Pimping Amy

Chubby Girl Running aka Amy is exactly the kind of blog I was looking for when I had the idea for pimping blogs. I stumbled upon her as I did a Blog Crawl yesterday, and now I am going to work my way through her archives.

Not only is she a highly entertaining writer, but she just completed her first half-marathon, which is a huge inspiration to me! I am not a runner, yet, well, maybe I am, but I still don't feel like it sometimes. ReadingAmy's blog is just the encouragement I need.

While I love the friends I am training with, I feel like they are just speeding right along and I'm going to keel over at any minute. I think Amy and I could have a good run together, then kick back and drink a beer afterwards.

Even if you aren't into running, Amy's writing is fun and full of real life. I look forward to going through all her archives and I'm excited that there aren't years and years of them so I may actually be able to get through them all!

Pimping Rebecca

Rebecca and I have known each other since first grade when we were both in Ms. Cockerham's class (trying learning that name as a 6 year old). Throughout the 12 years we attended school together, we shared classes, went to the same church and had a lot of the same friends. I think, though, it was chorus that really brought us closer and bonded our friendship.

Starting in 9th grade, there was a group of us in chorus that hung out and had tons of fun. A couple of the guys were older than us and I was "in love" with the one who Rebecca dated. Everyone knew it though and we all laughed about it. I remember asking one of the other guys, Jason, how everyone knew and he said it was because I was nice to Rebecca's boyfriend and so mean to him (Jason). Jason was so crazy and annoying though, it was hard not to be mean to him. ha ha

This was the group of friends who kept me honest when my boyfriend, who didn't attend our school, was pulling me in the wrong direction.

Rebecca is one of the sweetest people you will ever meet, but she can be feisty if need be. During our 10th year reunion, her little boy, Brooks, started to toddle away from her, but one sharp, "Brooks!" made him scurry back. I marveled at her parenting, as Peyton was already running me ragged. And then the baby, Reese, every time I see his picture, I see Rebecca as a little girl with her perfect ponytails and ribbons.

I'm so glad we found each other again!

Pimping Tamara

What can I say about Tamara without filling an entire blog? She is my sister, if not in blood, spirit. She is my bestest friend in the whole wide world. She is the one that even though we may disagree and piss each other off, I know she will always be there for me.

We met when we were 7 years old and became fast friends being that we were the quickest in the class and generally had extra time on our hands. We're survived her moving away and coming back, me moving away and staying, one divorce, two husbands, 4 children, cancer, death and the everyday hum drum of life.

She's coming to visit in a couple weeks for our annual get together and I couldn't be more excited. I wish I could steal her away for a whole month.





ok, guys, that's all in my queue. If you want your blog pimped, shoot me an e-mail. Tell your friends, neighbors and enemies.

Pimping Suz

Aside from Larry, Suz is the very first friend from the Internet that I met in person. Gosh, Suz and I have known each other for years. We met, ha ha, on a Dawson's Creek message board. We were both HUGE fans and wrote Fan Fic about the show. Before Suz had little Roo and she worked outside of the home, we e-mailed about 100 times a day. No lie. At that time, we kept a running commentary all day long. Even today when she has a spare moment and is on the computer, we will catch up through 5, 10, 15 e-mails before her attention is needed by her precious little girl.

Suz is great because she is not afraid to speak her mind and as per her tag line she is "Not Your Typical Mommy." Her husband is an amazing photographer and the family of three lives on a farm shared by his parents surrounded by huge space and lots and lots of animals.

I am often in awe and admittedly slightly jealous of their non-traditional lifestyle that doesn't include 9-5 jobs or keeping up with the Jones. Recently, Suz was contacted by a local magazine and asked to share some of her entries with their readers. I couldn't be more proud and I know she has longed for an opportunity like this for a long time!

Although we don't get to see each other very often, Suz is one of my dearest friends and I couldn't imagine not having her burning bright spirit in my life.

Pimping Chelle

If you ever need a really creative, fun activity to do with your children Chelle, or Ms. Congeniality is the woman you want to call, or e-mail, or comment on her blog. This woman has boundless energy and ideas and I am always amazed by the wonderful ways she handles holidays, birthdays, and really just any weekend with her family.

The stories she tells about her Man-cub and The Girl show what an awesome mom she is and I know her kids are so very lucky to have her. Also, Chelle is just someone I would love to sit down and have a glass of wine with on a cool fall day under the roof of her huge wrap around porch.

It's funny how well I feel that I know Chell even though we've never met in person. I really don't even know how long we've been reading each other's blog, except that it's been a few years. Chell is a prime example of how you can be friends with someone that lives a thousand miles away.

Pimping Summer

Summer aka Marie, has been one of my very good friends since the 6th grade when she moved to Montgomery and began attended my elementary school. After high school graduation, she and her high school sweetheart were married and moved to Hawaii as Jay was a Marine Man.

A few years later, they moved to Tampa and we were able to get together a couple of times. Wild fun was had by all!

Now they have settled in North Carolina and have two boys, Brantley, who is now 13 (!!!) (I remember holding him not a week after he was born) and Parker, who is fast approaching 2.

Summer recently traveled to Malawi to mission and her blog Look Out shares these adventures as well as many other awesome thoughts, good causes and provoking posts.

Funny story: Up until she and Jay were married, Summer was known as Marie, her middle name, and actually, that's still how I think of her. When I went to visit her in Tampa, Summer, one of her friends and I were talking and I kept saying, "Marie this and Marie that." Finally, her friend stopped me and asked, "Who is Marie?"

Pimp Your Blog

While I love reading my very popular bloggers, I'm in the mood for some new blood. I decided, just now, that I should host a Pimp My Blog on this site. So, if you want to Pimp Your Blog, shoot me over an e-mail eldk0404 at gmail.com with the subject line Pimp My Blog and I will post a new entry a day until I run out. Tell your friends, pimp this idea on your own blog, send them here! Let's get some lesser known blogs known!

(Please send me e-mails! I will feel so very unloved if no one sends me a request!)

Also, if anyone is good at making widgets and stuff and wants to create one for this idea, feel free and I will share them here.

Injured!

Two friends and I are running a half marathon in Miami on January 25. We've been seriously training for about 6 weeks now and I have my first injury. Saturday night we ran/walked 6 miles and by Saturday night, the bottom of my foot hurt ever time I stepped down. I went to the chiropractor yesterday and about jumped off the table.

My hips and pelvis are so knotted up that it felt like he was grabbing the muscles and trying to manually untie them, which in a way, I guess he was. He said that because I was so out of whack that the pain manifested itself in my arch. As long as I stay off of it, it's ok, but as soon as I walk for longer than 5 minutes, it feels like I am walking on a very large and nasty bruise.

Not so good when I need to run 3 miles today and Thursday and then 7 this weekend.

I'm so frustrated because this has not been easy for me. I am not a runner. My friends just seem to be coasting along and I am clawing my way through every practice. I can't afford to miss a week at this point.

I'm going to "run" in the pool tonight and be grateful that I live in a city where it is still warm enough to do that. I have to go back to the chiro on Thursday for him to torture me some more and hopefully these kinks will work themselves out.

Larry and I are also going to Key West this weekend for his birthday and I have to be able to walk then too or Larry is going to get awfully tired of carrying me. ha

Family

My younger cousin and I are exactly 18 months and five minutes apart. I have a clear picture of the two of us in my mind, dressed in my grandmother's play clothes, and standing in front of a huge tree in the side yard. Two little girls, one dark like the night and one bright as the sun. At that time in our lives, our personalities conformed to the genetic coloring. I was quieter and I've been told prone to crying or pouting. My cousin, Kelsey, was a sunny little girl, at least at that young age. Divorce and possible feelings of abandonment darkened her light over the years.

My aunt painted portraits of us. I was a nymph sneaking in a broken or raised window, the night behind me. Kelsey was with a rooster, I think, and the sun was coming up in the background. Unfortunately, due to a fire, these paintings were lost a few years ago.

We shared ice cream with sprinkles using my Grandmother's long silver sundae spoons. Stayed up late into the night whispering, giggling, just being little girls.

Kelsey moved to Atlanta, oh about 15 years ago now, I guess. She gave birth to two little girls at an early age, out of wedlock, a shame to our deeply rooted southern family. I've never met those little girls, who aren't so little anymore.

I haven't even seen my cousin in 10 years; don't even know where she is.

I look for her sometimes on MySpace or FaceBook. I think it would be nice to talk to her again. Sometimes I just get sad that we're no longer a part of each other's lives. You would think that with my dad having 5 brothers and 1 sister there would be a ton of cousins running around, but not so much. The few I have are younger than me and we've never been close.

Sometimes it just hits me and I get a little melancholy.

Something to Think About

While I won't go into a political rampage on this site, I do want to offer this fact that I read in light of last night's vice-presidential debates.

There is a 32% rate throughout our presidential history that the vice-president has taken over for the president. Broken down, that is 14 of the last 44 vice-presidents.

Just something to think about.

Greater Things

25 years ago, in the home of a Coral Springs couple, Coral Baptist Church started with a few dozen people. Today, Church by the Glades hosts almost 4,000 members, has 6 services a weekend, celebrated almost 1,000 baptisms in the last two years and is ready for a bigger building! We are literally busting out of our auditorium.

I'm not sure I can really explain how amazing the growth of our church has been without having you live in South Florida for even a month. People, we are not in the Bible Belt here. We're more the stinky feet. But the pure excitement reverberating from our little corner of the world is awesome.

A couple of weeks ago, we started a new series, "Greater Things" to gear us up for the hard work ahead. The building we are shooting for will take 15 to 17 million to build. It will take 8 million just to get started. We are asking for a miracle and I am asking for your prayers.

Last night, we held a special song and prayer service to lift our request to God and thank Him in advance for the blessings He is going to rain down upon us. There were hands raising all over the place and the Holy Spirit was among us. For the last prayer, we went outside where the footprint of the new building was waiting for us in candles.

You can barely go anywhere in our town without seeing a Church by the Glades window decal and now we all have yellow bracelets as well to remind us to pray. Pray we will.

Babies, Babies Everywhere

Because everyone expressed such great interest in our baby fish (ie. Tamara), I attempted to take some photos of them the other day.

See! Look! That little, bitty blur?


How about here? See it?


Ok, well, here are the two, what I suppose to be the parents. Very protective.


Eh, well here's the duck sitting on her nest.


Can't see that either, huh. Here's a close up. See the white? That's her head.


Science lesson done for the day.

**Edited to add: Actually, if you click on the second pic and make it big, if you scroll down a bit, you can see one of the babies. Just about the size of one of the pebbles in the tank.

Did You Know?

Kristin tagged me for a meme, so here it goes.

List 6 things about yourself that most people probably don't know.

I'm not sure if I can come up with 6 things, but I will give it a whirl.

1. I never took a typing class, however, after almost 9 years of working in an office and typing dictation, I am pretty fast. I don't always have to look at my fingers and I don't use the right ones by any means, but it gets the job done.

2. On a similar note, I cannot spell deterioration unless I am typing it. For some reason my fingers know where to go even if my brain does not.

3. I am a consultant for a scrapbooking company called Close to My Heart. I don't hold parties for people, but I do have a group of women that meet every month at my house and complete 2 pages. I really like it and it's a great creative outlet for me. If I had time, I would like to branch out eventually and maybe actually make some money off of it.

4. Our house is fertile grounds lately. We have a duck nest in our front bushes and although the adult ducks in Florida are UGLY, you can't help but love the little ones. I'm excited about the babies. Also, one of our fish had babies and we have about 15-20 little, bitty baby fish swimming in our tank. I hope they don't get eaten. I think I know who the parents are because our two Convicts are hanging around them and I'd like to think they are protecting them. Hopefully, they aren't protecting them just to snack on later.

5. I really like working with my hands and I am definitely the handy one around the house. I would love to learn to work with power tools and make things, like furniture and stuff. Just one more thing to thing about when the kids leave the house.

6. I'm really glad that we had the boys as young as we did. By the time we are 50, they should be out of the house, at least in college. I would love to sell the house, maybe buy a little condo as a home base and then see the country in an RV. Our neighbor has one and I am a little bit jealous.

Hey, I did better than I thought I would.

Decorating

With Larry out of town, I've been taking care of some miscellaneous decorating stuff that I had been putting off. When we were in Nashville a couple of months ago, my parents took the boys to the museum and they painted with watercolors. I really liked the end result, so I had them matted and then framed them.

Here is Peyton's. I think he made a mistake and was going to color it all black, but I'm glad he stopped. That would have made for a very dark picture. He says Grandmommy and Poppy took the good one home. I told him it looks like a water scene and the dark is a rock. He agreed that that explanation would work.

Shey had a long explantation explaining his picture, but when he rambles like that, sometimes it is hard to understand him. The side of his picture was torn purposefully, and I hate that that didn't show after I had them mounted.

I also took picures of Peyton's walls. The boy will hang anything and everything on them. I use painter's tape, so it comes off easily. It's actually pretty cool and he groups his different items together so well. I took these last night while he was sleeping.

Ike

Allow me please to whine, complain, bitch, moan and be completely selfish for this entry.

Larry and I are independent insurance adjusters for the same company. We are the liaisons between a multitude of insurance companies who write commercial policies and their insureds. I am also the office manager for the Florida office as well as over the Tampa, Nashville and Charlotte offices. I carry a small amount of files, but as things get busier, like they are about to, my load will increase as well.

Okay, now for the whining.

During the 04-05 hurricane season when Katrina hit and Florida collided with about 8 hurricanes over the course of the two years were some of the most stressful years of my life. Shey was born December 2004 and I really don't remember much of his first 18 months. Imagine tax season for accountants, but lasting 2-3 years without a break.

I remember in the height of it all standing outside on our patio wanting to claw my skin off. I made an appointment with my doctor pretty soon after that and he prescribed me Lexipro. I stayed on the medication for about 4 months to get me through the worst of it.

The last two years have been a nice reprieve, but now Ike is bearing down on Texas and here we go. Larry is already slated for the first wave and will probably leave Monday morning for at least a week. Thankfully, I have a great admin staff working for me now instead of the string of temps that came through a couple of years ago, but it is still going to be extremely hectic and upside down.

I feel for the people in Texas, I really do. It's going to suck for them big time, I know, but the selfish part of me is crying for me too.

I just really don't want to live through that again.

High School Pics

I was going through some old photos the other day and found these three that I thought I would share. I have more and now that I know my scanner works, I will post them sometime.

Here's Tamara. I think this was at one of our graduation teas. Remember how crazy we went? EVERYONE had a tea!



Here's Jonathan and Kristin WAY before she became 3 for Momma! I think this was at Winterfest.



And here's Carrie and me. I think this was at Winterfest too. I'm not sure why I look so serious. ha ha Look at those eyebrows! Whenever I look through old photos of myself, I never freak about my hair, but I do always want to go back and wax my eyebrows.



I know I have pics of Rebecca too, but for some reason, there weren't any in the pile I was looking through. I'm going to pull out my chorus album and post some of those. That should be fun!

Feel Good Videos

I love the Discovery Channels new commercials. The Boom Di Yah Da is so catchy and the World truly is awesome. This video is awesome too, and you just can't help but smile while watching it.


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Whine and Cheese

Shey is in that lovely age between baby and boy. This morning he cried and whined for 10 minutes for me to help him get dressed even though he is capable of doing it himself. The thing is, I probably would have helped him should he have asked correctly rather than screaching at me like a banchee child. As I dried my hair, he sat on the floor of the bathroom and carried on about his toe, his leg, his arm hurting. And then, just like that, he was over it. He stopped crying, asked me nicely to help him up and then got dressed.

The patience, it is wearing thin. I've been trying so hard lately to put myself in their shoes, but when I signed up for parenting, this is not what I bargained for.

And I swear they take turned irritating me. Shey was fine the whole way to school and then Peyton starts in. He's working on differentiating between weeks and months, but it just hasn't stuck. So this morning, we were talking about summer and how next summer he will be out of school as well and then he says something about two weeks of school have gone by. He stops after that and starts to correct himself and asks me what's it called? Monday through Friday. I tell him a week. He says, rather snottily, no, that doesn't make any sense . . .two weeks. I said, yes, Monday through Friday is a week. Oh, you would have thought I told him I was cutting his leg off, he carried on and kicked the seat. I tried to reason with him and ask him to help me out and I would help him with the word he wanted, but he thinks I can read his mind. It ended up week was the right word.

I just can't believe the "you don't know anything" attitude is starting already.

Happy Anniversary, Baby

Ten years ago today, Larry and I took a half a day off from work, went to the Fort Lauderdale courthouse and got hitched. We stood, just the two of us, before a female notary and exchanged our vows into an empty room. We didn't even purchase rings because it was a secret. We have one photograph from the momentous day by a camera I propped on our TV stand and ran to sit on the couch so we would both be in the screen. That night, we went to dinner to celebrate.

Over the past ten years, we have accomplished a lot. Two children, a house, successful careers, even retirement plans. I think, though, our most important accomplishment is our marriage. We've had our ups and downs like everyone else, but we continue to work together and are committed to making this marriage last. And even though there are times he annoys the beejesus out of me, he is my best friend and the one I enjoying spending my time with the most.

Monday Mention on Thursday

On Sunday, our regular pastor was away and one of the others filled in for him. While he is not my favorite and his lessons are never as dynamic to me, I had to share the link for the podcast here. In the middle of the service, the worship team performed a version of Amazing Grace that was just phenominal. It's funny how songs you have heard your entire life can just strike a cord on a certain Sunday and this one definitely did.

I also just finished The Shack by William Young, so I think I was especially tuned into Amazing Grace. Our church is big on saying, "It's a Relationship, not a Religion" and The Shack follows that same idea. I definitely recommend it.