken off the same five pounds for several years now, and while running several miles a week and cutting out junk food used to be enough to shed those pounds, it just isn't anymore.  My metabolism left town about six months ago.  Packed up and left in the middle of the night with no note and no forwarding address.  Just.  Gone.  Cue the country music.  And everything I've read lately tells me that I'm going to have to step it up if I want to combat that issue.  I've got to run farther, longer and harder.  Snap.   By the way, did you know that running a brisk three miles is the best way to learn that your bladder isn't as taut as it used to be?  Kind of puts a whole new meaning to that phrase, "There she blows!"

It's recommended that I work on strength training, which I used to do but then fell out of the habit of doing.  I've gone back to working with weights, and boy, do they make them heavier now than they used to.  Tip:  Working out around power lifting men can be a real blow to your self esteem when you can bench press only fifty pounds.  So can partially wetting your pants when you're running down the street. 

The other thing about working out when you get older is the grooming skills that come into play.  I used to be able to throw on any old pair of shorts and some running shoes and take off.  Now, I have to make sure there's a really good sports bra in my gym bag, otherwise the girls are joining my butt down there at the ankle party.  And since body hair now grows at an unbelievable rate due to lower estrogen levels, I have to shave my armpits every time I turn around.  To add insult to injury, I have to put on my reading glasses in order to see if they need shaving.  Without my glasses, my armpit is as blurry as a blowing snowstorm.  Yet another betrayal of this vessel I walk around in every day. 

Mama was right.  It's just one thing after another as you get older.  The body has free will and it wills itself to do something, anything other than what you want it to.  I look at young perky 20 something's these days and just laugh.  I want to run up and tell them to enjoy that perkiness while it lasts because one of these days someone on Bourbon Street will yell at them to show their ta-ta's, and they'll have to lift up their skirt to do it.  Gravity gets us all at some point, and it doesn't stop until we quit breathing.  Any day now, I expect the skin under my chin to start drooping.  Right around that spot where I keep having to pluck that stray hair that grows in every month.      

From the Back Pew

We went Sunday  morning to the church I grew up in, which is about 25 minutes away from where we live now.  We went for Baby Wheeeel's baptism, and it was the first time I'd been there in a couple of years.  Because mama and daddy live outside of that county now, I don't go through my old hometown that often anymore, so I always enjoy seeing how things have or haven't changed.  Rarely do things change there, and while I'm sure that's frustrating for people who are in the business of economic development there, I always find great comfort in that.  I guess I like the sameness in something that was so comfortable to me while I was growing up.  It 's always good to go home.

The tall Methodist church on the corner of Ferry and 5th Streets is the church where I attended vacation bible school, went on youth skating trips as a teenager and where I got married nearly 22 years ago.  I always see a few people I know when I go there now.  They are part of the village that helped to raise me, and I always enjoy visiting with them.   I was so lucky as a child to have the kind of support I did, to have people who praised me, guided me and believed that I could do anything I dared to dream.  This time, as I sat and looked around the pews, picking out those special people, I was struck by how old they are getting.  Some of them are in their 80's now, and their health is obviously not what it once was.  That made me kind of sad, but it was still great to see them.  There's a comfort in knowing that they are still there after all these years, worshipping in the same pews.

I noticed in the bulletin that one of the retired pastors, the gentleman who was a preacher there when I was a teenager, was on the prayer list for some kind of serious illness.  I saw his daughter sitting in the choir loft.  She was a year behind me in school, and I immediately thought of those teenaged years we shared.  I made a mental note to ask mama after church what was wrong with Brother Earl.  That question was answered later in the service though, when he stepped out of the back of the choir loft to sing in a quartet with his daughter, Pastor Gary and Pastor Gary's wife.  Brother Earl's presence surprised me, given his listing on the prayer list, and it seemed to pleasantly surprise some of the regular members.  The four of them launched into a bouncy a capella song that had a strong southern Baptist flair, and his big bass voice came booming from his chest.  I had forgotten how well, and how LOW, he could sing.  And while the four of them sounded great, it was the combination of his voice and his daughter's voice that drew me in.  He sang with great strength, bouncing from note to note with his whole heart.  And when the song and the standing ovation were over, Pastor Gary spoke of how Brother Earl was doing a bit better despite his health issues.  That prompted Brother Earl to talk about his recently diagnosed cancer, his treatment, his faith and his future.  It was a great testimony of a determined hopeful spirit.  Honest testimony from a man who devoted his life to ministry and has had to face his own weaknesses in his faith.  His daughter barely managed to hold back her tears as he spoke, and I couldn't help but think about how much older she and I have become since those days of youth outings and high school classes.  And how much older our parents are now and how frail their health can become at any time.  I shed a tear because I'm a sympathy crier, but I think I also shed that tear for the journey that lies ahead of us. 

The quartet followed with another song, and I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed the special music.  Brother Earl's voice brought back so many memories of time spent in church and in other places with all of those people and friends of my youth.  As Pastor Gary prayed, my mind wandered to so much of my youth.  With my eyes closed I could see and remember so much.  I was reminded of carefree days of hanging my head out of the back window of the car, watching the countryside roll by and whiffing the smell of freshly cut weeds and summer dirt.  I could feel the shape of a lightning bug in my curled up hand, and I could see the shape of my father working underneath the hood of a car.  The thoughts rolled through my head quickly, like pages of a book, and I realized how much of my life has involved the people who still live right where they did when I was young.  It was a wonderful church service.  I didn't get much out of the sermon, not because it was a bad one.  I just got way more out of sitting in that pew in the presence of others.  It's always good to go home.    

Strike a Pose

My family and neighbors laugh about how much time I spend in the grass and the bushes taking pictures of plants and critters.  This year, our patio is a haven for little frogs.  It's not uncommon to walk out there after dark and see a dozen of them hanging out together.  They like to hang on the wall of the Man Cave or the rails of the fence.  I sat out there Saturday evening, snapping away at a couple of them.  They dodged the flash until finally, one of them stuck his head around the rail and looked at me as if he were posing, and just sat there while I took several shots of him.  Him?  Her?  How do you tell?  Anyway, I ended up with this shot, which delighted me to no end.

I call this one, "Hurry up and Just Take the D*#@ Picture Already so I can get Back to Chasing Bugs".

Little Foxes

Among the crazy assortment of critters that wander into our backyard on a daily basis are some foxes.  We've seen as many as four out there at the same time.  Right now, we're seeing two.  We think they're mates and that they have babies.  They step out of the edge of the woods, slip over to the pile of cat food and scraps Hubby tosses out there and eat up.

They also get a big drink out of the water bucket Hubby fills up.

That's the same bucket, by the way, that the big raccoon likes to bathe in. 

Interestingly enough, we discovered recently that the foxes like bread.  I tossed out some slices of old bread, and they gobbled it up.  Once they ate their fill though, they each put two pieces in their mouths and carried them off.

We've noticed they've done that several times.  We think they're feeding their babies with those extra slices.  Sister mercy, how cute would it be for a couple of little foxes to wander into our sight?

There's Nothing Wrong with Something that Simply Makes you Smile

As I often do, I was recently asking for the input of some friends when trying to decide on some photos to enter into a local photo competition.  (One got picked!  Yay, for me.)  While I tend to lean more toward the rough edgy or unusual kind of stuff, one friend really liked the pretty shots, things with colorful sunsets or bright landscapes.  I asked why because I'm always interested in what appeals to people about a particular photo.  She said, "You know, I just like things that make me smile or make me feel good."  Her mother died almost a year ago, and she has really struggled with grief.  She's had some other ups and downs this past year, too.  She said that life was hard enough right now without having to dwell on the ugly or edgy.  She just wants to be surrounded by pretty and nice.  And I thought that was pretty insightful.  I like art that provokes a strong emotion or makes you think about serious issues, but I think she's right.  There's nothing wrong with something that simply makes you smile.  Despite what art critics may preach, art can be pretty.  And it can be nice.  It's okay if it makes you laugh or feel good.  It doesn't have to make you think in order to be appreciated.  Duly noted.

Perhaps, that's why I can't pass up a flower.

Big Ol' Fish

Grandpa (mama's daddy) was a true outdoorsman.  He hunted and fished all his life, often out of necessity, always out of pleasure.  You name it, he caught it, often with great success.  We have several pictures of him standing next to or holding big critters he captured:  deer, fish, even snakes.

Shiver.

And while Super Cop and I are fans of the great outdoors and are not above taking in a little camping and fishing every now and then, Handy Man is the one who truly inherited the hunter/gatherer gene from grandpa.  That boy loves to hunt and fish.  The walls of his house are covered in animal heads, which might account for why he's still single.  He hasn't found a woman yet willing to live with all those carcasses, although his current girlfriend is a serious contender.  SERIOUS contender.  Can I get an amen?

During deer season, he's always looking for that championship buck.  And through the years, like Norman Thayer from On Golden Pond, he's been looking for his Walter.  Well, I'm here to tell ya', he found him.  Late yesterday afternoon in the middle of the Ohio River with a boat and some skipjack bait.  A whopping fifty pound Walter. 

He's gonna need more wall.  And a new shirt.

My New Obsession

Windows.  Specifically, broken ones.  Who knew.

Always the Runner-up, Never the Queen

Summer television is the pits, except for that great miniseries about the Hatfields and McCoys on the History Channel last week.  Normally, I don't care for the whole hillbilly thing, but normally they don't look like Kevin Costner.  Who knew a corncob pipe could be so sexy.  Anyway, now that that's over and we're still several weeks away from the last season of Breaking Bad, TV is a vast wasteland for me.  And let's hope that Dish Network and AMC work out their contract issues before then or else...well, I don't know what else.  I'll be highly upset for sure.  In the meantime though, there are some shows that are so ridiculous they're amusing. 

As I flipped through the channels the other night, I rolled past the Miss USA pageant just in time to catch the vital statistics of one contestant.  Her hobbies?  Dancing and shopping.  I laughed out loud.  Notice she didn't say ballet dancing or tap dancing.  Just dancing in general.  And shopping.  Girlfriend didn't even try to dress it up into something substantial.  Now, I've never been to Arkansas, so perhaps there's not much to do there, but I hear the countryside is beautiful and that lots of folks find plenty to do in the great outdoors of Razorback country.  But not Miss Arkansas.  She's into shakin' her boo-tay and buying stuff.  Did she miss Pageant 101 class?  She was supposed to list her hobbies as reading Shakespeare and volunteering at the local food pantry feeding homeless veterans.  It's like the fumes from all that hairspray went to her head and disrupted her thinking.  Or maybe the duct tape holding up her ta ta's was too tight. 

The fact that we still have those silly pageants in this country just cracks me up, and I find it highly appropriate that Donald Trump bankrolls the Miss USA contest.  I mean who better to pay for it than a man who spends as much on hair product as the average contestant?  I used to get offended that we still parade young women around in swimsuits and evening gowns while pretending that it's their intelligence we're judging them on.  If that were the case, we'd put them all in gunny sacks and drill them on questions about history, math and political science until we whittled them down to the one who got the most correct answers.  Does the ugly girl ever get chosen as Miss America or Miss Universe?  Of course not.  But Hula, it's a SCHOLARSHIP pageant, you say.  To which I say, blah, blah, blah.  Tell that to someone who wears high heels.  I just find those contests a ridiculous holdover from the past, but I figure they will die a slow death in the next few years so I don't get upset about them anymore.  They do remind me though of the three personal experiences I've had with the darn things though.  Hula?  In a pageant, you say?  Well yes.  Not that I was really a contender.  It did however, teach me some things.

When I was seventeen,  our electric cooperative held an annual "scholarship" pageant, and since I was all about generating whatever money I could for college, I thought what the heck.  I read the rules, sent in my form and showed up on the appropriate day with my swimsuit and my evening gown, which in my case was the swimsuit I had on hand and my prom dress.  We spent the day rehearsing and going through the preparations.  One of the contestants was a girl I had gone to school with, and as I watched her that day, I had one overriding thought:  that girl came prepared.  Her swimsuit was the perfect fit (padded bra), her evening gown was more of a pageant gown (padded bra), and she had the flashy smile and the model stance.  Hula, on the other hand, just kind of showed up and hoped for the best.  She didn't know there was a model stance.  And if she had it to do over, she would have gotten the padded bra and tried to hide the fact that she's a tad bit pigeon toed.  But I didn't.  And I felt like a fish out of water the whole night.  At the end of the evening, my friend from school won, and I was happy for her.  She deserved it.  Girlfriend had WORKED it.  Hula, well, I'm not sure what Hula did.  I guess you could say she muddled through it.  She took her $25 consolation prize home and spent it on Calvin Klein jeans, which she considered to be a great achievement at the time.  It was 1982 after all.

A couple of years later, while in college, I was nominated by the communications department for a pageant held at the college each year.  It was a precursor to a state pageant of some sort.  I wasn't too enthused about the whole thing, given my previous pageant experience, but I showed up and did what was expected of me.  I was a people pleaser at the time, what can I say?

I had learned from that first pageant, so I figured I'd up my game a little.  I had no dreams of winning, but I figured I'd do my best to at least wear the right thing.  This time I made it to the top ten, probably due to my answer to the question of which Hollywood celebrity I'd like to meet and why.  I said Katharine Hepburn because of her independence and her empowerment of women within a male dominated industry.  I actually saw the eyebrows of a judge go up on that one.  Mmmm hmmm, I said to myself.  I'm startin' to get the hang of this.  I forget what my next question was and apparently, my answer was just as forgettable because I failed to make it to the top five.   I was not upset.  I sat in the audience during the last round and clamped my hand over my face to keep from laughing out loud when the biggest ho on campus told the judges that if she were stranded on a desert island and could have only one book with her it would be the bible.  The judges, not knowing about that wild party she'd had at her house two weeks prior, bought it and declared her the winner.  The absurdity of it just cracked me up.  Miss PCC went on to the Mountain Laurel pageant.  I went to Dairy Queen to have a Blizzard.

Flash forward to the last semester of my senior year at college, and the communications department nominated me for Homecoming Queen.  Now, every club and department on campus got to nominate someone so I didn't consider this any kind of special fete.  And with graduation close at hand, I was only interested in wrapping up my classes and getting out of there.  I was tired of going to school.  I wanted to get on with life.  The college I attended was small.  There was a large Greek contingent, and while that may not be a bad thing at other campuses, I felt like it was completely out of hand at my college.  You could literally look at a girl or guy and predict what sorority or fraternity they belonged to based solely on looks.  It was very clique-ish and smacked of high school drama.  I'd had my fill of it by the time that semester rolled around.  To me, the Homecoming Queen thing was just a big popularity contest.

All of the contestants had to show up for a formal interview.  I threatened to blow mine off, but at the last minute I threw on my dress and showed up.  After some thought, I had decided I could have a little fun with it.  I flashed a big smile, I gave my best model stance when I walked in the room and sat with perfect posture.  I flashed another big smile at the big semi circle of judges that faced me, and proceeded to answer their questions.  They were a well coifed bunch, made up of folks who as daddy likes to say, thought their s8#% didn't stink.  I gave them what they wanted to hear when we began.  The questions were simple enough.  I was poised and charming.  They smiled back at me.  And then they finally asked me what one thing I would change about the student body if I could.  And smiling just as Miss America like as I could I launched into a very polite and yet pointed speech about how our campus needed more diversity, how were weren't welcoming enough to foreign students and how we worked too hard at being alike instead of celebrating our differences.  I expressed my concern over our low number of minority students and how the sororities and fraternities were a sea of white faces.  I talked of inclusion and openness and a desire to break down some barriers.   I could see the smiles stiffen on some of the judges, and they coolly ended the interview with a polite "thank you".  I gave them another big smile and glided out there with my best beauty queen stride.  And when the door closed shut behind me, I smiled again...to myself.  And I bounced joyously back to the dorm, quite tickled with myself in only the way you can be when you're young and think you know everything.  "How'd you do?" my roommate asked.  "Just fine," I said.  "Just fine."  I was not surprised to find out later than I did not make the Homecoming court.  And I was not surprised to learn that the Queen was a well known member of one of the prominent sororities on campus.  They had proven my point.  I packed my self-righteous bags and headed for home.  Oh, how I laugh now at how little I knew about the world in those days.  And how full of myself I could be.

I can still be pretty full of myself now, but over the years, I've come to learn that not everything is as black and white as I thought it was back then.  There are women who have earned a fair amount of scholarship money by parading around in swimsuits and evening gowns.  There are other women who have earned a lot of money for college by swinging around a stripper's pole in skimpy outfits.  I'm really in no position to judge why they do what they do.  And to be honest, I probably shouldn't be too hard on Miss Arkansas USA.  I'm pretty fond of shaking my boo-tay.  That whole pageant thing wasn't a complete bust for me.  It taught me a little about how the world turns, and that's never a bad thing.   I just can't do that whole model turn.  Perhaps, if I knew how to walk in high heels it would help.

      

The Line for the Buffet Starts Here

Apparently, animals can pick up on the scent of someone who is a sucker for feeding them upon demand, whether they belong to that person or not.  Hubby has the scent.  He can't help himself.  I used to think he could, but I've finally decided it's a disease.  He can't stop.  He feeds the domestic animals and the wild animals.  I don't even want to know how much money he spend each month on feed.  He feeds the birds, the deer, the raccoons and the foxes, and he keeps treats on hand for several of the neighborhood dogs.  He's a regular Ponderosa for critters. 

And now, he's feeding this guy.  Isn't he a beauty?

He's a stray that wandered the perimeter of our yard at random for weeks.  He was extremely wary of any human being, and you couldn't get near him.  He was terribly scrawny and seemed starved.  Occasionally, he would eat the scraps we threw out at the edge of the woods for the raccoons.  But we left him alone because we didn't really want another cat after Sabrina passed away, and he was pretty wild.  But then gray kitty got close enough to us one day that we could see someone had painted red paint all over his back.  I'd like to think that kitty wandered under a freshly painted fence, but it really did appear that someone had done it deliberately.  We felt really sorry for him and tried to get him to come closer to us so we could get him some veterinary help.  We were afraid the paint had clogged up his pores and would kill him.  Is that possible?  I don't know, but we worried about it anyway.

We kept setting food out, and if we stayed far away from him, he would sometimes come close enough to eat it.  Long story short.....over the course of several weeks, the paint wore off, he started to like us, and now he eats out of his own bowl right by the garage.  He comes to the garage every night for his dinner and some head rubbing.  If we can isolate him long enough, we're going to have the vet run by and give him some shots, so we don't die of rabies from petting him and forgetting to wash our hands.  You can call him Smoky. 

We didn't want another cat.  Or did we? 

Oh, and the neighbor's cat, Patty O'Bell, who is used to getting her own meal of Meow Mix at the Hula-gen home each evening is not happy with the new interloper.  Not happy at all.

Winning!

So, today I had to rent a costume for a Cancer Society fundraiser next week at which I have to be a celebrity waiter.  I needed a 1920's dress for the Midnight in Paris theme I've picked for my table.  In the midst of trying on outfits at the costume shop at lunch, I walked out of the dressing room and onto the large platform in the store to see myself in the mirror.  I walked right past the three men trying on cowboy costumes for some kind of skit they're doing this weekend.  After I stood on the platform for a little bit, I turned around and realized the bottom of my skirt was hung up in the top of my panties.  Hello, Hula butt!

And THEN, when I drove back to work, I walked around a little in front of several coworkers and then realized I had failed to zip my pants.  That is now three out of the four days in this work week that I have embarrassed myself.  I think we can just go ahead and declare me the winner of the Head up the Butt Award.  Or the Dress up the Butt Award.

We miss you, London!

Teen Angel and I sighed throughout each and every event that made up Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee festivities.  Sighed because it brought back such good memories of our visit to London last year.  It's always better when you've been somewhere and you see that place later on TV and in movies or you read about it in books.  You've experienced it.  You've absorbed the sights and sounds, and breathed in the smells.  It's somehow more real to you.  You feel a connection.  And that's the way it was during the Jubilee.  Every time they showed an event like the big rock concert, we'd go, "Look, we stood right there at the Queen Victoria monument!"  Sigh.

"Their big picnic is at the back of Buckingham Palace where we ended our tour!"  Sigh.

"And we were there, at the Tower of London!"  Sigh.

"And where they're firing the cannons is right where we stood on the bank of the Thames!"  Sigh.

"Look, it's St. Paul's Cathedral!"   Sigh.

Is it possible to be homesick for a place that isn't your home?  We miss  you, London!  But about the subway?  As crowded as it was last summer during a regular tourist season, there's no way they're gonna squeeze all those folks on there during the Olympics.

But I'd like to try.  Sigh.

I'm on a Roll

So, yesterday, I worked out with my shorts wrong side out.  Today, when I went into the locker room to change into my running clothes, there in the middle of the floor lay my workout underwear from yesterday where I apparently dropped them after I showered.  It's a small gym, and everybody knows the few people who use it.  Which means any coworker using that locker room/restroom today could pretty well narrow it down to the one female who showered there yesterday. 

Y'all, it's like I'm on  mission to win an award for the most consecutive days I can embarrass myself.

Word of the Day-"Humble"

hum·ble

Pronunciation:  huhm-buhl, adjective, hum·bler, hum·blest, verb, hum·bled, hum·bling.

Definition:  adjective

1.  not proud or arrogant; modest: to be humble although successful.

2. having a feeling of insignificance, inferiority, subservience, etc

3. low in rank, importance, status, quality, etc.; lowly: of humble origin; a humble home.

4. courteously respectful: In my humble opinion you are wrong.

5. low in height, level, etc.; small in size: a humble member of the galaxy.

verb (used with object)

6. to lower in condition, importance, or dignity; abase.

7. to destroy the independence, power, or will of.

8. to make meek: to humble one's heart.

 Origin: 1200–50; Middle English ( h ) umble < Old French < Latin humilis lowly, insignificant, on the ground.

 Synonyms:  1. unpretending, unpretentious. 2. submissive, meek. 3. unassuming, plain, common, poor. 4. polite. 6. mortify, shame, abash. 7. subdue, crush, break.

Used in a sentence:  "After running three miles in the business district and then lifting weights amid coworkers in the office gym, Hula was humbled to find that she had been wearing her shorts wrong side out the whole time."

 I'm not namin' any names, but somebody around here might need to get her eyes checked.

Oh, Mama

Ya'll, I hereby declare one of my favorite portrait sessions to be the maternity shoot.  Give me a little sunshine, a field of wheat, a red chair or some pretty blue ribbon and cute little shoes, and I am all over it.  How can it not be fun with all that joy and love oozing from those beautiful mama's to be?  I just smile the whole time I'm editing those pictures.  Each and every one.