Sometimes, Melissa runs her legs. Sometimes, she runs her mouth.

Month: June 2009 (Page 1 of 2)

Father's Day

My father is a much more mysterious presence in my life than my mother. From about the age of ten until well into my adolescence, he traveled for work. He managed to go to pretty much all 50 of the states. Before the age of 10, we were buddies. I would sit in his lap and he would tell me stories of going to the farm and shooting bears. He’d sing these hilarious songs including one about a boy named Sue. (I didn’t learn until years later that this was a song written by a man named Johnny Cash).

He builds things. He has one of those obscure sounding positions like construction manager or project manager or something or other. I know that he overseas other people and he gets phone calls. He also has to be onsite. We used to drive around town and he would show me the stuff he built over the years.

He was in the Air Force when he was a young man and developed a “work wardrobe” consisting of khaki pants and a short sleeved button down khaki short. He also likes to play the guitar. As a result of this, I thought my father was Andy Griffin when I was a kid. “LOOK MOM Dad is on TV!” Yep.

Dad likes to carve things over the years he has made my Mom quite a menagerie. There are a whole bunch of people around town who have “peachpit monkeys” and “Arkansas Razorback pendants”

Daddy's Carvings Part V

Daddy's Carvings Part IV

Daddy's Carvings Part III

Daddy's carvings

He’s the guy whom every time he hears I’m going on a trip calls me to see if I’ve checked my oil lately. He gives me the “your car is like a horse” lecture. He’s also the guy who foot the bill for my piano lessons, dance lessons, band camps, and all that jazz.

So Thank you Dad for all you’ve done. I love you.

Funniest thing I've seen all month.

funny pictures of cats with captions
see more Lolcats and funny pictures

From LOL CATS = I can haz cheesburger

Bar Meeting round up for later but I got to give props.

My life has gotten ridiculously busy but I will say

If your car breaks down in Hot Springs while at an “annual meeting” or Convention

Burks and Mahoney are the wrecker service to use. They went above and beyond the call of duty during my unfortunate automobile difficulties while attending the Annual Meeting of the ABA.

Burks & Mahoney Wrecker Service
(501) 321-2232
1300 Malvern Ave, Hot Springs National Park, AR 71901 (there is the information.)

Also, these guys were amazing.

Automotive Service Center
(501) 623-8832
1540 Malvern Ave, #A, Hot Springs, AR 71901

I watched the mechanic do 10,000 different types of tests on my car. I eventually got tired and waited in the waiting room. When the original mechanic decided it might be the distributor, he got another mechanic to double check his work. I got to see enough of that process that I genuinely believe that is what happened. Also, they got a guy to drive me back to my hotel. They waited for me to pick up my car on Friday. It was close to closing time for them. They made special arrangements to put my car under an awning so that my car wouldn’t suffer possible hail damage during a particular nasty storm that rolled through.

I can’t say enough nice things about them.

Fitness and other craziness.

It’s amazing how the minute you commit to posting daily on your blog that life will suddenly get a lot busier so that you’re too busy living to write all the time.

I have made a new commitment to fitness. I am by all accounts fat. Back in the day (like high school and college), I was a “normal” weight so I’ve not always been fat and am definitely not accustomed to the sneers, snickering, and biases that fat people endure. To be fair, I’m not sure that anyone ever gets used to the abuse that people dish out towards the fat. People are MEAN! no wait.

MEAN

to fat people.

Starting June 1st, I committed to doing 45 minutes of exercise a day with a day of rest. This means 6 days of exercise. I’ve been doing running every other day or 3 of the 6 days. The other three days are something else.

I finally did my initial push up challenge. I managed to push out 5. My arms and chest hate me now.

I haven’t done the sit up challenge. I keep doing other core exercises other than bonafide situps. I’m not sure what I want to do about that. I’ll probably do the set up test tomorrow.

I also found via this site, the 200 squat challenge today so I’m thinking I can try that as well.

I figure that running and doing the situp, push up, and squat challenges with some yoga would be something I can do this summer that will shape me up. I have found that I can’t eat heavy before running and somehow exercise makes me eat less. No really. I had a big lasagna dinner the first day I ran and threw up. Okay that was TMI but it happens.

So that’s what I’m doing this month.

Sunday

This editorial depressed the hell out of me.

MY HERO: Schuyler

My heroes for today are the members of the Rummel Hudson family: Julie, Rob, and Schuyler.

Schuyler was born with an extremely rare brain disease called Bilateral perisylvian polymicrogyria. This disorder means that. among other things, Schuyler will more than likely never be able to talk. She uses technology that has been dubbed “BIG Box of words” (it looks like a giant Speak n Spell) .

Despite all these disadvantages, Schuyler has managed to surprise her detractors over and over again. She has basic speech and a higher rating of intelligence than many doctors predicted. She has performed better in school than predicted.

She also manages to be an extremely cheerful child who loves monster movies and monsters in general. She also enjoys a punk rock wardrobe with chucks and brightly colored hair ranging from purple to red. She has an independent streak, evidenced in this her drawing a picture of her sad parents crying when she was to travel cross country on a plane to visit her grandma. SHe also has a funny sense of humor, making her dad dress up like a chicken for Halloween. (he did it too)

Her parents also have an amazingly positive attitude as they struggle to raise Schuyler to be the best she can be while learning the limits of her disability.

This bugs me.

Okay I know that this NaBloPoMo thing for June has a theme of heroes. I guess I’ll say that my hero is someone more laid back than me. More specifically, someone who didn’t get annoyed about this. One one level, it seems fairly petty and on another level, it doesn’t. So hear me out.

I originally got this from
Blake’s Think Tank

John Brummett writes a blog and today, he met a female known in the blogosphere as “Arkansas Project Girlfriend” as indicated in the post below.

Oh, and P. S., since cross-referencing and cross-pollination seem to be the essence of local blogging — Afterward a perfectly normal-looking and nice-seeming young woman introduced herself to me as the “Arkansas Project girlfriend.” In case you don’t know, former Katherine Harris/Asa Hutchinson aide David Kinkade operates a consistently funny, sometimes mean, sporadically informative and often bikini model-adorned blog at thearkansasproject.com, and there he sometimes invokes some semi-charming anecdote involving the “Arkansas Project girlfriend,” a fictional character, I always assumed, on account of his being a lonely misfit blogger.

bwahahhaha yeah making jokes about people having “imaginary girlfriends” is funny. IN JUNIOR HIGH! Seriously, who does that?

John Brummett’s entire criticism of blogs is regarding journalistic credibility, ethics, and professionalism. By implying that someone is too ugly, dorky, mis-fity, mean, etc. to not have a “real girlfriend” and resort to writing about an “imaginary” girlfriend, John Brummett has lowered himself to a tactic that most people outgrow by the time they graduate junior high school.

The other issue that bugs me is that Arkansas Project Girlfriend doesn’t have a blog. She doesn’t really participate in theblog. She isn’t even pictured in the blog. With the exception of a few mentions here and there, she’s not really in the blog at all. I’m fairly certain she has nothing to do with the writing or the content of the “mean” blog. So I think that taking a dig at her is off limits. It’s similar to people talking smack about Chelsea Clinton being ugly when they have problems with Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Arkansas Projectiwas pretty blase about it except to mention that now his girlfriend doesn’t like Brummet either.

So today, the folks at the Arkansas Project are my heroes. There you go.

Listy Fresh . . . or a list of favorites

Since I like to read, watch movies, and listen to music, I tend to respect those who can write, sing, write songs, write books, and make movies a lot. Those creative artists are my heroes for today. (it’s part of that nablopomo thing)

So here are my list of favorite books

  1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov
  2. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  3. Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel
  4. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
  5. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
  6. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
  7. East of Eden by John Steinbech
  8. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

Movies

  1. Pan’s Labrynth
  2. The English Patient
  3. Shawshank Redemption
  4. Giant
  5. Blue Crush
  6. Amelie
  7. Vertigo
  8. Splendor in the Grass
  9. Kill Bill Volume 1
  10. The Sixth Sense

Music (some of these are albums and some are songs)

  1. When the Pawn . . . by Fiona Apple
  2. August and Everything After by The Counting Crows
  3. A Thousand Kisses Deep by Leonard Cohen (pretty much anything by Leonard Cohen but I’m not familiar with his individual albums)
  4. Adagio in B by Barber
  5. Paint it Black by the Rolling Stones
  6. American Idiot by Green Day (the whole album)
  7. Man of Leisure by the Big Cats
  8. White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane
  9. Firestarter by Prodigy
  10. Warning Sign by Coldplay

Running day. every day

“The Hero lies in you” — Mariah Carey

Tomorrow is National Running Day.

According to the website.

National Running Day is a national initiative whereby many of the major organizations within the running industry are joining forces in an unprecedented unified effort to nationally and locally promote running as a healthy, easy, and accessible form of exercise. The inaugural National Running Day will be Wednesday, June 3.

I ran the Little Rock Half Marathon in March. I must confess that I haven’t stayed on schedule after the post race tapering down phase. I was there for a little while and then it began to rain every day. Well, I’m not going to excuse it. I just didn’t get back to any sort of mileage.

Being a woman who is a chronic list maker, I always manage to take a half year assessment of my life and make a list of the things I want to do in the following year. Sometimes I look at my New Year’s resolutions and see how I’m doing with those. It just depends.

I am very proud for completing the big goal of completing a half marathon. I’m going to start running 4 days a week starting yesterday. There’s another half marathon in Conway around October. I intend to finish that and I want to try the Little Rock Marathon next march. I guess I better get training.

No kitten left hungry.

My family grew up in a 100 year old two story house with a porch and a cellar. The porch was about 3 feet off the ground and as a result, there is about a one and a half foot space between the bottom of the house and the ground. This housed among other things, the heating and cooling system and some wiring. It also proved to be fertile ground for all the knocked up cats in the neighborhood to come and give birth to their broods.

Each time there was a cat hanging around the house, my brother would go outside with a bowl of water and a plate of food. In the beginning it was whatever leftovers he could scrounge up. Eventually, he began to buy some bonafide cat food.

Over the years, my brother has probably fed and housed close to a hundred cats and their kittens. Some made it to be inside pets but most just stayed outside until they got bored with us and moved on.

After last week’s box of kittens episode, my brother was so sad that he went to the shelter and adopted a gray kitten. She’s a little girl cat about a month old. He hasn’t named her yet.

Kitten

My Niece cat

baby kitten

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