Power Struggle

When we adopted our dog, Dodger, about a year and a half ago we fenced an area outside of the garage. Two of my grandkids, who were 6 and 7 at the time, named the fenced area Dodger Park and the name has stuck.

They put signs all over the door with rules and information for Dodger Park. The kids, of course, have moved on to other things and most of their signs are gone. This sign has stayed up and Doc and I have not moved on. 

We are still having a power struggle over who has the highest rank.....Boss or "genral".

Freewheeling Friday

I've started a couple of post this week but starting them was as far as I got. Due to some Blogger problems and being a little lazy after being at work all day, instead of writing I opted to just read what all of you have been writing. So, that brings me to another Friday of playing catch-up with Freewheeling Friday.

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Sometimes it seems like my grandkids are growing up even faster than my kids did. My third oldest grandson, Wil, celebrated his graduation from kindergarten this week. He loves school, but I think he is glad for summer to be here so he can focus on his true love-baseball. He has surprised his coach in his first year of little league with his skills and knowledge about the game.

My youngest grandson, Beck, has struck fear in the hearts of his family by learning to crawl. No more putting him down on the floor and having him stay put. Nothing that belongs to his two sisters will be safe with this little guy on the move.

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My friend Belle at Tales From A Loser Who Is Sometimes A Winner at http://belle-goodmorninggod.blogspot.com/ has tagged me with this list of questions. I'm not very good at these but because I like Belle so much I will give them a try.

Do you think you are hot?

Ha ha ha ha. At my age, "hot" would not be on the list of words I would use to describe myself.

When was the last time you ate chicken?

You'd think that would be something I would remember but I have to honestly say that I really don't. I would guess it was in some kind of chicken salad....oh yeah, I had a chicken salad sandwich for lunch one day this week.

What songs have you listened to lately?

I had a Susan Boyle cd on at work for a while today.

Do you have a nickname?

Actually "Jeanie" is a nickname, but it is what I have been called all of my life. When I was growing up my mother called me "Ladybug"".

I think I may have skipped a couple of the questions, one because it required a picture and Blogger and pictures are giving me a little problem right now.

I am also supposed to tag 8 other people and answer some questions about each of them, but I don't usually like to tag people so I will say something about Belle instead. I met Belle when I read a comment she had left on another blog. I immediately started following her blog even though I had decided I didn't have time to follow any more blogs. It is always interesting to see what Belle has to say and her commenters are the best. I hope she will forgive me for not following the rules on this very well.

Update: I was also tagged for this by my friend Betty at http://glimpseintomidlife.blogspot.com/
Betty is a wonderful friend and her blog about her life in Paraguay is always so interesting to read. ..and I know she will forgive me for not following all the rules.

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I was going to talk about a couple of other things like my dental implant that is taking forever and is costing as much as it would to go on a really nice cruise, but the blog editor keeps changing my spacing and eating my pictures. I thing that means it is time for me to stop and just wish everyone a happy weekend.

A Three Birthday Week and Changing Fads

Happy Birthday has been the thing to say in my family this week. We started out the week celebrating with my granddaughter, Anna, who turned 3. She had a great big cake and she took blowing out the candles very seriously.



Both of my littlest girls are now 3. I love seeing what good buddies they are becoming.

Friday was the day to celebrate with my youngest daughter, Joanna. A massage and pedicure, dinner out and a hug from her daughter, Hope, made it a special day for her.

Today was Hope's turn to celebrate turning 9, and Hope loves to celebrate. She started out with a roller skating birthday party with her friends this morning and has lots of plans with her family for the rest of her big day.

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It seems like around here the fad for Silly Bandz has given way to a fad for feathers in your hair. Lots of the little girls at Hope's party sported these feather hair extensions.

I asked one of the girls what they were called. She just looked at me, clearly saying "DUH" in her head and answered "feathers." I guess my brain is a little sugar-addled from eating too much birthday cake.

Women Drivers!?!?

Doc has a couple of buddies that forward e-mails to him on a regular basis. The e-mails, at least the ones I see,  generally fall into one of two categories, politics or the battle between the sexes. Doc and I don't always agree on politics and we, of course, fall on opposite sides of the battle between the sexes. He will occasionally forward one to me, saying something like "you may not like this, but it is pretty funny", or "it's a guy thing". (He always says "it's a guy thing" if I don't get something he thinks is funny and it really irritates me, but that is a whole other post.)

Anyway, I usually just read them, roll my eyes and delete them. He forwarded one this week titled  "Women Drivers." I actually chuckled at some of these pictures. 

I think I could laugh at these because I am a way better driver than Doc is. Really! Everyone knows it.

Who is the better driver in your family?

Freewheeling Friday

Did the Blogger outage leave you feeling a little like the guy above or did you just get a lot of things done that you wouldn't have gotten done otherwise? From the posts I've seen since Blogger has been back up, I think lots of us felt like this guy, especially if you lost posts or comments.

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You can't blame me or my friend, Pam, from http://smilinggrammy.blogspot.com/ for the outage. We were nowhere near our computers when it started. We were in a coffee shop getting to meet for the first time. We had a great time getting to know one another in person and the only thing that could have made our meeting more fun was if our friend Betty at http://glimpseintomidlife.blogspot.com/ could have been there with us. The towns Pam and I live in are only 30-40 minutes apart so I'm sure we will get together again.

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My granddaughter, Hope, who will be 9 this month, was recently one of 3 kids selected from tryouts to be in a video for a traveling science museum produced by the Space Science Institute in Boulder. She had a lot of fun and did a great job in the video and was very excited recently when she was called back to do some voice-overs for the video. She was even more excited when she found out it was going to be done in a recording studio - "Am I going to be in one room with a big window that looks into the other room with all the people in it and they can talk to me through the speakers?!?!?" It turned out to be just like that, and she had so much fun (and she got a nice little paycheck).

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I hope Blogger finds all the lost posts and lost comments and that things keep working so we don't have to go through another blog withdrawl.

Not The Day We Planned, But Mother's Day Was Good

My daughters and my daughter-in law and I had planned to start out Mother's Day early Sunday by doing a 5k charity run/walk together (I would have been the walker). Our plans changed when my son-in-law, Brandon (Joanna's husband) ended up spending Saturday night in ICU at the hospital. I spent the night with their kids and my other daughter, Jill, helped me with them on Sunday.

On Saturday afternoon Brandon started having numbness on one side of his body, starting in his eye and ending up in his foot. Against his wishes he was finally talked in to going to urgent care and from there was sent to the hospital emergency room. Many tests later, they ruled out MS, a stroke (very unlikely in a 35 year old), heart problems and some other serious problems. His symptoms were gone by about 9 p.m., but the doctors wanted to watch him in ICU over night and do additional tests on Sunday morning. The still don't know what caused his symptoms but he is feeling fine now and will meet with a neurologist tomorrow. You can read the whole story on my daughter' blog http://harphouse.blogspot.com/ here. She tells it much better than I do.

Even though they didn't get home from the hospital until about 3:oo Sunday afternoon we were all able to pull it together to do a Mother's Day picnic that evening.

Brandon was more than glad to be outside playing baseball with the kids instead of in a hospital bed waiting for another test. We were all very grateful that he was feeling fine and that so many serious things had been ruled out.

We even thought to take a few pictures.

All the moms
Joanna, me, Jill and Leah

I even got my annual picture with me and all my grandkids on the slide 2011

2010

2009

After a very scary night our Mother's Day ended with a lot of joy and gratitude.

Remembering My Mother

This is a repeat of a post I wrote a little over a year ago on what would have been my mother's birthday. It kept coming to my mind as I thought about her this year with Mother's Day coming up, so I am sharing it again in her honor.

My mother in about 1960

It was the summer of 1960, the summer I turned 13. I went several days a week to a swim club to meet my friends. My mother drove me there and picked me up every time I went. I would go across the street to a toy store to use the phone to call my mother when I was ready to go home and wait there for her to pick me up. The owner of the store was nice to me. He made me feel grown up. He talked to me and said nice things. I started swimming and hanging out with my friends less and hanging out at the toy store longer before I called my mother.

At some point during the summer toy store owner asked me if I wanted to work for him there a few hours a week. I asked my mother if I could and she said no. She told me that I could not go to the toy store any more to use the phone. I was mad. I thought she was being unfair. I wrote "I hate Mother" on pieces of cardboard and put them all over the house. She turned them all over and wrote "I love Jeanie" on the other side and didn't come close to changing her answer.

My mother never went into the toy store, never met the owner who was nice to me, but she knew. He was being nice to me for a reason. He wanted me to work in the store for a reason. His reasons were not good. It was not until I looked back on the toy store owner's behavior years later that I realized what my mother knew when I was 13.

This Mother's Day my mother would have been 97 years old. She died at 51 when I was 18. I didn't get to have her long enough, but I was lucky to have her as long as I did.

And That Dummy Is Me

I have never claimed to be a computer expert or a blogging expert, but I'm a little frustrated that after 2 1/2 years of blogging I still encounter blog (or Blogger) problems that I can't resolve. My current issue is that for about the last two weeks I can't get my own pictures to publish when I am using the updated Blogger editor. I can import them and they show up when I am writing a post but they don't show up on the preview or a published post. If I switch to the old Blogger editor the pictures will post but there are other things about the old editor that I don't like, including the way the published post looks. 

I know there are formats other than Blogger that many people prefer, but I just don't have the knowledge or energy to try to make a switch right now. While I wait for a miraculous spontaneous fix, does anyone have any knowledge of what my problem might be? If you can offer anything I would really appreciate it....and keep in mind that any words you use need to be able to be understood by a dummy.

Speaking of pictures, do you have a picture of yourself in your profile on your blog? I have always had one and I changed it a while back because the one I had was a couple of years old. I had one for a few weeks that looked pretty much like a mug shot so I changed it again and I still don't like the one I have. I'm not looking to have a glamour shot, but I can't come up with a decent picture. I like to see a picture of the writer when I read a blog, so that is why I put a picture on mine. What is your opinion....picture or no picture of yourself on your blog and do you like to see a picture of the writer on blogs you read?