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Dear Friends and Family,

I recently accepted the challenge to raise funds to support the Komen Shreveport-Bossier City Race for the Cure® on September 20, 2008 in the fight against breast cancer. One in eight women will be stricken with breast cancer in her lifetime and the more we raise, the more the Shreveport-Bossier City Affiliate of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure can give back to fund vital breast cancer education, screening and treatment programs in our own community and support the national search for a cure.

Please join me in the fight by pledging in support of my participation in the Race or contributing to the Komen Shreveport-Bossier City Affiliate. Your tax-deductible contribution will fund innovative outreach and awareness programs for medically underserved communities in Shreveport & Bossier City and national breast cancer research.

It is faster and easier than ever to support this great cause - you can make a donation online by simply clicking on the link at the bottom of this message.

I truly appreciate your support and will keep you posted on my progress. Thank you so much for your time and support in the fight against breast cancer! Every step counts!

Click here to support me with a pledge.

Love and Light,

Kathy

I give up. If you’re RSS-feeding me, I apologize if you’ve been flooded with reposts and edits. Embedded YouTubes are messing up the alignment on the rest of my blog, and the only way I can find to fix it is paragraph-by-paragraph. I think I’m going to let it be.

Effing html and css and all the rest. Grr and Bah!

</rant> (She typed with a smirk)

Reading Elmo. Taken May 2.
Annabelle was reading an Elmo book in the car. Yes, dear, I was driving when I took this. They haven’t outlawed that yet.

Annabelle Hopscotching. Taken May 30th.
At the Carter’s store on the Boardwalk, they have a hopscotch board taped on the floor just inside the door. Since AB’s gymnastics class introduced her to the game, we can’t go to Carter’s without hopscotching. Repeat: Shopping with AB is never dull (and usually fun).

I moved - no exaggeration - 1200 pictures from two cameras to my laptop last night. I will be editing pictures for a week, at least. In the meantime, here are three videos that I pulled off the Fuji - all featuring Little Miss AB.

Alice in Candyland. Taken April 14th.
Points of interest:
1. AB is wearing her Alice in Wonderland dress over her clothes at her own insistence.
2. AB sees me holding the camera and immediately says “cheese.”
3. I ask her to clean up a mess, and she begins to launch into the “Clean up” song, which moms will recognize.
4. She counts three bags of jellybeans twice - once when picking up, then when putting up. My baby!

Shopping with AB is never dull.

Appetizer
When was the last time you had your hair cut/trimmed?
It’s been quite awhile as I’ve been growing out layers. Right now I’m holding off on cutting it only because my stylist asked me to be her model for a spa makeover in early August. If I don’t hear from her soon, though, I may just chop it off myself. :P

Soup
Name one thing you miss about being a child.
I’ll do better than that. Here are *ten* things I miss about being a child:

1. Being completely in the moment and not at all mired in the past or worried about the future.
2. Going barefoot everywhere. Grass, mud, asphalt, rocks: I had tough little feet.
3. Riding my bike in that wild pump-pump-pump, fly-down-hills, hair-flapping-in-the-wind sort of way.
4. Curling up with a book for the whole day - preferably in a patted down burrow in the tall grass (How I was never snake-bitten is beyond me) or in “my” treehouse (which was actually built by my brother and then mostly abandoned).
5. Spinning around and around until I got dizzy, then falling in a laughing heap. (LOL, I don’t think I could do that now.)
6. Playing on crazy playground equipment that would never make it past the fussy moms and school boards now: tall metal slides that you had to slide down faaaast to avoid burning your legs; rubber swings with metal chains that made a lovely rhythmic clanking noise when you got a swing going; metal monkey bars with asphalt underneath so if you fell you were assured at least a scraped knee; old wooden teeter-totters that some kid would always roll off while you were in the air, sending you flailing to a jarring collision with the ground. And merry-go-rounds that went so fast you had to hold on with both hands to keep from flying off! Man, they don’t make playgrounds like they used to.
7. Lunch boxes! Peanut butter sandwiches, carrot sticks, potato chips, Little Debbie snack cakes. The old-school thermoses with the screw-on caps that doubled as cups that you could pretend to be drinking coffee from because they had handles like coffee cups.
8. Summer vacation lasted for freaking ever. Months and months and months. And they were actual vacations.
9. Sleepovers: lying on the living room floor in our sleeping bags; staying up late; giggling til we got yelled at by someone’s groggy-grumpy dad; freaking each other out with Bloody Mary and light as a feather, stiff as a board; ooh, and Truth or Dare (when the worst it ever got was having to admit who you had a crush on).
10. Meeting = gathering on the playground with your friends … Deadline = when you have to turn in your desert diorama with little hand-made tumbleweeds … Bills = duck mouths … CVs, resumes, transcripts = What are those? … Car maintenance = washing it with the hose and a bucket of suds in your bathing suit … Cleaning = just your room

Salad
Pick one: butter, margarine, olive oil.
Depends. Baking? unsalted sweet butter. Sauteeing veggies? olive oil. Corn on the cob? margarine.

Main Course
If you could learn another language, which one would you pick, and why?
I want to learn Spanish - really, really learn it! I studied it for five years in school and can do passably well on paper, but I’m useless in a conversation. If you know anyone in town who speaks well and would like to help me do better, please let me know! I’ll cook/buy dinner in exchange for dinner conversation en espanol. :)

Dessert
Finish this sentence: In 5 years I expect to…
* have my MBA and be thinking about or working on a PhD or DBA.
* be making at least half over again as much as my current salary.
* have had a little sister or brother for AB.

Email to my friend DeAnn, at work…

Subject: Formal meeting request

Body:

Ms. XXXXX,

I am writing to request a meeting to discuss issues of timeless importance, including but not limited to potty-training, play dates and weight loss endeavors. I would like to seek your expert input on several of my projects in addition to offering support to yours. I believe this meeting will be to our mutual strategic benefit.

While lunch is my preferred venue, I am certainly open to any other suggestion you may offer. I understand that your time is valuable. Please consider me to be at your disposal; whenever you are able to meet, I will gladly arrange affairs on my end so as to synchronize with your availability.

I am excited about the opportunity to meet with you, and I eagerly await your response.

Yours most cordially and hoity-toitily,

Katherine J. XXXXX, Esq.

***

Her response:

Yo dawg, how about lunch tomorra?

***

I love my friends. :)

For Mom, whose compliments on my cooking are the ones I cherish most. :)

This is actually a really simple recipe, but it comes together just right! Originally this called for a pound each of carrots, potatoes and parsnips. I couldn’t find any good parsnips in town when I was shopping for this recipe, so I upped the potatoes and carrots and added an onion to give it a little zing. So, here it is:

1.5 lb. small red potatoes
1.5 lb. carrots, peeled and cut into 1″ pieces
1 white onion, chopped coarsely
1 T + 2 tsp olive oil
1 tsp salt
1 tsp dried Italian seasoning
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 boneless turkey breast half

Heat oven to 425. Place potatoes, carrots and onion in a large roasting pan and toss with 1 T of olive oil. Season with half of seasonings. Roast at 425 for 15 minutes, turning halfway through cooking. Rub turkey breast with 2 tsp olive oil and remaining seasonings. Press turkey into vegetables and continue to roast at 425 for 45 minutes or until temp reaches 165 on instant-read thermometer. Remove turkey, cover loosely with foil and allow to rest in a warm place. Stir vegetables and roast for an additional 5 to 10 minutes if necessary until fork tender. Slice turkey and serve with roasted veggies.

Don passed away Saturday. He left peacefully after spending his last weeks surrounded by the love of his family.  He’s going to be so missed. I think - hope - his son Andrew is going to move up to Shreveport from Alexandria, where he lives now, and enroll in college here.  More on this later as developments, um, develop. :P

Saturday night I came down with a gastrointestinal  yuckiness that is just now beginning to subside. I’ve been out of work two days so far and - per the doctor - have to stay home tomorrow too. I went up to my office for awhile this evening and brought home a stack of work. One, I am just about done with lying on the couch. Two, I have too damn much work to do. Anyway. Joey now has the affliction and so I expect to be taking care of him tomorrow too. We saw the doctor today, and she said that this has been spreading through town like wildfire and generally lasts three to four days. So, yay, there’s the rest of my week: sick husband. At least AB seems to have dodged the bullet. I suspect that she brought this home from Mimi’s and just bore it a lot better than us.

I need to update my 101 Things progress and completions. Hmm, maybe I’ll do that tomorrow. Right now I’m gonna post a recipe for my mom and then hit the hay.

xoxo

I’m at my parents’ house, waiting for the gang to arrive with Donnie. Beds made, coffee brewing, dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow arranged… So I’m going to not-think with a meme. My first in this blog, I think? Yeah. From zalary and others, mostly over at LJ…

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

Making my own rules:
1. Bolded those I have read.
2. Italicized those I have on my bookshelves but have not read yet.
3. Crossed out the ones I have no intention of reading, ever.
4. Underlined my three favorites from the list.

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 (yep, cover to cover.)
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 (Has anyone read the complete works of Shakespeare? I do own them, though. :)
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 Hitchhiker’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 (I tried to read this once before and will have to try again.)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - 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 (Not on my shelf yet, but on my Amazon wishlist. Birthday’s November 12, if you were wondering. ;))
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 (Oddly, I’ve read a lot of literary commentary and explication on this but never actually read the book.)
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 (Again, I’ve tried to read this and will try again. Maybe with help.)
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 (A good story, but that’s all it is. Dammit.)
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 (The book is so different. And Dahl is skeery. James and the Giant Peach freaked my sh!t as a child)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Uncle Don has been in ICU since night before last, and hospice released him tonight to come home to my parents’ house. Everyone is coming in, and that is where I will be. I’ll have time to write more later, but for now this is the fastest way to let everyone know what’s going on. (I find the Twitter word limit… limiting. Usually in a good way, but I’m too brain-tired to condense right now.)

I wrote not long ago about my Uncle Donnie but then quickly made the entry private out of concern for his privacy. In case you didn’t see it or hear it from me directly, here’s the catch-up version: Don is my mom’s youngest brother at 47. Not long ago my parents brought him up to Shreveport to find a doctor as he was having serious back problems and couldn’t even walk without excruciating pain. We assumed it was something like a slipped disc.

It was cancer - tumors growing on his spine and in other areas of his body. It’s a small-cell cancer that they said would respond well to chemo but would come back quickly. Don’s been receiving radiation and was set to start chemo tomorrow. Last night he started running fever, and my parents rushed him to the hospital where he experienced some respiratory distress. They’re running tests right now, trying to determine whether it’s the cancer or something like pneumonia (since his immune system was suppressed by the radiation).

We would sure appreciate your prayers. (Regardless of my stance on religious cosmology, I do believe in the power of prayer.) So, please, do whatever works for you: light a candle, send some light, raise energy, or pray to your God/gods. Not just for Donnie but more especially for his son, who is 20-ish and very close to his dad. And for my mom and her other three brothers, all of whom are facing the loss of their baby brother.

As for me, well, that’s a conversation for later. Existential rants and carpe diems can wait. Right now I’m concentrating on loving my family through this.

My friend Laura was in town weekend before last, and I had her and her new man-friend and our friend Scott over for dinner. Since Laura’s eating vegetarian now, I needed to find a good veggie recipe *fast*. I decided to adapt my Basic No-Boil Lasagne recipe into a Veggie Lasagne, and it turned out so, so yummy - way better than the meaty version.

Here’s the new recipe…

No-Boil Vegetarian Lasagne

1 medium zucchini, sliced
1/2 of 16-oz bag of baby carrots, sliced
1 medium onion, chopped
1 medium bell pepper, chopped
1 16-oz bag frozen chopped broccoli, thawed and drained
2-1/2 c Mozzarella cheese, divided
1 (15-oz) container Ricotta cheese
1/2 c grated Parmesan, divided
1/4 c chopped fresh parsley
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 (26 oz) jar spaghetti sauce
1 c water
12 oven-ready lasagne noodles, uncooked

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.  Heat about two tablespoons of olive oil in a large skillet. Add the onion, bell pepper and carrots and saute a couple minutes. Add the rest of the veggies and saute until tender-crisp.

Meanwhile, mix 1-1/4 c of the Mozzarella, Ricotta, 1/4 c of the Parmesan, parsley and egg until well-blended. Set aside.

Combine spaghetti sauce with water and set aside.

Spread 3/4 cup of sauce in the bottom of a 13X9 dish. Top with 1/4 of the veggie mixture, three noodles, and 1/3 of cheese mixture. Repeat layers: 3/4 cup sauce, 1/4 of veggie mixture, three noodles, 1/3 of cheese mixture, 3/4 cup sauce, 1/4 of veggie mixture, three noodles, 1/3 of cheese mixture, 3/4 cup sauce,  1/4 of veggie mixture, three noodles and remaining sauce. Top with remaining Mozzarella and Parmesan.

Cover tightly with greased foil. Bake 45 minutes. Remove foil and continue baking 15 minutes or til heated through. Let stand 15 minutes before cutting.

***

Add a bottle of red wine, a simple salad and some crusty bread, and you’re in heaven!!

AB’s Grandma and Grandpa left early Saturday morning, leaving just us young’uns to play on Saturday. We had a pretty great day.

First, we all went to the Shreveport Farmer’s Market. I’d never been before. It was smaller than I expected, but it was still excellent! I bought a handmade necklace, a bottle of blueberry merlot from Landry Vineyards, a jar of muscadine jelly, two handmade soaps from Sundew Herbs (peppermint and white magnolia), and a bottle of specially-blended creole seasoning. I may go back next week and buy some veggies for canning, since we never got our garden in this year. (You may recall that our yard flooded about the time I intended to plant.)

After the Farmer’s Market, we had a fabulous lunch at The Real Pickle. If you’re not local: The Real Pickle is a locally-owned and operated New York style deli that serves a huge variety of delicious sandwiches, homemade chips and sweet potato fries to die for, and - of course - scrumptious homemade pickles. If you are local and have never been there, you really need to check it out. It’s on the corner of Line and Pierremont, in the same shopping center as Superior’s Steakhouse. Anyway…

After lunch, J, Uncle Sam and AB went back home for a nap (which never materialized, as it turns out) and Aunt Lydi and I went to Spa Concepts for mani-pedis, then to DSW Shoes for shoe-sale shopping. Yay for shoe sales! I got these for work:

We met back up with J, Sam and AB for dinner at Posado’s, and then we took AB (against my wishes, but whatever - everyone else wanted to go) to see WALL-E. AB was a good girl in the movie; it was only her second time in a theater. This was especially good as the movie started about the same time as her usual night-night.

Man, were we ever ready for bed by the time we got there!

All in all, we had a good visit with J’s family. It was nice to lay down day-to-day problems and just relax for awhile.

I’ve got more blogging to do - maybe even tonight. So much to catch up on! But for now, it’s a bath and bed for the Dooger.
xo,KJ

Hi, Mommy’s bloggy friends! Mommy said I could com-and-deer her blog to show you some pictures from our Fourth of July.  My Grandma and Grandpa (Daddy’s mommy and daddy) and my Aunt Lydi and Uncle Sam came to see me from Pencil-cola and Acklanta. We had fun!
My Aunt Lydi woke up early and went to Krispy Kreme to bring us doughnuts and hats. She and Grandpa tried on the hats on the front porch:

I liked the doughnuts. Lots!!!

For lunch we had grilled burgers and dogs,  Aunt Lydi’s baked beans, Mommy’s Italian coleslaw, and corn on the cob. Yum.

At night we went downtown for fireworks by the river. The best part was when Mommy let me get my face painted. At first she said I wasn’t old enough, but she let me try anyway ’cause it was a special day.

At first I didn’t like it at all:

But I stuck it out and then I had a butterfly on my face!

When I finally got to look in the mirror…

…I didn’t want to  let it go:

After I got my butterfly, Uncle Sam let me ride on his shoulder:

I had fun watching the band with Aunt Lydi:

I told anyone who would listen: “I got a butterfly!”

Finally, I got to watch fireworks with my Mommy. I was fascinated for the first five explosions:

…but then I buried my face in Mommy’s shirt for the rest of the show. (Then Mommy had a very smeary butterfly on her shirt and I had a very smeary butterfly on my face. Oopsy!)

Well, it’s three hours past my beddy-time, so I better say bye-bye. Mommy says to tell her bloggy-friends that she will write tomorrow about what we did Saturday.

Love!

AB