Makeup or No Makeup that is the Question

I went to a party this evening at a Smokehouse and Tavern. I have to say, I think tonight was the first time I have ever been inside a Tavern. I've been to a nightclub twice and I've been to a bar once. Yeah, you could say I'm a real party animal. Anyway, I was getting ready to go out tonight and Forrest was sitting on the tub watching me put on makeup. After I was finished, I turned to him and asked him how I looked. He gave me a shy smile and in the sweetest voice you have ever heard he told me that I looked better.

BETTER.

Better? Better than what?

Now I must admit, I am not a makeup kind of gal. I hardly ever wear it. I have never felt that I just had to have it on in order to be presentable to the public, so his comment sort of took me off guard. Does makeup really make people look better. I thought about that for a moment and decided that obviously it does, or else it would not be a multi-billion dollar industry. I then began to think how sad it is that we were not just satisfied with our own natural beauty. Now don't get me wrong, I certainly do not feel that I would win a beauty prize, but I also don't think of myself as ugly. And do I really need makeup to make myself look better? I don't know. But Forrest and Nathan both agreed that I looked pretty tonight, and make up or no makeup, that made this hot momma feel pretty darn good about herself. I guess I could just let you all decided if you think makeup makes me look BETTER.

Makeup

No Makeup

The Green Bay Packers Rule!

The Green Bay Packers is my favorite football team. Why?

Well because Nathan and Forrest play for them of course.

The boys are making their first foray into organized sports this spring. They are going to play flag football. They seem to be very excited about it. They have their first game coming up this Saturday. Actually, it is a Jamboree to open the season. They will play two games back to back. Their first game starts at 11:00 and they are playing the Redskins. Then at 12:30 the real test begins as they square off against the Patriot. Let's hope this team of 7-8 year old boys and girls aren't the cheaters that their professional counterparts are. (Yes Rob and Suzanne are Patriot fans. BOOO to the Patriots!) HA HA HA

GO PACKERS! BEAT THE REDSKINS AND PATRIOTS!!!!

Anyway, I just had to show off this picture of the boys sporting their new jerseys.

No they are not conjoined at the hip! Just acting silly.
Wish us luck.

LOVE?

Love.

Such a complicated word. A word that scares the living heck out of some, and yet seems so unobtainable to others.

When we are young, love seems so innocent, so romantic, yet as we grow older we realize that our romantic fantasies are just that. Fantasy.

We search our whole lives to find a pure love. One that never fades away. One that never grows old with time.

Some of us are lucky and we find it when we are still young and innocent.

But our innocence is quickly lost, and somewhere along the way, love may become lost as well.

As life becomes more complicated, we end up making mistakes, and eventually, we cause our own love to fail.

A Lesson Learned

Even though we are sitting together in the same room, intense loneliness is what I feel.

I also feel pain and sorrow from my heart breaking in two.

The unpenetrable silence is unbearable.

You sit there brooding over things in the past.

There were promises broken; lies were spoken.

All of these are things I cannot take back.

I sit here wishing for a gentle word or a soft touch.

ANYTHING.

I pray to a deaf god to help me make things right.

I ask him to help us get back the love we once had.

I can't fix all that I have broken.

There are some pieces smashed beyond repair,

so I can't glue them all back together again.

I just sit here drowning in my despair.

I am hoping for a miracle to come and save our love from the bows of destruction.

Cece-May, 1996

Sometimes we become a lover spurned, and sometimes love is only one sided.

Hurt

He lay there listening to the waves crashing against the cold drab rocks.

A dreamy smile flooded his face.

She sat there looking at him, wishing the ocean would swell up and engulf her so that she would never fell the heartache again.

He just laid there dreaming of another.

She felt alone.

Like waves crashing violently against the shore, my heart slams against my chest.

The pain I feel is unbearable. The damage is real. Why did I let you climb over the wall I have for so long guarded? Why did you steal my love and leave me so empty?

Cece-1994

And then sometimes, we get lucky enough to find someone we think we could spend the rest of our life with.

Husband

Your love for me is tender.

It's genuine and true.

You can always make me smile,

When I'm broken down and blue.

I was a very lucky lady,

To find such a wonderful man.

Through life we will go walking,

forever hand-in-hand.

I want you to know that you are special;

You're a gold mine just for me.

Standing right beside you,

is where I always want to be.

On a chain or in your pocket,

No matter where you keep my heart,

I know you will keep it protected,

and never let it fall apart.

I love you with all of the power,

That God has given to me.

Together is how we will be spending Our eternity.

Cece-1996

So, as you can see, as we travel through life's journey, we met love along the way. And it seems that love is a chameleon that takes on many forms. A shape shifter in the night that changes as time passes. Sometimes we get really lucky and we get to experience the most wonderful gift in the world. Unconditional love.

I am one of the lucky few to have experience that wonderful gift. I experience it every day. For me this is what unconditional love looks like.

I bet the view is totally different for you.

What a Great Day!

HB got home from work this morning at around 7. Although he is always as quiet as a mouse, inevitably, I wake up. It seems that ever since I became a mother, I have also become a very light sleeper. The slightest creak will wake me out of my slumber. HB was very tired, so he laid down beside me. We clasped each others hands, and without ever uttering a word, we both quickly drifted off to sleep. At 7:30, we were both very rudely awaken. Nathan came into the room at full speed, high steeped over the chair at the foot of our bed and leaped onto the middle of the bed. He wedged our hands apart and shimmied up under the covers. He quickly found my warm legs and slid his ice cold feet up under them to get them warm. Seconds later, Grace entered the room. He came in running, tripped over the cord to the hand held massager that stays on the night stand beside the bed, looses his footing on the rug beside the bed and bangs head first into the wall. (All of this action takes place on my side of the bed.) So I sit up and pull a screaming child up out of the floor and check for blood and or broken limbs. All is fine, so I stand up and put him into the warm spot on my bed that I begrudgingly give up. I cover him up with the blankets, and head to the recliner. I pull the blanket out from under my slumbering dog that has claimed our $1800 Italian leather couch as her dog bed. I cover up and kick back in the recliner and like a blown bulb, I am out. At 9am Nathan wakes me up again. He wants to play his Godzilla game. We are down to one TV. It is in the living room where I am sleeping. That's it. I'm up for the day. No more snoozing for me. Forrest quickly informs me that he is hungry. Nathan is hungry too. So I fix them breakfast. Forrest choose Chef BoyrDee Chili Mac and Nathan chooses double stuffed ravioli. Ok, breakfast is easy enough. Two minutes in the microwave and wallah. I move on to the laundry, and then I load the dish washer. I take care of a few other hously duties and before I know it, it is 11am. I had plans for the day. We were going to a state park that was only about 30 miles from our home. We had never been there before, and I had asked one of my friends and her son to go with us. I head to the bedroom to get ready and I see that HB is awake. I tell him he has clean scrubs for work, and I tell him my plans and I head to the bathroom to get ready. He informs me that he isn't going to work tonight. Well, this changes everything. He had asked for the day off weeks ago, but I didn't know it. I was pleasantly surprised. I asked him if he wanted to go with us, and he did. So we got ready and off to my friends house we went.

We arrived at my friends house a little after noon. She informs me that she needs to go to the bank to get some money. No problem, we will follow you to the bank. She doesn't know how to get to the Park, so she will have to follow us to the park. On our way to the bank she calls me and tells me that she wants to stop and sign her son up for soccer as well. I tell her we would meet her at the Community Center (which is where I assumed soccer sign up was.) She agreed and we went our separate ways. Her to the bank, and us to the Community Center. This is where pleasant surprise number two was waiting for us. They were having an antique car show in the parking lot of the Community Center.

After perusing the old cars for several times over, my friend calls me.

Friend: "I'm done. Where are you?"

Me: "We are out here looking at all of the old cars."

Friend: "What old cars?"

Me: "All of these old cars out here in the parking lot. Didn't you see the antique car show when you pulled in?"

Friend: "I don't see you, could you walk towards the door?"

(I walk towards the door of the community center and realize, I don't see my friend.)

Me: "Where are you?"

Friend: "I'm standing here right outside of Hibbit Sports."

Me: "HIBBIT SPORTS? THAT'S CLEAR ACROSS TOWN FROM WHERE WE ARE AT!"

Friend: "This is where we had to sign up for soccer."

Me: "Why didn't you tell me it wasn't at the Community Center. Oh, never mind, just stay put, we will be over there in a couple of minutes."

So I gather my brood and we pile back into the SUV and head back across town. (My friend lives on the same side of town as Hibbit Sports.) I find my friend and off to the Park we go.

The park is sort of off the beaten path. It is in a very rural area.

The state park that we visited is called Toltec Mounds. The mounds are old Indian mounds. The park was named Toltec by mistake. The first guy that found the area thought the mounds were made by the Toltec Indians of Mexico. But after years of study, the realized that they were made by Native American Indians. But I guess the name stuck. It cost us $10 total to get in. I was a bit disappointed by the park. I was expecting a bit more, but the kids thought it was fantastic. As a matter of fact, Forrest wants to go back there tomorrow.

We walked the 2.6 mile park trail that went around the mounds and along side the Toltec Mounds Lake. The kids had a blast climbing to the top of the mounds and then rolling back down them. After we had completed our little trek, we went inside where they had the educational material. They had pottery, and arrow heads and tools and a table filled with furs. Yes, Suzanne. Real dead animal furs. Yep, it sort of made me feel a little sick too. The information lady, told us the furs had been confiscated from poachers by the Game and Fish Commission. The animals were already dead, so they had their furs preserved, for educational purposes.

You've got to be kidding me.

Today I received a package at work. This wasn't any ordinary package either. It was a special packaged that was sent Priority Overnight by Fed Ex.

First off, the sender spelled my first name wrong even after I told him how to spell it correctly. He spelled it Celile. WTF? Who the hell has that name? NOT ME!!!!

But what really got me was how the package was packaged. I mean some serious thought and careful consideration went into the packaging of this important product.

It was packed in a very large padded manila envelope. You know the one with the plastic air popping stuff inside?

So I opened the envelope and looked inside. I found a green piece of paper with packing slip information printed on it, and another white padded envelope.

Puzzled, I opened the white padded envelope and peered inside. Inside was a single sheet of paper that had a license code and a key number on it and direction in every language you could think of, except ENGLISH, on how to use this bit of information for the online account I needed it for.

I was absolutely flabbergasted. Who the hell sends a fucking piece of paper through the mail packaged like that? And why the fuck are the direction not in English?

Actually, I eventually found the English directions. They were second from the bottom on the back side of the sheet. It was such a small paragraph that I over looked it three or four times.

I just couldn't get over how they packaged it up. What a waste of revenue. Anyway, I just wanted to share this with everyone.

The Science of the Mind

I find it interesting the things our mind comes up with when we are tired. Take my latest post over at The Wild Onion for instance. I don't mean to toot my own horn, but apparently, it was brilliant! But today, my mind didn't come up with such inventive and burning questions. Instead my mind decided to have a pity party and make me cry on my drive home. Sure it seems logical that my brain would have this reaction. I mean, after all, I didn't get but perhaps three hours of sleep last night. My husband was lying next to me coughing up his lungs until 2am. My kids had been sick for the past 9 days and had now missed 5 our of the last 6 school days. Nathan has a rash all over his face, and tonsils the size of bouncy balls, and Forrest had a recurring fever and a throat that looked like a striped candy cane. I have had to leave work, or miss completely due to family illness the past three days in a row. Not to mention my sister called me this morning to inform me that my mother is mad at me for not coming to see her this weekend. She went back home to Missouri yesterday, so I missed my opportunity. She was suppose to be here for two weeks, but she only stayed for one. I tried to call her and explain, but she is not answering her phone. So I was driving home early to take the boys to the doctor and I broke down. I started thinking about my dad, and my sister and I started to feel lonely. I started feeling as if the only members of my family that truly loved me were gone. Believe me, I was feeling very low. Not even the Cure was helping. (The Cure's Greatest Hits is in my CD player in my truck right now.) But things changed when I got home. The boys were delighted to see me how early and soon things got better. I took the boys to the Dr. She confirmed my diagnosis of strep throat. They now have antibiotics and cough syrup with codeine! They still are not allowed to go to school tomorrow, and they are thrilled about that. Plus, I got to take a nap for an hour. So now my mind realizes how crazy it was being.