Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree

Maybe you don't realize, but not all apples hail from Washington. North Carolina is big apple country. So last weekend, the Divine Mrs. M (yep, she's back!) and I rode up to Hendersonville to Stepp Orchard to pick some apples. It was warmer than we might have liked, and we probably picked way more apples than we needed, but hey, if we get tired of canning and pies, there's always cake, bread and cookies. :-)

My computer is now deciding it won't load my pictures, won't save them as jpegs and is openly mocking me. I will post pictures soon.

Stay tuned...

Not Fade Away

I always post something for 9/11. It's such a huge part of my life, not in the sense that I know anyone who died, or survived, but that it is the marker between child and adult for me. One minute I was 21 years old, finishing up my less-than-stellar college career and my biggest worries were where we were going to hang out that weekend and would I find a job once I graduated. At 10:00 AM that morning, those worries ceased to be important. Meg and I came down the stairs just in time to see the first tower fall and we just stared. Our lives altered in that one morning and they've never been the same since.

The History Channel has been running their documentaries all week. I watch some of them, avoid others. There is one thing that sticks out in my mind every year this day comes around. The thing I notice most is this: I have lost faith in my government. My security has been shown to be as spurious as starlight. But I have never lost faith in the people of my country. Every year, I see the evidence, as I watch those towers come down over and over again. Because while everything else was crumbling, these people did not fail. We did not go gently into the night. We ran up the stairs, into the flames, fought for our planes and brought them down. Our government failed us, but we did not fail ourselves. We did not fade away. We were Americans.

And I'm proud of that.

Alpha

It's been awhile since I've posted but I've been busy. Getting ready for a new school year, turning 30, trying to lose weight, you know, the usual suspects. So while I technically have a great many stories to share, I can tell you that I doubt I will get to them all.
I can tell you that in honor of my 30th birthday, my beloved sister attempted to kill me by dragging me up a cargo net ladder and down a zip line. She did it too, but she waited till I went off the platform first, and when I didn't die, she went. However, in a weird genetic similarity, we both have a lack of coordination that refuses to let us do something like that and land on our feet. So we both landed on our, ahem, posteriors.
In retrospect, though I went over and tried to help her up off the ground, considering she tried to kill me...

I should've kicked her.