Willow and Work

Happy Birthday Willow!!  I hate not being able to spend birthdays and holidays with my girls.. :(



I have tons of work to do, but that's ok. It's a gray day (Ernesto provided that) and I have my music and some tea, so much will be done today!



I have to get over this. I get so nervous and just petrified to meet new people, that I passed on an invitation to hang out with faculty and staff  and meet the new "big wig".  I prefer the behind the scenes role, but I have to realize that it's ok to be in front every now and then and not let the fear rule me....I'll work on that one!

Quite a nice birthday

Yesterday was my birthday.  All in all, I had a very nice celebration. On Sunday, my children living nearby, joined me for a cookout.  We played a game of casual Uno and just visited. That's always fantastic. My children are all adult or near adult.  so spending any time with them is always fun.



Yesterday, I worked all day and then went to a very nice dinner. Some may say, "Aww, you had to work on your birthday.." but fear not! The sense of accomplishment and the release of stress due to the fact that I knew I had progressed in a large project that has a close deadline is completely worth it. Factor in that I get to crank tunes and work in my home, (the commute is just so HARD- move cat...heheh) makes it all the more enjoyable.  The dinner was very nice, too. My bestest friend, my husband and I had dinner in Alexandria at Ted's Montana Grill. Nothing says birthday better than a tender and juicy bison fillet...mmmm! AND to top off the evening, Frank barely even flinched when I accidentally spilled my ice water in his lap!! Now that's love, I tell you!



As to getting another year older?  I can't complain, since I recently got carded at a restaurant.  Maybe she was just being nice, but she was insistent in seeing my ID before she served me, and it made me feel extra good.  Vanity, thy name is woman.

Home again, home again, jiggety jig

I'm back home in Maryland. I've been away more this summer than I've been here and sadly, my garden shows it, as does the laundry, the mail, the catalogs, the fur puppies under and around furniture, the dust.... eeek! It was much easier living in a hotel, going interesting places and learning things and then coming home to freshly made beds and clean towels.



Getting back from vacationing is sometimes harder on me then not going anywhere. I feel the pressure to "catch up" on everything I was already behind in when I left! :) I know everyone is in this dilemma somehow. The ones with the perfect houses sometimes are behind in their paperwork or financial records. The people with great yards have so-so interiors and the people who make enough money, pay others to take care of the things they can't get to.... but that doesn't mean it doesn't make me feel the pressure to keep everything going. I don't have the funds to have someone clean the dust off my shelves and pretties... so it sits there and mocks me.



I am in the middle of major home renovations and the workmen are taking much longer than expected, so I have boxes of stuff everywhere and piles of things hither and yon and I'm just about to the point where I would like to just throw everything away and start over again.. but that isn't very frugal, so I'll keep my boxes and sort and sift as I can. At least I have clean clothes, a fairly good looking garden, a clean kitchen and a broom to keep up with the pet fur. I guess it's not perfect like I'd like to have it, but then again, if it were what would I have to blog about?

Chimney Rock and Lake Lure

We are tired.



We went to a place called Chimney rock today. It's for sale, btw, if you have 55 million dollars. We chose to go up the Outcropping trail, a series of boardwalks and steps up 26 stories, or 462 steps, to the peak. We  could have chosen the elevator, but what's the fun in that? Where is the adventure?? So we trudged up the steps, sweating buckets in the 87 degree heat and made it to the top. Because we really are gluttons for punishment, we took the elevator ride down and then struck out on the Hickory Nut Falls trail. This trail had a moderate incline but was about 1.5 miles and led to the bottom of the falls, which were 404 feet tall. On our way back, we shunned the idea of using the bus to get back to the parking lot and took the Four Seasons trail. Luckily for us this trail was mostly downhill for the 3/4 of a mile we hiked. Now that doesn't seem like much, but this trail was pretty steep and took a long time to get down. Once we got back to the car, we went to Lake Lure and wandered about for a bit. I especially liked the clever person who had named their restaurant the "Margaritagrille".  By now, we had worked up a bit of an appetite, so we headed back to the Chimney Rock Village and stopped at the Riverside Cafe for a sandwich before heading back to our hotel.



Honestly, we are both subdued and really zoning... heheh, it's nice..........we are packing up our goodies and getting ready to make our way home.

VICTORY

Just wanted to mention that we won!  Now let's just hope life becomes a little less frantic and chaotic and we don't have to do this again anytime soon!!

Cherokee Reservation

The Cherokee nation was broken into two bands when Andrew Jackson decided that he didn't need to pay attention to the Supreme Courts order to not move the clans off of their land and sent the Cherokee off to Oaklahoma, creating the Trail of Tears. The Eastern Band of the Cherokee nation is the group that lives in the North Carolina and Tennesee area and are the decendants of the indians that hid out in the hills when the government began rounding them up. They currently have 56,000 acres of land in the area and claim that much of their success and wealth has come from the casino that they operate on their property.



During a demonstration we learned that they have been able to begin to reverse the near loss of their language by teaching Cherokee in an immersion class in their nursery schools, requiring a year of Cherokee in their high school, offering college level Cherokee in the nearby college and branching out to the public school system and sharing their language, customs and skills in that venue as well. What a fantastic thing to find out. When I went to Wyoming, I was devastated by the condition of the Blackfeet nation. They lived in slums that even inner city people might take a second look at. During one of my visits to a museum there, I saw a video in which members of the Blackfeet nation lamented the loss of their culture and the difficulty in keeping their tribe together and surviving. There seemed to be an inner turmoil between a part of the tribe that wanted to go the way the Cherokee and Seminole have, and build a casino, and a portion that felt as though that was selling out. In a way it is, but if you can keep commercialism in one area of your reservation to keep your culture alive  in a more private area, isn't it worth it? Wouldn't it be basically the same as farming your land and making sure that the crop was contained in one field? 



I wish I had the information available to me to do a lineage search.  I am one eighth Cherokee and thus the last of my line to be considered part of the nation. At least I believe that I am, based on  what my mom had told me about my great grandmother being a full blooded Cherokee. I'm pretty sure she told me that Grandma Hutt was, but since that is about the extent of the information I have, it would take some time to figure out. Guess I'll file that in the "things to do if I ever have extra money and spare time" box.

Grandfather and Caverns

Today we traversed the Blue Ridge Mountains on our way to Linville Caverns and Grandfather Mountain. Dave finally got so sick of me twitching and braking and hissing and grabbing for the "oh sh*t" handle that he pulled off at Craggy Gardens and told me to drive!! Can't really blame him. It took a LONG tine to get to the caverns, but once there it only took .5 hour to take the tour. This picture is supposed to represent a wedding scene with the bride and groom on their knees and the tall figure to the left is the officiate.



We also went to Grandfather mountain, which has a mile high swinging bridge. It was a bit windy crossing but the bridge was pretty steady, unlike me. I get so dizzy when I'm high up. I can stand on top of a 50 foot square flat surface, but if it is up in the air,  I still get wobbly. After enjoying the view through the passing clouds we went to the museum and animal habitat. The animals were nice to see so close.



I'm not being to descriptive on this blog because most of my time on this computer was spent posting the pictures I've put up. Took forever to download the software, choose each picture, rename and such..... I'm just ready for bed at this point. Glad Dave has the laundry duty!! hehehe