I finally got my pictures transferred from my camera, from when we went to play golf the other day and the big family get-together yesterday on July 4th. Click on the extended entry for a couple of July 4th pics…
We’ve been so busy with the weekend (and our trip down the Trace), and the holiday yesterday, that I haven’t had a chance to do a whole lot else. Here’s a couple of random thoughts rolling around like marbles in my little brain 🙄
We were gone most all day on Tuesday, so this is a day late 🙂
Independence Day Fun (for any country just think of what you do on your day)
1. Do you have any traditions for this day? Yes, we normally go to Tim’s mom’s family’s get-together (whew, that’s a mouthful!)
2. What are your plans for this one We went to the get-together, then we went to see Superman Returns last night
3. Do you like fireworks? I love them, but alas, Tim does not
4. Can you use them where you live? No, we can’t shoot them off, but the town where we live always puts on a good family-oriented July 4th celebration, complete with fireworks at 9 PM
Happy July 4th to everyone! We’re headed out to a family get-together at Tim’s aunt’s house for the holiday. Tim’s mom is one of eight children, and they all get together on every holiday. We went at Easter, but Tim loves to go on the Fourth, and see all of his aunts, uncles, cousins and family. There’s usually at least 75 people there, so he has a lot of family to visit with!! I hope to be back by late afternoon, and maybe we can take in some fireworks tonight.
Hope everyone has a great holiday!
UPDATE: We’re back from the family shindig, but you-know-who has nixed the fireworks. We’re going to take in Superman at the theater instead
I finished a really great book this afternoon, called “The Secret Life of Bees” by Sue Monk Kidd. I had gotten this at the library last week and started it, and have had a hard time putting it down. It’s a different kind of book, very Southern and very much set in a certain time period, the beginning of the Civil Rights movement in the deep South. I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It has a certain voice and spirit to it that really appealed to me. I didn’t want to put it down, and that’s the sign of a really good book for me.
Rather than try to write my own synopsis, here’s one I “borrowed” from Amazon.com – “In Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, 14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart’s answer to the family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words “Tiburon, South Carolina” scrawled on the back. The search for a mother, and the need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest. When Lily’s beloved nanny, Rosaleen, manages to insult a group of angry white men on her way to register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes the opportunity to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can think of–Tiburon, South Carolina–determined to find out more about her dead mother.”
For the record, that makes #38 so far this year, with a total of 13,406 pages read. Up next to read is another library book, “Vanishing Acts” by Jodi Picoult. I recently read my first book by Picoult, “Plain Truth” and I really enjoyed it. I hope this one is equally good 🙂
I had a great time on Saturday, taking lots of scenic photos and getting to play with different settings on my camera. I hope to get to do more of that on Tuesday night… my camera has a fireworks setting, and I’d love to be able to go to a nearby park where they shoot a lot of fireworks, and practice some! Anyway, I digress. While we were going down the Trace, Tim let me take as many “scenic” photos as I wanted. I took a lot of churches, cemeteries, trees, grave markers, historic signs, etc. I even took some of figs, apples and corn! 🙂
Here’s an example of the 3 color settings on my camera… natural color, black and white and sepia. I tried to stand in the same spot and take a picture of the original Natchez Trace, at a spot now called the Sunken Trace, and take a picture in each mode. Take a look at the photos, and then vote in the poll and let me know which one you like the best!
Color:
Black and White:
Sepia:
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We spent all day Saturday on a very long road trip. We set out to drive down the Natchez Trace from our house to Natchez, stopping along the way to have a picnic and take in some of the historic and scenic stops along the Trace. We did all this, but once we reached the outskirts of Natchez, instead of turning and heading toward home (via a faster route, the posted speed limit on the Trace is 50 MPH), we decided to go somewhere else. Tim was reminiscing as we drove into Natchez, that he used to drive this way to his last base when he was in the Air Force. That base was in Alexandria, LA and has since been decommissioned. I said something along the lines of “we should go there sometime for you to look around”, which Tim interpreted as “hey, let’s go there now!”. So, we took a several hour detour and also drove down to Alexandria so he could see what was left of the base and show me around his old stomping grounds.
I took a lot (160+) of pictures on our day-long trip, and I’m trying to decide whether to post them all on Hambones. We made several stops along the way, including a couple of geocaching-related stops, as well as our picnic at Rocky Springs. I took lots of “scenic” pictures – pictures of churches, cemeteries, the old Trace, trees, historical markers, pre-Civil war buildings, etc. I’m going to post a few, along with the info, on the extended page, so check them out if you’d like. If you’d like to see them all, drop me a comment and I can load them all into Hambones.org.
OK, here we go….
We’re headed out for a road trip today. We thought we’d get in the car and drive down the Natchez Trace some. We’ve done this once, years ago, when we had Sally. She had a blast, riding in her kennel with us (in the air conditioning, natch), and then every time we stopped, she got to get out and explore. The dog had more fun than we did, I think. I still miss her…. Anyway, we’re going to drive down towards the Natchez end and stop and get out at all the marker points (points of interest). There’s a cool Indian mound that we went to before and a couple of places we can stop and have a picnic. I have us some hot dogs and chips ready to go, and our picnic basket. I hope to take a lot of good photos, and post some soon.
Oh, and I just dug through my old scrapbooks and found a page I did on our last trip. It was 6 years ago and this was one of the first scrapbook pages layouts I ever did. Yes, it’s old and yucky. Yes, my style has changed (most notably, I now scrap 12×12). But, I thought it would be fun to post it, check out the extended page.
Hope everyone has a great day!
I made yet another trip to my library today… to return the “Finding Neverland” DVD and “The Preservationist”, both of which I finished this week. I tried to just drop them off and walk out of there, but I have this sort of defective gene when it comes to the library. I feel like I have to at least look around, then after I start looking, I feel compelled to leave with several items in my hand. It’s a sickness, I tell you, a sickness.
I brought home 2 more movies – I have discovered the joy of renting movies for free from the library and I just can’t resist. I got another one on our rental list that we missed earlier when it came out, “Hotel Rwanda” and I also picked up the DVD of “Wuthering Heights”. Sigh.
I got 2 more books, and have just added them to my sidebar in the “up next to read” segment. They are “Vanishing Acts” by Jodi Picoult and “Shem Creek” by Dorothea Benton Frank. I have read one other Picoult book, “Plain Truth” and really enjoyed it, so I looked for another one. I have never read anything by Frank, but she’s a Southern writer and I generally like books like this. I have seen her newest one “Full of Grace” at the bookstore and resisted, so I thought I would start with an older book of hers (aka, free from the library). 🙂 Check back in the next couple of weeks for a review of these… these are both a bit heftier books, weighing in at 400 and 300 pages or so, so it may take me a bit longer with the weekend and holiday to finish them. 🙄
Friday, June 30, 2006
Feast One Hundred!!!
Congratulations to the Friday Feast Meme for hitting that magical 100 mark… time to feast!
Appetizer
On average, approximately how many times per day do you yawn? I have never actually thought about it. I think some days I might yawn a half a dozen times, maybe more. When I see Tim yawning, I always pick at him (he thinks he can get by with very little sleep, but he can’t always) about being sleepy, but Tim always says “I just need oxygen”. So, I guess I need oxygen at least a half a dozen times a day, maybe a dozen on a good day!
Soup
What was your most memorable school field trip? I went with my junior high class (maybe 9th grade, not sure?) on a field trip down to Natchez to tour some of the antebellum homes. I think I had just gotten a camera, so I took it along and took a lot of pictures of my friends on the bus, of the houses, of the insides (china, beds, etc, I have always loved all that big old antebellum stuff). I still have all those pictures to this day, which is why I can remember that trip. I will have to dig them out and look at them 🙂
Salad
Fill in the blank: I was extremely __________________ this week. boring! Or even better – exceedingly mundane
Main Course
Which color do you think of when you hear the word “soothing”? probably a light blue, like the sky or ocean, or maybe a soft mossy green.
Dessert
What is something that, if you had to, you could save up the money to buy within one month? Well, I keep thinking we’re going to need to replace our washer and dryer soon. We have some money in an emergency fund, so hopefully we could cover those with that fund. I don’t want to be without a washer or dryer for very long, I’m very spoiled and I really don’t want to have to go to a laundromat. I guess for the saving, probably a new heating/cooling unit for the house. Again, I have this worry it will go out and we’ll have to replace it. I worry a lot, you know 🙄
I finished another library book last night, “The Preservationist” by David Maine. It’s the fictionalized, sometimes irreverent, account of Noah. It covers fictional accounts the whole Biblical story of Noah and the ark – from his learning of the need to build the ark, his wife and sons and their wives, how they go about collecting the animals, how the people heckle him, what it’s like on the ark during the flood, the conditions, animals crammed in, what it’s like for months afterward, waiting to see land, how they get off and find land and figure out how to start from scratch when there’s not a soul left alive, except for them. It covers alot of things I really never thought about concerning a story I’ve heard of all my life. It’s not quite as good as another fictional based Biblical story I’ve read recently (“The Red Tent” by Anita Diamant), but it was still good and enlightening in its own way. I’m not overly fond of the way the author covered the dialogue and some of the actual dialogue itself (lots of references to “rutting” in this book!). But, with both books, I tend to forget that these characters were in the Old Testament, before the birth of Christ, in a time very unknown to me, and had to deal with hardships that I can’t begin to understand, as well as the fact that idol worship and mention of other gods, were commonplace. Anyway, I digress – I enjoyed it, and even though it wasn’t as good as Red Tent (few books are stacking up to that one for me lately), I’m glad I read it. 😀 If you’ve read any of my book reviews either here or at Hambones.org, you’ll find that I like almost every book I read, for one varied reason or another. I just like to read! To be entertained, to be enlightened, to make me think, or not, to simply read something light and nonsensical, just to read 😀 For a million different reasons, I just plain love books. So many books, so little time!
For the record, that makes #37 so far this year, with a total of 13,104 pages read. Up next is a book I’ve heard about for some time, but I haven’t gotten around to (or any other books by this author, for that matter). 🙂 It’s “The Secret Life of Bees” by Sue Monk Kidd. I hope it’s good!
These are not all brand new pictures (although most are very recent), but all are of things that I love in my yard. We have a small yard, but we have worked really hard to make it a homey, happy, blooming kind of place in the summer. 😆 I don’t profess to have a green thumb, but I am able to get some things to grow, and I love having other “stuff’ in my yard – bird feeders, bird baths, and what can be nicely called “yard art”. 😀
Enjoy, and thanks for stopping by!
1. I have impatiens every where I have shade, in one flower bed and a couple of pots. Here’s a hanging basket of them in a tree, that I love – it’s blooming nicely this year:
2. A new bird bath that hangs on a hook; we bought it this summer:
3. I really love watching the squirrels eat their corn from their feeder (yep, I’m weird that way!):
4. My pink moss rose is blooming well this summer:
#5 through #13 on the extended page….
Coffee is still a relatively new thing for me. Tim has drunk coffee all of his adult life. His parents are big coffee drinkers; they always have a pot going at their house, or if people come over to visit, that’s the first thing they do – go put on a pot of coffee. A very social thing, I think. 😆
For the first 8 years we were married, Tim drank coffee all by himself. Then, two summers ago, I made a herculean effort to learn to drink coffee. I have to add lots of splenda and creamer, but I can drink it now, and I actually enjoy it. Of course, it has tons of calories and is very sweet (think light brown, really light!), but I do like it. I love going to Starbucks or Cups and trying new coffee concoctions in the summer and winter alike. But, not my Tim. He just drinks plain coffee, black. We’ll go to Starbucks and he gets lots of quizzical looks by just ordering plain coffee. But, he goes with me, and that always makes me happy.
We’ve made coffee at the house since we were married, but we have always bought and used ground coffee. Community brand, to be specific. I buy really small sizes of flavored coffees for me, but for Tim, we buy Community ground coffee, dark roast. And he’s been perfectly happy with that. I’ve been trying to talk him into trying whole beans for a while, and finally, on Sunday afternoon while shopping in Sam’s, he agreed. We bought a bag of whole beans:
Now, we’re trying to figure out the proportions of how much whole beans to grind to make a big pot of coffee for us. The first one was a disaster – too watered down. We’re slowly getting there, but I honestly think it takes more whole beans to make coffee like he likes it than it will of ground coffee. Which, in turn, makes me think it will be more expensive to buy whole beans and grind them. But, we’re going to experiment and give it a try. He wanted to try some Hawaiian coffee first. I’m not sure if we’ll stick with this, try another kind of whole bean, or just chuck it and go back to ground. 🙄
Please leave me a comment if you have any sage advice about grinding whole beans, how much to use, what kind to buy, etc. We’d really appreciate it!
I blogged last week in my Thursday Thirteen post, about some movies I wanted to rent and watch over the summer. I had already found one and we watched it (Because of Winn Dixie, great movie), and I went back to the library yesterday to return that one, and look for more movies. I came home with “Finding Neverland” on DVD, and we watched it last night after Tim got in from the golf course. So, that makes 2 out of my list that I’ve seen in less than a week, yeah!!!
I really liked it, and I think Tim did also, but he did comment that it was a bit slow in the beginning. We give it a 7 out of 10 stars (and we’ll rate the Winn Dixie one an 8 out of 10). That reminds me, I need to do some book and movie reviews over on our main site, Hambones .
By the way, for those of you who do not know me, I didn’t ever really have a childhood. I didn’t grow up doing normal childhood things, like seeing Disney movies, playing games, singing kids songs, etc. Those things are foreign to me. I’ve never seen The Wizard of Oz, although I wear that like a badge of honor now and refuse to watch it. But, I realized last night while watching “Finding Neverland” that I never saw Peter Pan either. In talking to Tim after the movie, he liked that movie growing up and has happy childhood memories of seeing it and liking it. He said I’d need to look for either Peter Pan or maybe Hook with Robin Williams at the library and try to check that out. He seems to think that I need to see Peter Pan. 😆
I blogged in May of last year (2005) about a cutting we received from a neighbor of a pass-along plant called a Confederate Rose. It was just a little thing when we got it, and I kept it in a pail of water to get the roots going:
Then, Tim planted it in the yard a couple of weeks later (in May):
I watched it, and watered it, and cared for it all summer, and then finally – in late October, it bloomed:
Now, this year, it has really taken off. It’s taller than our 6 foot wooden fence, and still growing. I hope it really blooms this year, lots of blooms. It should be gorgeous if it does. I need to do some more research and find out just how big this thing is going to get, if it needs to be pruned, when, etc.
Here’s what it looks like today:
GoodReads
SwagBucks
