The Stonewall Inn
Today's Document
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Jimmy Eat World
Show & Tell
EXPECTATIONS
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titsay
RMH
Fieri Frames
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TMBGareOK. The Official They Might Be Giants tumblr
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Kiana Khansmith
Noah Kahan
KIROKAZE
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Origami Around
seen from Vietnam
seen from Singapore
seen from Lithuania
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Russia
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
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seen from Malaysia
@smtraxler
Ramblings of a Crazy Cat Lady
Thanks for joining me! I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. — Edgar Allen Poe As my children call me the crazy cat lady, I figured I would start my first blog with the topic of cats. My first cat was Jamie, she was technically my mom’s cat. My mom and dad had her before I was born. She was the $1000 cat because she climbed up inside my dad’s Karmann Ghia and was still there…
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The Fairy and the Witch - Choose your own adventure?
The Fairy and the Witch – Choose your own adventure?
Several years ago, I was in a continuing education class and I wrote this introduction on a napkin out of sheer boredom.
I’ve toyed with it and added to it here and there but I would like to try to get others involved to continue the story, just for fun. Continue the story in the comments and have a bit of fun.
So here goes…
The fairy floated as close to the woman as she could without being seen.…
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Frustrations Galore; my experience with the VA
Frustrations Galore; my experience with the VA
For the last 20+ years I have been helping my husband with getting his disability claim and then pushing him to go back to school through the Vocational Rehab program.
I started working on this for him, mostly because he flat out refused to deal with it and still doesn’t like dealing with it. So we started with getting the Form 21-0845 Auth to Disclose Personal Info so that I could speak on…
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Fireworks In the early morning hours, as she looked down the dark street she saw sparks flying and the following booms and pops many mis-take for gunshots.
Diabeetus
As of 11 days ago, I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, on top of Sub-clinical Hypothyroidism. I wasn’t even upset and maybe because I wasn’t overly surprised as I remember some of the symptoms my brother had when he was diagnosed with Type 1 when he was 15. The clincher was when my vision suddenly changed and I had just had an eye exam in April and got new glasses. I had also been losing…
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Faith in Future Generations
It is not often that we read about good things that are happening in our country these days. I’m proud to say that I know one little girl that is caring and thinks of others. I’ve been without ideas for a while on what to write about. Inspiration came in the form of an 8-year-old girl named Amelia. I’m proud of this little girl; whom I’ve only met a few times as she runs through the Police…
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Frustrations withthe Doctor's and the VA
Frustrations withthe Doctor’s and the VA
How do you go from seeing a Neck & Spine Orthopedic Doctor for neck and spine pain and come away with wrist brace for Carpel Tunnel? And maybe, if the VA will pay for it a cotozone shot in his neck for the pain. Didn’t even bother looking at his middle back where some of the other pain is located. Going into the ER thinking you are having a heart attack only to find that it is due to you being in…
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Ugh Spam Phone Calls We all hate those spam phone calls. I received this in my email today and I thought I would share with my readers (family mostly haha).
A Few Photos to Share
To view more of my work please visit Making Trax. Hope you enjoy.
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Songs of my Life
Music has always been a huge part of my life. Mostly from listening to radio and cassettes when I was younger to cd’s as a young adult transitioning to iTunes and then on to streaming music. I tried (not well) to play the violin when I was 10 and then the clarinet from 11 to 14. And enjoyed singing in the choir at age 15.
I sing when I’m happy and I get songs, sometimes good ones, sometimes songs…
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Small Town...Mayhem??
Small Town…Mayhem??
So, I think my work mayhem may have followed me home. Not literally, but it showed up out of now where.
Two days ago, I woke up about 10 minutes before my alarm, shuffled through the cold house with a full bladder and when I went back in the bedroom decided I really didn’t need to make my lunch and decided to sleep another 1/2 hour. About 20 minutes in to that half hour, the freaking doorbell…
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She did what?
I mentioned before in Quiet Strength and Blunt Honesty that we used to visit the coast every year. One year when my Great Grandmother was still alive, it was the first time my Uncle Tom (before he was my uncle) met anyone in the family. Boy was he in for a surprise.
My Great Grandmother had Parkinson’s Disease, and recently I have been reading about some of the early signs and symptoms (don’t…
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Big Hospital Rant, Little Hospital Rave
Big Hospital Rant, Little Hospital Rave
Ok, I have a rant. My daughter is 22 years old. She started having abdominal pains in her side when she was 16. So that would make the year, 2011. You would think we had pretty good health care even then with all the leaps and bounds in medicine.
We lived in a large city. We went to doctor after doctor, urgent care and emergency room, blood tests and ultrasounds, MRI’s and Cat Scans, yet the…
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Hello Mother! Hello Father! Here I am a Camp Granada!
We didn’t sing the song at camp but I actually attended a camp with the name of that amusing camp song.
After some Internet searching, I was unable to find anything about the camp and I have to assume it has closed. I attended Camp Granada for 2 weeks every summer for 4 years; from the time I was 12 to 16. I was fortunate to have a family who was able to send me to horse camp. My brother attended one year, but it really wasn’t his thing.
Two weeks out of the year, doesn’t seem like a lot of time, but those 8 weeks of my life gave me some of my best memories.
Our day would start out with mucking stalls in the morning, then breakfast, then our morning ride. The ride included going to the pasture to get our horses, then taking them to the arena to properly groom and saddle them. We would generally ride around the arena, learning the proper way to work the horse from walk to trot to canter. They would teach us formations and would practice a routine that would be shown to the parents on the last day of camp (I think I still have the VHS, yes VHS tapes of these rides from those sessions). My favorite was when we would go out on trail rides and get outside.
Ghazid is the horse on the bottom left side of the picture.
The first year, I rode a horse whose nickname was Beans (you can imagine why, he was quite gassy), I can’t remember what his real name was but It was entertaining to a group of young girls trotting along and a horse letting out loud farts. Beans was a gentle, tubby bay for a girl who didn’t have a lot of horse experience. The second year I rode a horse named Ghazid, his main feature was that his tail was extremely short, for an unknown reason and when he would trot he would lift his tail and it would look like a streamer.
 The third year, I started out with a pretty paint named Moon Beam, she was a mean tempered bitch, and that is the only description for her. Needless to say, she bit me in the shoulder while I was grooming her before one of our morning rides. Like I said, mean tempered bitch. Moon Beam was then replaced with Khalid, who was the exact opposite. He was a very mild tempered horse, and I ended up riding him for my 4th year as well. My final year, I tried an English saddle and wound up flying over Khalid’s head and onto my butt on the ground and switching back to a Western saddle.
The camp had a bunk house where the campers would sleep. A boys side and a girls side, but there was rarely any boys. In my 3rd year, the camp hosted a group of Japanese girls; we got to spend time learning about them and ended up making friends. At the end of camp we exchanged gifts from our home lands; I received a pretty pair of chopsticks, which I still have. That year we also signed t-shirts for each other and the girls signed them in Japanese, again, I still have mine.
Each year we would go on field trips. One year we went to Rogue Community College Amphitheater, where each summer they put on 2 musicals throughout the summer. That year had been Oklahoma and at the beginning of the performance they had a stagecoach with horses come from the hill behind the grass seating down to the stage. I thought it was amazing. The other interesting part of this particular performance was that Kevin Hagen, the actor that played Doc Baker on Little House on the Prairie played Ado Annie’s father. He had moved to the area and began acting in the local theatre.
Another year, we went to Historic Jacksonville and to the Britt Festival. I can’t remember what we saw but I recall that the owner, Carmen, and my best camp friends and I had one of the Old Time photos done. We did so many other things, but these are the one the have stuck in my mind over the years.
Top Left to Right: Michelle, Me, Andy & Kara Bottom: Dan (counselor) & Mari Carmen (camp owner)
A wooden mask hung in the dining room of the bunkhouse and legend was that it was cursed and the ‘witch doctor’ would get you if you touched the mask. Of course, we all dared each other to touch it. The closest we would get would be to put a hand in its open mouth (without touch the teeth, of course) and making faces.
 There was swimming in the pond on the property or pool (which was closer), bonfires, story telling, sitting in the bunkhouse playing cards (we generally played one called Speed) and listening to music. We also watched movies…
I’ve never been a fan of scary movies, and one year we watched Poltergeist. Probably wouldn’t have been a big deal except one thing, when we had to go to the bathroom that night. The scene where the clouds are roiling over the house just before all Hell breaks loose…. (I will come back to this after a short explanation).
The bathrooms for the campers were in the barn. At night, the barn doors were open for the paddock horses to run back and forth into the arena and the paddock and we had to go through one side of the barn around the back and down the other side of the barn. During the day we were able to cut across between the paddock and the barn. The night we watched Poltergeist, we walked out of the bunkhouse and down one side of the barn, when we got to the other side of the barn we looked across the yard and the sky above looked just like the one we had just seen in the movie. Of course, as girls will do we squealed and ran to the other side and walked quickly (no running in the barn!) down to the bathroom and did the same on the return trip, all the while giggling and freaking each other out more.
The first year I was there, Carmen’s mother, had just moved to the U.S. from Spain. She was sadly unable to participate in the following years, due to age and health. However, that year, she cooked a traditional Spanish meal, which I have searched for, for 30 years now and have not been able to find anything like it. All I remember was that it contained chicken and a Spanish rice, sounds pretty simple but there was much more to it and for the life of me I haven’t been able to duplicate it.
Finally, there were my camp friends, I made quite a few over the years, but there are 2 that were my camp besties. I lost track of them after I went to college and started moving around but due to the invention of Social Media, I was able to find them again, and even got to meet up with Andy about 5 years ago and introduce her to my children.
Andy & the Witch Doctor
Kara & Amy
Khalid
Flame (watched his gelding my first year…)
Camp Granada Hello Mother! Hello Father! Here I am a Camp Granada! We didn't sing the song at camp but I actually attended a camp with the name of that amusing camp song.
Just hanging out. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bnz030eAlXOdWGFhFeDUXhTtWZbYJ2mk6D5v7w0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=11lerkn3ldyfn
I Was Slapped This Morning In the leg, by Bean, because I was standing by his dish and was not filling it with food.
Evil No More
The grass and flowers swayed and the wind blew down the deserted stretch of highway. A coyote howled in the distance, and startled out of its hiding place, a rabbit kicked off and high speed. In the darkness, shadows danced and played peekaboo with the moon. The peaceful scene, was momentarily thrown into one of terror when the blackness began to cover the glowing orb. Then came great flash of…
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