First off, please take the Monday Meme poll if you want to see these continued. I'm tempted to stop posting these and need to know if anyone cares...'cause if you don't then I don't know why I'm doing them!
This weekend I took some time to lie out in the sun. I would have rather been by a pool, but since that would have entailed getting my act together to go to a pool I opted for the back yard. For a great post by one of our AW Bloggers about actually going to a pool and some nostalgia about swimming as a youngster, I highly recommend Insomnicole's recent post.
So I'm all nostalgic for those days of yore at the ol' swimmin' hole and I've created a Monday Meme for it - just check under the cut if you want to know about it.
1. Where did you learn to swim? When? Who was your teacher?
2. Did you ever skinny dip? Care to share about it?
3. What was your most outrageous bathing suit? (and define outrageous any way you like)
4. Do you swim now? How often? Pool, lake, ocean or other? (and please explain other)
5. Do you have a favorite swimming story - don't just say yes...tell all!!
6. If you don't swim anymore can you say why? No need to do this one unless you're willing. Yes, I'm nosy.
7. If swimming as a sport is your thing, what distance? stroke? Do you have a favorite swimmer?
8. Are you a gradual immerser or a jump in and take it kind of person?
9. If you could go anywhere to swim in the world, where would that be and why?
I'll come back and answer these soon!
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Summer Holiday Meme
The astronomical beginning of summer is June 21, 8:26 A.M. EDT (12:26 UT). Now many folk in my experience have kicked off summer on Memorial Day weekend. Others don't feel it's really summer until the kids are out of school.
Your meme this Monday is about Summer Holidays
What is your earliest memory of a summer holiday? What did you do? Why do you think it was so memorable?
What was your favorite thing to do in the summer as a kid (let's say pre-adolescent. I know all adolescents' favorite thing is to hang out all summer and drive their parent's mad)?
Did you ever get squished into the back of a station wagon (or any vehicle) and hauled on a scenic summer holiday trip? If so, where to, why and did you stop at roadside shacks for fresh fruit or pecan rolls? If not, where would you have liked to go?
Would you or have you subjected your offspring to an equally memorable excursion?
If you were given unlimited holiday funds but had to take a "kitschy" trip to get them - what would you go?
Anything special planned this summer?
That's it! Thanks for Meme'ing. Use the tag!
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My answers under the cut.
What is your earliest memory of a summer holiday? What did you do? Why do you think it was so memorable?
I'm not sure this is a 'real' memory or one that has been built from my mom's stories and picture albums -- but I remember the summer when Mom, my sister and I lived with Mom's parents because my dad was stationed in Greenland for a year. I remember the back yard at my great grandmother's and all the flowers. I don't really remember much else but there is a picture of me first sitting in a bird bath and then a wading pool in another photo - I'm thinking someone didn't think a bird bath was the right place for a 4 year old to splash about.
What was your favorite thing to do in the summer as a kid (let's say pre-adolescent. I know all adolescents' favorite thing is to hang out all summer and drive their parent's mad)?
Swim. I loved going to the Base Pool. It was most fun when Dad could take us and we'd play great water games and he'd show us dives. He taught me and my siblings to swim while we were still pretty young and fearless and he'd take us all to the pool most every weekend of the summer, if he wasn't on extended duty somewhere else in the world. Later as I got older I was a Red Cross swim instructor and I loved being at the pool every day. Dang, I wish I had one in the back yard right now...sigh.
Did you ever get squished into the back of a station wagon (or any vehicle) and hauled on a scenic summer holiday trip? If so, where to, why and did you stop at roadside shacks for fresh fruit or pecan rolls? If not, where would you have liked to go? I've not only had this done to me, but I've done it to my kids. They got the station wagon treatment. My parents had a sedan with a bench seat in the back for the three kids (me, my sister and my brother). We travelled from Southern California to Toledo, OH the summer before we left for Taiwan (so I was almost 11 then) and we did the same trip after we got home from Taiwan. We went through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio to get there. I don't remember stopping at many roadside stands or pecan rolls. I do remember motels and motel pools. (yeah, I do have a thing about pools)
Would you or have you subjected your offspring to an equally memorable excursion? Yep. But not for as long a distance. One summer I was constantly taking them on day trips - zoos, parks, one weekend we did a 'family retreat' up in a mountain retreat campsite. It was wonderful but the drive was very scary at the end when it was dark and the roads were narrow and twisting and I was driving a Sable Wagon that seemed bigger than a Semi-truck that time of night.
If you were given unlimited holiday funds but had to take a "kitschy" trip to get them - what would you go? I'd start at the Winchester Mystery House, go to the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot, head to Herst Castle (well, it's not so much kitschy as just amazing) The Crystal Palace (Buck Owen's Museum) in Bakersfield, La Brea Tar Pits, Hollywood Walk of Fame and finish off at Venice Beach. By then I'd just be so worn out that I'd want to go home, so all the out of state kitsch would just have to wait for next time.
Anything special planned this summer? Star Trek 40th Anniversary Convention in Las Vegas, World Con IV in Los Angeles, Disneyland, my son's Basic Training Graduation. That's pretty special!
I've done some additional work on my OhDawno.org site and as a result I couldn't find my blog page anymore - so I'm posting this as a test post to see if it rebuilds the blog index and my blog comes back.
I sent out a new edition of my CafePress newsletter which you can subscribe to by email (look for the subscription box in the sidebar) OR read here .
The lovely and talented Chacounne has offered to create unique handcrafted needlework bookmarks for five special someones. I'll be posting some pictures and the details of how to be one of the five on my website, as well as blogging about it here and posting it on AW, etc.
If you want to pre-order, sight unseen, contact me and I'll send you the details directly via email. I'm working on setting up a webpage for this and getting PayPal set-up which will probably take all day. So if you don't want to wait and be one of the "first come, first served" when I post it on my website, email me soon.
By the way, I've seen the sample work and it's beautiful - you can choose your own design from a large number of lovely examples of expert stitchery and your own color scheme.
Chacounne is donating the entire $20 price to AW. That's $100 total to help Jenna pay the bills and the technical helpers that got us back up and running, and keeps AW on the net, every day.
Hosting a huge bandwidth sucking site like Absolute Write Water Cooler isn't cheap; she's got a ways to go to recover from all those days of lost site revenue and other expenses undertaken to get our data back intact.
Hi again - long time no see. I am working on things I want to do with the "OhDawno.org" domain - it's not going to just be the blog anymore, it's going to be a number of things like a real website. The blog will remain, but not as the main page when you type in "ohdawno.org"
Of course first I have to figure out how to do that.
Meanwhile I'll be adding links to my other Ohdawno pages - an index to my newsletters from CafePress and a page of ways to help support Absolute Write - including a great list of books for writers.
Thanks for dropping by. I'd open comments but the comment spam has been terrible. I think I'm also getting email spam as a result of the way my set up forwards comments to my email and somehow that addy has been collected. *sigh* Why do people have to ruin the internet experience?
Please do visit my other blog, lots of posts, lots of links and good stuff in the sidebar.
~Dawno