through my eyes

 Today is my very last day of break. Roy and I are going to do it up right and make a "day" of it - shopping in Fort Worth, dining out at a restaurant we don't normally visit, and painting the town red. Okay - maybe we're not really  painting the town red...but you know what I mean. Of course, thrown in the midst of our playing will be a hefty dose of regular: I haven't done any laundry since before  our Portland trip so there's that . Also I intend to clean the house which will include mopping the floors (which I only do monthly so it's quite a chore when Mopping Day rolls around). I will spare you the rest of my "chores" list as it's all just about as mundane as mopping, but suffice it to say, today will be busy. Good! - but busy. Time off always reminds me that I love my job. Now don't get me wrong - I'm already counting the days until my next mini-break (which will be in just over a week when Darian flies in for an overnight visit...

 This past weekend my entire family and I flew to Portland to visit Darian who lives in Happy Valley, a nearby suburb. It was simply a delightful time - we laughed until our bellies hurt, and ate (until our bellies hurt) and drove up Mount Hood and meandered city streets and drank smoothies and played cards and - well, just had a wonderful time being together. But probably the highlight of the trip (other than finding out that Savana is pregnant but that's an entirely different blog) was seeing Margie, Roy's sister. We haven't seen Marge in about twenty years now. Twenty years!  I'm not sure how it's been so long, or why we've allowed it to be so long...but regardless, it has. We met her at a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant that was tucked away on the side of a busy two-lane highway on Saturday afternoon. She walked through the door, held out her arms, and welcomed us all in. And then she sat down at the table, all of us circled around her, and began to enter...

I am not a tv person. God knows I've tried, subscribed to everything under the sun: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Discovery Plus, Disney Plus, Apple TV... But I always end up frustrated, annoyed - flipping from show to show, restless. I think my distaste for television links back to the good ole days of high school when Mom and I lived together - just the two of us - in Edmond, Oklahoma. Mom and Dad had just split and Mom was not a fan of TV, preferring instead to spend her hours memorizing the Bible, reading spiritual books, or cooking up her healthy concoctions in the kitchen. And so, we didn't have one. At one point, Dad suggested I take one of his spare tvs for my bedroom and so I did. I know Dad felt badly for me, felt I was steering too far from normalcy. And maybe I was, in hindsight. I wasn't a normal teenager, that's for darned sure - preferring elevator music on the radio rather than the current music of the day such as Michael Jackson, Def Leppard, or Ozzie Os...