This Musical Message is For the Queens We Use Would Not Excite You

Tall Tales for All

I was lucky....I got to choose this week's Saturday Scavenger Shots word! I knew I'd be up to my ears in a program today, so I choose something that I could do easily :) The word is CREATIVE. And....here you go...

Here is something to start the CREATIVE process.

 

Add some CREATIVE supplies.

 

Soon, you too will have your very own Tall Tale hero! This one is called Silly Sally Soupcan. Here special talents are telling hilarious jokes, flying, and able to talk to animals. She has a frog side-kick named Ribbit. How CREATIVE!

 

Actually, the kids will probably get much more CREATIVE, but I wanted to get this up while there was time. After my Tall Tales for All program, I am getting off early so that DR and I can go to 80s Night at the Hollywood Bowl! Hearing the Go Gos, Psychedelic Furs, The Motels, and Bow Wow Wow will be a CREATIVE way to pretend I am a Youth again :-D

 

Happy Saturday! Hope you have a chance to get CREATIVE.  And Tara...tag!!!!!

Everybody Gets a Nice Autographed Picture

We've made it to Wednesday, thus we deserve some Choose and Defend. This week you get to be a star! At least for awhile :)   Which of these "look at me" moments would you most enjoy doing?

Guest Star on Your Favorite TV Show

OR

Sing the National Anthem at the First Game of the World Series

To make it interesting...and to get a more honest look at what you'd REALLY want to do...let's say you won't embarrass yourself at either one! If you want to sing, you can. If you want to act, you can. Get it? So Choose and then Defend your choice! Come on, Super Star, shine!

Thia Musical Message is For My Thoughts, I Confess...

And I Feel My Finger On Your Trigger

HAPPINESS. What a great word and a beautiful thought. All thanks to Tara @ Eclectic Spaghetti for making this week's Saturday Scavenger Shots so pleasurable.  Please share my HAPPINESS.

Music = HAPPINESS. I love all kinds of music. And I love brick and mortar record shops like this one near my house. I could spend all day and be perfectly content browsing and chatting with the clerk about which bands were the shit back when KROQ was meaningful :)

My kids are at the heart of my HAPPINESS, always. Some of that HAPPINESS comes from the special little things I enjoy with each one of them. As illustrated here, Handsome Lad, my youngest, and I like to go out for Thai food together every so often. It is our little thing. We also share that love of music and even have some similar appreciations.  My oldest, Kick Back Dude and I have a good relationship and I think we both find it very easy to talk about almost anything together. My daughter Girlie Girl and I have our shows, the occasional manicure that she'll perform for me, and the bond of two women who lived in a house of men. My middle child Social Animal and I have our talks too. He is a very deep thinker and I feel energized and excited by discussions with him.  My second oldest Secret Agent Man and I have a less evident bond...but it is old and deep. He was very possessive of me when he was a very little boy. He's always felt so close to my heart. As a young man, he has become very independent, but I feel sure of our love. Plus, he has a "Mom" tattoo :) So much HAPPINESS. I am very fortunate.

Here is my DR. I believe I caught him mid rico suave face here :) I feel so much HAPPINESS that he is in my life. When I think of the series of circumstances that brought us together I sometimes want to gasp in amazement. He calls it Absolute Fortuitous Happenstance. I call it my good luck. Things aren't always easy, but I do think at the heart, the HAPPINESS and love is very deep. 

So, this is my HAPPINESS post! Thanks for stopping in to look. It was a so pleasing to greedily count my piles of treasure. I wish each of you all the HAPPINESS in the world.

Friday 5 - Where to Go

I noticed I haven't done a Friday 5 in quite some time. I need to remedy that, as I do enjoy them very much.  This particular one is great, what with it featuring food and all! One of my favorite things :)

Won't you join me in exploring where I go for great treats? Please feel encouraged to play along in comments or on your own blog!

1. Where do you go for a great cup of coffee or tea? If I have a gift card, I will admit to being a sucker for the omnipresent Starbucks. However, on most occasions, if I don't get my brews at home I am more than happy to stop in at 7-Eleven. My friend Millie and I call their coffee Gucci Coffee, because it tastes so fancy!

2. Where do you go for a great doughnut? Mmmmm...Donut Man. What up?!?!?

3. Where do you go for a great sandwich? I like Subway, sure. (Bring back the Seafood Sensation, dangit!) But the most delicious, crave-worthy sandwich comes from this great place near my house called Plaza Produce. Everything is so fresh and delicious. My favorite thing to get is a tuna on squaw bread. The tuna is mixed with yogurt instead of mayo...no relish in the mix. OMG. I am almost at a drool right now. 

4. Where do you go for a great bowl of soup? I am a big fan of the french onion soup at Red Robin. As their little song says...Yummmmm....

5.Where do you go for a great post-midnight snack? Go out after midnight to eat? Me? Even be out after midnight and need food? Not likely. My older kids and their friends seem to be big supporters of the Dollar Menu at McDonalds though. I will give them their say for this one, because I'm sure you don't want to hear me say - Uuuhhh...my fridge?

And there you have it! A Friday 5 that has whet my appetite :) Please check back in tomorrow to see my HAPPINESS for Saturday Scavenger Shots. Will it be food related? Oh man...I hope not....

(-.-)

I Shoulda Learned to Play Them Drums

It is Wednesday which can mean only one thing here in Fresh Hell....it is time to Choose and Defend. This week, you get a new job. Yay! Well, maybe not yay, exactly. It isn't a spectacular job, but it pays pretty well, you have a pleasant working environment, and you are fully able to do or learn all aspects of your new position. And guess what? Since this is Choose and Defend Wednesday you even get a choice. There's a twist for you :)   You get to decide what sort of work you'd prefer to do, to a degree....

Would you rather

Work Exclusively with Co-Workers

 OR

Work with the Public

I'm really interested to hear which you'd choose and why. This is your Choose and Defend Wednesday. Go!

This Musical Message is For I Was Never One to Believe the Hype

And Nobody Knows How She Got That Strong

Saturday! A working Saturday, but still a Saturday...and so, we shall have some Saturday Scavenger Shots.  This week's word was chosen by our fine friend Jasen over at Swamp Gas & Moonlit Reflections. The word is PARCEL. What shall we do with this? I don't have my own PARCEL of land to show you. We do get many PARCELs here at work though. Items are always coming and going around here. Check this out.

Several large PARCELs arrived at the library last week. I felt a great urge to build a fort from the boxes left on the loading dock. What would a PARCEL like this contain?

It turned out to be some new furniture for the special space we've carved out for our Middle School students. A very nice PARCEL to have received. 

 

Here is a smaller PARCEL I received at home, just yesterday -

These are some very cool card/bookmarks that a Twitter friend of mine sent me. Nothing...NOTHING beats getting a little PARCEL in the mail. Thanks @inmybook ! If anyone wants to check out her merch. you can do it HERE

Thanks for stopping in to check out my Saturday Scavenger Shots. Looking forward to the coming week and what comes next :)

You Don't Know How Lovely You Are

Hey. Ho. For this week's Choose and Defend Wednesday you get to be a scientist. Or maybe just someone looking in the right place at the right time. Who knows? In any event, this week you get to make a discovery all your own. Given the choice, which of these discoveries would you prefer to make and why?

A New Comet

OR

A New Dinosaur Fossil

Imagine either of these things, completely undiscovered before, and then you announce your find! You probably even get to name whatever it is you've found! What will it be? That is the Choose part. And if you can explain your preference, that would be the Defend part.

Thanks for stopping in and noticing that I am in a better frame of mind mid-week :) Choose and Defend!

The Lumpish One

WARNING. THIS IS A COMPLAIN-Y POST.

 

Me on Saturday. And Sunday.

 

I spent this past weekend being incredibly unmotivated. You know I go on about how I love the heat of summer, but for the past few weeks I've just felt miserable. It is so hot and so humid. When I am at work in my little ice box of a library, of course I am unbothered. But when I am off work and meant to be enjoying myself I am always just sweating! I'm at work or I'm sweating.

Part of it is my fault. I tend not to run my ancient air conditioner because of the cost. I have been struggling financially lately, so I guess I'm afraid to press my electric bill higher. My daughter has her own air conditioner in her room which she runs constantly, so she's fine. I do force DR to suffer along with me and he is very kind about it and doesn't complain as I do.

So anyway, this weekend it was just hot and I was just tired and all I did was sit like a lump on my couch trying not to do anything that would cost me any money or make me feel hotter. I'm tired of being so broke, as well as being so hot. The struggling with temperature, money, and my own moods is exhausting. Because of my lumpish weekend though, I do feel less tired as this week begins.

And I try and try and try to remain positive, because there is a lot to be positive about. So much is good. It will get cooler and I will soon enough be complaining about that! I will catch up at some point with the bills or get desperate enough to let something go and there will be some relief. And I will take those lumpish weekends when I must. But maybe next weekend we deserve to do something fun. Let it be :)

 

This Musical Message is For We Slept On Couches

We're All Burning Under the Same Sun

Hello fellow Saturday Scavenger Shooters and all other comers! Today's word, chosen by me, is SHAME. I must have had some secret, subliminal reason for choosing such a loaded word! However, the reasons remain secret and subliminal. I don't know what I was thinking. Had a small struggle coming up with something....but then I realized where most of my SHAME lives. 

Everyone has weaknesses...or I assume that most people do! Many times, what we view as a weakness is what give us that sense of SHAME.  On the other hand, SHAME isn't always personal. Sometimes we look around us and see things that are a SHAME...but they aren't our SHAME...if you know what I mean.

Today, I decided to go ahead and make it personal. Show you my SHAME.

What you are looking at is the snack stash I keep at work. I get a lunch at work, for eating. I try to eat breakfast before work and I will certainly have dinner after work. So...why the snacks? The SHAME I feel about my enjoyment of food is about body issues and feelings that are not quite strong enough yet about wishing I were different.  I don't NEED to eat between meals, but I LIKE to eat between meals. And I don't like the SHAME, but I feel it. And I ignore it. But I am showing you here.

If you give me weight loss tips in comments, you will break my heart. Part of me wants to be someone whose weakness doesn't show so clearly. Part of me wants to be more certain that I deserve desire and affection. But then another part of me feels how content I am with my own self, as I am. When I want to be different, surely I will be. But for now, I share my SHAME.  Hope we can still be friends :)

Next up....Jasen (a.k.a. AlienCG), s'il vous plait!

Seasons Don't Fear the Reaper

As always, after Monday's holiday I am completely thrown off on my days. Where am I? Luckily, I have markers that help place me in time and space. One of them is Choose and Defend Wednesday. This week's is based on a discussion DR and I had a few weeks ago. I'm sure you've had this discussion as well.  So, let's bring it here, shall we?  It is life and death!

If it were possible to make this choice...would you want to know when to expect your death? Or would you prefer for it to remain a mystery? Choose and tell us why you made that choice.

Keep the Mystery

OR

Know Ahead of Time

Share your thought and participate in Choose and Defend Wednesday. It's a fun way to mark that middle of the week slide toward sloth...or is that just me? 

This Musical Message is For All the Blood I Would Bleed

We Moonwalk the Foxtrot

In a last minute save of this week's Saturday Scavenger Shots game, Tara-Sweet-Tara of Eclectic Spaghetti gave us the word SPICE. What a great word, right? And it can be as easy or as complicated as you want it to be. Personally, I am going easy this week :) 

First a little info on the SPICE in my life over the past few years. I admit, that there was a time after I first got my own place (for the second time in my life) that I only rocked the salt and the pepper. That was all I had. With the encouragement of fellow blogger Jasen over at Swamp Gas & Moonlit Reflections, I went out and got myself another couple of versatile SPICEs to add to my repetoire. Now I live with a man who loves to cook, and loves to experiment with different flavors. It is fun to watch...and to eat! I never know what sort of SPICE he will come home with next! 

Here are most of the little darlings gathered on the cutting board for their big moment. We don't have a spice rack...they all just kind of hang out on the counter. It is SPICE world.

When left to my own devices I tend to rely heavily on Hot Shot, which is a black and red pepper mix. I also like onion and garlic powder. Kiss me, I'm Smelly SPICE!

Do you have a favorite SPICE? Tell me about it! Thanks for stopping by to take a look at this week's Saturday Scavenger Shots :)