Living Low
Dallas-Fort Worth is home to me. I was born here, lived here until I was 35, did some moving around in different states for 11 years, then happily came back to let my toes become reacquainted with the sweet Texas soil. When I heard the Bushes (of the W. variety) were planning his presidential library to be built on the grounds of SMU, right here in the metroplex, I was thrilled, because I'm a lover of history, both of our country, and the presidency, itself. With this knowledge, you now know that yesterday found me watching the dedication of that beautiful building and its contents, set against the azure sky of my home state, with full colors and the Battle Hymn of the Republic sung...
Judge Not
I actually had something else in mind to write about this morning, but I can't seem to shake this image, and the conversation that I read surrounding it yesterday. I'll be honest with you. This is really hard for me to look at for very long, as all I can think is "his face...his beautiful face!" On top of that, it just makes me feel sad. Piercing is one thing, but the gauging is something I cannot get my brain around. Yesteryear's dying your hair bright blue in the name of self-expression seems pretty tame by comparison. But when this came through my newsfeed on Facebook yesterday, and a friend whom I've never met, but whose work and viewpoint I admire, had posted a comment to it, I was...
Real TRUE Beauty
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about labels. It was about how we see other people, and how we often only get to know them within the confines of whatever label they happen to carry. It was interesting to me that, very soon after, this "Real Beauty Sketches" video from the people at Dove went viral. I'll give you a minute to watch it, if by some miracle you missed it! When I first saw it, I thought it very thought-provoking, certainly telling about us, as a society, and how much we rely on the thoughts of others as our truth. Then, the controversy started. There was a lot of talk about how it was only done with thin white women, and only a small subset, at that. How it...
Wash, Rinse, Repeat
I was schlepping my laundry basket from my closet to the washer yesterday, trying to get it all in one trip and failing pretty miserably, leaving a trail of socks and underwear in my wake. It's been a Monday ritual for the last almost-thirty years, with quite a few of those years also including additional days of the week. As I was sorting it all in piles on the laundry room floor, I wondered exactly how many loads I had done, how many stains I'd fought and conquered (I'm a mean stain-fighter; truly, stains tremble in my presence), how many socks I'd dried and inexplicably lost. While I don't have an exact number, I know it's a LOT on every count! Dirty laundry is a continual,...
Finger Paint
I usually wait a couple of weeks after a trip to Florida, for a day when I'm really missing my people down there, then I check the pictures on my phone and iPad and see what I find. With a tech-savvy toddler in the house, there is absolutely NO TELLING what could be waiting for me there. Usually, it's 72 of the same photo in a row, say, of Lilli's foot, or the top of her head. But I had forgotten that I'd loaded some interactive books with games and puzzles on my iPad this time, and they allow you to color a picture, then take a photo of it, saving it to your photo gallery. That little beauty to the left, there, was left just for me. It makes me think of her, sitting there in deep...