Category Archives: life

8 Things about me

Posted on May 9, 2007 | 2 Comments
Natasha Moore tagged me to do this 8 things thing. Problem is, I don’t know that there are 8 things y’all don’t know about me… Anyway…

Here are the rules:

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.

2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.

3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

I hope my 8 people haven’t been tagged with something like this recently.
Okay, here are my 8 things…

1. Just got back from a quick trip to Galveston Island–and I didn’t even go in the water! (shame on me–but I did take a walk down Seawall Blvd…)

2. I played flute in high school and college marching band–and I doubt I could get a sound out of the sucker now. I was not very good at it because I never actually practiced. Barely good enough to qualify. One of my roomies and I volunteered for last chair and next-to-last chair in concert band while in college, and when playing the really hard stuff, we would play alternate notes. Together we made a not-so-bad player…

3. I once worked as the “managing editor” of a small town weekly–what this really meant was that I wrote all the copy (except sports), took, developed and printed all the pictures, wrote the cutlines and picked out the stuff from the press releases to fill up the spaces in the rest of the paper. All in 3 days a week. For not very much $$.

4. While in college, the university renovated some old buildings, replacing towers that had been removed years before. The towers were built on the ground before being hoisted to the roof, and they were roughly the shape of a metronome–those weighted ticking things that keep time for practicing musicians. One of my roommates was inspired to take a gang of us and climb the construction fence and spraypaint the front of the tower (the plywood undercladding) like a metronome. And nobody knew we had done it until about 30 years later when I “fessed up” to the alumni magazine…

5. I’ve been reading Tarot cards for about 9 or 10 years–and still consider myself very much a beginner.

6. I have “tilted kneecaps” which gives them a predisposition to dislocate. Because I’m not very athletic, I’ve never dislocated them, but they’re still persnickety about a lot of stuff…

7. I have 14 nephews and 4 nieces.

8. While walking down the seawall, and other places in Galveston (plus hurrying through airports for plane changes), my sandals wore blisters on both my baby toes. (I haven’t worn them much since last summer and I haven’t toughened up my toes yet…) And one of them popped. Owie! I’d better get them tough before RWA in July!

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Posted in family, life, pastimes, Tarot, trips

Blogging

Posted on March 25, 2007 | 2 Comments


I have signed into Blogger at least three times this week, intending to blog, and never got anything written. I did manage to blog this week, but this was three other times I came here to blog again, and never did.

I even had some things to write about. Like, how when I walked down to the bank this week, the librarian saw me heading back (the library is half a block down the street from the bank), and came out and hollered at me to come sign something. I had to sign something to send in to the State Library people. Or maybe the federal Library people. I don’t know. I did read it, but I don’t remember who it was for. I’d forgotten that she called me last week or so and asked whether I was the president of the Library Advisory Board.

I knew I was on the board, but had no clue whether I was the president or not. I’ve been on it for over a year, and we’ve met once. And when Jerri Ann said she thought I was the new president, I said, fine, I’ll be the president. Only now she tells me we need to meet and come up with a policy for the kids’ computer use at the library once school is let out. Sigh. And one of our board members lives way out of town past a couple of slidy hills and some low-water crossings and can’t get to town if it’s raining, so of course it’s been storming all week…

This is like when I agreed to be the vice president for the Friends of the Library, because I wouldn’t have to do very much. Then we discovered that we had to completely split the Friends from the Advisory Board, and the president of FoL went over to be an Advisor, and I got to be the President of FoL–and that was when the treasurer discovered that we really needed to fill out the official IRS paperwork to become an official non-profit organization (even though we barely fundraise $500 per year), AND we needed to re-do our bylaws to make them fit with the IRS papers. Sigh. This always happens to me.

I did remember to go to community choir practice this week. It was sounding pretty good when the second soprano showed up so us altos weren’t drowning out the only soprano who was there for most of rehearsal. Oh well. Performance is Palm Sunday. AKA this coming Sunday. Hopefully, whatever’s making the gunk in my throat will die and I can sing all those Fs without getting rattly. For some reason, an F (the low one–I haven’t been able to hit a high F in 25 years)(I can only hit a high E when the sun is shining, all allergens are dead and the birds are singing sweetly in the trees. E-flat is generally possible.) shakes loose all the gunk in my throat, when there is gunk, and makes me cough. It’s not where the voice breaks–that’s somewhere around an A or B–it’s just the gunk vibration note. (And I’m sure y’all really wanted to know all that…)

The daughter made an A in her probability class for her statistics PhD. The younger son made a 99 on his engineering test. (This after majoring in theater performance and theater design for 3 semesters before switching to engineering.) We haven’t heard from the older son in a while. Hmm. So, life is mostly good.

Oh, and today, we went to town and bought half-price ready made frames for a couple of paintings, and put them up in the son’s room. They look pretty good, if I say so myself. It all started when we moved out the old broken-down dresser and moved in this antique chest/armoire/desk thing (it has drawers, a door where you can hang up things, and a pull-down writing area). Then I brought in one single painting (see above) to see how it looked over the armoire/desk–and the fella said to bring out all the paintings-ready-to-hang, and we found two more that looked good. We put the “Breakfast in Tuscany” painting over the chest/desk and the one above across the room, and a big “boys at the beach” painting above the bed, but to one side, not over the headboard. Yeah, we started something.

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Posted in life, painting, singing, volunteering

Slow weekend

Posted on February 11, 2007 | 3 Comments

It’s been a really slow weekend. We talked about getting tickets for the Sousa concert at the Amarillo Symphony, but when the fella had trouble getting home from Austin, it’s just as well we didn’t. Amarillo was socked in with fog and freezing drizzle most of the morning and early afternoon. He’s been spending a lot of time in Austin, because the Texas legislature is meeting. They only meet for a few months every other year and all the business has to be done very quickly–the theory was that if they didn’t meet too often, they couldn’t cause too much trouble–and being in the junior college business, the fella feels the need to be present to make sure the gummint doesn’t forget to fund the colleges. (They only pay for about 1/3 of the cost of running them, right now…but this isn’t a government or educational blog).) Anyway, it means that for the next several months, he’ll be in Austin almost as much as he’s at home. And it’s nice when he comes home again. :)

We spent the weekend just hanging out. We watched a couple of the movies I rented to watch while he was gone, and didn’t watch at all. I read a book. We changed lightbulbs–this is a complicated process that involves getting out a ladder (high ceilings) and lots of cussing, so we tend to let a lot of lightbulbs burn out before we go round changing them. And okay, he does most of the work. I stand by ready to catch him in case the ladder wobbles, and throw away the old lightbulbs. But we replaced three of the four bulbs in the den, two of the three lights in the spare room, the light in the laundry room, one of the bathroom lights and… surely there was another one–oh yeah, one of the 4 bulbs on the ceiling fan fixture in our bedroom. (Told ya we wait till we’re fumbling in the dark.) We can see again! (I really like the fluorescent fixtures in the bathrooms…)

I’m going to have to start going to basketball games with him again soon–except this week, it’s on Thursday, which is choir night–okay, I completely forgot to go to the community choir this past week, but the fella was out of town, and it’s harder to remember stuff when I don’t have any schedule at all to keep… Anyway, I can go to the ball game, then sneak out for choir practice, then sneak back for the rest of the guys’ game.

I’ve made an emergency hair cut appointment for tomorrow afternoon. I need to make myself a big sign to put on my desk so I don’t forget to go. We’re getting a family picture made early Tuesday morning, and my hair has reached that icky in-between too-long-to-be-short and too-short-to-be-long stage, where some of it wants to flip out, some of it wants to flip under, and some of it sorta wants to go sideways…(No I do not have photos!) and no way am I having my picture made with in-between hair…

I need to write a “alumnus success story” article for Gwen Shuster-Haynes’ marketing workshop. I’m not sure it got me to doing more things that what I was already doing, but I feel better about the things I’m accomplishing, and I think I’m focused better.

Okay. This weekend, I watched Sixteen Blocks with Bruce Willis (liked it), and Mrs. Henderson Presents with Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins. I also read Natural Born Charmer by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, and Tongue in Chic by Christina Dodd. (Dodd’s title doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the story, but it’s cute, and I liked the book. I liked both books, actually.)

Back to work in the a.m.

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Posted in life, movies I watched, what I'm reading