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- My back hurts.
Fiance turns around and looks at me.
- Right here, on the lefthand side.
Fiance raises his eyebrows.
- Why are you looking at me like I'm totally milking this?
- No I'm not.
- Yes you are.
- No. I'm looking at you like it's quite unfortunate that your back hurts, but I think it's all a ploy.
When I was a kid, we had a family Father's Day tradition. Every year, my mother would spend the week or two before the holiday asking my sisters and I to dictate stories to her and collecting the crafts we made at school or in our Girl Scout troops. Then, she would lay out large sheets of white paper and squirt different color paints into old pie tins and have us dip our hands and feet in them. When we were little, we walked across the paper. As we got older, one foot was more than enough. Our hands were always the same: two little handprints side by side.
My mom collected these traditions every year in a big black art portfolio. And every Father's Day morning my sisters and I would pour into my parents' bedroom and my mother would fetch the portfolio and we would spend some time sitting around looking at its treasures. I'm sure there were other gifts, but that portfolio is all I remember. And then, sometime towards the end of my high school years, the tradition unraveled.
I'm not sure what started this process of degradation, exactly. Did Father's Day become just another Hallmark holiday to us? Was it something that we tolerated but didn't care about? Did we think it was un-cool to appreciate our father? Was it that we were old enough to write our own stories, but not yet great at time management? 
Was it that we never seemed to find the time to make our handprints and footprints? Or that our hands and feet had stopped growing? Was it that we'd long stopped making DAD crafts at school? Did it have anything to do with our family growing out of our home - going to college, studying abroad, moving out? It could have been any of those or a combination of all of them.
For a long time, that portfolio represented family to me. It held our history in a way that photograph albums, home videos, and reminiscing at the dinner table did not. And I suppose that until there are grandchildren running around, the portfolio will remain as dormant as it has been these past years. But just the other night, my family was all together under one roof and - for the first time in a long time - we took a picture.
Looking at this picture tonight, I am convinced that it wasn't the portfolio that represented family to me. It was the moments that made that portfolio possible.
Happy Father's Day to everyone out there making moments with their families - moments to look back on and smile about. It is those moments which I have learned to cherish. And a VERY special Happy Father's Day to my Dad, the coolest cat of them all, who I am never too hip to love and appreciate. You're still my hero!!
I forced Fiance to go to the LA Bloggers Party with me. The man had absolutely no say in the matter.
On Saturday, Fiance and I were running late from about 8am on. We had a million errands to run - including borrowing a bundt cake pan from my parents - and it took us much longer than we had anticipated. After we were finally home, Fiance set to work making a lasagna and I ran a couple more errands we had forgotten about. I'm not typically much help with lasagna making because Fiance doesn't follow a recipe, he just smells and tastes and works from memory. All I do is grate the cheese and after a few pounds of cheese have been grated, he tends to intervene because I do that so damned slow it is maddening.
For at least a month, Fiance and I had been planning to attend the LA Bloggers Party. I had responded to the email invitation that we would bring lasagna and Kahlua cake and that we would show up early to help get things set up. So I knew that we needed to leave at, oh, 4pm Saturday afternoon.
4pm came. And 4pm went. SHIT.
And then 5pm came. And 5pm went.
And then 6pm came. And we finally left.
Fiance, the poor and wonderful soul that he is, tried to stay out of my way while I panicked and fumed for two hours that THEY WERE ALL GOING TO HATE ME because I said we'd be there by NOW and we hadn't even left and WHEN THE HELL would that cake be finished baking and WHY wouldn't the FUCKING lasagna brown already?
I think he was maybe two minutes away from taking me out back, shooting me, and then claiming my whereabouts were a mystery.
I kid. He would never hurt a hair on my body unless it was by accident or he got a good laugh out of it.
Anyway, the party was great. And they didn't hate me after all. And here is the photographic evidence:
(RedStapler, Fiance, and LA Daddy)
A non-blogger, Tara Met Blog, her friend, and 8 Centimeters Deluded
Frowning of a Lifetime, Childsplayx2, Honea Express, Sink into the Pacific, Tara Met Blog, and House of Prince (left to right, top then bottom)
Fiance taking a shot with Tara Met Blog and two other peoples' hands =)
Now I have some people to email and soon I'll add a sidebar link page with everyone's websites. I'll also get all the links in order for this post, which shouldn't take too long. I used everyone's screennames and blurred out the nametags because I'm not sure who is picky about being anonymous and who is not. Hopefully all the pictures that I need to email and responses to comments and emails that I have received will be finished soon. I'm sorry to those of you who have been inconvenienced by my inability to email in a timely fashion but in my defense, I'm, er, busy? =P Thanks for your patience!
Fiance and I went to the LA Blogger Party last night. Everything was great, the people were awesome company and from what I hear, the alcohol was pretty damned cool. Being the total geeks we are, Fiance and I had a very fun time and since this was my first blogger party, I now know that IT WILL DEFINITELY NOT BE MY LAST. What a fun time! I'll be posting about it later with pictures and everything but in the meantime, I just wanted to say this:
THANK YOU, L.A. DADDY!! THE PARTY ROCKED!!
Oh, and next time I'll try not to be, like, two hours later than I said I would. I really am sorry!
Also, if anybody has any pictures, please email them to me at twizt16 (at) yahoo (dot) com OR sarah_and_donald (at) yahoo (dot) com. I am usually snap-happy but I thought I'd scare people off so I only took a few, but I'd love to leech off you folks for memories. If you leave your email address in the comments, I'll be sure to pass mine on to you.
I learned yesterday that a girl I went to high school with was murdered recently. Murdered. Along with her father and her mother, she was beaten and then stabbed and then torched. Her mother survived - although her medical state is critical - but her father perished with her. Their home was destroyed in a fire.
When I say that I went to high school with her, I need to clarify that I did not know her. We were not friends or even acquaintances and her name didn't sound familiar. My sister had to pull out the yearbook and show me photographs. She was a few years younger than me, which may be part of it.
In the grand scheme of things, high school is a very short period in one's life. Every year or so, I run into so-and-so at the supermarket or in line at an amusement park or out to dinner and we'll stand there for five or ten minutes and catch up. This is how I have found out about weddings, divorces, babies, graduations, deaths, and all sorts of other occurences. But I also run into so-and-so from other facets of my life: former coworkers, fellow volunteers, ex-clients, people my parents or sisters know, etc. And from these people, I also hear about a multitude of happenings. High school figures - students, teachers, coaches, and administration alike - are a very small percentage of the total number of people I encounter like this, but they comprise a total after all and that's something.
As high school is a definite period in my life, something I can measure as having been a constant in my life over the span of four years, it is easy to use that one as a measuring stick of sorts. And since those years, it never ceases to amaze me what I hear along the road. Last year, I ran into a former teacher who had married a fellow student. About six months ago, I saw a high school friend who told me about the suicide of someone I hadn't seen since graduation. Things like that, they always hit close to home because they make me reconsider my life.
This murder, this heinous act committed against a family who CERTAINLY DID NOT DESERVE IT, struck me last night. I researched it in the news this morning and I have spent the entire day turning it over in my head. What was she like, this woman? Who was she and would things have been different if we had ever met? Did I ever brush up against her in the hallway, did I know her and have since forgotten, what could she have taught me in life? What was her family like? Who were they and why would someone do this to them? What could possibly possess someone to do something like this to another human, to an entire family, to a full community?
I guess you could say that I have always been a fairly idealistic individual. I like to think that people are inherently good and I prefer to consider their mistakes while believing that they did the best they could, the best they knew how to do. The more I hear about incidents like this - the incidents that hit me the hardest because I have something in common with that victim - the more I loose a little of that shimmer from my youth. I know that it is only natural, that with time all peoples' optimism fades a little. I'm still a silver lining kind of gal and I am more grateful today than I was yesterday. It's just difficult to learn of an event such as this one and not realize that innocence is something which is stripped of someone, layer by layer, in this world.
And that's a shame. It really is.
Rest in peace. I am praying for your family.
