shoes, and Aaron......

This post is for my friend Aaron.. I entered into his blog accidentally, but enjoyed it immensely. Here is it's link: http://beingaaron.blogspot.com/ ( I hope you don't mind Aaron, I only have 5 followers). The blog I really enjoyed was labled 'Cuteness over comfort, Really', from March 3, 2010. It was about us silly women and our 'need' for cuteness in our shoes and the way we outweigh the comfort factor that they might not possess. Now, we women might not always wear comfy shoes, but we always wear styling shoes. Okay, not always, but when we can buy them for $1 at Goodwill on "$1 day Thursday" we at least need to wear them one time to see if we get any....'Oh, cute shoes', or 'I love them, where did you get those?', or even 'wow, neat shoes, I've never seen anything like them'. All of those comments are a boost to women's ego's in making sure we choose a 'cute' pair of shoes. True, sometimes all we can last is the 3 hour block meetings and then we are taking them off in the car on the ride home, but most of the time our shoes are 'somewhat' comfortable. Here, Aaron, are a few men's shoes I found that might be the most comfortable shoes to wear, but are definitely NOT on our (womens) A-list of 'cute'. Go ahead, try wearing them to work, church, on a date, wherever, and see what looks you get.

And my favorite:

Now Aaron, to support you in your blog, here is a women from China, from the time she was 7 years old she (or her mom) bound her feet to fit into 'tiny cute' shoes. As was a custom of the rich women of the in the 10th century, they would break the 4 small toes binding them under and then later break the arch of the foot to bring it closer to the heel, all in the attempts to have the 'prized' 3-inch golden lotous. Here is the full story :http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8966942

Thank you Aaron, for really just thinking about our pain and what our feet might become if we subject ourselves to the 'cute' shoe nonsense.

my Saturday ride

I usually don't ride on Saturdays. It's one of my days off, but I didn't ride on Friday, and you all know my Thursday $1 activity, so I felt guilty and decided to go for a ride. I did my old normal route of 3 miles. Nothing too exciting to mention. No garage sales, no dead birds, no weedy lawns, etc. However, I did find two treasures: I am not a golfer, but the grandkids love balls of all kinds, and for the matches, I am always needing matches down in my bedroom to light yummy candles. Thanks to Susie, who has introduced me to Gold Canyon candles, I am hooked. I love the Birthday Cake and Sugar Cookie ones!! All of them are good. After my ride I walked out in our garden and WOW, within 2 days these grew from smallish into 'ginormous' zuchini. .
Griffin was complaining about how heavy it was to hold them. I should have weighed them, but (luckily), Julie and Ken stopped by, and we 'talked' them into taking some off of our hands. Thanks guys! We have, as others have warned, easily grown the zuchini and now we have to find neat and exciting ways to eat it all. (Or hope neighbors and family drop by every couple of days). Steaming is Doug's usual way to cook it, but I tried a deep-fried recipe on Friday and here is Allan trying them. Apparently, he didn't like it:

Gearing up... The shove in....
And the reaction.. Was he playing it up for the camera? I think so. Not only is Allan's face funny, but take a good look at Doug....I love it! The rest of the family really liked it! And we will be doing it again soon and all summer long it looks like.
Here is one more photo of my curio cabinet. It is antiqued, although you can't tell, but I like it and now I need to fill it with my stuff. I will be downsizing what goes in there though. I've been watching HGTV......less is best. It's pretty with the light on, huh? Later in the day, Doug made smoothies, hon, you're the best! Kai and Treyson really loved them.....

Um, yeah, they both seemed to get it on one spot on their forehead. Those are not matching bruises.

Okay last photo. I went to DI a couple of weeks ago. It is not one of my usual shops to go to, but I went in looking for material remnants, which I found a couple of pieces that I liked. One of them went on my piano stool (check older blog), but when I was there I saw all these bags of jewelry. Most of it was costumey, silly stuff, like the tiny seashell necklaces that everyone brings home from Hawaii and the mardi gras shiny beads, but in with all the 'stuff you wouldn't want' were some really nice things. Here is my favorite one: The computer doesn't do it justice, but it is cute. Light pink and diamondy jewels mixed in with the pearls. I love it. It was broken on one of the side flowers (be sure you click on it to enlarge) and all I had to do was get out my small pliers and hook it back together. Nice find.

Random Hearts...

I couldn't even tell you what this is, but it was found on the corner of Greenfield and Main. Anyone wanna guess?

Flowers and dirt on Main Street.

Tree non-branch on Val Vista by the Torrisi's home.

Tiny piece of chicken from Saturday's dinner.

On the floor in Wal-Mart (try and take a picture there without embarrassing yourself). It was near the drinking fountain, so I kinda pretended to be needing a drink, all the while I was getting my camera ready to shoot. FAST! I always have to keep my camera ready, you never know when you'll see something!

I think I might have posted this one already, but it was on the sidewalk near the Dragoon/Val Vista corner. LOVE ON. OFF.

Memorial Day - Part 3 of 3 - Finally!

Continuing from my part two: (Monday morning)

My girls, Shannon and Katie, after scriptures and prayer, were up eating breakfast and they of course were admiring our work on the cabinet when they decided that they needed to do something to their rooms. I will agree to almost anything if the end result is cleaner than what it was right then. Their idea was a neat idea so we decided to go with it. The girls will now share a bedroom and they, meaning all of us, will help change the second bedroom into a dressing room - or a large walk-in closet. That sounds so much classier. Of course the walk-in closet will now need to be updated. Shannon's old jungle themed, green 'leafed' wall will not work for the dressing room. Another trip to Home Depot for more paint, closet rods to hang on one of the walls, curtains (not found) and shoe racks (also not found). For the rest of the day that is what we worked on. My lonely curio cabinet stood in the middle of the living room all day long. We took apart Shannon's Ikea bed, a horrendous task, cleaned walls and baseboards, vacuumed, moved furniture around and in and out, went through clothes, drawers, old school items, closets, etc. EVERYTHING!!! Then the painting began. They had picked a deep aqua blue which we painted two walls with and for the other two we left white luckily finding a 1/2 gallon of old paint out in our storage room.

If you look close, you can see Treyson just waking up from his nap.

I'm sure that me taking this picture did NOT make him wake up.

Glidden Paint - Peacock Blue. It's prettier in person. It doesn't look like it, but it really took us all day and even into Tuesday. The mess we had left out in the hall and not too many people could pass by that night. A pile for Goodwill, a pile for Name Brand (love their stores), pile of, wait, PILES of trash, and other assundry piles. Where's the fork-lift?

Memorial Day - Part 2 of 3

Monday, Memorial Day, 5:10am - "Mom, have you seen my shoes? Do you know where they are"? As I mentioned a while back, Allan, my youngest, recently turned 13. In years only. He still is the babe (?) of the family and still needs his 'momma'. I'm not sure I wanted to hear his lovely voice so early in the morning on a day that could have meant sleeping in a little bit more, but yet, here he was, in my bedroom, close to my ears, at 5:10am. "Umm.....I think I tripped over them in my bathroom last night. Check there." "Nope, there not there mom". "Okay, check under my computer desk, maybe they're there". "Uh-uh, not there either". "Allan, think for just a minute where you took them off yesterday, I don't wear them". "Hmm....I can't remember, that's why I'm asking you. Oh, wait, here they are. On Dad's side of the bed. I got them mom, don't worry about it. See ya."
And so my day began. I got up, got dressed and headed out for my ride. I decided that since it was Allan's first day using his gym membership, that I would ride down there and see him at work and possibly take a picture of him on the treadmill or stairstepper or whatever he was working on. I rode my bike there - 2.04 miles, tried to look inside the windows for him, the front desk boy looked questioningly at me, I decided not to click a few and rode back home, another 2.04 miles. Then I got busy on my curio cabinet. It wasn't going to need two coats, but I did touch up a few spots. Now, I forgot to mention that one of the glass 'windows' had been broken for about 4 months AND as I tried to take one of them out on Sunday, I cracked another one. Luckily we had bought a plexiglass sheet on Saturday (for the first window) when I went to try and decide on paint colors. And, luckily again, it ended up being big enough to replace both broken parts. Thanks Dougie for cutting them for me.

On my ride to the gym I had passed this spoon at the side of the canal. Now, who would have a spoon, a real metal one, at the side of a canal. The spoon looked sad, like he/she had lost it's purpose for life. So, yes, I picked it up. It rode home fine.

Was excited to find a new home..

I told it it would have to have a bath when we got home and it agreed, reluctantly, because it hadn't seen liquid of any kind for quite a while. But it seemed to enjoy it's swim immensely. A little scrubbing on it's backside and it was as good as new and ready to serve it's purpose. Cereal, ice cream, soup - here I come!

Also, I noticed on my ride the designs that are on the side of our freeway canal overpass:

A turtle and a snake . Cute.

And there was a cute Momma duck with her little ducklings sitting on the canal step. When I tried to get a closer picture they all dove in the water. Too cute.

Be sure to click on the first duck picture. The baby ducks are adorable!

Hey-ho....I'll have to wait until tomorrow to add to my Memorial Day trilogy. Yesterday's ride was 4.08 and involved a spoon (later on that, possible part 2), and today's ride was 4.32miles. Just wanted to let you know, I'm still riding around town. Okay, Today is my, our, 31st wedding anniversay! WOW! Can you believe it? Me either. It's way too late for a long post so here is a fast one...I love my hubby! He's great. In another post I'm going to tell how Doug kinda-sorta asked me to marry him through a poem he had written calling me his Queen of Hearts. (How ironic it is that I am now a collector of hearts. Mostly heart pictures of things in nature. Someday I'll post some of those too). Okay, so Doug wrote me another poem to celebrate this day. I haven't asked him if I could insert it in my blog, so I'll ask him tomorrow. Look forward to reading it! Wow, lots to talk about tomorrow. Stay tuned! Yeah - 31 years....

And my favorite # 31 sign!!!!

2 scoops of chocolate chip on a sugar cone. Nothing compares. Hey I should have asked for that for my anniversary present. Darn.