Where have the days gone?

Show us your mother.

A good time was had by all

My mother is the gorgeous one on the right, and my daughter is the gorgeous one on the left - they're beautiful both inside and out... I am one lucky chick!

Happy Mother's Day to all you mothers out there! (and as my friend Lynn said this morning, to all the fathers who made us that way - LOL!)

One of the benefits of having an artistic daughter is Mother's Day gifts like these hand-painted notecards, which arrived in yesterday's mail:

How many pair of shoes do you have? Out of those pairs, how many do you wear more than a few times a year?
Submitted by fightinggale.

Without going to check, I'm going to say about a dozen total: Teva sport sandals, running shoes (my most recent shoe purchase, last spring), trail shoes (about 15 years old now; they're starting to wear out, and I hope I can find ones just like them), tan mules for summer (currently wearing to work every day), black flat moccasin-type (cooler weather wear, but after several years of constant wear they recently developed cracks in the soles which let the rain in, so I'll have to buy a new pair for next fall), navy Italian pumps (business-me), my wedding shoes (white pumps which I actually do still wear after almost 28 years, but they still hurt...), black zip-up chunky-heeled sandals from the 80's (little black dress type), beige wedge sandals (2nd hand), really chunky clogs Nikki handed "up" to me, cute brown bootlets (2nd hand, don't quite fit but now & then I squeeze into them), plus Nikki's closet full of shoes (nice to wear the same size as one's daughter who loves shoes!). But I generally only wear one pair to work every day, either the cold-weather flats or the warm-weather mules. Sport sandals or trail shoes for running around at home or camping. The rest not very often. Bare feet when possible.

Boo - Obama 63 - Clinton 213 in my precinct

Mmmm.... last night was the first night of the season that we were able to sleep with the window open, which is one of my favorite things in the world. Our bedroom window faces on the creek, so we get all the creek noises: this time of year that's spring peepers and tree frogs, and last night there was also a gentle rain dripping and plashing and making everything smell fresh, and around 11:00 a long train went click-clacking by on the opposite shore. Later in the season there will be crickets, and later yet cicadas, but always the frogs whirring in the trees along the bank.

There was a check for $10 in my mail yesterday, from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority!

That almost (but not really) makes up for their denying our WBE (Women Business Enterprise) certification last year. Who needs it anyway? We've already produced precast stairs for at least a dozen projects for them without having their piece of paper, but it's the principle.

Tonight I went to one of the training sessions for Beaver County election officials, of which I am one. Next Tuesday is going to be a big day! As you may have heard, Pennsylvania has found itself to be in the position to make a difference for a change, despite the late date of our primary.

Our Election Bureau director told us that our county has added over 2,000 new registered voters for this election (out of a total population of 175,000 - not sure what the total county registered voter count is, but I know our precinct has about 1,000). I have to assume most of those were Democrat. And I also think there were a lot of voters who switched to Democrat for this primary (2 in our household alone!). Also, there are about 2,000 absentee ballots cast, which is way more than usual; they're expecting about double the turnout at the polls as we've been used to seeing lately. They re-emphasized to us that we're not to allow any media into the polling places, nor allow cell cameras, etc.

This will be my first time working a presidential election year, so I'm excited - I'll have to get lots of sleep Monday night, since Tuesday will be a grueling 16-hour day of constant activity. Should be fun, though!

DreamScene

Here's a piece of my new desktop background, courtesy of Vista DreamScenes. Of course, you can't get the full effect, because I've only "snipped" it (have I mentioned how much I love the Snipping Tool in Vista?) - but it's a constantly flowing stream right on my desktop! How fun! It doesn't seem to be taking up all that much memory or CPU time either (on a laptop with 2G memory and 2 GHz processor). Time will tell, though.

So I tried the new (to me, anyway) thing on Giant Eagle's website where you can create a personalized shopping list, either by typing items, or choosing them off of lists of previous shopping trips (which of course they know from my "Advantage card"), or clicking on weekly specials, or on items they've "selected" as things I would like (which they're correct about), or items that are needed for recipes I might have chosen (which I didn't). Then it sorts it by category before printing, so as to make my shopping trip more efficient! It was actually pretty cool, and I really did feel that I was more organized. ;-b

PS - today was the first time I saw someone other than myself using cloth bags at our local store. Woot for them!