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cycling / food / iPhone / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
7
Jun 12

The cat is mad at us, and I might not be pleased myself

We’re back home. I unpack the laundry — Not clothes. You do not take dirty clothes to someone else’s place to clean, of course. You leave with clothes; you return with laundry. Home, if you’ve ever wondered, is where you do your laundry. — and throw it in the basket or, sometimes, in the washing machine as soon as I arrive home.

The Yankee … she does something. I am usually too fixated to notice. Unload car. Unpack suitcase. Hide suitcase from myself so as to trick the eye that there are no more trips, no more windshields, insulting airport experiences or unusual pillows.

Typically this works. She’s petting the cat, I’m distributing the suitcases, the backpacks and whatever else we have going on. Eventually Allie comes to me, we’ve missed each other, but I want to have these things out of the way. And she’ll camp out in the suitcases if they’re left sitting around for too long.

We’ve been gone a while, but we have someone who is kind enough to spend some time with Allie every day. Check the food and the water and pet her. You’ve never seen a cat crave more from “hoomans” than this one. And so all night last night it was stamp, stomp, meow, head butt, yowl, stamp, stomp.

We don’t have the heart, yet, to tell her we’re leaving again tomorrow. The suitcases, it turns out, didn’t go very far.

At least all of our trips are really great trips!

This is the scene at the Crepe Myrtle Cafe, the local market where we get a lot of healthy food. This is some sort of onion flower:

We get this entire basket of fresh fruits and vegetables every Thursday. Most of them are grown very nearby. The girl that sold them to me today asked if I needed help carrying them to my car. Time to get that hair coloring product, apparently.

I mean, this basket is packed solid and gets hefty after a while, but really. I can handle it. And if I can’t, I’ll be in a commercial for one of those Rascal scooters. Delicious veggies, though:

Finally, got a chance to ride my bike again. Did 28 miles today, working on the backside of the big hill in town. There’s less traffic there, it has two great bends and is nicely shaded in the afternoon. I was timing my speed up it, going up and then down, up and then down. When the time started falling I moved on.

Elsewhere in my ride, I found a new personal best. I’ll have to double check, but I think I might have been speeding:

I believe I could get another mile or so out of that stretch, actually. Something else to shoot for.

FInally, my grandmother is feeling a bit under the weather. We went card shopping. This is the one I did not get:

The inside:

adventures / food / iPhone / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
6
Jun 12

Travel day

Heading home today. On the one hand it is amazing that you can travel across something like 1,000 miles and nine states in an evening. On the other hand it is amazing that it takes the better part of a day to get home.

Also, I got my first freedom rub today. I passed the time humming Lee Greenwood. Not sure the ~~security guard~~ federal agent got the joke.

We had lunch at Overton’s, where you can get four fried shrimp on a bun for $4.75.

The sunny, stormy view:

And now he’s playing coy:

But, really, they are after your french fries:

Flying out of White Plains:

I have the best travel companion:

She just reads and reads:

Sunset over … let’s call it Tennessee:

On the descent into Atlanta:

We got home around 11 p.m.

photo / weekend — Comments Off
3
Jun 12

Catching up

Never got around to mentioning this at the end of a full week, but that’s what the catch up day is for.

My mother-in-law runs a program at local church called special church. It isn’t even her church, but she’s a giver like that. So this class provides an outlet for some of the members of the local special needs community. There are always projects, like last week’s flower planting:

There are parties, social opportunities, a little bit of scripture, snacks and so on. Everyone there is always smiling. Here are some more of the flowers they planted Thursday:

We wrote names on the bottom of the terracotta and spooned in potting soil and pretty blooming colors. After a while, it was time for the music therapist, who stops by and plays for a half-hour or so every week.

The weather was so nice they did everything outdoors last week. We sat in the side lawn at the church, surrounded by peaceful trees and a memorial sculpture and under picturesque clouds and howled through made up songs and people danced through classic rock and sang What Wonderful World.

Some of us even remembered the end, but no one was really looking forward to it. Sometimes things should just go on.

adventures / family / history / photo / video / weekend — Comments Off
2
Jun 12

Surprise!

The Yankee’s parents are celebrating their 40th anniversary this weekend.

The Yankee and family friends conspired to throw them a little surprise party. Here they are walking in the door of a little Italian restaurant they frequent:

Did you hear her say “We say your car?” That was one of their local friends. We parked right next to them and they said “That looks like their car … ” We also parked right next to an out-of-state family member’s car. No one noticed it.

We crammed 28 people into Tutti’s, the delicious little Italian place. Everyone had a great time. My mother-in-law said “These are all of the people we’d want to have dinner with.”

The Yankee and all of the people involved in putting the party together did a great job. The guests of honor had no idea.

One of the brides’ maids produced the dress she wore 40 years ago. Some of their lifelong friends brought out the old photographs.

Here are two snapshots someone showed off, taken just after the young couple had returned from their honeymoon:

Here’s another picture from some time shortly after that:

And these next two pictures were taken on the night they met. This was at a one year reunion for her nursing program. I was sitting tonight next to the lady who set them up, she told me the whole, cute, story.

My mother-in-law is on the far right, decked out in crepe paper. It seemed to be the style of the time. The guy in the awesome jacket was a doctor in that nursing program. (Three of her nursing classmates were at the party tonight.)

Facing the camera in the photograph on the left is the groom-to-be. He’s a bit fuzzy in the original too, but there’s an entire series of pictures where he’s floating in the background, in that posture, in the same place.

She says he tried to pick her up by suggesting they go out to his car and listen to his stereo.

“No way,” she said. But he’d finally win her over. He’d soon tell his friends she was the one. They’d be married a year or so later.

And here they are today, surprised and surrounded by their friends.

Great party.

adventures / baseball / food / Friday / friends / iPhone / memories / photo / Samford / Tumblr / Twitter — Comments Off
1
Jun 12

But, hey, this will be quick

We had dinner with our friend Paige tonight. Drove up to her house.

She let me take a picture of the famous Rory:

This is only slightly intimidating. I was shooting her cat with my phone. Paige is a photographer on the side. In fact, she shot our engagement:

It was 17 degrees with about nine inches of snow on the ground. Maybe more. We shot those at a park up the street from The Yankee’s parents’ home, a park where she’d played as a child. There’s a pavilion there. Under that roof, there was six inches of snow covering everything.

The next year she shot our wedding in Savannah.

It was well into the triple-digits that day.

It seems we can’t all get together without severe weather, so naturally it rained tonight.

By the time we got back home there was lots of rain.

We ate dinner at a Thai place called Somewhere in Bangkok. Good food, lousy website. The server was … well, she was as American as could be.

Today I fixed a printer problem, which is a piece of equipment normally beyond me. Samford won a huge baseball game in NCAA regional play. I uploaded three pictures to the Tumblr blog.

Also, don’t forget to check out Twitter.

Yeah it is thin. I’m not spending a lot of time on the computer just now.