Bumper Stickers 2012

People who know me know that I have long been a fan of bumper stickers.  I last blogged about my bumper stickers back in September of 2010 in this post.  Back then, I was still driving my Nissan Sentra.  Sadly, courtesy of a lady (not myself) who decided to run a red light, that poor little Sentra ended up like this just 6 weeks later:

These days, I'm driving an '02 Chrysler Voyager, and it has a whole new collection of it's own stickers that get a great deal of attention.  When stickers get old, they are rotated out for new ones.  A few of the current stickers are almost ready to be replaced, so I thought I'd document the current collection before making any changes.  And I decided to show them off to my readers!  Take a look!

The Paternity of Edward

While I realize that the Twilight series is wildly popular, I can say that it is hands-down the most ridiculous book I have ever attempted to read.  It is so ridiculous that I refuse to force myself to see the movies.  However, in light of the newest (final?) movie's release and current popularity, here's a funny things that makes me giggle.

Gay Men: Marrying the CRAP Out of Your Girlfriends

While my last post has taken off and gotten a lot of attention—both good and bad—I have realized that I'm due for a post with a bit of humor.  Too many people get unnecessarily and overly emotional about political matters, taking every differing opinion as a personal attack.

So, when I saw this posted on Facebook earlier, I decided it was exactly the spot of levity I needed tonight.

I have retrieved this video from the comedy section of the Huffington Post website [link here, opens in new window] where they had this to say about it:

"There may have been gay rights victories in Maine, Maryland, Washington and Minnesota this past election, but there are still states out there doing their best to keep couples from getting married.

For those states, the men of College Humor have an ultimatum: Let them get hitched, or they'll bite the bullet and start marrying your girlfriends.

They have a pretty solid case, guys."

Of course, it's well known that I already support same sex marriage.  This video, however, is pure comedic gold!

CollegeHumor's Favorite Funny Videos

Hometown Happiness: Blue Angels Homecoming Air Show

On November 12, 2011, Dad and I took Kaleb to the Blue Angels Homecoming Air Show at Naval Air Station Pensacola.  I had seen the Blues in the air practicing plenty of times, having grown up here in Pensacola, but it was only the second time I had attended an official performance.

At last year's show Kaleb managed to take a 45-minute nap on the ground (see photo, left)—surrounded by thousands of strangers, 50 feet from a crazy-loud speaker tower, in the bright sunlight, with the roar of various aircraft directly overhead.  It was amazing, and baffling, to discover that anyone could sleep in such a noisy, chaotic environment.  We all had fun, though, and Kaleb still remembered last year's show vividly when I began talking about attending the show again this year.  In fact, he spent plenty of time over the past two weeks talking about the Blue Angels to anyone who would listen.  It was clear he has been excited.

This year, I was afraid there would be no nap happening at the show, and I hoped that Kaleb would stay interested.  We had thought ahead and had remembered to bring along a blanket to sit on this time, and the weather was much warmer than last year.  After a bit of walking and looking a some of the static aircraft displays, we picked out a patch of grass, spread out our blanket and sat down to watch the early acts.

It was a very sunny day, and I was glad that we had all sunblocked before leaving the house.  I had brought along Kaleb's hat, but hadn't considered how I would handle the bright sunlight myself.  As someone who neither owns nor wears sunglasses and hats, this just isn't something that often comes to mind for me.  During the course of the show, we ended up having to buy a hat for me, just so that I could keep my eyes open long enough to see the show!

Jazzing Up Presidential Debates

Did you think the Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates were just boring?  Lots of folks do.  Well, here are some videos created by a couple of guys who wanted to add some musical style to the debates.  Check them out, and let me know what you think in the comments section!

First Presidential Debate


Vice-Presidential Debate

Lots of fun!  Can't wait to see what these guys come up with for the next Presidential debate next week!

The American Way

Yeah, I know, it's too early for Halloween pics already.  What can I say?  I adore this child, and when we tried on his costume tonight, I just couldn't resist.  Besides, it's not like my blog readers are going to get to see him live and in person on Halloween night...

♥

My Boys

It's not at all unusual for me to see a few raised eyebrows when I make reference to "my sons" or "my boys."  Most people know that I'm a single mom with a little boy, but those plural nouns often throw people for a loop.  However, even when I was pregnant with Kaleb, I already had one fuzzy child—my big orange cat, Morris.

In 2002, I was married and living in PPV military housing in a little town in Northern San Diego County called Ramona, California.  One day while I was home alone, there was an unexpected knock at the door.  I opened the door, and there stood a sleep-deprived Navy wife with a Radio Flyer wagon containing a basket of mewling orange furballs and several dozen cans of kitten formula.  She told me that her cat had had these kittens and had taken off and not returned.  She had been trying to take care of all 6 kittens herself, but was finding it impossible to keep up with them and her own children.  She was looking for families to adopt the kittens.  I had always wanted an orange cat—it seemed a redheaded woman should have one—so I agreed to take one.  We already had 3 cats, and I knew my then-husband would be none too happy when he came home....but he was rarely very happy anyway.

Recapturing a Piece of My Childhood

One of the best things about becoming a parent is that you have a valid excuse for having toys around the house.  I mean, sure, some of us have held onto some childhood toys even though we were not yet parents, but it might still have been a nit awkward to have a friend pop by for a visit and find us having a teddy bear tea party in our adult dining rooms while we were yet single or childless.

Now that I'm a parent, I get the added bonus of having a legitimate reason to play like a kid: it's good for my son!  Yes, that's right....not only do I get to have fun with his toys, but it also benefits his development for me to get down on the floor and play toys with him.  What an amazingly wonderful concept!

When I was a child, two of my favorite activities were coloring with my crayons and building with Legos.  And these are still activities I'll readily admit that I enjoy as an adult.  At this age, Kaleb has the larger Duplo-style Legos, and I am so excited for the time when he gets old enough to have bucketfuls of the standard-sized Lego bricks.  Right now, our favorite activity to do together is to color.  I have a large set of Crayola crayons, and Kaleb has a box of larger preschool-sized Crayolas of his very own.  We each also have our own coloring books—his Mickey Mouse & friends, mine Strawberry Shortcake—so that we can lie side-by-side on the floor and color together.  He may not have the motor skills for fine art yet, but he's improving at the same time he is learning by watching me.

Being a parent may have its ups and downs, but getting to play with an adorable little boy whenever I want is definitely one of the ups!

It's Not Supposed To Be Real!

Have you ever been watching tv program or a movie with a car chase, and then watched as the car magically burst into flames and exploded after a collision?  Sure, I think most of us have watched that scenario on a screen at some point.  When I see something like that, I, like many people, have the initial reaction to proclaim, "Cars don't really just blow up like that!"

Well, of course they don't.  And the television and movie producers aren't trying to maintain reality.  If they were trying to make it real, they'd go work for reality tv.

Sometimes, we need to take a moment and remember to take our entertainment at face value, as the simple entertainment that it is, rather than trying to force it to be reality or anything else other than what it is.  If you want reality, watch documentaries.  If you want something pretending to be reality, watch "reality" television.  But if you want to just be entertained, watch anything else and resist the urge to pick apart the specifics.

(9Lo9i9D): 9 Best Movies I Have Ever Seen

Today's list is a list of 9 movies, in no particular order, that I would say are the best I have ever seen.

1. Children of Men
2. Cold Mountain
3. Gattaca
4. Breakfast at Tiffany's
5. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
6. Lost Souls
7. Singin' In the Rain
8. The Stand (Yes, I know it's 8 hours, but I love it.)
9. The Brave One

What are your favorite movies of all time?  Are you willing to admit them publicly?

Red! Blog: New Features & 2012 Goals!

This past week has seen several changes to Red!, and I wanted to tell you all a little bit about them as well as my goals for Red! during the rest of 2012.

The Red! Main Blog

This is where it all started. Things are basically the same, but I'll be posting much more frequently this year than in the past.  I've been on a bit of a blogging spree so far this year, and even if it wanes a bit, my goal is to maintain at least 2 posts a week.

Red!'s Family-Friendly Recipes Blog

In August of 2010, I began to notice that around dinner time every night my Facebook news feed would be filled with friends who had run out of new ideas for family dinners and fallen into a rut, eating the same old tired foods over and over again every night.  So, I launched this recipe blog to facilitate the sharing of family-tested and -approved recipes.

Quote of the Day has replaced Red!'s Life Lessons.

Life lessons started out as something that really excited me.  I had planned to micro-blog each day, telling of the lessons I learned each day just by living my life.  Unfortunately, my days tend to be more routine than I realized, filled with quick lessons specific to my life that were not noteworthy enough to blog.  Because of this, that blog went dormant after only about a half-dozen posts.  But something I do hear each day is at least one quote worthy of sharing, hence the new—and much shorter—Quote of the Day format.

Stepping Back Into Sanity

Kaleb is home from a fun sleepover night at my mom's house, and I'm in much better shape than I was when I dropped him off at daycare yesterday morning.  Things had been a little tough lately, and I'm so thankful to have had a day to focus on me and to do some mental and emotional housekeeping.  As anyone who's a parent already knows, you can't be as good a parent if you yourself are falling apart!

A Rough Start to 2012

Back on New Year's Day, I resolved that 2012 would be my Year of Acceptance.  What I have discovered is that accepting things as they come my way means that I am unable to ignore them and simply hope they will go away.  Life has shown me that ignoring problems rarely solves them, and I'm also learning that facing problems head-on is both the most-productive and sometimes the most-painful way to handle them.  And I don't know about you, but I would rather just bite the bullet and get things over with than try to draw them out and deal with that dull ache over a prolonged time.

Several weeks ago, I had to take Kaleb out of the daycare he had been attending since he was only weeks old, a daycare that I once loved and highly recommended to others.  We've found a great new place, but Kaleb's adjustment to a new environment and my adjustment to an altered morning routine have been a little bit stressful.

Of course, there's also the ever-present stresses of parenting, not at all diminished by my being a single parent.  I love my son, and I love spending time with him, but it was begin to wear on me when I'm with Kaleb every waking moment that isn't taken up by work—except for the shorts drives back and forth between my work and his daycare.

Enough With the 3-D Junk Already!

I believe that Hollywood has officially run out of new ideas.  No, I'm serious!  Instead of making new movies from new ideas these days, filmmakers are instead spending all of their production dollars to re-make old movies and turn them into 3-D monstrosities.  And on the rare occasions someone does have a new idea, they turn it into 3-D as well to cover up the fact that they're turning bad ideas into movies.  But what is this fascination people have with 3-D?  Is it that people assume that the 3-D movies must be exponentially better simply because the ticket prices are double those of "old fashioned" 2-D movies?

Why do we seem to need EVERYTHING to be 3-D?  It's not just the occasional novelty movie anymore!  Lately, it seems like nearly a third of new movies are being made in 3-D, and that's not counting the movies that everyone from Steven Spielberg to Disney is re-making into a 3-D format.  Add to that the books, magazines, and posters being printed in 3-D and the craze begins to grow to ridiculous proportions.  They are also making hand-held video games in 3-D (although for the stupid amount of money you pay, they recommend that you only use the 3-D feature for a maximum of 15 minutes at a time).  And if all that weren't enough, you can now buy a 3-D television for your home and use it to watch 3-D movies and television shows and play 3-D video games!

Have we all gone 3-D nuts?  Have we all forgotten that we LIVE in 3-D all the time already?  Our world is naturally 3-D!

I don't know about you, but for me the whole reason that television and movies are enjoyable are that they offer your mind the opportunity to spend some time focused on something unreal.  It's like a mini-retreat for your brain.

And 3-D is expensive!  3-D movie tickets can cost twice as much (or more) as tickets for standard movies.  3-D home television sets are expensive and require the additional purchase of battery-operated or rechargeable 3-D glasses for each person who will be watching the shows.  And everyone knows how totally cool you look sitting around in 3-D glasses!

Well, I'm not falling for the 3-D craze.  I will not be going to see any 3-D movies, and I certainly am not going to invest in a 3-D television for my home and all the necessary pairs of "stylish" 3-D glasses and other accessories.

In actuality, I think that this will be a rather short-lived fad.  I think, in the long run, the studios won't end up making enough profit to justify the continued making of 3-D movies and they will return to their previous status as occasional novelties left for the Universal Studios experience.

Un-Subscribed

Near the end of every major sports season, I find myself un-subscribing from the statuses of one Facebook sports-fan friend after another in order to rid my News Feed of the constant sports-related updates and team rivalry and posturing.  This could happen during the Stanley Cup, World Cup, World Series, Super Bowl (or other bowl games), March Madness, or numerous other "big" sporting events.

In advance of un-subscribing from anyone, I generally post a status myself to let them know.  Tonight's post went like this:

Initially, I meant my response to my friend, Richelle, to be funny.  But after posting it, I realized that it was actually more accurate than I had planned.  I do un-subscribe from people from time to time; we all do, and modern technology makes it easier and easier all the time!

You've done it, too.  I promise.

Why Must Personal Be Made Public?

There's so much in the news about the private lives--rather, what should be the private lives--of politicians and celebrities.  I just don't understand why it's news.

It began when I was in school, watching the Congress attempt to impeach then-President Clinton over events stemming from his affair with a White House intern.  I wasn't much aware of politics at the time, but even then I didn't understand why his bedroom behavior was on the news every minute of the day and why the Congress was getting involved.

Over the following years, numerous politicians at local, state, and national levels were found to be cheating on their wives...some with other women, and one or two with men.  Each time this was discovered, it filled the headlines and "top stories" for weeks.  And still I thought, "who cares?"

Internet Randomness Comes Together

I've seen this posted by several friends on Facebook.  Although I don't normally do any of the wacky "pass it on" things people post on Facebook, this one looked like fun!

These are the instructions given:

1 - Go to wikipedia and hit random. The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band. 2 - Go to quotationspage.com and hit random. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. 3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”. Third picture no matter what ...it is, will be your album cover. 4 - Use photoshop or similar (picnik.com is a free online photo editor) to put it all together. 5 - Post it with this text in the "caption" and TAG the friends you want to join in.

So, I gathered the elements, and was pleasantly surprised at how they seemed to compliment one another so nicely.  Here is the result:

Wanna Check Your Odds?

Ever wondered what the odds might be that YOU could win the lottery?  Or be audited by the IRS?  Or die tragically?  Check this out!

Cotton As High As My Little Boy's Eye!

This past weekend, the annual Peanut Festival was held at the Gabbert Farm in Jay, FL.  Kaleb and I were invited to go to Jay to have lunch and attend the Festival with some relatives from my mom's mother's family...relatives I hadn't seen since middle school 13-14 years ago.  None of them had ever met Kaleb, and there would be children around there that had been born into the family since my last visit to Jay.

I traded cars with Dad for the day, since his van is roomier and runs better than my little Nissan.  Kaleb got to ride up in the front seat (still in his car seat) for the long trip.  He slept most of the way there, which meant he arrived well-rested and happy.  We ate lunch at my great-grandmother's house; she's Kaleb's great-great-grandmother...that's pretty great!  Kaleb sat in a booster seat at the table and ate lunch.  He's so adorable around people he doesn't know; he acted like a miniature man eating his lunch, wiping his own hands and face on a napkin, and politely asking to get down when he was finished.  Kaleb was fascinated by all the new faces, especially his young cousins who were running around being silly and playing.  The little girl-cousin who was Kaleb's size last time I visited has grown into a lovely 15-year-old young woman.

The Swift Decline of Quality Television Programming

This weekend as I've been home with Kaleb, I've really noticed how few television programs there are anymore worth watching.  On the weekends, Cox Cable should just give us two days free, since most everything showing is absolute garbage.  We have 70 channels of TV, and I can't find anything to watch!  I shouldn't have to pay for extended service and hundreds of channels just to find one or two with worthwhile programming!

The first problem I have with weekend programming is the number of channels that air movies one after another all day instead of the normal hour or half-hour shows.  I'm a single mom with a toddler; I do not have time to sit and watch an entire movie uninterrupted!  Leave the movies to the movie channels!  But, while the movies are a problem on the weekends, there's a much bigger issue.....one TV style that is flooding the airwaves and ruining the quality of television:

"Reality" TV!

It all started in 1992 when MTV started a show called "The Real World" that followed a group of young adults thrown into a posh urban/downtown apartment together.  Real?  Hardly.  Seriously, in the real world, when would you ever find 6-8 beautiful young adults (men and women) who've never met all moving into an apartment together?  It would never work, especially not when you're hooking up with a different roommate every couple of days.  If "The Real World" was the real world, the rate of homicide would increase dramatically.....or maybe just the rate of STDs.

It's JUST a birthday, you know.

It seems to me that there is a growing trend among people I know: unnecessarily-prolonged birthday celebration extravaganzas!  Let's face it, people, it's really not that big a deal that you have "managed to survive" yet another year.

Yes, when you were a kid, I'm sure your parents made a big deal of your birthday.  They'd plan a party, and invite your friends over.  You'd have a sleepover or a pool party, or they'd rent one of those inflatable castles for you to jump around in all day.  They'd come up with a theme like Princesses, or Lisa Frank, or that year's biggest Super Hero or Disney character.  Or, maybe you had a roller skating party or a bowling party, or an all-day Chuck-E-Cheese's blowout!

But, let's face it, now that you're a grown-up, it's time you knew the truth.  While you and your friends were gorging on pizza and cake, watching "PG-13" movies until midnight, and jumping and laughing until you puked, your parents were busy celebrating one thing.....YOU were one year closer to adulthood!  Sure they had all those fond memories of the day you came into their lives, but the fact remains that you were one year closer to being responsible for yourself, and that was worth celebration!

However, many of my adult friends seem to have gone birthday-crazy!  Now, some of you celebrate your "birthday weekend" or your "birthday week."  I've even seen some people who, when their birthday fell in the middle of a week, have begun their celebrations the weekend before their birthdays and continued them all the way through the end of the weekend following their birthdays!  Does anyone really need 10 whole days of birthday celebration?  That's 2.7% of the entire year you've spent celebrating!