good sport

This is my patient girl yesterday, putting up with me and wearing the dog hat I found in the dollar spot at Target long enough for me to take some pictures. She actually doesn't look very patient in the first picture, but she'd resolved herself to it by the second one. And don't doubt for a second that there was some serious bribery going on. Are my hopes too high that she could end up like Chuck?

but it was really good ice cream!!!

The weekend of my last post, Seester (Megan) and I took a little Saturday afternoon jaunt, the likes of which we have not done in years....probably since before she got her driver's license which was seven years ago (gasp! i'm old!). Over the years (15 years at my best estimate, 8 of which were spent as her babysitter/nanny), we had our share of adventures, most of which are a blur at the moment. But during her early teen years, we definitely put a lot of mileage on my car, whether we were going shopping or just driving around. So what started out as a lunch trip to Panera Bread in Sparta became another little caper.

I've had it in my mind during my various trips to Sparta that I would like to investigate Lake Mohawk a little bit, especially when I found out that it had little shops and its own boardwalk.

(photo credit)

So anyway, after our lunch, I told Megan that we were going exploring, so that's exactly what we did. We entered Lake Mohawk and drove around the perimeter of the lake, scoping out the little shops and the mixture of little lake houses and huge architectural monstrosities that made up the community...even cruising right through the gates at the Lake Mohawk Country Club (hey, the guards didn't even try to stop us, they just let us roll on through). Once we did our lap around the lake, we parked by the shops and went to a little ice cream place, deciding that we were going to eat our ice cream out on the boardwalk.

Yeah, that didn't work so well. While the ice cream shop was only a couple store fronts from the boardwalk, the humidity had our ice cream melting faster than we could eat it. Combine drippy ice cream with lake winds and what do you get? Wearable splatter art. Very Jackson Pollack, don't you think?

We couldn't help but laugh every time either one of us looked at my shirt. And Megan totally thought I was kidding when I told her that I was going to take a picture of the mess and blog about it. If she only knew!!

hook, line and sinker

I think I have mentioned before that I am a voracious reader. I have loved to read books for as long as I can remember. I get *involved* with book characters, form attachments to them as if they were real parts of my life...so much so that I have certain books that I read and re-read, maintaining that connection. I am always excited to find new series. Btw, did you know that the plural of series is...series? I didn't til just now. I love discussing books with people, and love to know what other people are reading. Whenever newspapers, magazines or other bloggers mention particular books, more often than not I find myself hopping onto Amazon to see what I can find out about those books. So, I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and lay the blame for my newest literary addiction at the feet of my internet friend, Heidi.

I ordered Twilight on an absolute whim, figuring what the heck, I'll try it, after Heidi mentioned the series in a few blog posts. Totally. Sucked. In. No pun intended (the book involves a coven of vampires). I read the book's 500+ pages in about a day and a half, and within an hour of finishing Twilight, I was back on Amazon ordering books 2 & 3 (New Moon and Eclipse) and pre-ordering book 4 (Breaking Dawn). New Moon and Eclipse were delivered a week ago. Minutes ago I finished Eclipse, and here I am, blogging about my addiction.

Now also thanks to Heidi, I know that a movie has been made of Twilight, due to come out in December. So now after some IMDB surfing, I am familiar with the faces of the cast members. All I can say is Cedric Fucking Diggory!! Robert Pattinson played one of my favorite characters in the Harry Potter movies (the aforementioned Cedric). He just seems like such a perfect choice to play Edward Cullen. I have to admit that there were only a couple other names I recognized in the cast list and I had my reservations about both. Peter Facinelli will always be Mike Dexter to me, from Can't Hardly Wait, so I had a hard time imagining him as Carlisle. And being a Grey's watcher, I'm just so used to Elizabeth Reaser as Ava/Rebecca. I couldn't picture her as Esme -- it probably doesn't help that my mental picture of Esme had her blond. As a book lover, I always worry about the translation of books to the screen, and the maintaining the integrity of the book. Anywho, since seeing a still photo of the Cullen family, I'm actually pretty good with the choices and am excited to see the movie. Now I'm trying to spread the Twilight disease among my reader friends, so I don't have to see the movie by myself, or fly to Oklahoma to see it with Heidi - haha! If you click on that picture down there, you can check out the Cullen goodness for yourself.