Fantabulous Friday!

I guess it's my week for the fun stuff, huh?

I'm getting all excited for hockey season -- rookie tournaments, training camps, preseason games, then in about 27 days (but who's counting?!) the regular season! Woohoo!

I admit I'd love it if I lived somewhere closer to a place where I could actually *watch* hockey on the regular without having to pay for NHL channels/website access, but hey! & I'd really really love to be able to watch women's hockey... *sigh*

So for today, here's a comic about a gay boy from GA who used to be a figure skater but is now a hockey player at the NCAA level -- the link is for the start of the "official" comic, but the extra material makes the world so much richer & more immersive (but even at that, the "official" comic can serve as sort of a hockey primer if you're not really sure what's going on).

So please, enjoy Bitty, Jack, Shitty, Ransom, Holster, and the rest of the Samwell Hockey Team. :D

Check, Please!

Can we just all take a few minutes to be VERY PROUD of this young man?

This is Michael Sam, recent NHL draftee (to the Rams) and first professional football player to come out before retirement (even before playing professionally, even). He is accepting the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage at the ESPN awards ceremony.

I cried, and it looked like there were very few dry eyes in the audience.

VERY PROUD.

And I don't even *like* football.

Friday!

On the way back to GA via Pittsburgh & my parents' place in SW VA today, but first, a couple of random pictures from the last couple of days:

Baby ducklings in the river (we fed them some bread)

Somebody's dog swimming in the river

A church that sits just down the road from my in-laws' house

Horses. In the fog, At sunset (again, across the street from the in-laws')

More sorta sunset-y. If I had time, I'd see if I couldn't play with it & get the pink more vivid...

Setting aside the reason for the trip, it was a pretty good one...

Fabulous Friday

Songs & videos that make me happy:

The Friendship Song by Carbon Leaf from the soundtrack for Curious George 2: Follow That Monkey (actually, kind of a cute movie & chock full of CL songs).

Mairi's Wedding by the High Kings -- not my favorite version of the song; I have a higher-energy version I like better, but still, a good song & the voices of these guys make up for it.

 Tell Me Ma by Gaelic Storm

ALB is a lovely lovely lady with some great stuff to say!

What makes you happy today?

Fabulous, Fantastic Friday

Label this one Toys I Love! Rated G edition

Perplexus original

So as many of you know, DinoBoy is in the Gifted program at his school, which thus far this school year has caused me many a stressful diorama/craft-related moment. (Don't worry. The second half of the year it's Ancient Greece, which just gives me all KINDS of happies, no kidding!)

Anyway, one of the things in the Gifted classroom, for students who have a few minutes, is a Perplexus. I had never heard of these dealies before, but DinoBoy fell in LOVE.

My mom tracked them down, and for Christmas, both DinoBoy and VelcroBoy got Perplexuses (Perplexi?) -- DinoBoy got the Epic, and VelcroBoy the Original.

Best. Presents. EVER.

I don't think those things were still for 20 minutes over the 3 days my parents, sister and husband were all here, and they're still hardly out of somebody's hands. We were all instantly addicted. They take a nice clear plastic orb, fill it with random curvy tracks and rails and obstacles, toss in a little ball, and... your challenge? To get it from the start point along the numbered course to the end. You flip, turn, tap, fall off, and start all over again.

Seriously, if you have never played with one of these, do it. If you have kids, get them one! Among other things, it helps develop hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills.

Friday Friday Friday!

I can't remember whose day it is today, but I'm here & I've got a couple of things floating around my brain, so....

I've been sick for a week & a half now, but I'm starting to come out the other side, so excuse any incoherence, please.

Top gifts this Christmas were the scarves I crocheted (I ended up having to rush one in a day & a half for the hubby b/c he felt left out) and my mom's gifts to my sons -- there's this toy called the Perplexus. It's a clear acrylic sphere with this maze-y thing inside, and a little marble ball you're supposed to manipulate through the maze by twisting and manipulating the sphere. It's excellent for hand-eye coordination and spatial/motor skills, and it is frankly FRUSTRATING. But the two the boys have (the Original and the Epic) have kept all 8 people in the house over Christmas occupied for simply hours at a time.

Seriously. All 8 of us (me, hubby, 3 kids, my parents and my sister) were enthralled.

At one point, DinoBoy said "Oh My God I HATE this thing!"

Me: "OK. Can I have it?"

DB: "NO! It's MINE! It's just driving me CRAZY!"

Seriously, these things are AWESOME. Go find you one, and PLAY!

Fabulous Friday

Only a few minutes today because life is crazy and also it's Friday (which means grocery shopping and picking up all the million & one other little things that rack up over a week or so) so I just wanted to share a quick video with you all.

I make no bones about my love for the band Carbon Leaf. They're out of Richmond, VA, and I first heard them at a frat party in Roanoke, VA, my ostensible freshman year in college (I hate frat parties, but these guys were, to me, worth it. I started going JUST to hear them). It was a love affair that has lasted ever since -- we're heading toward 2 decades now. My kids love them, too. And one of the things I love most about them is a way they have of transporting me back to my childhood through one of their more nostalgic songs.

A couple of years ago, they came out with an album of original Christmas music. I died of happiness. I sometimes listen to it in the middle of summer, just because it's *that* awesome. So, here's the first song off that album, which always makes me feel as excited for Christmas as when I was a little kid.

A couple of other "nostalgia" songs by them, if you're interested, are "X-ray" (which is about a kid, about 8 or so, biking around suburbia over summer break, and is awesome) and "Red Punch Green Punch" which always reminds me of MY great-aunts. <3

Fabulous (Feel-Good) Friday

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So, I'm sure many of you saw, last Friday, about the Make-a-Wish Foundation teaming up with the city of San Francisco to turn 5 year old leukemia survivor Miles Scott into BatKid for the day, complete with stopping a bank robbery and rescuing the San Francisco Giants' mascot from the Penguin. (I particularly liked that the "villains" were dressed to resemble the bad guys in the campy Adam West/Burt Ward version of Batman; that one's my personal favorite, not least because it's the one that I like to watch with my OWN kids! "Some days, you just can't get rid of a bomb")

BatKid receiving the Key to Gotham City

Of course, this was an expensive undertaking, and many people have been griping about that cost -- most of which, of course, comes from donations to the Make-a-Wish foundation, which exists solely to make these once-in-a-lifetime dreams come true for kids whose lives have been so very profoundly touched by illness & adversity.*

Someone who said much better than I could all the reasons why focusing on the cost of something like this is not only wasteful but cruel, and why the opportunity to give experiences like these is a wonderful and uplifting thing for all of us who emotionally invest in it is, well, a blogger here: evoL = , where I will admit to reading a pretty fair way back through the archives.

Another interesting article, complete with pictures of Miles's younger brother, dressed as the most adorable Robin EVER, is this Buzzfeed one, Everything You Need to Know About Make-A-Wish Foundation's Adorable, Crime-Fighting Batkid

There are tons more videos, articles/blogs (both positive and negative) and pictures around the internet, if you're interested and managed to miss this over the last week!

*I'm a huge supporter, whenever I can and as much as I can, of both Make-A-Wish Foundation and St. Jude's Children's Hospital, as I have dear dear friends who have been blessed by both, some as patients and some as parents.

HAPPY FRIDAY, FRIENDS!

Fantastic Friday! (from your friendly Minion)

*taps mic*
Is this thing on?

Umm... So apparently, Cherie is swamped today, and it's up to me to blog today! I'm having one of those "Cannot brain today" days, so...just a few quick notes on GRL.

Basically, it was overwhelming.

Honestly, I think I'm horrible at people. I simply cannot just walk up to someone and say hi without a LOT of pep-talking. And here I was going to a thing where there was going to be one -- ONE -- person out of around 500 that I had ever met in real life before.

By the time I got myself to the hotel, I was pretty much ready to completely panic, and I was seriously THISCLOSE to turning around, going back to my car, and escaping back home. Only the fact that I knew Cherie was waiting for me (quite literally) and the fact that I really needed a bathroom kept me from doing just that.

I will admit, I spent a lot of time kind of hiding in my room, but I did try to join in the actual "social" events in the evenings -- dinners & parties -- and not just because of the free drink tickets, although they did help.

What really did it for me was a friend who wasn't even there hooking me up with other friends of his via text message. So I ended up having some really awesome conversations with a couple of really awesome people who managed to make me feel grounded enough to join in on conversations with completely random strangers in, for instance, the loooong line for drinks at the bar at the various parties.

I never really think people will actually connect the me in real life with the me online, so a couple of highlights for me were along those lines -- like, when Anne Tenino realized, about 20 minutes into our really really long and amazing conversation that I'm the Tracy who posts frequently (regularly) on the Lanyon Q&A group on Goodreads about all the far too many projects (dioramas & the like) that my kids have to do for school. (We were supposed to talk hockey, too, but somehow never quite got around to that.) Or when Amy Lane remember the nicknames I use online for my boys -- DinoBoy and VelcroBoy -- but then, Amy Lane's just all-around awesome, and gives great hug. And Katey Hawthorne, who was there as a reader & let me geek out a bit with her at a party -- we kind of monopolized each other, but it was good.

The best thing was Saturday night, when Cherie and I went to dinner with a lovely group of people including Aleksandr Voinov (who is responsible for bringing the two of us together in the first place) and L.A. Witt. I had Lobster mac & cheese, basil rolls (sort of like spring rolls), and fried green tomatoes (I LOVE eating in the South). Then the bulk of the group left and I stayed behind with Clancy Nacht and Thursday Euclid (lovely lovely funny people) for a piece of truly foodgasmic red velvet cake.

It's kind of sad to me that I was so overwhelmed for the first half of GRL that I really only managed to actually talk to about half a dozen people, but they were really good conversations. I didn't feel like I really got my feet under me till Saturday lunch, but I do feel like I'll be more comfortable with the whole experience next time that I'll be able to settle in quicker. Especially if I can meet up early with the people I'll already know by then!

(Also, since next year it's going to be in Chicago... If there's a home game that weekend, does anybody want to maybe see about going to watch the Blackhawks play hockey? My hubby doesn't know it, because he & the kids would probably disown me, but they're my other hockey crush. First and best is the Pittsburgh Penguins.)

Love,
The Minion

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