Team Gray!

I didn’t mention here that I am a finalist in a competition, did I?

I mentioned it on facebook and twitter, but not here at home. Sorry about that. And now I’m about to put you in a bind. The thing is, I don’t have many votes at all. I would love to win a new bed. Lord knows I need one!

But I’m now motivated by the desire to not be in last place.

Please go here and show me some love.

Here’s my video for the bed competition. Isn’t it cute?

This is a brain dump kind of post. Emotional things happen; blogging helps me process them. Some people are interested in getting into people’s heads. Others are interested in mundane minutiae of complete strangers. I would fall into both of those categories, and I’d like to hope I have at least one reader in either camp.

I am working my way through two different workout programs, and everyday feels like a success if I manage to get through one or the other. Yesterday was a Jillian day, and I noticed that 30 Day Shred is so much more manageable when you don’t complain.

Today was Couch to 5k. I usually try to map my route so that I am neither far from home at the end of the cooldown, nor too close. I walked into the house during the final few seconds of the cooldown, so I consider that a success today.

The last time I ran, I ran with Joy, who remembered that last year we’d made a gingerbread house the same day that her friend Anne came to visit. I’d forgotten both, and tensed up just a tad at the thought of making a gingerbread house again.

But I’d warmed up to the idea by the time Yanni called to ask if she could come over and bake. I thought I’d get her to reproduce her gingerbread house greatness of last year. But she wasn’t feeling it, so it was left to Mum.

I had made a few houses out of graham crackers in the past, and one really ambitious cresh with my mother out of real gingerbread, but I’d never done a house by myself. Yanni made the pattern for me, and I made the batter and cut out the forms and baked them.

The house pieces didn’t turn out well. The roof looked pretty good, though. After I put Chanya to bed, Esteban, Joy and I started over with a fresh batch of dough. We put this and the royal icing in the refrigerator overnight.

I won’t hold my breath that the icing will be usable, but the dough should be right. Now I have experience enough to know when the dough doesn’t feel right.

I’ll show pictures of a finished house. Prolly won’t show you an unfinished pile of mess. Just keeping it real.

Daughter, at 19, representing her title.

My mother’s first cousin was also a beauty queen. I knew she was a child beauty, and that she’d been featured in Ebony and Jet magazine as a young adult.

With a little searching, I found her.

Clintona Jackson, my mother’s cousin, won Miss Freedom Festival in a field of 120 girls at the age of 20.

My mother was jealous of her lovely cousin for years. What she didn’t know was how much Tona looked up to her. The two were able to connect in later years, and Tona was very stricken at my mother’s funeral.

Check this out:

This is my parents, either just before or just after their wedding in 1962.

My mother was beautiful. Why didn’t she see it?

While I’m tripping, I hesitate to share a picture of me taken Friday, when I thought I was pretty pulled together, but it’s not perfect, so–I don’t know.

But we must learn to appreciate what God’s given us, warts and all, as the saying goes.

So there it is. See any resemblance? We’re getting there.