You are currently browsing the archives for October, 2008.
This time of year is one of my favorites. The Texas coast is so stunningly beautiful, and it still amazes me that in a world of consumerism and ruthless development, a place such as this still exists and that I live in it.
If you want to find beauty, you must get outside. Your camera will not take lovely pictures just sitting on the counter.
Search out some beauty. Find some adventure. Everything else can wait. Do not be ordinary. Be extraordinary.
Get your Halloween on, folks. There is candy waiting tomorrow, and I intend to eat my fair share. Next week you will see lots of running and exercise posts, but for now carmel apples rule.
Espresso and candy……the breakfast of champions.
My mind wanders here on days when I would like to throw my computer out the window….or in front of a large truck.
My mind wanders here when I want to include in my world only 6 people.
My mind wanders here when I feel that it is time to unplug myself from everything and everyone except my family.
**edit to add that I am just wanting to be either on the road or on the water with my family and am having a nice little pout about it. Not to mention that today I read a blog that I had stopped reading a few months ago because the blogger is mean, spiteful and just plain bitchy and guess what?? She still is! Big surprise. Gah.
I am voting today.
I will be heading to the polls and exercising my right, as an American, to help choose the next President of the United States.
My candidate may not win. But you know what? That’s okay, because I relish the fact that we live in a country in which we the people elect our leader. If my candidate wins. Whooo hooo! If he doesn’t, there is always next time, you know?
So, for those of you who claim on your blogs that if your candidate does not win you are going to take an overdose of pain medication (how asinine and I swear this crap is out there, and I know that they are kidding, but still), please get a grip on reality and see a psychiatrist. Or if you you are going to move away if your candidate loses, well, that is your right!!! God bless America!!! Because you are living in America, you CAN freely leave, so I say go for it! Exercise your right to freely cross the borders and fly wherever you want! Many people in other countries are oppressed and cannot do this, so cherish and appreciate that freedom. Oh, and be sure to come back…..you will be welcome again.
In fact, I think you should go to someplace like Tunisia or Morocco, Africa. In Tunisia and Morocco you can’t be a Christian….or Jewish…or Buddist….or Hindu. You can only be Muslim, and that is enforced brutally. It is a place that jails it’s tourists if they pray to Jesus. Just ask my brother. He has spent several nights in a Moroccan prison for simply being a Christian. Amnesty International got him out. I also know what it is like to receive an overseas call from him in Tunisia, years later, saying “I am being persecuted, and am in hiding in Tunis. If you don’t hear from me again by noon tomorrow then it means I am dead, so call the American Embassy in Tunis and tell them what is happening”.
Or how about heading on over to Kenya, where you will be hacked to death with machetes if you happen to have voted for the man that won? Or gunned down in the streets if you protest the election.
When you throw a hissy fit because your candidate loses, you look like a spoiled 2 year old and it is embarrassing. So grow up and be an adult this election. Use your manners folks and quit slinging mud and ignorance from both sides. I am not a racist for voting for McCain, and someone is not a terrorist for voting Obama. You know what I consider racist? I consider it racist when someone calls me a “stupid, white neo-con” for my support of McCain/Palin. Those who know me, know this is not true. Let me tell you a little secret……I did not sit in a church listening to my pastor preach racist rants from the pulpit for 20 years. If my pastor ever spoke angry and terrible things about any people, I would get up and walk out the very first time and never go back again. Period. It is that simple.
I am voting the way I am because I do not support abortion, raising taxes, “redistribution of the wealth” (how can you give a tax refund to someone that didn’t pay taxes to begin with??), socialism, campaign fraud (ACORN) and spending millions, upon millions, upon millions on a campaign that pledges to help the poor but is wallowing in hypocrisy. If helping the poor were that important to Mr. Obama, the money would have been spent helping those rendered homeless by Ike in Galveston, Louisianna and Haiti……not on the around the clock “Obama Channel” on satellite.
I could care the less what color the candidates skin is. That should never be a reason to vote a man into the office of President. EVER. Yes, how flippin’ cool would that be for us to have a black President FINALLY!! But, the color of a man (or womans) skin is NOT a reason to elect a person President. You should make the choice based on who you think is most qualified for the job and I think that is Senator John McCain.
We are so damned blessed to have the rights and privileges that we are granted as members of this amazing country. You live in one of the greatest nations ever founded. You live in a country in which you can chose how and where you worship. Food is readily available to you. Clean water flows from your faucets. The poor receive help from government run programs and many, many of our citizens freely give to those in need.
We are black, we are white, we are yellow, and we are lucky to be members of such a diverse nation. My grandparents and great-grandparents came here by boat from Italy and Denmark seeking prosperity and freedom. They found it, and I praise this great nation.
I encourage you today to get out and exercise your rights as an American citizen. Whether you support Obama or McCain, please vote. It is your right and a privilege. Do not take it for granted.
I am not.
This morning, as the veil of sleep was still floating in the air, my daughter and I were snuggled together under the covers. I was dozing, and she was humming softly and tracing my face with her fingers.
I slowly opened my eyes and looked at her….this child that I once carried inside of me and longed to see for 9 long months. As I gazed at her, she stretched and I could still see the babyness in her hands and face. I thought about my pregnancy and remembered feeling her movements inside of me. I wondered how much babies remember of the warmth of the womb and for how long they retain that memory.
As she hummed softly I asked her “Do you remember being inside my belly?”
She stopped and looked at me and said “Yes”, so I asked her what she remembered.
She said it was warm. I asked her if it was light or dark, and she said “It could have been light, but I couldn’t see anything”.
So I asked “Could you hear anything?”
And without missing a beat she said “Yes, I could hear your heart beating”.
For the most part, I have never been a clingy, insecure person with Bill. I have had my moments of insecurity, but they have always been hormonally driven by my cycles, child birth, or having an infant permanently attached to my breast.
The truth is, I have always found strength in our relationship. Strength that I never knew I had. I had the strength to allow myself to fall deeply in love. Something I had never allowed myself to do before.Early in our dating relationship, I had the strength to allow him to walk away from my arms when he got scared and confused.
Most importantly, I had the strength to trust him again and give him my heart when he was ready to come back.
From that moment on, I never doubted his love. It is just something I accept in the same way that I accept my right hand. It just is.
Time has proven his undying love and unconditional acceptance of me. He brings me so much joy and has made my life one that I can look back on and simply be in awe of it. He dazzles and fascinates me. In September we celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary. This Christmas we will have been together for 21 years. Unreal. I have so many memories of him that are special. In the coming weeks, I intend to post some that stand out in my mind as magical.
It’s amazing how you
can speak right to my heart.
Without saying a word
you can light up the dark.
Try as I may I could never explain,
What I hear when you don’t say a thing.
I wonder if he remembers that day when I moved home from Florida before we got back together again (we had broken up several months before and I had moved to Florida…we had stayed in touch), I moved into the dorms 3 days after arriving back in Texas, and was feeling afraid to give Bill my heart again. The problem was, how could I resist?
I spent that day getting re-enrolled in school, arranging my room (in a co-ed dorm much to Bill’s dismay) and fretting about calling him as he had asked me to as soon as I arrived in Galveston. I finally did that afternoon, and he was not happy that I had waited all day. He came right over, and we spent the weekend together. It was really hopeless for me, but I resisted getting close. He could really sense my distance, and kept asking if I was okay.
One evening the following week I didn’t call him, and at around 9pm there was a knock on my door. When I answered it I was not prepared to find a pissed and distressed Bill standing there. All he said to me calmly was “I have been waiting, and you didn’t call. I have no way to get hold of you (there was no phone in my room). Why didn’t you call? You should have called.” He walked in the door, and the feeling I got was that if I so much as touched him he would simply fall apart.
Bill, I am going to tell you this and I want you to listen…..That night you came into my dorm room and paced about it in frustration at the fact I had not called you that evening. You were feeling jealous and insecure, and you said “I don’t like the way I am feeling. I don’t want to tell you how I feel”.
Although you did later that night, you really didn’t have to say a word….I knew. I just had to watch you to know the truth. You had fallen in love, and I would have followed you to hell and back after that evening.
stoked- from Urban dictionary
“stoked” – adjective – to be “stoked” is to be completely and intensely enthusiastic, exhilirated, or excited about something. those who are stoked all of the time know this; being stoked is the epitome of all being. when one is stoked, there is no limit to what one can do.
This, my friends, is the definition of “stoke” in pictures:
Dad gives a little shove into the wave.
Wahine Mia gets right up on her feet.
She checks the little waves out…
Then up she goes.
And down she goes…(see that smile? She is even stoked while falling).
But her stoke is burning.
She grabs the board.
Drags it back out.
And tells Dad “I want to ride another one!”
So Billy takes his little surfer girl by the hand
and she catches another little wave on a perfect fall day at the beach.
It’s just another day in paradise.
“It seems so exceptional, that things just work out after all. It’s just another ordinary miracle today.” ~Sarah McLachlan
This is for the many, many people who have come to my website searching for “multiple miscarriage” “miscarriage is there hope”, “4th miscarriage will I have a live baby” and other heartbreaking phrases.
You won’t find all the answers here, but you just might leave with some hope.
The weather has finally cooled off a bit here, and that leaves for cool evenings and mornings, but midday is still nice and warm. We are still in our bathing suits and shorts here, and it feels a bit like the endless summer.
This time of year is my favorite for lots of beach time. The crowds are gone, and we pretty much have the beach to ourselves during the weekday.
I can’t tell you how nice it is, on the spur of the moment, to head to the beach for some surfing and beach combing. We just load up our boards, a couple of chairs, a small cooler of water and beer, and off we go. We head there at least weekly, sometimes several times a week.
A few months back I met a woman who said that she moved here from Wisconsin. When I asked her what brought her here all the way from up north, she said “The beach! But I have not been to it since I moved here.” I asked her how long she has been here, and she replied “7 years….I have just been too busy”.
As strange as that sounds, it is not uncommon. Many people get complacent about their surroundings. They get wrapped up in the routine of life, and sometimes forget that they live in paradise, be it the mountains, the beach or the desert.
Bill and I promised each other that we would not do that. Here we took this huge leap, packed it up and moved to the beach, and damn the torpedo’s, we are not going to take it for granted.
This past weekend, we went to the trailer and cleaned it up. Ewww, it was nasty dirty. Being in storage for so long, the bugs invaded it, so, we had loads of bug poop etc to vacuum up. I bombed it, and basically sterilized it with bleach products. Bill cleaned out all the storage underneath, scrubbed the outside and now it is all shiny and clean, ready for our first escape…..we just have to dig ourselves out of the mound of routine activities that we piled on ourselves needlessly.
Life should not be about running here, and running there…..scheduled stuff that really sucks the life out of you. My kids don’t need soccer, UIL and such to occupy their time. What they need is quality time, spent with their parents and friends OUTSIDE. Why we signed them up for such stuff is beyond me. It has not been a totally enjoyable experience for us, and Quinn really could take soccer or leave it. I think our society has the notion that your schedule must be crammed and your life must be busy or you are not “succeeding”.
Success for me is having the time to sit outside and sip a cup of coffee while chatting on the phone with a sweet friend. Making time for my family and friends is the most important thing on my schedule, and I am glad to have friends who are the same. I feel very lucky.
The rest of the “stuff”, I am starting to think, is just wasted time….mounds of “business” that we should dig ourselves out of.
What things do you think you could eliminate from your life schedule to make more time for the simple things? How can you set in motion a big change that will be hard, but ultimately be the best thing for your family? Do you have a dream? Tell me about it and what brave thing are you doing, or want to do, to make your dreams come true?
Billy celebrated his birthday just a week or so ago, and as a gift to himself, decided that he wanted to join the long boarders club. After weeks of painstaking research, he is now the proud owner of a Robert August 9′ log and surfing has moved right up there with sailing as a free time filler.
After spending so much time in the water lately, I have my surfing mojo back…..or basically I have found my groove. I feel comfortable on my board again, and not so much like a kook. I pretty much can catch every wave that I paddle for, and it feels so great.
I think that having lost a bunch of weight has contributed much to my balance on a board. It is hard to describe, but I will try. When Billy had the board made for me about 18 or so years ago, I weighed about 105-110 lbs dripping wet. The board was custom made for me. I learned how to surf on it, and had it wired.
Fast forward 40 lbs and you have a very off kilter surfer girl. Everything was off. Paddling was harder, catching the wave was harder. As a wave approached, I had to turn and paddle my ass off to catch it (or not, as the case was 70% of the time). My balance was totally off. I was a kook.
Now subtract 20lbs. Paddling is that much easier. I can literally turn and bury my board as the wave approaches and let it pop up in the momentum of the wave and voila! I have caught it! Yesterday Billy and I went surfing alone together, and I rode every wave that I attempted.
It was so fine.
What was even finer was my honey sitting on his board and “whooping” out loud when I caught a wave. I wish that every married couple could feel the thrill of that kind of bond. There is just nothing like it.
Your friends can’t fill it. Your parents can’t. Your kids can’t.
Foster your marriage my friends. Don’t take your husband or wife for granted. Make him/her your best friend and treat them as such. They deserve nothing less.
I love taking photos. You will rarely see me without my camera around my neck.
This can be annoying for the captain on the boat when it is time to tack or jibe, and I have to first remove the camera and place it below deck or have someone run it below for me. This is especially annoying to him when he must tack or jibe NOW because the depth has suddenly dropped to 5′4″ and your boat drafts 5′. Hold your horses, Captain Bligh, I don’t want to scratch my len.
Although it is a pain (oh! my! GOSH mom, stop with the pictures already!!), I think everyone in my family appreciates the fact that one day, they will have lots of images to go through and remember all the fun we had. Well, maybe Quinn won’t appreciate the ones of him clad only in ducky rain boots (especially if they are included in a slideshow at his wedding rehearsal dinner) but for the most part I hope they will love having those memories caught and preserved for generations to come.
EDIT: Okay, so I started this post to write specifically about something, and I chickened out. It just felt boastful and weird when I typed it. But, here goes…I am being paid to take pictures now. I am working freelance. They call me, tell me where, when and what they want, and I go take some pictures for them! So, I am actually getting paid for doing what I love! It is perfect for our family schedule. Not to mention how fun it is to see pictures that I took in print! So, that is my little announcement. Carry on…..
Paulette asked if we have been sailing. The answer is “Yes, FINALLY!!!”
Life has been getting in the way. This summer we had some big plans to vacation on the boat….plans that we had to put on the shelf in lieu of more important matters. Billy’s dad was quite ill and over the 3 months of summer, had a cardiac procedure and a kidney procedure. In addition to this, his BP was insanely high, and we just didn’t feel comfortable being out of touch on the boat. Instead, we opted to vacation at home in case we were needed.
Then Ike hit and all of the chaos that he brought kept us busy.
This past weekend, Billy finally made it to Calypso and put her back together again after the hurricane prep from several weeks ago. Then we went sailing, and it felt so good it was insane.
The weather is cooling here finally, and the mosquitoes are dying off. Soccer is almost over, and we have no weekend commitments after that. Weekends away on the boat are up and coming and will dominate this blog.
With Galveston in complete ruin, we will obviously not be heading there for Thanksgiving. We are talking about a trailer or boat trip instead. I am going to need to pick Kathy’s brain and find out how she roasted a turkey in the trailer oven……I think I remember it being cut in half or something. The boat oven is about the same size, so…..maybe we will have cornish hens instead?
If we go in the boat, we will head south. If we go in the trailer, we may head south or west.
Wherever we head, I will be glad to be rolling, as this moss is getting me down.
One morning last week I woke up at 5:45 to let the dog out and noticed that all was not right on the back porch.
Let me back up a bit. A couple of months ago, we rescued some newborn water turtles from death by heron. I was out for a run, and the herons were going to town snacking on these tiny turtles. I rescued 4 of them and brought them home to the kids. In the end, we built a small pond on the porch to house them until they got a bit bigger and we could release them in the big pond at the park.
We have enjoyed them so much. The word adorable did not do them justice. They were precious. They would swim to the side of the pond and wait for me to feed them, and would stretch their little necks out and allow us to pet them. We all loved watching them swim around in the pond and basking in the sun. We called them our babies, and adored them.
That morning, however, as my eyes adjusted to the bright light of the back porch, my mind started to register what had happened. There were little, water paw prints everywhere, and the pond lily was torn to shreds. The pond was still and silent. Raccoons had raided it moments before and taken all of our babies…..our sweet little turtle babies.
I think everything finally caught up with me (Bills dad being sick, Ike etc) and that was the straw that broke the camels back. I cried like crazy as I searched the backyard with a flashlight, cursing the raccoons (little bastads). I DREADED telling the kids what happened. How was I going to tell them that raccoons ate their “babies”? (do…not…laugh)
When Mia woke up, I lightened it up a bit and told her that they probably got away by crawling into the grass and hiding. Bill later came to me and said “She is no idiot Jody. She just told me that she wished she could shoot the raccoons with a BB gun and get her babies out of their tummies.” Nice. At least she doesn’t spit and scratch her crotch.
We did take the opportunity to teach about nature and how animals do what they do to survive etc…blah blah blah. You know, even though we rescued them from being a heron meal, they still became someones meal. Karma exists in the animal world, no? Still, she and Quinn will never look at raccoons in the same, sweet light again.
In the end, I did what any rational mother would do….I got on the internet, found a turtle breeder (yes, they do that….the little nurtles are less likely to have salmonella) and had 2 baby red eared sliders shipped overnight to our house. They are the size of quarters, and are wonderfully adorable. They spend their days outside basking in the sun, then come into the house to their little lagoon at night…the spoiled, little darlings.
As for the raccoons….they better watch out. Mia said “Well, if they come in this yard again, I will knock their teeth out and they won’t be able to eat turtles anymore”.
Isn’t she precious?
It has been birthday marathon time here. In 8 days we celebrated 3 birthdays and all were roaring successes. Even the big boy, who bought his own present (9 feet of pure, wave riding magic), had a mawvelous time. I am completely sick of cake, cupcakes and ice cream. Well, sort of. At least until the next birthday in 3 weeks.
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