EAT Spam!

I just had to load this story up...it is so funny...

SPAM...what is spam? Well, I grew up on it, and love it. Sorry for all of you non SPAM eaters....

They actually had a story on line that SPAM sales are increasing, and they are making 2 lines of shifts to increase production of SPAM! YEAH!!!...

So, eat SPAM!

BE AMERICAN!

SUPPORT the SPAM Makers!

(ok, I know my humor is OFF!)

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2008/11/17/spam-other-filling-foods-selling-well/

the Invisible Mom

Read to the end, this is really great!

It all began to make sense, the blank stares,

the lack of response,
the way one of the kids will walk into the room while I'm on the phone and ask to be taken to the store.
Inside I'm thinking, Can't you see I'm on the phone?'

Obviously not; no one can see if I'm on the phone, or cooking,or sweeping the floor, or even standing on my head in the corner,because no one can see me at all.

I'm invisible.

The invisible Mom.

Some days I am only a pair of hands, nothing more! Can you fix this? Can you tie this? Can you open this?

Some days I'm not a pair of hands; I'm not even a human being. I'm a clock to ask, 'What time is it?'

I'm a satellite guide to answer, 'What number is the Disney Channel?'
I'm a car to order, 'Right around 5:30, please.
'I was certain that these were the hands that once held books andthe eyes that studied history and the mind that graduated summa cum laude - but now they had disappeared into the peanut butter, never to be seen again.

She's going, she's going, she's gone!

One night, a group of us were having dinner, celebrating the return of a friend from England . Janice had just gotten back from a fabulous trip, and she was going on and on about the hotel she stayed in. I was sitting there, looking around at the others all put together so well. It was hard not to compare and feel sorry for myself.

I was feeling pretty pathetic, when Janice turned to me with a beautifully wrapped package, and said, 'I brought you this.' It was a book on the great cathedrals of Europe.

I wasn't exactly sure why she'd given it to me until I read her inscription: 'To Charlotte, with admiration for the greatness of what you are building when no one sees.'In the days ahead I would read - no, devour - the book.

And I would discover what would become for me, four life-changing truths, after which I could pattern my work:

No one can say who built the great cathedrals - we have no record of their names. These builders gave their whole lives for a work they would never see finished. They made great sacrifices and expected no credit.

The passion of their building was fueled by their faith that the eyes of God saw everything.

A legendary story in the book told of a rich man who came to visit the cathedral while it was being built, and he saw a workman carving atiny bird on the inside of a beam. He was puzzled and asked the man, 'Why are you spending so much time carving that bird into a beam that will be covered by the roof, No one will ever see it. And the workman replied, 'Because God sees.'I closed the book, feeling the missing piece fall into place.

It was almost as if I heard God whispering to me, 'I see you, Charlotte.

I see the sacrifices you make every day, even when no one around you does.

No act of kindness you've done, no sequin you've sewn on, no cupcake you've baked, is too small for me to notice and smile over.

You are building a great cathedral, but you can't see right now what it will become.

At times, my invisibility feels like an affliction.

But it is not a disease that is erasing my life. It is the cure for the disease of my own self-centeredness. It is the antidote to my strong, stubborn pride.I keep the right perspective when I see myself as a great builder.

As one of the people who show up at a job that they will never see finished, to work on something that their name will never be on.

The writer of the book went so far as to say that no cathedrals could ever be built in our lifetime because there are so few people willing to sacrifice to that degree.

When I really think about it, I don't want my son to tell the friend he's bringing home from college for Thanksgiving, 'My Mom gets up at 4 in the morning and bakes homemade pies, and then she hand bastes a turkey for 3 hours and presses all the linens for the table.' That would mean I'd built a shrine or a monument to myself.

I just want him to want to come home. And then, if there is anything more to say to his friend; to add, 'You're gonna love it there.

'As mothers, we are building great cathedrals.

We cannot be seen if we're doing it right.

And one day, it is very possible that the world will marvel, not only at what we have built, but at the beauty that has been added to the world by the sacrifices of invisible women.Great Job, MOM!

Share this with all the Invisible Moms you know... I just did.

The Will of God will never take you where the Grace of God will not protect you.

Dad,......August 10 through 19

My dad almost died this August. He was in ICU for almost 1 1/2 weeks, and we almost lost him. It was really scary, and although we were praying for miracles, the miracle was that we would all be at peace, which whatever God had in store.

You can pray for healing, you can pray for miracles, but just knowing that it isn't in your hands is a hard thing to just 'let go'.

The peace that GOD brought to my brothers and myself was that we did get to have time with dad. He was healed and he did walk out of the hospital


He was able to celebrate his birthday, he's 74.

This is my dad moved from ICU to a cardiac care room, and he's doing well.

He was discharge on August 21st, 2 days later.

How Well Read are you?

Are you Well Read?
I saw this little list on Shannon's Blog, Live, Laugh, Love and Stamp.The Big Read" reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)
6) Amy's adding...I didn't read it but I saw the movie...mark with an astrick!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (NEVER)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell*
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald *
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams*
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen*
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (kind of duplicates #33)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden*
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown*
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert*
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen*
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58??? It wasn't on the list I copied
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding*
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker*
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray*
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple, Alice Walker*
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro*
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine de St. Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

35/100 -Read Not bad...How'd you do?
plus 13 movies

cupids...and torrance...

Obon Season is coming!

Obon Schedule for 2008

Want a cultural event, Japanese Style?

go visit the OBON. It is Japanese culture at it's best in America.

Obon is Japanese style dancing. Anyone can try it. They have practices for each one which start up about a month or so before the actual Obon. It is great exercise, without being very strenuous, and you will have fun with others learning Japanese style dancing.

At the Obon, you can get dressed up in a Kimono or wear a Hapi coat and dance in the street or in the parking lot of the temple. You can, afterwards, enjoy Japanese style foods like Chicken Teriyaki or Shish-kabob sticks of beef or chicken, or sushi, sushi rice (no fish), and veggies.

For a more cultured event, you can also visit the exhibits. Many Obons have flower arranging, and bonsai exhibits as well as art displayed. They might have Origami exhibits! Some also have vintage Kimonos on display.

For those of you who don't know about Kimonos, wearing a Kimono is a very traditional style of dress in Japan. Many contemporary people in Japan have never worn the traditional Kimonos, which can take at least an hour or more to get dressed. The colorful Kimonos, (the pretty ones) are for the young unmarried girls, and the more drab two tones Kimonos (usually navy and white) are for the married, older women. (like the flowers attracting the bees...hint hint)...

The Obi is a stiff belt or sash that is worn around the waist area, and is usually colorful for the young women, and navy or black for the older, married women. I still have my Obi from my grandmother when she bought it for me in Japan.

http://www.japanese-city.com/calendar/events/japanese-city-events-locations-summer-obon-odori-taiko-line-dancing-dango-drums-games-food.php

Lakers at CDA

Well, today, we saw LAKERS.....
well, I did at least! It was fun to go to CDA but most of all, it is always entertaining to see who is at CDA and signing Basketballs, footballs etc... (CDA=California Dental Association)

This year, we had...... RICK FOX !!!

And............JERRY WEST!!!
How cool is that!!!!