Yay for Hodgepodge

I'm joining up with Joyce and friends for Wednesday Hodgepodge! 

1. What's one thing you're excited about in the coming month? Let’s see . . . I won’t bore you with the whole “we have a move back in our house” date! Our youngest granddaughter is turning 4 in July and we are going to her Tea Party birthday party. Right now, we have nothing else planned due to my first boring really exciting to me fact.

2. What was your life like when you were ten years old? Well, my birthday is in June so since I'm writing this in June . . . I would have just turned ten and I was headed to the fifth grade. We rode bikes in the summer and played lots of “beauty pageant” that summer. I’m pretty sure we were still playing with Barbies, too. Our family usually took a vacation to the beach and stayed in these little cinder block houses that were about a block away from The Seahorse. The Seahorse was in Laguna Beach (near Panama City) and it was such a cool place. I remember walking in from outside where it was blazing hot and it was actually dark and cool inside. The floors were wooden and I’m sure I never had on shoes. In the back of my mind, I think they had one of those giant wooden barrels full of dill pickles. We only ate out once during our week each year, but it was always at a “nice to us” restaurant like Captain Anderson’s. I remember my mother always ordered fried snapper throats. If we were back in our house (see #1 haha!), I would go look for some pictures because I’m pretty sure I have some from that year.

Another thing I remember about that year is the fact that the following May, while I was still 10, we had fifth grade graduation before moving on to the middle school. I was Salutatorian that year and I remember giving a speech. I think we also had a fifth grade banquet and I probably have pictures of that, too.

3. What's something from your childhood you still enjoy today? I couldn’t think of an answer and then I remembered two things. I still love dill pickles and I still like to ride a bike . . .even if it is stationary.

4. What state (that you haven't been to) do you most want to visit? Tell us why. I would like to visit Alaska. Mark will be going for his second time in August but they are going to a fishing location that isn’t really conducive to me tagging along and just hanging out.

5. Do you like to drive? Tell us how you learned to drive. I prefer driving over riding because I suffer from motion sickness. My daddy taught me to drive in our driveway. I could pull forward and backward as many times as I wanted. He then took me around and around the block. I also took Driver's Ed with Coach Seale and remember it fairly vividly which is amazing since it has been 50 years ago. How could that be? How in the heck did I get old???

6. Insert your own random thought here. If you follow my blog, you may remember that I said I was going to do something to celebrate the longest day of the year and I did! Mark was not supposed to be home but his schedule changed and he was. We grabbed a cold drink from the fridge and went downstairs to the sidewalk in front of the apartment and sat outside until it was dark. We had a rain shower earlier and the night was actually fairly cool for June in Alabama. It was really nice.

It was really lovely -- there are some
things I will actually miss about living
in the apartment!

Mark said something about the
direction we were facing so I opened
the compass on my phone. He is
rarely wrong about outdoor
kinds of things but this time
HE WAS WRONG and I was RIGHT!