Wedding Anniversary

Next Thursday is our 44th wedding anniversary, can't believe it!  Really does seem like yesterday.  We're going to Cumberland Island which is an island about 7 miles offshore from St. Mary's, GA.  We're staying at Emma's Bed and Breakfast in St. Mary's and then spending the day out on the island.   We thought about spending the night on the island, but the only place to stay on the island is the Reynold's Plantation, Greyfield Inn, which runs $350-$500 a night. We actually considered this, I mean how many 44th anniversaries do you get, but the only place to eat is in their dining room and it required a coat and tie for Mac and a dress for me and they don't serve Bud Light, so we knew we probably wouldn't fit in.   So we found Emma's Bed and Breakfast in St. Mary's.

I have to make the ferry reservations for us to get to the island, that's the only way to get there, they strictly control the number of visitors and there are no cars except service vehicles allowed on the island.  

The island is wonderful, full of live oaks, wild horses, wild turkeys, ruins of a mansion, the gravesite of Lighthorse Harry (Revolutionary War General and father of Robert. E. Lee).  And one of the most beautiful seashores I've ever seen.

I can't wait.

Fussy Eater

I did a survey on Facebook to list 5 foods I wouldn't eat and I realized that the hard part of the list was naming only 5, because I am such a fussy eater.  It would have been easier to list 5 things I'm willing to eat.  I've been this way since I was a kid.  My Mom use to make me eat whatever was on my plate, but that often took 3-4 hours so she stopped that, simply telling me that I didn't have to eat it but I couldn't have anything else to eat. 

As a child I wouldn't eat liver, cheese, fish, macaroni, anything in a cream sauce, milk  and for a long time strawberries.   Didn't like a lot of things my Mom  cooked but managed to eat them including all the meat that was always so well done it was like shoe leather----that's how my Dad liked his meat so that's how we all got it.  My Mom was a rather plain cook so it wasn't until I got older that I realized there were many more things I wouldn't eat.

When I met Mac he introduced to me to crab, rice, shrimp and calamari, none of which I would eat for years. As we traveled around the world I learned the word for chicken in about a dozen languages because I like chicken cooked about any way you can fix it.  You'd think being so fussy I wouldn't eat veggies, but I love veggies.  Right off hand I can't think of a single veggie I won't eat, with green peas and broccoli probably being my favorite.

Mac'll eat pretty much anything and when his Mother would come to visit she'd cook him a lot of the things I wouldn't.  As time went on I did learn to eat crab, shrimp, rice and calamari (if they're deep fried , otherwise they're too rubbery), but I still don't like liver, cream sauces, macaroni and cheese or milk.  I will eat a piece of cheese (swiss or monterey jack) but don't like cheese in or on things.  I've been known to order pizza with no cheese, there's just something about melted cheese that gross's me out.

I still don't  eat much fish, even though I know it's good for me.  If it's bland and doesn't taste fishy I'll eat it,  otherwise no.   I don't eat octopus, sushi, mussels, raw oysters, salmon, mahi-mahi or anything else in the fish family besides tuna and halibut.

I'm not crazy about Chinese food eitherbecause they're always trying to sneak weird things into it, but I love Italian, minus the cheese. 

There is no doubt that my favorite food is chocolate.  I've often said that I'd eat a '56 Chevy if it were covered in chocolate, I'd probably eat anything covered in chocolate.  Once had a dessert called "Death by Chocolate" and it was to die for.  Even ate chocolate covered ants once, but that's another story.

Miss Kitty

Miss Kitty is our cat, or more factually, we're the humans she owns.  She came into our house nearly 3 years ago.  She had been living at the local animal shelter for more than 6 months when we adopted her.  We had gone looking for a male cat, but she insisted that we take her home with us and within days had stolen our hearts and we hardly remember life without her.

She's a cat of many moods and like all Tabbies she's very smart.  Strong-willed, she knows how she wants her home to be run.  I'm allowed to play piano solo in the daytime, but in the evenings she expects to play duets with me.  

Bird watching is an obsession with her and she has recently discovered squirrels whom she assumes are simply really ugly cats. 

 Much of 

her spare time in the evenings is spent searching for bugs and spiders.  I don't know why we bother paying someone to come in  quarterly when she does such a good job. As she owns the house she pretty much lays anywhere she wants, boxes being her preferred location, but any port in the storm.  

She loves loud noises, which is truly unusual in a cat, and spends large parts of her day knocking things onto the floor so she can check out the sounds they make, the louder and more metallic they are the better.

She also enjoys ice.  The first summer she was here she would play with an ice cube and then fall asleep with her cheek on it.  She still likes to sit on the sink and bat cubes in to hear the sound they make.

Kitty has a large collection of mice that she rules with an iron paw and you will frequently hear them being batted about or see them whizzing through the air.  She loves for you to throw them to her so she cat bat them, she's amazingly athletic.

One of the things that she does that has always puzzled us.  She likes to sleep stretched out in front of the refrigerator, one of the hottest spots in the house.  Not a bad location in winter but uncomfortable in summer, but there she is, often with her friend tail.  Now I know that she knows that ice comes from there and she loves ice, but how can she stand the heat coming from under there.  She tries to stick her paw under there, has tried to stick her mice under there too, and all the time she's looking for something.  I use to wonder what she thought was under there, but now I've decided I'm better off not knowing!

Chickensaurus

Apparently a Canadian Palaeontologist, Dr. Hans Larsson, has decided that he can create a dinosaur by reverse-engineering or in other words  "devoluting" a chicken's DNA.

Chickens have been around about 65,000,000 years (since the Cretaceous era) and may be dinosaurs closest living relative.

Dr. Larsson,  who has spent years studying dinosaur bones,  says he wants to "flip" certain genetic levers during a chicken embryo's  development so he can reproduce  certain parts of a dinosaur's anatomy.  He says that his goal is not to hatch a dinosaur, but to show that birds are a direct descendant of dinosaurs.

One person suggested that all he'll get is an ugly giant chicken with teeth and that he's calling dibs on the drumstick.

But it would be wild if Jurrasic Park happened.

Live Oak Trees

One of the most beautiful features of living in our area are the Live Oak trees. Every where you go along the coast you see them.  The Live Oak is the state tree of Georgia and there's no wonder why, often covered in Spanish Moss they are magnificant.  Frequently growing 65-85 feet tall and living more than 200 years they are one of the wonders of Savannah.

There aren't any on our prop

erty but the neighborhood

 is full of them.

In the city of Richmond Hill there are a number of these majestic oaks and one of the finest stood near the Ace Hardware Store.  Stood that is until Saturday when we received our more than 4 inch drenching.  Lightning didn't hit it (though there was plenty of that) it was just that the ground was so drenched from the rain that day and all the previous week that the wind was able to split  it.  Only part of it is down so there hoping to saw  at least part of it and I'm hopeful too, I enjoyed seeing that tree each time we went to Ace.

Football Season

Another football season has rolled around, a season I use to look forward to eagerly.  I was a huge fan, even bought a tv that had screen within a screen so that I could watch 2 games at a time.  When we were stationed overseas I'd get up in the middle of the night to listen to games on the radio.  But those days are long gone.  I watch football in dispair. No more Stabler, no more Plunkett, no more defense that every team feared. My mighty team  who thrilled millions is beyond woeful. They're so bad they don't just suck (pardon my French), they blow.  I can't even watch them, it's too painful.   My only hope is that some day soon its owner will die peacefully in his sleep (I'm not completely heartless) and someone who understands the game, knows how to draft players who actually want to play for the team, knows what the West Coast Offense is, will buy the team.  Until then I'm just a sad, Raider fan who now follows the Colts and the Giants, really like the Manning brothers, I remember their poor father playing for the Saints and the fans wearing bags over their heads.

Dreams

I was reading Patrick Rothfuss's Blog (he wrote The Name of the Wind--a great fantasy book) where he was talking about a dream he'd  had, pretty funny.  And it got me thinking about dreams.

Scientists think we all probably dream (though many people deny they do),  in color about 85% of the time, with older people more apt to dream in black and white and more women than men dreaming in color.  I'd read somewhere that people who grew up without much tv or black and white tv were those who were more apt to dream in black and white.

Mac says he doesn't remember his dreams much and those he does remember are usually in black and white. Recently he remembered one that featured a hermit crab that was partly a crawdad (a symbol for me perhaps?).

 I always dream in color and usually remember most of my dreams at least for a short while.  Recurring dreams for me include: the ability to fly--a very common dream, being out and about without my shoes (never naked, just no shoes), surviving after a nuclear attack (too many atomic bomb drills while in school---duck and cover), and finding a treasure. 

Different dream books interpret these dreams in different ways, I just enjoy them, other than the bomb ones.  When I got my first pair of glasses as a young child I wanted to sleep with them on.  When asked why I said," So I can see my dreams better."

Jeans

When you're short and round it's next to impossible to find good looking jeans that fit. Notice I said good looking, you can always find long, baggy ones that you'll have to chop off and hem before you can wear them.  But there are d**n few jeans you can take off the rack and just wear.  And of course  I'm short waisted which makes the search even harder.  A number of years ago I stumbled across Gloria Vanderbilt Jeans.  Now with a name like that you'd expect them to be very expensive and designed for tall skinny models.  But truth be told they start at about $18.00 and have sizes to fit nearly any shape.  They come in short, medium, tall, petite, regular cut, skinny and stretch.  Actually all of her jeans have a bit of stretch in them.  That's what makes them great.  If you order a pair and they fit well and then you put on a few pounds, no problem, the jeans stretch.  And they don't lose their ability to stretch as they grow older.  I wear my Glorias until they fall apart and that generally takes about 5 years with me wearing them constantly.  Then I cut them off and make them into shorts and wear those until they finally dissolve in the washer.  I've had many a short, round lady come up to me and ask where I buy my Levi's and I always tell them I don't wear Levi's I wear Glorias.

You can find them at Beall's  or JC Penneys, Sears use to carry them but I'm not sure if they do any more.  I bought my first ones in the store and since then I just order online their sizes stay constant.  My daughter, who is even shorter than me, 4ft.10in. to my 5ft. loves them too.  I'd be lost, or naked, without my Gloria's.

Floods of Biblical Proportions

And God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water the fire next time.  Well I don't know about that because it rained yesterday, no, I mean it really rained!  During the week we'd gotten nearly 5 inches and then yesterday the heavens opened up and in less than 2 hours we got more than 4 inches of rain. Lordy it was coming down in sheets with thunder and lightning to match the deluge.

I looked out the window and saw that the lagoon had flooded into out yard and our boat was ready to leave, while our dock (on the right look carefully) was under water.  The plant I had sitting on it looked like it was getting ready to float away.  I called Mac and he waded out to the boat, the water was ankle deep half way across our yard, and pulled the boat back.  In the picture it is still sitting in water but not in danger of floating away.  My poor yard!  

Back to School

Our county's kids went back to school a couple of weeks ago, and the surrounding counties have slowly started back too.  Only Chatham (Savannah) waits until September to start.  I'm a retired teacher (and I've finally stopped having nightmares---the worse one was where I was teaching a class of third graders how to smoke and drink), many of my friends are teachers or are looking for teaching jobs.  Bless their hearts, I was once an enthusiastic teacher, ready to save the world one child at a time, the slogan of one of my principals.

I taught for 14 years, 1 in Georgia and 13 in California.  The one year of teaching Kindergarten in Augusta, GA is still one of my happiest teaching memories.  I taught in an school that was probably 95.% African-American (though they were still called Blacks then) and poverty was the norm not the exception.  But they were amazing kids, eager to learn, discipline wasn't a problem, the parents were caring and helpful.  I was sorry to leave, but we were moving home to California and I was looking forward to teaching there, it had to be more progressive and innovative than Georgia.

I had known we'd eventually go home to California so along with my major in Early Childhood Education I had done a minor in Spanish figuring that would help me get a job there, and it did.  My first teaching job in California was a Bilingual Second Grade class.  Most of the children was of Mexican descent, some newly arrived (illegal) with no English, some had been born in California of Mexican (illegal) parents who spoke English and some good old regular kids.  I had an Aide (Lidia) who was a native Spanish speaker and between us we taught the class. 

After a couple of years in Second Grade I had a class I liked so much that I moved up to Third Grade with them, and then the next year I shared them with my husband Mac who was teaching 4th grade and we both did a 3/4 combo.  It was great.

I enjoyed the kids I taught, but not how we were supposed to teach them.  When I taught in Georgia we turned in lesson plans each week that included lessons based on the  core curriculum we were supposed to be covering.  In California no one turned in lesson plans, you taught what and how you wanted.  When I was given my books for my first class they included Spelling Books but I was told I didn't have to teach Spelling if I didn't want to.  We didn't teach phonics, it was all Whole Language.  In 3rd and 4th grade you didn't have to teach Time's Tables because memorization was a no-no.

Needless to say we were "educating" a generation that would not be able to read, write or do math.  Towards the end of the 90's the pendulum swung the other way and all the old fashioned things we had done in Georgia when I first started teaching were now "in".

The teachers hated it, no more Fun Friday when they ran videos and played games all day.  No more teaching thematically and the curriculum be damned.

I thought it was great, with Godzilla sitting on my desk, the classe's bathroom passes in an alligator's mouth and a drawer full of chocolate I had been teaching all along.

Singing in the Rain

Started out to do our walk today but it started raining so we thought we'd have breakfast first and then try again.  We usually walk before breakfast because if you wait too long it gets so hot you turn into a puddle of hard to define body parts.  So back home for coffee and to wait for sunshine.  Coffee drank, sun appeared and off we went only to get absolutely drenched, I had to wring my clothes out before I could put them in the dryer. 

 I'm getting bored with rain.  We knew when we moved here  we'd have to put up with high humidity and more rainfall than we were use to, Hemet, CA where we'd moved from had averaged about 7 inches of rain a year.  While living there my skin had dried out, cracked, wrinkled and aged oh so nicely.  I resembled an elderly horny toad.

Then one fine day after seeing the sun for 700 days in a row I turned to Mac and said,"I'd like to live where they have 4 seasons, where summer has a smell."

And so we moved back to Georgia which does have 4 seasons, with winter being mild, and summer does have a smell, usually that of pine trees on a hot summer day.  But unfortunately this is one of those years where rain has ruled the weather.  My yard never completely dries up and the lagoon is lapping at our backyard.  The thing I smell most this year is mold.

Thought my skin has stopped cracking, my wrinkles have filled in a bit (that's not cosmetic surgery that's fat),  I'm now growing webbing between my fingers and toes.  And like the little froggy in the picture I'm doing a lot of really bad singing in the rain.