Sunrise

For some reason my sleep schedule is all out of whack lately. Either I'm unable to fall asleep until very late at night, or I fall asleep at a decent hour but then am wide awake at 4, 3, or sometimes even 2:00 in the morning!!! This is Saturday, a day when I could sleep as late as I'd like since there's nothing but housework awaiting me today. But, no. Just before 4:00 I was wide awake. Again. So, I got up and surfed the net for a while, answered some emails, sorted some more pictures and woke Marty at 6:00. I said, "Come watch the sunrise with me." He told me to come back in a few minutes, to let him sleep just a bit longer. So, I did and a FEW minutes later I woke him again. He was a good sport and got up and we went for a drive to see the sunrise. We can't watch it from our yard because there are too many trees where we live. I first brought up the subject of watching the sunrise last night, so he was forewarned that I'd be waking him early. We had talked about taking the motorcycle, but he said it would be too cold this morning. He was right. When I got up it was 68 degrees and I was cold so I didn't hesitate to take the car instead. Yes, I was cold at 68 degrees. I'm a huge wimp when it comes to being cold!

It was just getting light when we headed out and the sun had not yet made an appearance. I took some photos of the peacefule, foggy morning.

Then we decided to drive down to the river to see if there were any good photo ops there with the fog over the river. The fog was up higher on the hill but I was still able to get some decent shots.

When we drove back up the hill to check out the sun rise, this is what greeted us:

And now I'm in dire need of a nap!

Costumes

Fall is here. There's a crisp feel to the air, the nights are finally cooler (although the days are still HOT) and the leaves are beginning to fall. I really miss Missouri at this time of year. There are no spectacular colors here in South Texas to enjoy....only greens turning to brown and trees becoming bare. I guess our colorful springs make up for the drabness of fall and winter!

With this time of year, thoughts begin to turn to fall festivals, carnivals, county fairs, hay rides, Halloween, and costumes. I've been going through old pictures and came across some Halloween costume pictures of Heather and I decided to post them. We rarely purchased Halloween costumes for her and I always tried to make them, even trying to make them with whatever we could find around the house when possible.

One year she was the tin man. I spray painted a box silver and strapped it on her. I rolled thin cardboard tubes and spray painted them and put around her arms and legs. I cut gray fabric (I think from a pair of her old long-johns) and stapled pieces of that to the pieces of cardboard to create joints so she could bend her arms and legs a little. I found silver make up and put it on her face. This costumed turned out to be a very frustrating one for her! She couldn't sit in the box well and it had to be removed each time she got in and out of the car. She couldn't bend well despite the joints we made. She carried her daddy's oil can in one hand as part of the costume. We took her to the dance studio for a costume contest and parade and she won a prize. She was adorable! But, to retrieve her prize she had to walk up the steps to the platform for all to see her costume. She couldn't get up the steps so her gym coach Mr. Chris picked her up and set her on the platform. At one point during the evening she sat down on the sidelines with all the other kids...and she fell over backward....and could not get herself up! It was so funny and we all laughed so hard. She was not at all impressed with her mom's costume making abilities that year!

Here's my "tin man". Notice the duct tape is beginning to peel off her legs???

Another year I sent her to school as a bag of jelly beans. I recreated the logo from a bag of Jelly Belly and printed it really big and attached it to a large clear plastic bag. I cut a hole for her head and 2 for her arms and we blew up ballons and stuffed inside the bag she wore. She didn't like this costume at all either. At the time I worked for a company in West Plains that colored comic books. Several of the employees there dressed up for Halloween every year. I was one of them. Mostly we dressed up as comic book characters (imagine that!) and I went as Cat Woman one year and Huntress another year. The day Heather dressed as a bag of jelly beans, I dressed up as a scarecrow with some help from my sister Regina. At the end of the work and school day Heather saw my costume and said, "Mommy, can I just wear your costume tonight when we go trick-or-treating?" I told her of course she could and we proceeded to make it work for her. She was a GREAT scarecrow and these are my absolute favorite Halloween pictures:

We of course have a huge assortment of dance costumes in our closets (because I can't bear to part with any of them! Silly, I know, but that's just the way it is.) The following costume was originally a black unitard for a solo tap dance routine Heather performed to "Twilight Zone." Miss Suzi had been watching Circ de Soleil at the time this costume selection was made and approached me about watching Circ with her and painting Heather's costume to look like something from there. I agreed to see what I could do. Because painting the fabric would cause it to no longer be stretchy, Heather had to sit for hours in the costume as it was being painted. There's even a face painted on the back of the hood for the parts of the routine in which Heather's back was to the audience. Miss Suzi even wanted her to put red food coloring in her mouth just prior to each performance so her tongue would be bright red as there's a part of the routine where she had to stick her tongue out. The judges at the competitions LOVED this number!!! Of course we had to keep tissues on hand to wipe the food coloring off her teeth!!! Then green make up had to be purchased for her face. Then it was decided she needed some sparkle on her face. Thank God for eyelash glue!!!!! Works wonders for sticking things to your hair and face!!! This turned out to be the MOST EXPENSIVE COSTUME EVER!!! But didn't she look awesome (if not a bit freaky???)!!! We even had to have a separate pair of tap shoes so they could be painted green!!! All in all, Heather was a pretty good sport for all she endured for this dance!!!!

Heather's next tap costume definitely made up for the expense of the previous one! The wig was borrowed from a fellow dancer. The top was from a costume from Heather's first recital in Texas a few years prior. Of course back then it was not snug and the fringe hung way down to her thighs! The pants no longer fit at all so I took a pair of her jazz pants and cut patches from the old pants and sewed them on the jazz pants. Then because these jazz pants were too short I cut off a strip from the bottom of the old pants legs and attached them to the bottom of the jazz pants. It turned out great and she even won a platinum trophy for a costume contest at the dance competition! Heather is an amazing tapper and I sure miss watching her tap performances!!! (and ballet, and jazz, and lyrical....sigh)

Has It Really Been That Long?????

I hadn't planned to continue my trek down memory lane tonight, but here I am doing just that. I'll throw in a new sunset photo I took tonight to make up for it to those of you not interested in glimpses of my past. :0)

I introduced you to some of our Arizona friends, including "Tree" here. Tree and I have been emailing off and on for a couple of years, after having lost touch for several years. We talked long ago, right after graduation from tech school, about having a reunion of all our Arizona friends. It never happened and most of us have lost touch. This evening we began discussing that again. We haven't seen most of those friends since we graduated tech school in 1991. The rest (except for Dar) we haven't seen since 1993 when Marty and I left Arizona for the last time. We have decided to have a "Friends" reunion in Arizona in 2009 and he and I split up the list of the group to try to find them all and contact them. We've talked about this for years and now we're finally doing something about it! It will be so much fun to see them all again!

Here's Tree back then, in a picture taken at his wedding:

Here's a more recent photo of him I swiped from his myspace page:

On top of that trek down memory lane, I also checked my messages at classmates.com. I rarely do that. Since I don't have a paid account I wasn't even sure if I could send and receive messages there, so it was a fluke that I even checked. I logged on to classmates so I could go to the tech school and see if I could locate some of our friends from AZ there. I never got that far. I had a message from my buddy Rusty (who prefers to be called Russell now) from third grade!!! I haven't seen or talked to him since we were seniors in high school. I was just telling someone about him this week. Russell and I used to play together in grade school. He is also to blame for a scar I have on my knuckle! He stepped on my hand in third grade, leaving me scarred for life. :0) He's also the one to give me my childhood nickname that I've always hated and won't share with anyone. (Regina if you say a word I'll make you regret it!!!) I hope he doesn't mind, but I'm sharing his message here:

I don't know if you recognize me, I haven't gone by the name Rusty for
years and years...Some of my fondest grade school memories are the ones of us
giggling in third and fourth grade.You could always make me laugh really hard.
You have a nice looking family and I just wanted to say hello and thanks for the
fond memories. Hope you are doing well.

This is our third grade class oh so long ago:

It was so funny to hear from Russell today. I was just telling Marty a story about him this week!!! Isn't it fun how a simple message can take you back to relive those fun moments of long ago?

Boys and Their Toys

Marty's first car was a 1974 Firebird. It was red with bits of yellow where a previous owner had an encounter with a light pole. I can't find a picture of this car yet, but when I do I'll post it and our "Bonnie and Clyde" story along with it.





When I met Marty he worked at an outdoor outfitter store and was going to school to get his degree in automotive and diesel technology. I guess spending all the time I did with him and his other automotive friends got me somewhat interested in sports cars as well. Of course I'd long had a love of Corvettes, but they introduced me to some other sports cars I'd never even noticed before.





Marty tried to teach me to drive his Firebird but it was a 3-speed and I'd never been taught to drive a stick. It appeared pretty hopeless. I could not get it and each lesson would usually end in tears of frustration. He eventually gave up and put an automatic transmission in it so I could drive it. I will go into more detail about how that came about when I post about Bonnie and Clyde.





My room mate Dar always wanted a 1968 Camaro and she wanted it painted Parrot Green. She and Marty enjoyed debating that one. He doesn't care for green and enjoyed teasing her that she would ruin that car painting it such a putrid color. Marty's car of choice is also a 1968 Camaro, in Pearl White, with Rally Stripes. It all sounded good until he said rally stripes. I'm not crazy about rally stripes.





One night while we were sitting in the drive through of a fast food restaurant near our apartment complex, waiting on our food, a drunk man from a nearby bar approached the car. Though Marty's car didn't look great it did sound great. Marty was all about high performance engines and fast cars that rumbled. This man was in need of money and it seemed he had a car for sale he thought might interest us....a 1967 Firebird ready to race with a plexi-glass window, push button start, etc. He said he'd bondo'd the louvres in the rear quarterpanel and made every attempt to make it look like a Camaro instead of a Firebird. The only give-away that it was in fact a Firebird, were the tail lights. We decided to take a look at it. After seeing it and starting it, of course we had to have it. The price was one we could afford and I made arrangements to purchase the car. It had wide rear tires, which incidentally didn't last very long for some reason...


Although the car was ready for racing it was still street legal...barely. Because it was a push-button start there was no key. We were concerned it would be very easy to steal so we kept it locked despite no key and we kept a straigtened coat hanger just under the hood so we could unlock the door.


The car had some quirks along the way. I was constanly blowing transmission lines it seemed, the last time when it was 115 degrees and I was 8 months pregnant and still 2 miles from the shop where I was to pick Marty up from work! And the car constantly overheated if I had to sit at a red light too long. It was also very hot and no a/c. The car didn't idle well either. At stop lights I'd have to sit with one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas to keep it running. Nearby drivers would assume because the car would be almost lurching from the high idle, that it was because I was trying to get them to race. Many times I would race them, but just "off the line". Stories of my racing always got back to Marty and he'd chuckle...until it was time to buy new tires. I was totally blown away one afternoon by a Vette. Wow was that a fast car (the Vette!)






We took the car to Wyoming when Heather was a baby to visit Marty's family. The trunk was way to small to hold all our luggage and I couldn't downsize what we needed to take enough to get it to fit. The spare tire took up most of the trunk! So, we had no choice but to put a luggage rack on the car. Marty was horrified! He waited until the last possible moment to put it on the car so none of our friends would see it then when we were almost to his hometown he took back roads into town and as soon as he arrived at his mom's he took the luggage rack off. I wish I'd taken a picture of it!!! ('cause I'm just that mean!)





When we moved to Wyoming I had to learn to drive in the snow...in the Firebird! I'd grown up in Missouri where we had lots of snow but I'd never driven in it. I was scared to death and we lived way out in the boondocks, 30 miles from where I worked in Worland, WY. Marty did teach me well how to handle driving in the snow and I always managed to keep the car on the road. As part of my job responsibilities at the shopper paper where I worked, I had to drive the paper to another town (Thermopolis aka Hot Springs) to the post office. Thermopolis has some hills that are very scary in the snow and ice. The car did great on the way to the post office with the weight of all those bags of papers in the trunk and back seat. However once empty, the car would fishtail just trying to get out of the post office parking lot. I was always a bundle of nerves getting back home again!





We eventually had to sell the car when it became a money pit and needed more work than we could afford to keep it running. Marty was so heart broken when we left it in Wyoming to be sold and moved to Missouri. We always thought we'd find another one, but who knew those muscle cars would get soooo expensive!!!!


Marty got to know my Uncle Jerry pretty well when we moved back to my hometown. Jerry ran a salvage yard and his hobby is racing cars, specifically an IMCA Modified race car. West Plains has a circle track and that's where Marty spent most weekends. He became Jerry's pit crew. Before Heather got so involved with dance, we'd usually go with him and watch the races from the pit. These were taken the year I helped paint Jerry's car:

My friend Suzanne posted recently about her husband Bill's winning night at the race track in West Plains here.

Here's my sports car of choice. No, I didn't take this photo. I scanned it from my Corvette book.

I don't care for it in orange. This suits it much better, don't you think?

Big Brother Finale Party

I posted before about our "obsession" with reality tv. Tonight was the finale for Big Brother. Our 2 favorite players lasted until the final 2 and it was up to the jury to decide which one would win the prize money. We'd have enjoyed watching the finale at home, but it was made even more enjoyable when we decided to watch the final episode with our friends who are just as (if not more) obsessed! We all pitched in with hamburgers, hotdogs and the trimmings for a simple dinner and gathered at Jimmy and Paula's house to eat and watch tv. Even Marty and Jason were off and able to enjoy the finale.

Heather and Michael wrapped up homework before the show began.

Chef Jason prepared our food.

Ok, so I'm even more obsessed with my camera than with Big Brother....

Marty was determined to hide behind his shades when all the cameras came out!

Paula and Erica engrossed.

Jason and Erica. Aren't they sweet???

Even the teenagers are really into this show!!!

Paula and Jimmy really enjoying all this.

Thanks guys for a fun evening! Next up....SURVIVOR!!!!

Arizona (continued)

I began telling you about my move to Arizona here. I look back now and still remember that time as being full of excitement, fun, and close friends who still mean a lot to us.

The night I met Marty, I also met his friend Garth, who we knew then as "Tree." The man is 6'4" (or is it 6'6"???) so I can only assume that's why he was called Tree. Marty lived upstairs from the apartment where the party was we'd been invited to. Those throwing the party were Tom and Frank and they were celebrating Tom's birthday. All these guys and many more we met were friends of Marty's through school. They were attending the Automotive campus of the tech school Dar and I were attending. (Dar and I attended the graphic design campus 11 blocks away from the main campus.)

One of the dates Marty and I went on was to a nearby roller skating rink. We were skating around when we noticed a guy in a cap that said "Wyoming" across the front. Marty's from Wyoming so this got his attention quickly. Marty went up to him and said, "You from Wyoming?" That's all it took. The conversation poured. Tron and Ed (his cousin) were from Laramie, Wyoming and Marty from Torrington. We learned that Tron and Ed were also enrolled in the same tech school as Marty. Tron invited Marty and me to go 4-wheelin' out in the desert with him the next day. We agreed that it sounded like fun. I think that's the first and last time I've been 4-wheelin'. It was fun for the most part but I'm sure I saw my life flash before my eyes a few times as he'd race up the hills and I was sure he was going to tip his truck over before we headed back down! I later learned to just brace myself whenever riding with Tron anywhere! He still carries the honor of the scariest driver we know! Just buckle up and hold on when Tron's in the driver's seat!

As new friendships were formed most weekends were spent with all of us hanging out somewhere together: Marty, me, Dar, Tree, Tron, Tom and Frank (sometimes Ed, Adrian and others would join us too). The only married couple in the group were Jim and Joyce and I can't remember exactly how we met them. I think Jim and Tron were buddies but I'm not sure. We were a scattered bunch with Dar and me from Missori; Marty, Tron and Ed from Wyoming; Tree from Portland, Oregon; Tom and Frank from Eugene and Cresswell, Oregon; Adrian from Mountain Home, Idaho; and Jim and Joyce from Colorado Springs, Colorado.
While we were all in school, bonds were formed that still exist today. Tree was the best man when we married and Dar was my maid of honor. Although we've lost touch with most we still keep in touch with a few and email has made that easier. Tree is the only one I know of still in Arizona. We still email from time to time and still send him Christmas cards. He has a 10-yeard old son we've never met. Tron is back in Wyoming with his family. We haven't seen him since Heather was 2 years old and he has 2 children we've never met. We call every year or two and send Christmas cards. Dar and I still email fairly regulary and call every few months, or try to. No matter how much time has passed between conversations, it's as if no time has passed.
As I'm writing this I've just received an email forward from Tree so I asked him how we met Jim and Joyce. Here's his reply: "we met jim and his big ugly dodge at school!"

For all these guys it was all about their cars (or their trucks)! Tree had a 64 1/2 Mustang. Marty and I had a '67 Firebird (well....it was half Firebird half Camaro -- front end was Camaro, back end was Firebird). The guys at school called it our "Chevyac" or "Fire Chicken". But oh could that car MOVE! Marty says I had way too much fun driving that car! He claims he couldn't keep tires on it....guilty as charged.... Tron's a Ford man and had a Ford truck for 4-wheelin' and had a Thunderbird for crusing in. Either one was a scary ride! Jim was a mopar man and did have a big ugly truck. (Sorry Jim!)

I think they let me hang out with them because they liked my tea and the no bake cookies I'd make for Marty!

Here's our '67 Firebird. I couldn't find a better picture yet.

Ed, Me, and Tron at our Graduation!

I worked at Sears for a while in the childrens clothing department. The Phoenix Suns Gorilla made an appearance one day to help sell some Suns Tshirts. Spurs fans: please don't hold this against me!!!

Whereas now our hang out spot is Kirby's Korner....back then our diner of choice was the 5 & Diner. I always thought it was cool that it was on Missouri Avenue!

I don't have a lot of photos of myself from back then, unless they look like this one. Marty doesn't pick up the camera often, but when he does this is what he takes pictures of!

This was our cat "Sox". Yes, we were creative, weren't we?

Frank and "Lucifer". Frank, Tom and Lucifer lived downstairs from us when we lived in the apartment complex near the school.

Jim. I don't have a picture of his truck. I wish I had a photo of the day he dumped it in the river and had to be towed out!!!

Tree and Tron the day Marty and I got married.

Marty and me...way back when.

Dar and me being goofy in a mall photo booth.

Playing in the Verde River in Tron's truck. Marty's standing in the back.

Tron's car. I'm telling you some of my scariest moments were in this car!

Tom.

Tron's apartment where we'd hang out and play sand volleyball. Even when I was pregnant! What fun we all had!

Where we went to the movies. We could always scrape up enough money to go to the dollar movies. This one was located in the same center as my school. I remember one night after class I thought I'd lost my mind because I couldn't find my car! I finally found it over next to the theatre and could not remember parking it there! I was about to drive off when I found a note on the windshield that said "Gotcha!" Frank and Tron had skipped school and pushed my car across the parking lot and then went to the movies. I'm so glad they were still in the movie and didn't see me trying to find my car!!!

Dar with Heather just before we moved to Wyoming. She'd brought Heather some warm jammies to keep her warm in cold Wyoming!

The house we lived in after Heather was born. I STILL love that house!!!

The view from our back yard.

Heather and I with Snoopy at a park Dar and I used to live near and go to swing.