A Brain Bender, Ya'll

Weird weird weird. Let me tell you what happened to me today.

Some of you may know that I've been keeping a photo blog for a few weeks now. A couple of days ago, I got a comment on a photo but didn't actually find until today. It was just a general, "nice job on the photos" comment from some guy in the Netherlands. So I looked at his blog and found that he takes some really gorgeous photos and that I should get a better camera.

I found on his blog that he'd chosen a while back to give awards to some of his favorite photograph bloggers, so I started looking at who he deemed an award-worthy amateur photographer. There was this one lady from Kansas he mentioned, so as I was scrolling through her photos, I came upon a photo that those of you from Jackson, Mississippi might recognize. This slide is the exact one (or exact replica) that used to be at Riverside Park. As a kid, I loved this slide for how it made trips to the moon so easy, with lots of scary, shaking reentry into Earth's atmosphere...and not even mentioning the aliens we met while up there.

I sat there for a few moments reminiscing about that wonderful slide and then decided to post my own comment about it. Well, lo and behold, a fellow Jacksonian had beat me to it! She'd commented on the exact slide I was remembering. So I wanted to know who this person was out there in Internet-Land who knew about my beloved slide.

Now this is where the story gets really weird. I clicked on this commenter's name and found out that she has a blog herself, one of them mentioning "PDX" in the title. Why isn't that the symbol for Portland? Yes it is.

It turns out that this cool woman is from Jackson but has recently moved to Portland with her 81-year-old mother. And not only that, but she blogs about the experience and comes out with sentences like this:

"Mama's wearing my Dale Earnhardt Jr. red hat--she felt her perm was too far gone to foist her hair on the public."

I could never in a thousand years write a worthy description of how entertaining this woman's blog is. After reading it for about ten minutes, I realized how I need to get up off my hiney and go do some living. These two women are fierce, I say, fierce. I want to be just like them.

Go take a look here, and be sure to check out the pictures of her mom walking her dog, Duncan, wearing said Dale hat.

So I find out about a fellow Jacksonian living in Portland through a woman in Kansas who posted a photo of the same slide I played on as a child which won her an award from a Dutch photographer who somehow found my photo blog. Got it? And if the story couldn't get any more convoluted, it turns out that my friend Neola actually knows these two women. Lots of bewildered head-shaking going on in the Rooney house this afternoon, let me tell ya'.

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Besides all the head-shaking, it's been a pretty low-key weekend, mostly boring. I got the new Ben Lee CD in the mail, and I'm not too crazy about it. Sigh.

Despite thinking they're kind of pretty and even taking pictures of them, I got bitten on the face a couple of nights ago by a spider. I woke up with a big welt on my forehead which is not a zit. Believe me, I know what zits are like and this thing refuses to pop and is like a small anthill. Gross.

Ted's currently in the basement rocking out to the Indigo Girls.

The morning after we did yoga, I woke up in severe pain. I asked Ted if his upper arms hurt as much as mine. He nodded yeah but said that was about it for him as far as soreness went. I said, "But what about your abs?" He nodded yeah. Then, "And what about your thighs?" Yeah. "And here?" pointing to my hiney. Yeah. "Oh, and your sides?" Ok, that too...

We also hosted a couple of Ukrainians last night. The formality and insisting they sit down and have tea and sharing the bar of chocolate they brought from the Ukraine and hearing them talk about trying to visit Tatry...it all felt so comfortable for me, like the good ole days in Slovakia. Then we got home from church this morning (we had to go really early) and found this in the kitchen:
They'd washed not just their own dishes but ours as well, despite there being a dishwasher right there. And these dishes were spotless. It reminded me of how my Slovak friends, even guys, would fight over who got to wash the dishes at my place.

It's been a weekend of spider bites, rain, worse-than mediocre Ben Lee, Ukrainian visitors, Indigo Girls, Portland-love from Jackson, hot tea, sparkly wine, and clean dishes. See? Even the most boring weekend can have its bright spots (well, excluding the spider bite that is not a zit).