Ollie Ollie Oxen Free!

I've been tagged! The rules are oh so simple.

Step #1 - Link to the person who tagged you. That was Kara! I met Kara on Plurk and we share a current home town, although she will be moving out of state soon. Going back home, actually, and getting married. :)

Step #2 - Write Five Fun/Interesting Facts about yourself. This gives fellow bloggers (and your readership) a chance to actually get to know you better.

1. I love lighthouses. I have no idea where this fascination originated, but when hubby and I went to Maine for our 25th anniversary, he indulged me by slogging through the woods so that I could take pictures of an otherwise inaccessible lighthouse. He's taking me to see another one in San Francisco in a couple of weeks.

2. I also love cemeteries. As a child, my mother would drag me all over West Virginia searching for old family headstones to help with her sister's genealogy research. I find them fascinating, and fortunately my hubby does too. That trip to Maine? We fought hoards of angry mosquitoes to take pics of some over-200 year old headstones.

3. I love setting up new computers. The thrill of taking a new one out of the box and customizing it to my own liking is just ... *shivers with delight*

4. I was a church choir director for over 22 years. My mother discovered me 'conducting' my dolls one afternoon when I was 5 or 6, pretending to be our choir director. I eventually succeeded her when she moved away, and remained as director at my home church until it closed in 2006.

5. My favorite music to sing is the Renaissance Madrigal. In college, I sang with the Madrigal ensemble for four years, each year as a part of the Christmas Madrigal Dinner. Then, later on, hubby and I were part of a madrigal quartet that performed for over ten years at the Renaissance Festival at Vizcaya, here in Miami.



Step #3 - Tag Six Other People and link to their blogs. Then let them know you’ve tagged them by twittering them or leaving a comment on their blog.

My tags include some friends from Plurk (a social networking site).


1. Mind over Mullis
2. Between Keyboard and Chair
3. Messy Stuff: A Life with MS and Other Ramblings
4. The Dangling Conversation
5. Womb Quake
6. Maple Mama

Tag! You're it!

Wordless Wednesday, Not my squishy, too!

It's not enough that you take my pillow every night,
you have to take my squishy too?!

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Tuesday Ten

Things I need to do in preparation for our trip to San Francisco.

~ clear off the memory card for the camera

~ clear off the other memory card for the camera

~ install PSP7 in the laptop. It's old school, but it's still my favorite

~ purchase one more set of rechargable AA batteries

~ buy sticky tabs so that I can mark things in my Guide book

~ clean out the laptop bag

~ ask neighbor to feed the cats

~ clean up so neighbor doesn't have heart failure

~ add more obscure things to iPod

~ find a pair or two of jeans that fit well


We're leaving on the 24th and returning on the 30th. Whee!

Words, words, words ...

"The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get."

That was a favorite quotation of mine when I was a child. It appealed to some quirky little corner of the humor center of my brain. I know that there are other pithy quotes to apply to my topic for today, but at the moment I am too tired to remember them. There is at least one about knowing when to cut your losses, yadda yadda yadda.

All of this is to say that I'm officially bowing out of NaNoWriMo. It took a week for it to become not-so-much fun any longer. Yes, I know, I waxed poetic about it in the car Saturday evening on the way to a friend's birthday gathering, and I still believe everything I said. However, I have no way of catching up on my word count and still retaining my sanity. The fact that we will be in San Francisco from November 24th through 30th had a lot to do with my decision. The deadline for NaNo is the 30th, and there is no way I can get my minimum daily word count (1,667 words) while on a family trip, especially not with all of the things we have planned. We were on family trips in 2006 and 2007, too, but the holiday fell on dates that made this easier to manage. Also? I wasn't working then. Hello! All day at home to write!

We were out for the evening both last Friday and Saturday, and most of yesterday was spent either in church or at meetings. That was three days with hardly any writing at all. Could I really force it and still finish? Maybe, but at what cost?

This isn't the year for me, but it is the year for many of my friends! So, I will be here cheering you on and if you need advice you all know where to find me. Now shoo! Why are you still here reading? Go write!

"It's November, do you know what your word count is?"

Wordless Wednesday, Rosa sat ...

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Election night results

Feel free to snag this for your own use, be sure to scroll down and find the format that you need.

Of cows and cancer

"The cow is out of the barn."

It was July 1984, and those words were spoken by my older sister in a phone conversation to our mother. She, my sister, was in the hospital in Daytona Beach, FL where she had been sent for testing. Her home at the time was about 45 minutes south of there, and the local medical center was small and very basic. She had been having back problems for several months, and chiropractic adjustments weren't really helping. She tried not to let it slow her down, but when it became impossible for her to get out of bed one morning her significant other somehow managed to get her to the local hospital.

The details of that particular hospital stay are fuzzy, because at the time it didn't seem like anything more than a nuisance. What they discovered in Daytona would change things forever.

Cancer. A tumor the size of a grapefruit had spread from her breast and wrapped itself around her spine. She was 44 years old.

If you live in the country, or know anyone from the country, you might understand the importance behind her words. "The cow is out of the barn." Once the cow is out of the barn, it's too late to close the gate. The 'cow' in this case, cancer, was too widespread to contain.

I made the four hour drive up from Miami to meet my mother's plane from her summer home in West Virginia. That afternoon we began the task of facing this beast head on. Our mother had been widowed six years earlier, and from that moment on she gave up whatever life she had begun to rebuild without our father. "We'll beat this," she said and she never gave up even when my sister begged to.

She began the first round of chemotherapy, an experimental procedure back then, that was combined with a dose of hormones. She was entered into a national database so that her results could be compared and studied, and that hopefully she could be helped by someone else or vice versa. I was the baby, fourteen years younger, and I had a four year old son and a job that I needed to get back to. I kept my chin up as I said goodbye, but I sobbed all the way home.

She endured the chemo and radiation, and eventually that 'cow' was reduced to a blip the size of a pea. Remission was a gift and she returned to work full time and traveled everywhere she could manage. I had another son, and eventually our mother moved back into her home and became the more frail of the two. We cared for her then, my sister via long distance while I did the leg work here.

The cancer returned and when Harriet was too sick from radiation to attend mom's memorial service in December 1993, she decided she'd had enough fun. She made the well informed decision to stop further treatment and it was glorious! She visited, we packed up mother's house, and moaned at all of the crap she had collected. We sold it to the first interested buyer because we were afraid we'd never get another one.

We shopped, we went antiquing, we went out to lunch, and we laughed. We took mother's ashes back to West Virginia and held a small graveside service. Harriet insisted that she didn't need the closure of a service, but I knew better. We were able to grieve together as we placed flowers on her grave, right next to dad's.

What I didn't realize was how sick she was. It was now August, and by September she was back in the hospital and we were looking for a nursing home for her. They spoke of hospice care, but I couldn't understand why; they were only sending her to rehab to get stronger, so that she could return home. Weren't they?

On October 20th, 1994 I received the call. She had died peacefully around 1:30 that afternoon. She was 54 years old. Too young, everyone said. I knew that as well, but this past August I turned 54 myself. It was a benchmark I have counted up to for the past 14 years and never spoke of to anyone. It sounded morbid, even to my own ears, but now? Now I have outlived my big sister and there were so many more things to do, so much to talk about, so many questions to ask.

There is nothing I can do except to refuse to become another statistic of this horrid disease that claims lives and devastates families. In 1984, mammograms were not the norm. "Those are just benign cysts, don't worry." Well, we should have worried. But it was 1984, and who knew? We didn't then, but we do now.

Get tested. Refuse to take doctor's reports lightly. Wear pink! Not just in October, but throughout the year. I find it ironic that the month she died is now Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I like to think that just maybe she had something to do with it.

If you have a sister? Cherish her, love her, hug her tightly. And then give her an extra one from me.

Wordless Wednesday, Support Breast Cancer Awareness

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Wordless Wednesday, Home from Iraq

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Oh look, it's (almost) October 1st

And some of us know what that means. It means we, the few, the proud, the angst-ridden, have signed up for NaNoWriMo, or in its longer form, National Novel Writing Month.

We are students, we are parents, we hold full time jobs, we have spouses and significant others, and we are prepared to forsake all of that to spend thirty days glued to our keyboards or duct taped to our legal pads. The actual writing never begins until the stroke of 12:01am on November 1st, but October? October is filled with the sheer joy of plotting! Making outlines! Scribbling scene ideas on 3x5 index cards so that we can shuffle them at will as we control our fictional little pieces of the world.

We busily post our introductions to the message boards at the official site, and we squeal about how we have the most amazing ideas ever, and we research. Oh mercy, we research until we know, we just know that it's going to be perfect!

We stock up on coffee, or M&Ms, or sugar-free gum; we buy a funny hat to wear when we're writing so that no one will dare bother us. (The hat is a signal to our loved ones, but seriously? They don't need the hat to know that we've gone completely insane.) We plan to attend local write-ins. Remember love-ins? They're sort of the same, but with laptops, and pencils and pads, and with clothing ... well, anyway. We attempt to flock together with like-minded people in our hometowns once a week and challenge each other to word wars. Word wars!

Sounds serious? You bet. But it's just about the most fun you can have for thirty days as you work your way from absolutely nothing up to 50,000 words. That's right, 50,000 words in thirty days. Just for laughs, the Thanksgiving holiday is thrown into the month and you are descended upon by hoards of relatives who do not understand your continual need to sneak away and write 'just a little more'. Thus, you really don't have a full thirty days, now do you?

What do you write about? That's up to you. Find something you like, take an odd idea and roll with it.

The quote below is a favorite of mine. Embrace it, and then read the entire article.

Know the needs and desires of your characters; find out something they want badly, and take it away from them.


Dramatic plotting made simple


See you at the finish line!

Redbirds and reminiscing

Last week I meant to post a follow up to my Wordless Wednesday post, the photograph of the cardinal in my back yard. Busy-ness and life seemed to get in the way, so I thought I'd add a little postscript now.

Cardinals are my favorite birds, hands down. I can thank my family for that, mostly my daddy. Although I am a south Florida native, the rest of my family was born in West-by-God Virginia. (If you're from that neck of the woods you know exactly what I mean, and if you aren't? That's okay, it mostly matters to those aforementioned neck-of-the woods folks.)

The cardinal is the West Virginia state bird, and growing up I always knew that. We had a huge ficus tree in our back yard, big enough that the shade covered most of the grass. For those of you up north, the ficus trees are those spindly looking things that you find in large decorative pots, usually in hotel lobbies. The first time I saw one of those in my University up in DeKalb, Illinois, I laughed. It seemed so absurd that the climbing tree of my childhood had been reduced to this caricature of nature. I wanted to set it free, to send it out into the world to seek its true potential! Go! Run free!!!

But I digress.

Our backyard ficus tree was home to what I perceived to be hundreds of birds. My daddy's favorites were the family of cardinals. He made sure I saw the 'redbirds' every time they came to the feeder, and I knew that the female was more of a subdued, muted brown. Daddy Redbird was a sight to behold. Vivid, stunning red, with a call that I will always recognize.

Our feeder was not as stunning, however. It was a beat up old aluminum pan whose handle was long gone, its shine had disappeared years before. As I look back, I think it might have been from one of mama's first sets of cookware. Daddy filled it religiously and became extremely put out if the pigeons showed up; or the squirrels. The feeder was a temptation to them both, as he left it in easy access in the center of our ceramic picnic table. (I think it was more fun for him to complain and puff up protectively than it would have been to simply move it.)

I grew up, married, and moved away. My dad passed on, and eventually the tree had to be cut down. Mama passed away 14 years later and my sister and I sold the house. Just before mama died, we bought our current home. It's on a spacious corner lot, and the lot just behind us has never been developed. It's full of Australian pine trees. In hurricane season we fear for our roof, their trunks are so soft. But the trade off? The trade off is that I now have my own redbirds. They visit my patio, they perch in my trees, and they visit my feeder.

My daughter is carrying on the tradition of listening for them, for helping keep the feeder full and ready. The pigeons of my childhood are nowadays extremely fat, well fed mourning doves, but at least my feeder has not attracted the squirrels. Yet.

I can hear them outside now, time to go fill the feeder.

On Monday ...

On Monday We E-mailed Jokes
Author Unknown


On Monday we emailed jokes.
On Tuesday we did not.

On Monday we thought that we were secure.
On Tuesday we learned better.

On Monday we were talking about heroes as being athletes.
On Tuesday we relearned who our heroes are.

On Monday we were irritated that our rebate checks had not arrived.
On Tuesday we gave money away to people we had never met.

On Monday there were people fighting against praying in schools.
On Tuesday you would have been hard pressed to find a school where someone was not praying.

On Monday people argued with their kids about picking up their room.
On Tuesday the same people could not get home fast enough to hug their kids.

On Monday people were upset that they had to wait 6 minutes in a fast food drive through line.
On Tuesday people didn't care about waiting up to 6 hours to give blood for the dying.

On Monday we waved our flags signifying our cultural diversity.
On Tuesday we waved only the American flag.

On Monday there were people trying to separate each other by race, sex, color and creed.
On Tuesday they were all holding hands.

On Monday we were men or women, black or white, old or young, rich or poor, gay or straight, Christian or non-Christian.
On Tuesday we were Americans.

On Monday politicians argued about budget surpluses.
On Tuesday grief stricken they sang 'God Bless America'.

On Monday the President was going to Florida to read to children.
On Tuesday he returned to Washington to protect our children.

On Monday we had families.
On Tuesday we had orphans.

On Monday people went to work as usual,
On Tuesday they died.

On Monday people were fighting the 10 commandments on government property.
On Tuesday the same people all said 'God help us all' while thinking 'Thou shall not kill'.

It is sadly ironic how it takes horrific events to place things into perspective, but it has. The lessons learned this week, the things we have taken for granted, the things that have been forgotten or overlooked, hopefully will never be forgotten again.

Wordless Wednesday, Cardinal

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How to make a mom cry

Our Marine Son™ in Iraq left me a comment on my MySpace page this morning.


Hey mom i love you and i will be home in 2 weeks.

Thursday Thirteen (#1)

This week I'm trying something new. I have spent fourteen years posting to forums from the old AOL 1.5 days, through the various incarnations of the email lists that are now housed at Yahoo. I spread my wings to Live Journal (and several of its clones) in February of 2003 and never looked back.

Oh I still use some of the email lists, I have some very dear friends there, but blogging has become my best venue for journaling my thoughts and my irritations with life, both in general and sometimes very specific.

Today I discovered (thank you Plurk friends!) ThursdayThirteen.

With yet another hurricane setting its sights on South Florida, I thought I'd offer my list of:

Thirteen Things I Need to Do to Prepare for Ike

1. Check our hurricane supplies and make a list of what needs to be refilled or replaced.

2. See that both cars have full tanks of gas. Even after our experience with Wilma three years ago, not all service stations have generators to run the pumps.

3. Withdraw a decent amount of cash from the ATM and tuck it away for the days after the storm. (See number 2, the ATM's need electricity as well.)

4. Wash clothes and especially towels. There's that pesky lack of electricity problem again.

5. Find a card deck or two, including UNO. Replace if need be.

6. Charge all of the rechargeable batteries for the camera and the old school MP3 players. The iPods will eventually die and there won't be a way to recharge them.

7. Print out a list of phone numbers for online friends.

8. Print out info on exactly how to post by phone to Live Journal and Twitter. Maybe Plurk, too.

9. Designate a few online friends to post updates to various places once we're in the all clear. Text messaging saved my sanity in the three weeks following Wilma when we had no power and no land line.

10. Which reminds me, I need a car charger for this phone. It's only a little over a year old, post-Wilma.

11. The last items are bigger and more difficult. Mostly, it involves securing our house. This entails covering the windows and bringing inside anything that has the potential to become airborne in 135+mph winds.

12. I need books. I will dust off some paperbacks that I've had sitting around for a while, and I might take a trip to my favorite second hand book exchange store. LuAnne Rice books, in case you were wondering.

13. M&M's. Yes, M&M's. My very shallow, guilty indulgence, hurricane comfort food. Diets don't exist when you're playing 5 Card Stud by candlelight, and in a pinch they can be used instead of pennies or poker chips. Best of all? The winner can eat their earnings!


The best that we can do is prepare for the worst and hopefully, rejoice if we are spared. The worst that we can do is ignore the God-given days of advance planning time that we have.

See you next Thursday.


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The taste of summer

Over the past few weeks I've been following posts from my new friends over at Plurk. The most mouth-watering tidbits have concerned recipes, and berry picking. The ones that especially caught my eye were the posts about blackberries.

No, not the phone (although I tend to be fascinated with those as well), the fruit. That deep purple, prickly little gem that grows off the beaten path in amongst the poison ivy and the garter snakes and the Queen Anne's lace.

I spent my childhood summers in southern West Virginia, visiting my cousins and various aunts and uncles, and for a while, both of my grandmothers. I was born and raised here in Florida but I was the only one. My parents had grown up in neighboring towns, and so we made the journey back every summer as soon as school was out. Both sets of families were about as diverse as could be: my dad's side was from the poor side of the tracks, literally; my mom's was from the more affluent yet modest side. They dated all through high school - the football player and the cheerleader, a vision of my mother that I still find hard to accept!

When my dad's mother was still alive, way back in the late 1950's, we would visit and my cousin and I would venture up the hill behind the ramshackle old house. We would follow the worn path in the high grass to the chicken coop, and I can vaguely remember feeding the chickens. There was a pig pen a little further on, but the most I remember of that was the smell. On the way back to the house she showed me where the blackberries were and how to find the ones that were just right.

I'm sure it's no surprise to learn that very few (if any) of the berries ever made it back to the porch. I may have been all of five years old, but I can still see the tall grass and feel my heart beat as I, the city girl, was led on a purely country adventure.

The house became our summer home when I was in Junior High. The weeds and my grandmother were long gone, as were the pigs, the chickens, and yes - the blackberries. Yet the memories are there, and I can close my eyes and remember them any time I wish.


Last, I'll share a recipe that my late sister gave me many years ago. If you make it? Send up a word of thanks to Harriet.


Berry Cobbler

Preheat oven to 325F

1 stick butter (melted)
2 cups berries (or a 12 oz. pkg of frozen berries)
1 cup milk
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup self-rising flour (don't cheat, all purpose flour won't work!)


- Sprinkle 1/2 cup sugar over the berries and set aside.

- In mixing bowl, combine flour and 1 cup sugar. Add milk and beat until smooth. (I use a whisk)

- Melt butter in 10" baking dish in 325F oven


- Pour batter over butter, do not mix. (Batter will magically cover the top as it bakes)

- Spoon berries on top.

- Bake 45 minutes or until top crust loses its shine, or when toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.

Best served warm with vanilla ice cream!

It's raining ....

Well, it isn't raining men, but it's most definitely raining.

I find it fitting that the inaugural post in Tales from the Sunny South should be about an impending tropical storm and the preparation that precedes it.

I'm a native South Floridian save for a handful of years in Illinois as a newlywed. I've seen itty bitty storms and I've seen the Big One, Andrew back in 1992. We were fortunate enough to live far enough north of landfall that our biggest loss was a window my husband broke putting the plywood up over the windows. My in-laws down in Homestead weren't as fortunate. They lost their roof (all the way down to the plywood), their pool enclosure, and a storage shed that they never did find. We've always assumed that it ended up in the Gulf of Mexico.

Homestead was where the Florida Keys residents came to seek shelter when told that Andrew was going to decimate the islands. He didn't, and instead veered just enough north to wipe clean all the major landmarks. Homestead Air Force Base was gone-we'd just done music for a wedding there a month earlier. The Publix supermarket we shopped in with my mother-inlaw was gone. Stop signs, houses, trees ... it was all gone. We took them a generator a few days later and there were none of the usual visual clues as to how to find them. Our oldest son was almost 13 at the time and he was stunned and shaken.

Tropical storm Fay isn't the next big one for us, but as one of the newscasters urged: we 'practice like it is.' Supplies have been laid in since June, and on Saturday morning we topped them off with a few more items. Now? Now we sit back and listen carefully to the weather reports, and we stay close to home.