My first love has died. RIP, Davy Jones.

From the time I was 11 until I was about 13, I walked a mile to the closest variety store each month to spend the few quarters I had saved that month on the latest Tiger Beat magazine, because photos of this adorable man graced page after page.

I couldn’t wait to get the magazine home so I could have Davy all to myself.  Once I’d memorized each photo, I’d invite my similarly-swoony next door neighbors over so we could swoon together for a few more hours. 

I could have sworn that the feelings I had for Davy Jones were the real thing back then and anyone who challenged me, especially bratty older teen brothers and teasy parents, would get an earful if they ever challenged me – which they eventually learned not to do.

Davy even got me into big trouble.  Yes-siree, he did!  I had decided that enjoying photos of Davy in the teen magazines wasn’t enough; I wanted him with me in my (beautifully wallpapered) room at all times!  So I mixed water and flour together to make a thick paste, as a friend from school had taught me to do, and I used that tacky paste to “glue” photo after photo and page after page of Davy onto my bedroom walls until the wallpaper barely peeked through.

When my parents discovered what I had done to the walls of our turn-of-the-century home with the perfectly beautiful (but not to me) turn-of-the-century wallpaper, I was in BIG trouble! 

To this day, I believe that my supposed teeny-bopper schoolgirl crush on Davy Jones was more.  After all, I went on to marry this gorgeous look-alike!

Rest in peace, Davy… my first crush, my first love, my first boyfriend.

A quarter century ago today

….this guy made his grand appearance.

(:::::The years, they pass so quickly!:::::)

Happy birthday, Peter.  I’m so proud of you and I love you to pieces!

This ain’t no mother/daughter cupcake party!

Oh, no.  When the daughters, best friends since junior high are the ripe old age of 27, they are so much more mature…

And the mothers?  Well, we’re all no longer spending the majority of our days being…this:

And we’ve all come to really enjoy our mother/daughter friendships.  (Oh wait, does that imply that we ever didn’t?  Nah, couldn’t be!) So what do we do?  We get together for occasional mother/daughter cooking parties! 

Last night we cooked a Thai meal in our new kitchen… where the bar is a perfect gathering place for chatting and munching on hors deurves…

 

…and there’s plenty of room for lots of cooks.

Of course, chopping and cooking with one hand reserved for the wine glass takes a little longer.  But with company like this, THAT’S the whole point!

Before we knew it, dinner was served.

Here’s all of us, sitting down for a meal of deliciousness!

Cheers!

I’m not sure how the conversation steered to my mother’s fur coats and willed and bequeathed jewelry, but the evening eventually came to this:

Mom would have really loved to be at this little gathering – and I guess that, in a way, she was.

Testing the Blogger iPhone app

Testing, testing... Is this thing on?

Of course I must post a photo!

That is a photo of the wine I bought for the mother/daughter dinner party we're having tomorrow night. Yes, wine is included when the daughters are 28 and the moms are 50-something!

And hey, I'll blog about it.

Because I'm back and all...

Missing in Action

…or rather, INaction. 

I used to blog incessantly, about every little thing, no matter how trivial.  I was constantly amazed that anyone at all visited my blog but somehow over the years I attracted a following of people who, for whatever reason, found my relatively mundane life interesting.

Then I joined Facebook and I slowly stared posting trivialities about my mundane life there instead of on my blog.

Oddly enough, I constantly ask myself now whether a topic is blog worthy – which I never used to do.  And 99% of the time I answer myself with a resounding NO.  So I Facebook said topic instead which, truth be told, simply bores a different audience!

Regardless of whether my loyal readers miss me, I miss blogging!  So I’m making an effort to come back.  Brace yourself more of the truly mundane!

So where have I been, you ask? 

Mostly hanging out here in the Land of Limbo. 

Although my company Sandcastle Educational Consulting is still alive and well (though a bit dormant at the moment), I am looking for full-time work as an Educational Media Specialist (“I create experiences that engage and inspire youth and families”) with my eye and heart focused on one position in particular with Microsoft’s Kinect for Kids.  Just how perfect would THAT be?!

I’ve interviewed twice and now it’s pretty much a waiting game while that team re-structures and figures out what their needs are and where (if anywhere) I’d best fit.  My fingers have been crossed for so long that I have a feeling they’re stuck this way forever – which is fine, because hope and optimism never hurt anyone.

And if that position doesn’t pan out, I’ll do my own re-assessing.  Unfortunately, Sandcastle doesn’t offer great benefits that allow us to save for retirement, which is really where we need to focus now that we’re ONE TUITION PAYMENT AWAY (!!!) from being done with paying for kids’ college – something we’ve done for the past ten years solid!

So instead of waiting until everything is resolved and all nice and pretty, as I’ve been doing thus far, I guess I’ll blog all the ups and downs and ins and outs of my life – just as I did for five years until I… didn’t.

And hey, guess what?  I’m solidly on the road to getting back in shape and finding a new healthy me – or, as I indicate on the masthead of my blog at My Fitness Pal, “steadfastly clawing my way back from the depths of LETTING MYSELF GO.”  This journey is a tough one and has been where I’ve focused the majority of my energy lately.  After almost 30 years of focusing on everyone else’s health and needs, I am finally, finally focusing on my own.  It actually is beginning to feel good and I am actually beginning to look forward to the endorphin rush that I get each day when I work out at the gym. 

I know – that looks funny to me too!  Me?  Working out daily at a gym?  Yup!  I lift weights (a full circuit!), sweat on the elliptical, and swim.  Something every single day.  Me!  Can you believe it?  And for two months now I’ve tracked every single morsel that’s gone into my mouth – which is so easy using the My Fitness Pal app’s bar code scanner!

So ten pounds down, forty to go.  Ugh – that just looks so daunting!  But I’m taking it one pound, one centimeter , one lap, and one carrot at a time, allowing myself a full year to accomplish my goal.  If nothing else, I should feel better this year (my third!) at the Danskin Triathlon… where I plan to actually jog, rather than walk for the first time since breaking my ankle three years ago.

So yeah, that’s where I’ve been.  I promise not to stay away for so long again… as long as you promise that you won’t mind if I go back to posting the mundane. 

Could I ever love again if…?

I always wondered whether I could fall in love again if something happened to my sweetheart.

Today I discovered the answer.

His name – I kid you not -- is LORDAI.  Lordai, lordai, lordai!

I love my Boo dearly.  How could you not love THIS?

But I stopped cold in my tracks at PetSmart today as I passed the room with the kitties up for adoption because this guy just took my breath away.

Yes, I’m shallow.  And fickle.  And he’s a looker.  What can I say?

Unfortunately (or, actually, fortunately), there wasn’t anyone available to open his cage so I couldn’t hold him and love him… and steal him.  (Or even wake him up!)  But oh, how I wanted to.

I also kinda fell for a few other kitties in nearby cages:

This is Peter:

And this is Babs:

And this is Vaughn:

But Lordai’s mai gai!

Good riddance, Bank of America!

I became a Bank of America customer in 1979.  In 2012, I will be leaving in disgust.

Until last year, we never paid regular fees for any of our accounts or any regular transactions with Bank of America.  Things whirred along nicely, just as one would expect of their bank. 

Then, the bank started crapping on us.  “Hey, thanks for being loyal customers of 30+ years.  Here are a few new fees for you!”  It seemed that any time our money came or went, there was a fee associated with it.  Yeah, that $5 debit card fee felt like the last straw, but I was too busy then to go through the hassle (and it is such a hassle!) to change banks.

Then B of A revised their website and somehow in that process, they lost or Visa account.  Oh, we still had it, but it didn’t show up online.  Easy fix, right?  Nooooo – it took me SIX hours of waiting on the phone four different times over six weeks to get that resolved.

Grrrrrr! 

That experience should have kicked me into high gear toward dumping B of A, but yeah, regular life got in the way.  And by that I mean that I was still just too lazy to go through the major hassle of moving all our accounts, changing all our auto-pays and direct deposits, and finessing the timing to go through the whole painful process.

THEN, yesterday…

I get an e-mail alert from Bank of America that Aleks had overdrawn his savings account.  (Yes, I’m connected to the kids’ accounts while they’re still in school.)  Overdrawn his savings account?  The mandatory savings account that we had to open when we opened student checking accounts for the kids?  The savings account he never touches?  How could he be overdrawn?

I called the bank.  “Yes, ma’am.  Yes, there is now a $5 fee for those savings accounts.”  (Yes, the mandatory savings accounts tied to checking accounts…)

“HUH?  I was never told that!” I complained.

“It has been indicted at the end of your monthly statement since August,” I was told.

“I went paperless in August!”

“Well, ma’am, it’s on the paperless statement too.”  Guess it’s my bad for not scrolling to the end of my online statements and reading the fine print.

Eye roll.

So… funny thing – as of yesterday, I was “allowed” to close those associated savings accounts.  Which I did.

And then I got in the car and high-tailed it to our local BECA office to open a multitude of accounts. 

I was seen immediately – though the account manager told me that I was lucky; in November and December, hundreds of people who’d been screwed over by a variety of big banks waited patiently for hours to open BECU accounts.

Within an hour, I had opened checking, savings, Visa, a LOC loan, and a money market account with BECU.  After leaving the credit union, I received calls throughout the afternoon from the account manager keeping me apprised on the results of my credit check (suckas, Bank of America, you guys lost a good customer!), reminding me what items and actions were still needed, and just letting us know how things were progressing.

Yes, it will be a pain in the butt to make this change. I’ll be busy notifying all our merchants of the change and trying to time the process just right so that… well, so that we don’t incur any FEES from Bank of America.

Good riddance, Bank of America!  You could have kept these customers of 30+ years if you wanted to.  You obviously didn’t want to.

Slushy in Seattle

After a week of being cooped up in the house while it stormed and snowed and iced outside, I couldn’t stand it anymore and today I just HAD to get out.  Problem is, our neighborhood is still essentially snowed in… or rather, slushed in, with the local hilly roads being rutty with wet, melting snow, making it really hard to drive a normal 2-wheel drive.

So, while Tom took the 4-wheel-drive truck to do some of his errands, I took my own two legs to do mine and I headed out to walk – or, as it turned out, trudge -- to the local store, about a mile away. 

This is what I encountered:

Where is all that melting snow gonna go?  The ground is completely saturated already!

Unfortunately, I no longer have any snow pants or boots because they were cut off me in the emergency room three years ago…

So I trudged to the store and back in these boots from Kristin (remember THAT great story?!). 

Dumb move!  By the time I got home with a backpack full of groceries, not only were the boots completely soaked, but my socks and feet were drenched as well.

Tom arrived home from his errands just as I arrived home, took one look at my boots and pants (which were soaking wet up to my knees) and insisted on taking me to REI to get “real winter boots.”  I told him that boots on clearance at Target are fine with me, but noooooo….

So bring on the next snowstorm, dudes.  My feet will be dry and warm!  (And hey -- bring on some summer hiking in the Cascades and Olympics, too!  I am ready now!)