Saturday, August 13, 2011

first friends


Summer of 1968
Originally uploaded by Julep67
When you are the first born child in a family, your first real friends are your cousins. My first friend was my cousin Kathy Forbes. She was two years older than me and she was also the first born child in her family. Eventually, we would both become big sisters to younger brothers named Patrick.

I've been thinking about Kathy a lot this week. She passed away 3 years ago today, after a long, hard-fought battle with brain cancer. She was 43 years old.

This morning when I got up, I poured a coffee and started going through some photo albums my parents had put together for me a few years ago. I had a good time looking at the old family pictures of us kids. All of us look like kids, children and parents alike.

I scanned the first of what I expect will become many batches of photos from those albums and put them on flickr. I plan to share them with my cousins because I'm sure that some of them have either not been seen in a while or not seen at all by them.

In other news, today is Gracie's birthday. She's 4. Sam turns 4 on Monday. They got to have chicken for dinner and a fancy organic dog cookie for a treat earlier today. It's a dog life around here for sure.

Via Flickr:
me and my cousin Kathy, hanging at Grandma Forbes' house during the summer of 1968.

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

not for me

I'm on vacation this week, home with the dogs. Mark will be off next week so this week I've been puttering around the house and doing some reading.

Just got back from a walk with the dogs and thought I'd put a movie on while I sorted out some papers in my office. "Eat Pray Love" was available on demand. Started to watch it, got about 9 minutes in before I had to shut it off. Admittedly, I have not read the book. I'm not big on things that have "pray" or "prayer" in the title (unless it's A Prayer for Owen Meany). I find that if I can't care about the main character in a movie after 5 minutes, I'm probably not going to stick with it. I gave this one 9 so that's four extra minutes. Generous of me huh?

Partly I blame documentaries. We've been watching a lot of them lately and after a spell of them, I find it tough to go back to movies. I may just have to put some music on while I sort and shred and declutter my mess of an office.

Hard to figure out how I will accomplish that without disturbing the dogs who are sleeping under my chair right now. They love a walk but they crash hard after it's over. I may just let them sleep for a little while before I dig in. Looks like it's going to rain today anyway, so I'm in no rush to get through it all.

Found this a few weeks ago. Forgot how awesome Fernwood Tonight had been. The added bonus of a young Tom Waits is extra fun.