Saga of The Southwicks

We're Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack....

Stay tuned for our new redesigned, better than ever family blog....

I'm gambling today

I'm a not much a gambler. But today I am. 

It's E's first "official" School Picture Day. 

All that preschool stuff, sitting on a horse, holding a flower, etc. 

Doesn't count. 

Her first School Picture. 

For posterity. 

For the yearbook. 

For her friends.

And I sent her off to school with a check for $40 to pay for a picture

that I have yet to see. 

It may or may not look like her. 

It may be truly frightening. 

She might have fixed her own hair just before they took it.

(Found a chunk of her hair under her dresser she cut herself last week so her part has to be just right...)

It could have a horrid background that makes her look washed out

or floating in the stratosphere and/or mud puddle

I have over 10,000 pictures of her on my computer right now that I can see.

And yet I sent her off with 40 hard earned dollars.

$40 bucks.

You have to pay upfront or they won't take the picture.

Now if this is not a gamble, I don't know what is. 

It's 5am and I'm posting...

What is an infrequent blogger doing blogging at 5am you may ask? 

(Well actually I was up at 4am but I am now realizing that I won't be going back to sleep so I may as well do something productive....does blogging count as productive? as productive, as say laundry which I am really behind on?)

Our sweet indoor cat, Lulu, has a gentleman caller that likes to arrive at 4am and yowl sweet nothings to her through the window. It seriously sounds like he is being run over out there. Lulu just sits and stares at him calmly. So I get up to chase him away before he wakes the neighbors. 

How do I tell him that she is fixed? 

And never outside for more than 5 minutes...

and never outside ALONE...

or that she already has a boyfriend...er...girlfriend...whatever?

Ooo! I just heard the newspaper arriving. Off to be even more productive...

don't know why but this cracked me up

Must be  because I was a 1970's kid.

Big News

I've started another blog. I know. Crazy. Isn't it almost the end of October and there is still a header for September up there? And when was my last post? ...like I said...crazy. But this is a joint venture with my dear friend Kristi so there will be some accountability. I will need to pull my weight since she is a creative genius of extraordinary blogging proportions. 

So this site has been up since October 1st but I wanted to give it a running start before sending you, my loyal reading public of about 10 closely related persons, over to judge its worthiness. Basically its a conversation between Kristi and I of what we are working on or what we think is too clever. Hence the name :

What does this mean for this blog here? It means that this will become my family journal (a.k.a Ode to My Amazing Child E) and less creative play space. So if you are not interested in how wonderful and entertaining my personal life is you can take this blog off your links and/or RSS feed. If you find my mundane details thrilling (Hi Mom) then stay tuned to this station. I might actually post more here since I have more mundane things happen than things that are 2 clever. But I just wanted to make your all aware of this change before this blog became a vehicle for total self absorption and glorious gloating of how great my life is. 

Thanks for your support,

The Management

I heart books

I stole this from Jill's blog. Just had to do it.

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The Big Read is a National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.

Here’s what you are supposed to do:
*Look at the list and bold those we have read.
*Italicize those we intend to read.
*Underline the books we LOVE .Share this list in your blog, too, if you like.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling


5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger


19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis


34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez


44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan 

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth


56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy


68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray


80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

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wow!

I'm above average. That's nice to hear. 

Very interesting list. Not sure I would agree that it is the top 100 books ever 

but nice to have some books to think about reading in the future. 

September Take Out Photo assignment

Just a 10 minute quickie. Hoping I can find more time to play with this before the month ends. So fun! Check it out here.

The first day that feels sort of "non-summery"

There is a harmony

In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

Which through the summer is not heard or seen,

As if it could not be, as if it had not been!

::Percy Bysshe Shelley::

This morning is the first time it has felt like autumn might one day arrive. Texas summers are so long for me and I feel like a new woman today just looking into that sky with a cool breeze on my face. I honestly didn't adjust the color of the photo...it really was that beautiful blue. {unfortunately the blue clashes with my september header. oh well} The acorn was found as i walked back from E's school after I dropped her off. So surprising to not feel the usual sweaty feeling that has been my constant companion since May. Maybe I'll just spend the day outside gazing up and breathing it all in. Except now I have no excuse not to tend to my yard work. 

dang. 

Meet the Teacher

So here it is. My one and only baby starts Kindergarten. Sigh. I knew this day would come but it doesn't make it any easier. I swear she grew up literally overnight. She is so ready. So I guess I have to be too. I will just miss having her be my buddy all day. 

Last Friday was "Meet The Teacher" where we got to find out who her teacher would be and go and see the classroom. She got a haircut {chopped off about 8 inches at least} before we left Utah a few weeks ago and wanted to make her own hairbow to wear to the event. Not sure how well it worked out but it was good practice in tying. {thanks kristi for the olive juice sale notice and notice the necklace laurie?}. We had to drag her out when it was over. So I guess that bodes well for her future kindergarten career. She wanted to stay and check it all out. Her teacher seems very nice so I guess I can trust her to watch over my sweet E. 

Channeling my "Inner Kristi", E and I made this flower vase for her teacher. 

It's just a bunch of #2 pencils around a Crystal Light canister thingy {you could use a OJ can too}. We used 3 white rubberbands to hold them in place and a piece of cardboard taped on the bottom to hold them up. You could glue them on but I like the idea of the teacher being able to use the pencils for her class when the flowers fade away. The flowers were beautiful. But I did not know that these particular red sunflowers where dyed red. The water was so pink and turned everything pink. So glad I used a disposable vase. Just thought I'd let you know if you plan on using them in a clear vase. You have to like pink & red together. {i'm personally not a huge fan}

Overall :: Meet the Teacher a Huge Success

July Monthly Special from Take Out Photo

So I am seriously the worst blogger. I have good intentions and start many a post but never seem to find the time to complete them. But I did want to participate in a fun thing from the blog Take Out Photo. We were supposed to take some photos of Architectural Details. I'm cheating and using some photos I already had. {my excuse is it feels like I have been gone for all of July and and leaving again on another trip soon} Today's the last day to post so...here are some of my oldie but goodies....

 

 Inside of the Dome of The Capital Building in Washington DC.

Love the curving lines in this shot that create movement. It was such an inspiring building with so much history. Some day I will have to post about this amazing trip we took in May to see Kristi . And someday I will have to send a thank you to my cousin Mark who got us awesome VIP tickets to see the inner workings of this amazing place.

The Experience Music Project & Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame 

in Seattle, Washington.

Okay so its kind of cheating to put this shot on here. Any shot of a Frank O. Gehry building is a great one. We didn't even go in to the museum but its right by the Space Needle and it is so interesting to look at the building from different angles. You don't get a sense of scale but this is the huge side of the building. His style is not for everyone, but he does make simple materials take surprising forms. 

Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, Scotland

I'm posting this one for my husband. On our trip to the UK a few years ago this building was high on his list of places he HAD to see. His company built the building so he had seen some images of it and heard about its construction. We didn't have a great camera back then so most of our shots are not very good. This was the best photograph but not the most interesting part of the building really. It's just a back hallway. But I like the slight "M.C. Escher" feel to this shot. You are not sure what is up or down. If you are ever there in Edinburgh I suggest you check this building out.