how book addicts are created . . .

You may have wondered how Kimberly came to be such a voracious consumer of good books . . . Here's the scoop: books were a breakfast menu staple in the old days when she was young! They still are . . . and she still is :-)

younger sister stories . . . on the occasion of big sister's 40th birthday

Kimberly....I can barely remember our childhood. Mainly I remember always being jealous of Kimberly. Hating her birthday came before mine...things like that. One or two things stand out about Kimberly. She'll hate me for this but, oh well. That's what little sisters are for!

When we were real little...I was younger than 6, so she would have been 8 or younger at the time. Apparently she had a penchant for butter. They didn't have tubs of butter back then, just the sticks. I guess Kimberly got extra hungry one night and decided to snag a stick of butter to munch on in our bedroom upstairs.Next thing we know, there is butter dripping through the floor down into the living room where our parents were watching TV! BUSTED!!!! Lesson learned, do NOT place butter sticks on the heater vent in your room!! Hee hee!

One other fine event: one afternoon Kimberly and I were playing around in my room. We were actually getting along for a change! We started thinking that tumbling on my bed was a brilliant idea. As in somersaults on the bed. Kimberly tumbled a little too far, and ended up putting her FOOT through the wall! Now this would have been bad enough, yet we decided to LIE about what we were doing to try to get out of trouble. I forget what we said, but Daddy did NOT fall for it. I guess because the hole in the wall was suspiciously shaped like a FOOT!!! We were almost banned from going to the fair that afternoon because of our lie. I'm pretty sure we ended up going.

Like I said, my memory is sketchy.

I am getting old, too, you know.

Not as old as Kimberly, though! :)

Love, Michelle

Easter weekend casuals

Back to the reality of the work week in the morning but, at the moment, everything's smiles and sunshine deep within. I've learned that microwaving a kid's meal is more complicated than cooking one from scratch, that a camera is a good excuse to play spectator, that we often miss what's most obvious, that a few minutes in a hammock swing is still worth its weight in gold . . . Other stuff too but I have those proverbial miles to go yet and it's almost bedtime :-)

a "park" of my very own . . .

one perfect morning . . .

This has been so.

65. walking a cool, early morning beach framed in sun glow and sea breeze
66. wearing sandy-hemmed sweats
67. being able to go the extra mile the day after the race
68. having just enough change for the parking fee you didn't expect
69. beginning with Amigos Para Siempre (both versions randomly back-to-back)
70. collecting not just one baby's ear but two :-)
71. remembering "here on the shore, turned into stone, lies a piece of a conch's one-spiral cone"
72. collecting whelk fragments for someday's frame
73. finding both Carolinas' state shells on the same morning

74. ending with Somewhere in Time (Michael Crawford with words :-)
75. eating breakfast both before and after

I would not have imagined that I would have been

. . . absolutely in awe as I drove over the Ravenel bridge for the first time today.

I have gone out of my way to avoid this encounter. They tore my beautiful bridges down, frail sacrifices to this aquatic demon. I wouldn't look in its direction on my few visits to its city. I went around, but never across, until today.

Today, because, in the morning, I will walk with thousands others the breadth of its span and more. Today, because this first encounter needed to be more up close and personal, more private.

Traffic crawled this afternoon, crawled enough for me to savor the marvelous intricacies of this giant Tinkertoy creation. Yes, marveling, wondering, agape with awe. . .

I can see its skyprint from my window tonight. Tomorrow it too will become one of my beautiful bridges, one that I imagine will live on this earth and sea longer than I . . .

a home song

I find it interesting that this evening, for the second time in as many springs, I'm relieved to learn that I have not been "selected" for a professional opportunity. Both might have offered additional financial security--a position more immune from budget cuts or a second income to bolster rainy day accounts. But, even in this unsettling economy and with retirement on the not-too-distant horizon, I'm loving where I am. Maybe I reach out for those other possibilities just to ensure that I don't become complacent, lose my edge? Or maybe this is my Everest: I reach out because the opportunity is there?

Whatever the reason, both rejections gifted me back precious summer weeks I would have lost to work. And today, after two glorious afternoon hours puttering in my wilderness but wannabe well-groomed yard, I was especially grateful that I had not traded my summer for financial security before realizing, once again, how much this annual tussle with nature is an inherent part of who I am.

64. Happy 11th anniversary, home of mine! Looks like we'll be spending much of our sweet slow summer days together again after all :-)

I'm smiling. Are you?

love u infinity plus one

63.

the local March birthdays trio

the Facebook experiment . . .

Like blogger, it's taken a while for Facebook to "take" with me. I joined last summer after my cautious oldest out-of-state child said she'd set up a Facebook page for professional reasons. I thought it would be a way for me to connect with her and with out-of-touch professional colleagues. Several in a cohort that is soon to disband had their own Facebook pages. With my daughter, they became my first "friends."

Connecting on Facebook with colleagues at work has been a different story--perhaps because ours is a professional where one misstep in cyberspace today may easily translate into loss of livelihood--position and credentials--tomorrow. But, after two years of blogging on a site easily googled, I figured I wasn't a misstep candidate so . . .

I invited my other daughter to join. She was the natural anyway--and truly uses the tool for what it does best, connecting with old friends before they've grown so old they've forgotten you or grown wary of risk-taking, of stepping out into the unknown. My son--well, he still hasn't mastered sending/responding to personal emails, so I haven't bugged him . . . yet. But it's interesting to note that, in the meantime, I've connected to all my brother's and sister's children :-)

Which brings me to another point--sister and brothers who also don't have Facebook accounts . . .

In the meantime, I've amassed oodles of Flair, joined a group from my mother's hometown across the Atlantic, and begun taking tiny risks--like quizzes (I should have been a detective [aren't I?] and settled down in Italy [close enough to that across-the-Atlantic hometown]). I support my college basketball team (my classmates also aren't on Facebook but the more recent residents of my former dorm are). I dabble in the trivia of what I'm thinking at any given moment--and truly enjoying being more in the know about the lives of those I have so little-face-to-face contact with.

Facebook keeps us close when time and space and the demands of our separate lives would ordinarily dictate otherwise.

The one drawback? Just not the right venue for longer thinking, reflecting. Which is why I'll keep right on blogging :-)