Family events are chaotic when it comes to my sister and brother-in-law’s attendance. All families from both sides live in the same state, in neighboring cities in fact, we’re not very far apart…Mark and Tiffany make it a point to be at both family’s homes for each holiday (and sometimes more than that because parents are divorced and siblings are involved). The way I see what they do is this: leave early from one house to show up late at the next (I’m sure that’s appreciated *said with sarcasm if you didn’t catch it*). I don’t think that’s cool, besides that, it’s just a major pain in the rear, it seriously causes my family heart burn. I have a theory, and I don’t see the problem with it, but she thinks I’m delusional because of what I think…
So, here we go:
It seems to me that this is the way holiday’s should work (with the exception of Mother’s and Father’s Day, which I haven’t quite worked out yet *shrugs*). Every other holiday get’s alternated between families every other year. Whichever family get’s Christmas and Easter in one year, get’s Thanksgiving the next and vice versa. With the exception that if the families actually get along and we have holiday’s together (my understanding is that the chances of that happening are very slim). Now, there are details that this theory doesn’t take into consideration, details such as what if we don’t live in the same state as the families or one of the families doesn’t live in the same state as us (because if that’s the case, traveling can become an issue, which can fabricate other issues in and of itself very quickly).
That’s the theory I gave to my sister, minus the issues that could be involved and she told me that I had a lot of guts thinking that my husband, whom I haven’t even met yet, is going to agree with that theory. At which point I told her that my husband would be like minded on this issue because anything else is completely and udderly insane. At which point I got told that I’m delusional.
I wouldn’t call me delusional, I would call me logical, rational, of a sane mind.
“I’m supposed to start on Saturday and we’re going to the beach. I’m really worried that the sharks are going to get me.”
“Hahahahahaha. That’s what the plug is for.”
a new skirt: $18
a new shirt to go with the skirt: $20
shoes to match the entire outfit: $30
looking cute: Priceless
It’s been a few years since I last flew a kite, but I was more than excited when I was at the park today and there was all kinds of kite flying going on…And I was even more excited when a nice man was going to let the kids fly a kite but I asked if I could before Ben got his hands on it…
Eventually, however, Ben got his hands on it, and in order for me to fly it again he initiated the stipulation that the kite had to crash before I got to fly it again. Unfortunately for him, he got the kite wrapped up in a tree…Lucky for me, I was able to get it untangled without taking one step towards the tree. As the boys were running towards it, the wind picked up, I yanked the string slightly and the kite lifted off into the air. All I could think was that I wish it were that easy when I was a child.
When I was little we lived in Bremerton, Washington in a trailer park. At the end of the road there was a ditch and on the other side of the ditch were trees…Across the street from the house there was another house, and around that house were trees. I had a kite that probably had a 5ft wing span…it had a stegosaurus on it…I can’t count the number of times that dad had to get a ladder to get my kite out of the trees…it never did go in the trees across from the ditch because I wasn’t allowed down there, but more often than not, it was in the trees across the street instead of the sky…
I love things that glow in the dark…When I was a child I wanted glow in the dark stars on my bedroom ceiling (I never did get them, but I wanted them none-the-less). If I got stickers, I wanted glow in the dark (I remember that I had stickers that were dinosaur skeletons, and they glowed in the dark)… I painted a picture on my journal, and the moon glows in the dark (I thought I was pretty genius in mixing my acrylics with glow in the dark paint). In one of my scrapbooks is a page about the planetarium, and I painted the stars glow in the dark…Tonight, the pajama pants I’m wearing now as I type this, they have stars on them, and guess what, they’re glowing in the dark (it’s pretty cool, I didn’t realize that they do that)…
So, now that I’ve established that I love things that glow in the dark, let me tell you about my favorite glow in the dark item…It’s the coolest one of all and it’s not man-made; it’s one of God’s creations. The stars on a crisp clear night is my favorite glow in the dark thing in the whole world.
Even though stars can be seen from anywhere, even admist the annoying city lights, I have a favorite place to view them. My favorite viewing places are the places that my dad takes me camping, he usually finds the beautiful spots so far removed from any city that we get to view the stars in a whole new light, which actually happens to be the absence of light.
The stars are so beautiful just hanging there in the sky. And it’s completely amazing the pictures they create. There are so many constellations and even though there are only two that I can usually locate (the little and big dipper) it’s fun to look for others.
I look up at the sky at night (even when I’m at home and there’s the annoying city lights) and I marvel in the beauty of it all. It’s a favorite in several categories, tonight’s being glow in the dark.
Every school morning I get off the bus that shuttles me from South Lot to Main Campus. WIthin 100 feet of where I get off the bus is a green house. As I walk past it, I smell seaweed.
I used to fear seaweed. The big clusters of it floating in the ocean. You just never knew what was in it. Some sea creature just waiting to take a bite out of you. I feared it more than the undertow of the ocean that could suck me under and carry me out to sea. I feared it more than the big ocean waves that would crash over me and force me to hold my breath. Whether or not I could hold breath long enough was never an issue. I’d eventually come back up to the top. But the seaweed, I feared the seaweed.
I welcome the smell however. The smell that takes me back to summers past spent on the beach, soaking up the sun, boogie boarding, building sandcastles, body surfing. Going home sunburned, scraped up, and sand logged.
I was standing on the bed this morning pulling the sheets off of it so that I could do laundry, and these are the details that came to me:
I’m about 10 years old and I’m in California visiting David for the summer. I’m in my room where I’m supposed to be making the bed which is made up of four stacked matressess. I’m jumping on it instead. In one instance, the wicked step mother runs past the room and tells me to stop jumping on my bed, and so, I do…but when I stop bouncing, the bed is still moving…In the next instance she’s running past the room and yelling at me to get in the doorframe, and so, I do…
Let’s just say I’ve never been like a monkey jumping on the bed again.
I went shopping today to complete an outfit that I had started yesterday. Yesterday I had purchased a skirt and a necklace, but to complete it I needed shoes and a shirt. Thus, I went to a mall for what would be a 3 hour adventure…and of course, no adventure is complete without a cohort, mine was the 6 year old son of a friend…I can only hope that one day when I’m married that my husband is like him. He spent just as much if not more time than me in the dressing room. He was equally indecisive about which clothes he wanted and if it had been his wallet and not mine he most likely would have left the store with several pairs of pants, not just one pair. And just as I will do with the shirts that I bought to go with my skirt, when he had gotten home he would have checked out which pair went the best with all the shirts that he might wear with them. At which point all other pairs of pants would have been thrown back in the bag to be returned to the store from whence they came…Being that he could only walk out of the store with one pair of pants on this particular day, he had to not only get my opinion of which pair to buy but he had to be sure to ask Allie the sales woman which pair she would choose…we all concurred on the dark blue ones with the zip off legs…
Unlike typical male fashion, when he was done shopping with my credit card for himself, he didn’t immeadiately want to go home, he instead embraced the opportuntity to pick out shoes to go with my skirt (that he had never seen) and was more than willing to give his opinion in the shirt arena, both in style and color. He did a good job, I look cute (or so I’m told).
I will be seriously lucky if I can find a man that has the shopping mannerisms of this 6 year old boy.
Isn’t our entire life just a huge amount of events with the most impressionable parts in our minds only the “details” of those events.
Our first airplane ride and the memory is the wobbly cart rolling down the isles with peanuts and half full soda cans…details,
Swimming in the ocean, the memory is how cold and salthy the unstable water is…details,
Eating luch at the duck pond yesterday, I see the trees dancing in the wind, I hear the noise of the birds, I see people walking by and not taking any of it in…details
Can you imagine the void if for some crazy reason we were not able to express the details of our lives, that make it all so real to us?
Details are such a crucial part of our lives…without the details there’d be no memories…without the memories what would keep us from carrying out the same routine day in and day out…doing the same thing, making the same mistakes…there’d be nothing to keep us from traveling the same beaten path over and over again…it’d be like the movie ‘50 First Dates’…
Remember the details…
I love days like today. I walk out the front door to be greeted by the warm and cozy feeling of the sun beating down on me. I look up to sky to see that there’s not a cloud in sight and that the sky isn’t a faded dull blue, but rather a brilliant blue. It’s a gorgeous day, there isn’t even a breeze to speak of. (Which is abnormal for a spring day in NM, however, it’s still morning and by afternoon it will be more than a breeze that we’re speaking of. The talk around the city will be of the ferocious wind that would blow a small child away. A wind that if it were in existance now, would ruin the beautiful picture that I’ve painted. Thus, we’re moving on…) Not only when you walk out the door do you feel the sun and see the sky, but you can smell the green. It’s one of my favorite smells. Your olfactory nerves are immeadiately overwhelmed with the various aromas of fresh cut grass, trees in bloom, and the stems of plants growing. The smell of green, it’s a heavenly scent. It’s a scent to be relished in for it only comes one season a year. And realistically, it’s only at the beginning of the season, the beginning of spring… This is because you can’t smell green if you just smell fresh cut grass (which you can smell from the beginning of spring sometimes all the way to the end of autumn), and it’s not just about the blooming trees (which bloom all the way through spring) and it’s not just about the growing stems of plants (which can grow through the summer months); it’s the smells together…the smell of green is the beginning of spring…enjoy it…I do.
