Black and White calendar for sale

This is a sample of a calendar my daughter is selling to help pay for her trip to Nicaragua this winter. Feel free to contact me if you would like to help support the cause!

Lindsay Lohan, what happened?!

We watched Lindsay Lohan in the movie Freaky Friday recently. She was so cute and squeaky clean. What does Hollywood do to these girls? She is so NOT cute and squeaky clean now. It is distressing! Drugged out, skinny, sleazing around with men and women....cannot act in a movie...

Her last film, the one about her pretending she was pregnant went straight to DVD and it was suppose to be her re-entry into acting! It is so sad. I wish some of these young actresses after they make and INVEST their millions would leave Hollywood, go to college and do something great with their live instead of living the self destructive life in Hollywood. It is pretty tough watching so many of them self-destruct right before our very eyes.

Father daughter bonding

I came home from work the other night and my daughter was home sick. She was staying home for another day and so she was downstairs watching tv. My husband calls the tv area his man-cave. It is a pretty inhospitable environment of our basement where we have our tv/vcr/DVD player set up. I like it because the TV or "boob tube" is not a huge part of our daily lives. Anyway, I was cleaning up the kitchen and I could hear music and dialogue from downstairs. It sounded kind of older cinematic music. Finally, I went downstairs to see what they were watching. I looked onto the screen and saw a forest scene with bloodhounds and men searching for a runaway. I said, "The Spitfire Grill, I love this movie!" Thinking, what a great movie for my husband and daughter to watch together. A sweet but sad story of a girl fresh out of prison trying to make a new life for herself.

My daughter started to giggle and my husband looked at me and said, "No, it's First Blood with Sylvester Stallone."

I returned to the kitchen.

Oregon Postcard 2

This is another postcard series I made with my daughter's photographs.

It is interesting to see the different items she likes to take pictures of...very colorful.

Oregon Coast Postcard 1

These are some photos that my daughter took while we were at the Oregon coast in August of 2008. She was 14 yrs. old at the time....and a great photographer by then! I try to take pictures but mine usually come out blurry.

I do like putting the photos together in this type of collage format...check out my other blog for my Australia photos!

Letter to my daughter take two

I wrote a guest editorial five or six years ago after I chaperoned a dance at Lewis and Clark High school. My editorial was a letter to my daughter trying to formulate an answer on “how was the dance?” At the age of nine, she was so excited to hear about what the dance was like at the high school. I was in a quandary because what I had witnessed was so distressing. Young people groping and grinding in an orgiastic frenzy in a hot and dark gymnasium.
Now six years later I am addressing the same situation. She has just attended her first high school Homecoming dance and she is a little bit shell shocked from the experience. She did not partake in the freak dancing although a number of young men attempted to encourage her. Very little has changed in terms of teenage dancing strategies in the past ten years…this passing phase of “dirty dancing” is still going strong. Many faculties and administrations have addressed this issue by canceling most mixers and keeping Homecoming and Prom in the hopes that the formal wear will encourage more appropriate dancing. One school on the southern skirt of town has seen the necessity to lock all exits so that revved up dancers do not take their gyrations to the next level and remove all obstacles of clothing out on the football field.
The way this trend seems to be going culturally, I would not be surprised if we started inoculating the girls for Human Papillomavirus Virus on their way into the dance and hand out condoms to the young men on the way out….better safe than sorry! However, the issue has become way too personal for me now…My daughter’s trauma and other like her add a whole new dimension to this issue. At the dance, I cannot tell you how many young women came up and told me that teen boys had forced their grinding dancing onto them without their consent. An upper classmen told me how some guy came up to her and grabbed her in the crotch while she was dancing with girlfriends.
In this day and age of sexual harassment, I cannot help but think that we are really dropping the ball here. Yet, I do not believe that ending all mixers and dances is the solution, the students from wealthy families simply rent a grange hall and hold their own mixers off campus. We need to find some suitable alternatives that allows for socialization without the threat of assault.
One Christian school in the area holds a ball for their 7th-12th graders that encompasses refreshments, parental involvement, and dances of the Jane Austen tradition. Other churches hold dances for their youth groups with the absence of freak-in. Many colleges have dances in which Swing dancing is taught and then practiced for the evening. I believe as a culture we need to address this issue of Dirty Dancing and help design some alternatives that will allow the sexes to interact without our girls getting pressured into unwanted contact. Do we really want to have a bowl of condoms next to the punch?

Encores on the first day of school..............

the first day of school....I never sleep well, nervous about my classes, the students...nightmares of 50 minutes of class time with nothing to do and them all looking at me and thinking, "our teacher is an idiot!"

This year was worse, I worked out in the morning after a fitful night sleep and drove home to pick up my daughter. I poured cereal as we were running out the door...1/2 a mile down the road I realized my mistake...if I continued eating I was going to hurl all over the steering wheel.

I eventually made it to school, but my anxiety was not relieved in any way because I could not find my classroom keys. I had pulled them out of my purse the week before while we were on vacation... and I had not thought of them since. Finding them in our house was going to be a hay stack style of search since we had not really unpacked from the trip.

I traveled the hallways in search of a master key to open up my room, in the meantime I ran into a favored student that was leaving for a new opportunity in Seattle. I listened to his plans as sweat beaded up on my forehead...the waves of nausea were back and Honey bunches of Oats were ready for a repeat appearance. This great kid was telling me of his exciting future and all I could think about was how not to puke on his shoes....encores on the first day of school