Returning from Paradise...(Squash, Raffle, Quesadilla, One-Man-Band, Heinous)

We've been here a little over four years and loved it. Along the way, we’ve learned a few things:

1. It’s better to win the raffle than the golf tournament. When you win the tournament, everyone is jealous (because you were better than they) but the “rifa” winner is lucky and celebrated. It’s backward, but that’s how it goes.

2. Paradise is overrated and overpriced. Heinous prices are charged for everyday things like peanut butter and dark beer, if you can even get them. Usually, you can’t.

3. Just because the people speak Spanish, it doesn’t mean they have good Mexican food. The quesadilla I had last night was heated cheez-whiz on a tortilla.

4. They have no regard for sports that make sense to gringos. No basketball, no football…they play squash, if you can believe it.

So we are departing this island to take over the family business in the USA…it’s a mom and pop place, a one-man-band, but it’s the next step in a journey that continues to get better.

~dt and family will move from the Caribbean to rural Tennessee in May. He can’t wait to watch ESPN.

Milkshakes (Testing, Fundraiser, Mint, Car Wash, Pizza)

I have an idea for a really cool school fundraiser: a challenge to drink one of every milkshake on our local Cookout Restaurant's menu within one week. And, on top the requisite stomach capacity, here’s an additional twist: you can’t gain ANY weight! The person who drinks his or her way through the menu, (approximately 45 different varieties) without gaining an a single ounce would be the winner and receive some cheesy t-shirt at the final weigh-in ceremony. The proceeds to the school would come from the entry fees. Also, maybe we could talk Cookout into donating a part of the sales on each shake bought for the competition. I think we could pitch it as great publicity.

Each entrant would weigh in at the beginning of the week, keep up with a menu card that Cookout employees punch as they purchase and drink each flavor (verified by an eyewitness, of course), and then weigh in at the end of the week. What do you think? Personally, I believe this would be much more fun (and profitable) than just another carwash or pizza sale!

I’m planning on testing the process out next week. Some quick math says I need to target seven shakes a day Monday through Friday and then taper off to just five on Saturday and Sunday. I think I’m going with classic chocolate, followed by Oreo mint, then blueberry cheesecake, and a banana pineapple chaser. After that, I’ll take a break for a couple of hours or so until I’m ready to pick it back up with caramel fudge, then orange push-up, and finally finish the day with peach.

My strategy is to drink the most disgusting mix of flavors each day in order to induce vomiting, and hence, no weight gain! I’ll let you know how it turns out.

~To see a picture of Cookout’s milkshake menu, see Belinda’s blog at Upside Down Bee!

The Wedding Reception (Testing, Fundraiser, Mint, Car Wash, Pizza)

Do you believe that I once went to a wedding reception held at a Busy Bee Carwash! It’s true….and to make matters worse; it was the wedding of a guy I once dated. I can tell you that my dad breathed a sigh of relief when that ended. His name was Charlie Brown, again, no lie. He was from West Virginia and at the time of his marriage worked at the carwash. He was one of those “great” guys that my brother-in-law hooked me up with.

The wedding had been held at a nearby park with the Wedding March played over a portable tape player that squelched during the whole song as they were trying to amp it through a karaoke system. They had put up this little platform right by the pond and the ducks kept coming up thinking they were going to get fed. The Bride’s father kept trying to shoo them away. I don’t know which made the more noise, the ducks or the horrible sound system. There were about 25 of us at the wedding, standing there as they had not provided any chairs. Fortunately it was a very short ceremony. Then we all proceeded over to the carwash for the big reception.

They had the buffet table down the middle of the carwash. They had those buttery wedding mints, pizza rolls, little crust less tuna & chicken salad sandwiches and a two tier wedding cake with a big Busy Bee on the top of it. They had no plates, just these cocktail napkins with ducks on them left over from the annual Ducks Unlimited fundraiser. The best man kept joking that he was going to hit the button to start the carwash during the dancing. The bride’s father invited us over to his house after the reception for a taste testing of the different Boones Farm wines! As the couple was departing and we were throwing the rice my brother-in-law leaned over and said, “And this could have all been yours.” Thank you, Lord, for my singleness.

~Cheryl keeps writing monologues but forgetting to put in tag lines. So here is one that GM wrote for her. She has a knack for humor!

My Head (Baseball, Caramel, Curry, Horns, Rain)

I’ve had the strangest headache for the past three days. It’s really more of a skull-ache or a scalp-ache, I suppose, than a traditional headache. Nothing I take seems to give any relief; I’ve tried Motrin, Excedrin, and Aleve. The pain is centered on the top of the right side of my head in an area about the size of a baseball. It’s been keeping me up at night.

This morning around 2am, awake and uncomfortable, I turned on the TV and flipped around until I settled on the Food Channel. I watched a show on Indian food and now I have a great coconut chicken curry recipe to try. A blessing in disguise, I suppose. Then I tried to go back to sleep by lying still and listening to the rain pinging on the gutters. It didn’t work, but it was rather peaceful to be awake in the middle of the night, listening to all the sounds a sleeping house makes.

Finally, around 5am, I gave up and decided to just get up for the day. I made myself a caramel-flavored coffee with our new fancy one-cup brewer and settled down on the couch to do a little reading. The pain was too distracting, so I gave that up, too. I went to the bathroom to see if I could find anything on my scalp that would be making it hurt so bad. I parted my hair and gave myself a good examination. What I saw was very disconcerting.

I think I’m sprouting horns.

~Belinda, writing at Upside Down Bee, really has had a weird headache for the last three days. Her husband was the one who suggested it was horns.

The Horse Sale (Baseball, Caramel, Curry, Horns, Rain)

I had so much to do and the rain would just not let up! The water was pouring in sheets off the roof of the barn and even running in rivulets down the aisle between the stalls. The horses were stamping and snorting at the noise that the rain made pounding on the tin roof above them. I had six horses left to curry and also the back breaking task of trying to sand and blacken their hooves and then clip the hair in their ears. All of this to do with yearling foals who like to jump around with every noise, pretending to be scared. To make matters worse, my younger sister and some of her friends were out in the paddock chasing “Elmer,” our young steer around trying to tie one of the girl’s tennis shoes to his horns. Needless to say Elmer was not a happy camper and kicking up quite a ruckus. I’m sure they could hear him bellowing and blowing at the farm down the road. The girls were soaked through to the skin and covered with mud.

My dad was in the house trying to get the horses’ pedigree papers ready while an Atlanta Braves baseball game blared from the radio in the background. Grannie was in the kitchen making my very favorite caramel cake. My two sisters and I had once devoured a whole caramel cake at the wake of one of my great aunts! We were sitting by the dessert table and just kept slicing on that cake, “making it even” until we had evened it down to crumbs. My mom was sitting, as usual, at the big desk trying to figure out how we are going to pay this month’s training fees for the horses we had at the track.

Tomorrow will tell us much of how the rest of our year is going to go financially! We have a group of 11 foals going into the yearling sale at the “OBS,” the Ocala Breeders Sale. The sales are great fun to go to as a spectator, but a lot of hard work and nail biting if you are counting on the sale of these foals to fund your breeding farm for the next year! Sure, you have grooms and walkers working for you, but when there is so much money at stake, there is lots of hands on supervision from the family! We are really a very small thoroughbred farm, surrounded by huge, palatial farms, but we have had good results so far with several different multiple stakes winners to come from our mares. My father is great with the animals and does the training work with them from the time they are foaled till they go for their last training before the track.

Some people would say it is as much of a gamble to make a living off a breeding farm as it is to make that same money betting on horses at the track. And most people you see trying to do that are usually in the food stamp line! My father, who has been known to win a nice sum every now and then, says that he would give back ALL his winnings for 10% of what he has bet over the years! There is a lot of hard won wisdom in that statement! All in all, I’ll take the bumps and the bruises, the highs and the lows, the wins and the losses of horse breeding any day over the endless grind of trying to make a living sitting in an office forty hours a week, 50 weeks a year, 30 years of my life!

~Cheryl didn't write a tag line for this, but she has quite an imagination.

Fall Hiking (Strawberry, Mall, Sunder, Brick, Waterfall)

We had been backpacking in the North Carolina mountains for 12 days. Toni and I have been doing this every October for the last several years. There is no more beautiful place on earth than the North Carolina mountains in October! The air is crisp, the smell rich with the loamy earth, the leaves beautiful hues of red, gold and yellow! We keep our hikes near the creeks as we love to hear the sounds of the rushing water. We often stop at different waterfalls to eat our lunch and revel in the sights and sounds of water cascading down the mountain wall. Sometimes we even get the courage to jump into the water, gasping as we come up, laughing at each others expressions because it is so shockingly cold!

Toni has always been the one to take care of our backpacking menu, and she is very creative. She has figured out how to take backpacking meals way beyond the usual freeze dried concoctions and beany-weanys!! In fact, last night for dinner with had chicken and artichoke hearts with egg noodles with strawberry Jello with fruit for dessert! She takes the Jello and puts it in a water bottle and submerges it in the creek for awhile and there you have it! She does the same with instant pudding. It is always fun to see what she is going to pull out of her backpack for the next meal.

Last night we made our camp by an old homestead that had nothing left standing except an old brick chimney. You see many of those lonely sentinels scattered through the southern landscapes. As we sat around after dinner we invented stories of who lived here and of their loves and losses. Times change, seasons come and go, and yet, our hopes and our dreams are in most ways the same as the family that lived here on this mountain those many years ago: The desire to be loved and appreciated, to have a home where harmony rules and is a safe haven from the discord of the world.

Unfortunately, this morning we left the mountains to head back to civilization, jobs and the every day world. As we came down into Brevard we had to stop by the mall to pick up some supplies for our long drive back home. In the midst of the cacophony of too loud music, too many people and too many lights I felt that sense of peace that had come to me from two weeks of reveling in God’s beautiful creation sunder under the gaucheness of the world we live in.

~I am a medical missionary (a nurse) and live in the Philippines where I work with street children. I have always loved words and writing so this looks like a fun way to develop that even more.

Hester (Strawberry, Mall, Sunder, Brick, Waterfall)

I pull into a parking space as close to the mall entrance as possible. I sit in my car, breathing slowly, trying to get the courage to open the door, step out, and walk the short distance to the door. I hear a roaring like a waterfall in my head and it feels as if a brick is sitting low in my stomach, anchoring me to my seat. I think I'm going to be sick.

This is the first time I have been back since the day I lost Sophie. She was there playing in the racks of clothes, bright red and green Christmas sweaters, and then she wasn’t. She was gone. Flyers with her little elfin face, clear blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair are still plastered all over the city. Bob and I are keeping up our weekly rounds, checking to make sure the flyers remain posted, asking questions of the store clerks, putting up more if they have become ragged or torn. Every Tuesday, we visit the police detective assigned to our case, Jeff Rayner, just to check in.

Lost, stolen, kidnapped, taken: All words describing what happed. But lately, I’ve been thinking that none of these particular words really describe the truth of that day. I came across the word sunder last night while rereading The Scarlet Letter in preparation for the freshman English class I'm supposed to start teaching next month. I'm somewhat doubtful that I will be able to keep that commitment. Mid-way in the book, there is a scene in which the leaders of the town are interviewing little Pearl, trying to determine if it would be in the best interest of her young soul to be taken from her fallen mother, Hester, and given to someone else, someone more godly, to raise. The men decide to put the matter aside for later consideration and, as Hester scoops Pearl up in her arms and leaves, she encounters a woman who invites her to the woods for a satanic ritual later that night. Hester declines, but says if they had taken little Pearl from her, she would have willingly gone and signed her name to the Devil’s book. The last lines of the chapter keeps playing through my mind:

But here -- if we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins and Hester Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable -- was already an illustration of the young minister's argument against sundering the relation of a fallen mother to the offspring of her frailty. Even thus early had the child saved her from Satan's snare.

After reading that chapter, I went to the dictionary on the swivel stand in the front living room and looked up sunder. The primary definition is “to break or wrench apart, sever.”

Sunder. Yes. That's the word. That’s what has happened to Sophie and me. We have been sundered. We had been wrenched apart. We, mother and daughter, have been severed. And now, fallen like Hester, if I could have the offspring of my frailty back for even a moment, I would gladly sign my name to the Devil’s book. I would lay myself before Satan's snare if only I knew my little girl was safe. God help me and forgive me.

~Belinda is enjoying the challenge of these weekly monologues. Among other things, she posts them on her blog at Upside Down Bee.