Remembering

This time of year (Halloween through first week of November) makes me think back on the brief history of Boots and me.

2007- November-- we were at a U.S. Band concert at the college I went to (he and a friend crashed) and after talking about it we have decided we probably stood right next to each other-- this was before we met.

2008- Halloween-- the first time I ever laid eyes on him, but we were both distracted by other people at the party.

2009- November 4th-- We had been dating a few months at this point and went to a Sister Hazel concert.  He told me he loved me for the first time at the Mexican restaurant.

2010-2014--- married.  The End!  Just kidding!  But seriously, we've settled down and haven't been that exciting.  Maybe next year we could do something different and record-worthy.

Like a Rabbit

**Disclaimer: If reading rambling pointless posts isn't your thing, perhaps you should skip this one today.**

*If you missed the recipe links, here's the one for the eggs and the bread.

*Monday morning I woke up with a headache and didn't shake it off until Tuesday night.
I took a whole bunch of pills but, nothing helped.
I thought I really was dying when I put my contacts in the wrong eyes and couldn't see straight yesterday morning.

*Boots had a wee bit of a motoring accident in his work vehicle Monday.
He's ok but, the corner of his eye is black from his head hitting the seat belt holder thing.
The doctors checked his head out real good and so far he seems fine.

*This morning I was listening to the radio on my way to work and Toby Keith's new song "Bullets in the Gun" came on.
(I know some of you are positively stroking out right now about the fact that I listen to country music but, I can't help it, I've listened to it all my life.
Let a good Sawyer Brown song start playing and I'm six years old riding in the backseat of my mama's blue yacht-length Crown Victoria again.)
The song is pretty much a rhyming crime spree.
When he said, "Never see it comin’, just hits you by surprise," I thought, "Is that how so many people become murderers?"
Do most murderers just snap under the pressure of whatever duress they've been subjected to and just go on a rampage?
I'm not trying to justify murdering or anything like that, I'm just telling you how my mind runs.
All this from a song.

*Today's my Friday.
I'm looking forward to a long nap when I get off work.

*I want to walk the four mile loop with Boots again.
Here's to getting him motivated!

Blabbers

I don't have a lot to say since it's still pretty early and not much has happened yet.

1) I almost ran over not one, but two, cats this morning on my way to school.
A sign, perhaps?

2) Today, today, is the proclaimed unofficial last day of organized class as I/we know it complete with graduation practice and I'm sure lots of picture taking.
I think back on my last graduation practice a mere three years ago, yes, I am a baby, and  of how these will soon be people I'll probably never see again and remember somewhat fondly in pictures. 
I hope.

3) Speaking of pictures...
Yesterday I received my second year book from this place.
There's only two pictures of me in the whole 200 page complete color thing and in both of them my hair is a flat wreck.
Not a flat wreck, but a flat. wreck.
Awful, just awful.
Couldn't someone have warned me?!

Origami Swans

I didn't take this picture, I Binged it.

When I was in the third grade there was a meeting just for the girls of the class which resulted in me bringing home a note on pink paper and telling my mama that I had to be in Girl Scouts.
My mama paid the required $7 to join (was it really just seven dollars?) and schlepped me to all the meetings.

We got the big fat handbook (maybe that's what the 7 bucks was for) and started trying to earn badges right away.
There were so many things that just weren't feasible to do in my mind.
Like spend a day in a soup kitchen.
I'm pretty sure there was no soup kitchen in my hometown.
Or learn to make a campfire.
Why did I need to know how to do that when my daddy made all the fires when we went camping?

We sold cookies, of course, and I'm pretty sure that this was the beginning of my disdain for all things fund-raiserish.
I really dislike fund-raisers.
So I did a few things, I don't remember what, out of the book and got a few badges for my mom to sew on my bright green vest.

The best thing about Girl Scouts was the trip we took to the Children's Hands On Museum.
It is what the name says it is, a museum for kids to touch everything.
I don't think places like this are very conducive to teaching kids the right way to attend a real museum, but whatever, it was fun.
The exhibit was on China and everything was decorated all China-ish right down to the paper doors and the sandboxes filled with rice.
We arranged flowers on green metal frogs and I thought that was pretty lame.
Maybe that's where my flower complex stemmed (haha!) from.

I quit Girl Scouts a few months later (I forget why) and have since then resolved myself to learning things that help you out in life that don't earn you badges.
I still can't sew on a button properly though.

Some time after the Girl Scout era, a year or so maybe, I was looking through my old handbook and I came across a page with instructions and pictures on how to make an origami swan.
There was a small origami swan with orange tips stuck in the crease of the page.
My mama made the swan just for the fun of it when I was in Girl Scouts and left it in the book.
The orange tips were dots she had drawn on the paper as linear guides.

I forgot about the origami swan and Girl Scouts for a long time.
I don't even know where that book is now but I think my vest is still in a closet at my dad's house.

In my second semester of mortuary college I had to take Restorative Art.
"Had to take" and not "took" because it was not a fun class or an elective.

Maybe you're not familiar with Restorative Art.
To put it simply, RA, as we liked to call it, is the way of taking something ugly and messed up and making it pretty and whole again, usually the face.

We had to learn all the bones of the skull and face, all the muscles of the face, as well as all the facial wrinkles, make a head with wax to match a picture of someone (living, not dead!), and learn lots of crap about color and what matches with what and what doesn't match with what.

Our first test covered the bones, muscles, and wrinkles.
We were all pretty stressed and trying really hard to make a good grade because there were only two tests in RA besides the final.

I'm usually a pretty fast test taker so most of the time I finish second.
(I have a thing about finishing first.  But that's another story.)
I finished my test and asked to go to the bathroom.

On my way back to the classroom, the sunlight was shining through the glass doors so bright, it made the waxed linoleum look like a mirror.
I saw a tiny shadow in the sun-mirror, the shadow of an origami swan!
I bent down to pick the origami swan up, but it wasn't a swan, just a crumpled up ball of paper with words scrawled all over it.
I unfolded a paper and my eyes read the answers to questions that were on the test I had just finished.

Right when I stood back up, a classmate of mine walked out of the room and was standing in front of me.
I didn't want her to think that it was my cheatsheet and get me in trouble when it was my wild imagination that found it in the first place!

"Look what I found," and I shoved it at her.

"What are you going to do with it?" she asked me after she read it.

I decided that the only thing I could do was give it to our teacher, what she chose to do after that was up to her, not me.

I did not know how much grief an innocent origami swan could get me.
My classmates were furious that I had ruined the afternoon by getting us all an hour long lecture about cheating and put the teacher in a bad mood by turning in some dummy's cheatsheet.
I told myself that a smart cheat wouldn't have dropped it and if they were smart they wouldn't have had to cheat in the first place.
Or if they had any scruples.
I had scruples.
That's why I turned it in.

Turning in the origami swan/cheatsheet and sitting through the Cheating Gripe Fest of '08 did not even the playing field between us at all.
After that episode, the cheaters had to figure out new ways to get the right answers.
Our teacher was wizened to their game although she never did figure out who the cheat sheet belonged to.

I have my theories but, theories are just that--theories.

I haven't seen an origami swan since then.

Here's what we started with.

Here's what I made.

No, Thanks

Of all the many things in this world that I'm glad I'm not, a school bus driver ranks pretty high up there on the list.
I have so many bad memories of riding the bus.
I fear that if for some reason bus driving was my occupation, I would only acquire more bad memories and probably lose more of my hair, forget the steady paycheck.

I always sat in the back of the bus, with my great-aunt So-and-So who rode the bus because a) she didn't have a drivers license and b) she worked in the school lunchroom so why not catch a ride going in the same direction?
Great-aunt So-and-So got off the bus before I did and this proved to be a problem on several occasions--one in particular stands out.
One day we had a substitute driver.
I was in kindergarten and was pretty short at that age (the growth spurt that made all the boys say I was on steroids didn't happen until sixth grade.)
After Great-aunt So-and-So got off the bus that afternoon I just kinda chilled back in my seat.
Being meek and mostly mild in life isn't an overnight development, you start out that way.
When it came time for my stop the substitute bus driver didn't stop.
I didn't jump up and run for the front exit, I just sat there and watched the world go by out of my little rectangle window until the very end of the route when the substitute bus driver (his name was Joe) finally caught sight of my little short self and said, "Hey!  Where you 'sposed to get off et?"
I don't remember what I said, but he was probably pretty agitated about having to take me back to my house, where he'd already been.
My mama was running up the drive way with the cordless phone in her hand, crying and upset because she didn't know where her baby had been!
Haha!
That was pretty funny.

One time this older scary high school girl flicked a lighter in my face and told me she was going to set my hair on fire.
My mama had a fit about that.
That was pretty scary.

The same girl laughed at my baby doll I took for show-and-tell, saying it was "a yellow baby."
Psshh......
So mean.

Kindergarten was pretty traumatic as far as bus riding goes but it only got worse after that.
Every year somebody would puke.
Gross.
Every year there'd be a massive fight.
Intense.
There was the lady who made us late to school every Monday because the bus would go dead over the weekend.
Why she didn't plan accordingly after this turned into a habit, I don't know.
The bus drivers hated their jobs.
They had to have hated their jobs.
They were always in bad moods and probably closer to the ends of their ropes than any of us realized.
The kids were horrible.
I'd like to think that I was pretty compliant.

The buses were always nasty.
Kids sticking their food wrappers between the seats, spilling their drinks on that black floor.
Trash and crumbs everywhere, mold growing on the seats from sitting shut up during the humid summer months.

When I was in the band I had to carry my trombone back and forth to school, via the school bus of course.
We got assigned seats one year and I got stuck sitting on the hump.
On the inside.
That brass beast rode between my fifteen year old knees and ankles, pressed up against my nose while the little third grader that got on after me was oh, so, comfortable.

I wouldn't wish bus driving on my worst enemy and I hope that my kids are fortunate enough to not have to ride the bus.
It might be a gas-saver but dang, its traumatic.