Yes, I have a new love in my life. I just got this little sweetheart. I love her!
2001 Mazda Miata MX-5 LS Limited Edition
There is something so thrilling about driving on winding country roads witht the wind in your hair, the smells of nature all around you, the hum of the engine accenting the soulful CD playing on your sound system.
This car is fun to drive!!! I have always wanted a Miata and when this one came available I knew she had to be mine!
British Racing Green, low mileage, and mint condition! What a joy!
My BFF’s youngest daughter got married. She (the BFF) is originally from Norway. Oodles of Norveeejuns vas ober here for dis vedding, ya! OOf Dah!. The groom’s family is from Turkey. They came. They saw Americans. They’ll never be the same.
They combined many of the rituals and customs of both nationalities in this four-day-wedding-extravaganza! Evidently drinking and dancing are universally recognized as the way to start off a marriage. ( I happen to know it helps the rest of the time, too!)
On Thursday there was a ceremony for the women where henna is applied to one palm of each lady to assure luck. I got a big blob of it in my right hand. A piece of gauze was placed over that and tied in the back of my hand. I was told to leave it for 20 minutes then wash it off.
Platter of Turkish wedding henna and accoutrements
The bride has henna applied to both hands, then a lacy bag is tied over her hands while the henna does its dying magic, leaving the bride-to-be with stinky orange palms.
Bride-to-be before henna
Supposedly it signifies purification of some sort. All I know is it doesn’t come off for a couple of weeks and it kinda smells like sour cooked spinach.
Then there were the belly dancers who tried to teach us how to shake that groove thang.
I tried it. I think I am missing some extra hinge-y thing in my hips that lets her do this!
The next morning I woke up, went to the bathroom, did my business, wiped and then saw that brownish-orange blotch and thought I’d shit on my own hand! It took me a minute to realize that it was indeed the henna and not me being nasty. Well, we drank some the night before…
Friday evening was more dancing, more drinking. Then some more eating, drinking, and then more dancing. One lady snuck a grab of D’Bear’s ass while he was on the dance floor! It pretty much made his whole weekend! LOL
Saturday, Wedding Day, turned out sunny and beautiful. The bride was radiant, the groom marvelously handsome, the ceremony poignant and heartfelt. Then there was more dancing. LOTS of dancing! Drinking and dancing and dancing and drinking! A good time was had by all…. I think. I know I had fun!
Sunday I paid the piper (f*cking piper!). D’Bear and I mowed fields for six hours in the hot sun. It’s amazing what a few Excedrin, a pot of strong coffee, and a tractor rumbling under you can do!
After checking my Blog Stats here on WordPress, I thought it might be fun to take those search terms that keep bringing folks here and actually use them all in one post.
This is from yesterday:
anthony bourdain
134
fiona
38
french maid
20
collard greens
13
letter n
12
nick nolte
10
sexy maid
9
maid
7
the letter n
5
french maid costumes
4
So I will attempt to write something using all these words!
I am a maid. I am not French and yet I can speak French un petit peu. Therefore I shall call myself a French Maid ( because this is my blog and I am doing the writing!) I clean house for my oldest daughter because she pays very well and I happen to like house work! It’s a win-win situation for both of us! Plus I happen to hate being “supervised”. I can work all day scraping the crud from her home as long as no one tries to tell me how or when to do it!
I am also a huge fan of the show “No Reservations” starring my favorite chef Anthony Bourdain, who has French ancestry . Thus we are forever tied in this commonality!! OO la la!!
I don’t think he has ever cooked collard greens, but one day I would like to make them for him. My mother’s technique was to wash them, chop them and then cook them for 2 years with 10 pounds of pork. She would then serve them and all their glorious “pot likker” with her own homemade skillet cornbread. This is why I have always had a problem with my weight. I grew up eating this shit that tastes like heaven to every southern Florida Cracker girl!
I grew up eating what most people think of as “Soul food” . Black-eyed peas, collards, mustard greens, catfish, and cornbread with red-eye gravy were staples at my mother’s table. And dried lima beans if you were a bad girl. I must have been very bad as a child since I can remember gagging my way through plate after plate of the nastiest, glutinous-iest horror ever put before a child. Even a Troll like Fiona would not have eaten dried lima beans without gagging!
Now I am not going to use the letter n word just because I’m from the South. I grew up friends with my Black neighbors. We looked out for one another. If my mom and I caught too many mullet for our family to eat right away we took the extra over to Blue who would gladly take them for his supper! He raked our yard in exchange for our surpluses. We gave him produce from my mother’s bounteous garden and he did what he could considering his lame foot and curved spine. We took care of one another back in those days.
Nick Nolte played a Southern gentleman in the Pat Conroy version of The Prince of Tides. I loved him back in the old days when he was still handsome and I was still young enough to think I might have had a chance with him “if only”…. The Pat Conroy novels were some of my favorite books, and still are. He wrote about things that I grew up with , like the crazy relatives, the drinking, the spousal abuse, the real South, ya unnerstand!!
I am trying to decide if buying a sexy French Maid outfit would make my man, D’Bear happy.
My dearest friend, W. , is 9 years older than I and in the past two years has gone through several serious and life-threatening health issues. Her husband has also had a few surgeries the past few years after a lifetime of really bad habits. Now they spend half their time going from one doctor to another. Her calendar is filled with doctor appointments, lab tests, MRIs, and check-ups with one specialist after another.
Recently I re-injured a badly torn rotator cuff injury in my left shoulder while doing any one of a dozen chores around this big old farm of mine. It could have been caused by picking up huge rocks from the field or from restacking the wood pile, or perhaps moving 5-gallon gas cans around. Who knows?
Either way , the result has been that I am often brought to tears from the wrong movement of my left arm. In the mornings I have learned that the only way to tackle the day is to get up, put the coffee on, and take a pain killer! Then maybe twenty minutes later, after a hot shower, I can hook my bra and pull up my pants without being brought to my knees from the pain.
I have an appointment with my internist tomorrow to get the ball rolling on repairing this injury. Insurance companies have a whole series of procedures one must endure, in the proper order, in order to get anything done. So I see my internist who will send me for x-rays and an MRI and then from there I will see an orthopedic surgeon. Having a daughter who is a physical therapist comes in handy here because she sees first-hand the work done by our local surgeons and knows who to recommend.
Yesterday I had a follow-up visit with my gastroenterologist and today I had a check-up at my OB/Gyn’s and tomorrow I see the internist. AAGGH!!! I am becoming like my friend! Every day filled with doctors and tests and poking and prodding and co-pays!!
I LOVE having people visit me. The farm is plenty big enough for company and I was born to cater parties and make people welcome.
So D’Bear and I had some friends from “the city” down for a country weekend. They are younger than us by almost 10 years. She’s 47 and he’s just turned 40 ( bless his heart! he’s a boy toy!) They always act so excited to come to the farm and go biking and kayaking and hiking and of course drinking, smoking, and eating!
They arrived Friday and, while they are lovely and friendly and sweet and complimentary, they are also lazy!! I kept asking if anyone wanted to GO DO SOMETHING but all I kept hearing was ” maybe later…” and “Nah, I’m enjoying just lying in the sun” (as they ate the quesadillas and homemade pizzas I prepared.)
While I enjoy lying in the sun doing nuffin’ as much as the next middle-aged woman, I also get the screamin’ meemies after a day or two of sunworshipping and magazine reading and eating and drinking. I NEED to MOVE IT! No one wanted anything to do with activity. NADA!
OK, that’s cool. I busted my nut trying to make this a weekend get-away to remember but I really think the only thing they’re gonna remember is the vaguest memory of a hangover on Monday! I mean, after all the posturing about fitness that he does (he goes to the gym 6 days a week) and the comments about how cool it would be to kayak out on our local lakes or bike along the river, I made sure the bikes were in good shape, I pumped up all the tires, oiled the chains, checked the gears, etc. I loaded the kayaks in the bed of the old Dodge pick up so that we could be on the water in 15 minutes or less. I even found lots of extra gear like hiking boots and hiking poles, flotation devices, water bottles, old sneakers and water shoes, back packs, and so on. The weather was more than adequate for any of these activities most of the long Memorial Day weekend.
I never really expected D’Bear to go kayaking. He doesn’t really like the water and doesn’t swim well. She has been working crazy hours and I know she needed some plain old down time but HIM!
Oh, well. I can feel pretty good about myself now when I am sitting on D’Bear’s porch of an evening and he walks past in his workout clothes being all Mr. I-Am-Going-To-The-Y-Now-But-You-Are-Too-Lazy-To-Go-With. HAHAHA!!!
As someone who has battled with the same 30 friggin’ pounds my whole adult life, I consider myself to be a professional dieter. BUT I read this post by Flurrious today and I realized that I have met my match if not my superior.
PLEASE go HERE and read the funniest thing you’ve ever read about dieting in your life!!!
My new grandson is here!! I just got back from the hospital where I got to see the birth of little Ryan.
He weighed 8 lbs. 14 oz. and he is absolutely adorable!
His mommy, my daughter is doing well right now. She has complications and is still potentially in danger but they tell me that she is doing pretty well so far so I have to focus on that.
When I left the hospital the little tyke was nursing away already!! He’s got a healthy appetite!
I’m exhausted. Watching your daughter give birth is rather draining. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world! It is amazing! It’s so hard to believe that the daughter I gave birth to 33 years ago has two children of her own now!
I’m off to bed to rest up after a long night. Nighty night!
When he was born,in 1973, I was in an Army hospital in a now-closed Army base. I was pretty sick. I had pre-eclampsia and my blood pressure was creeping up hourly. The doctors decided to induce labor.
I insisted I did NOT want anesthesia. I wanted my baby born free of any chemicals, alert and and as healthy as I could make him. They patted me on the head and told me, in the nicest *cough* Army way, that they would do what they felt best. Can you say patronizing?
Then they had a sadistic ,woman-hatingnurse come and shave my entire pubal region with a cold basin of water and a rusty razor. After that I got a lovely enema and was told to “void when you feel you really need to”.
It was fun, let me tell you. Nine months pregnant, guts filled with soapy water, in labor and all alone. I had just turned 19 years-old.
Lying in that sterile labor room by myself, no radio, no TV, no one to hold my hand through the contractions, I decided to be proactive for what was probably the first time in my life. For my baby. I began to push a little with each hard contraction and left alone for most of the next two hours I was not told I couldn’t or shouldn’t.
The next time the nurse came to check me I told her I thought the baby was coming. “Oh, don’t be silly. You have a long way to go yet” she said in her most condescending voice. Then she checked my status and her mouth fell open. “Oh, my God! ” and she ran to get another nurse to help wheel me to the delivery room.
I am a maid. I am not French and yet I can speak French un petit peu. Therefore I shall call myself a French Maid ( because this is my blog and I am doing the writing!) I clean house for my oldest daughter because she pays very well and I happen to like house work! It’s a win-win situation for both of us! Plus I happen to hate being “supervised”. I can work all day scraping the crud from her home as long as no one tries to tell me how or when to do it!
My new grandson is here!! I just got back from the hospital where I got to see the birth of little Ryan.
When 
