Dreams of spooning

Daily Prompt – Fork

It’s so junior high, but it was so much fun!

“Fork it over,” said the spoon. “I heard them say, ‘you’re done’.” She was hoping this would be the last time she ever saw him or heard his barb-like wit.

“They said ‘put a fork in it’ you hollowed out excuse for flatware,” replied the fork, trying not to see how smooth and well-rounded she was.

“You’re finished,” shouted the spoon. “’Your tine has come.”

“Haha, you pint-sized ladle.

“You’re such a prick,” shouted the spoon.

“Yeah, and I’ll stick it to you if you’re not careful.” They both looked down sadly knowing it was true. Their shiny finishes seemed to dull. The first time Fork spilled over into Spoon’s tray, their parents had warned them.

They could be friends and co-workers but their dream of spooning would always be tainted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If it’s good enough for Einstein

Daily Prompt – Countless

“Twenty sit-ups,” I say enthusiastically and start counting, “One, two, three, four. . .”

Five minutes later, “Ten burpees. You can do this! One, two, three. . .”

Countless counting! I count reps all day long. I count to twenty countless times during a day. If I expand that time frame to a week, a month or a year using the word “countless” becomes an understatement.

Counting is important in my business because it is one way to measure a person’s improvement. I’m good at my job, but I’m a terrible counter. I start out well enough then my attention turns to form or I want to explain how the muscles work in a particular exercise. My counting starts to sound like that of a two-year-old.  “One, two, three, four, five—drop your back knee—three, four…”

If my client has been training with me for a while, they quickly point out, “that’s six.”

“Right, six. We’re doing twenty. You know I can’t count. You count,” I’ll say and continue the explanation.

This whole counting thing goes back to my multi-tasking abilities—or I should say lack of multi-tasking skills. I don’t multi-task.  I don’t think there is any shame in not being an accomplished multitasker; I’m just not good at it.

Actually, I used to multi-task, but Mom said I was scatterbrained and teachers said I couldn’t stay on task. So I developed strategies to overcome my multi-tasking shortcomings.

I write everything down. I am an avid note-taker. I am renowned for my outlining, highlighting, labeling and organizing skills.

These strategies have created other problems, however. My obsessive outlining and note-taking has diminished my memorization abilities which in turn makes writing down everything even more important.

My spreadsheets of client workouts are extensive. I record the exercise, repetitions, sets and countless other data. Some of my co-workers consider this record-keeping a sign of professionalism, others as an idiosyncrasy. I always thought of it as a crutch.

Then I read Einstein’s words, “Never memorize something that you can look up.”

Saying the words, “wait a sec while I look it up,” used to embarrass me. I felt that as an intelligent person I should have this information on the tip of my tongue. Well, those days are over!

I am in the company of geniuses. If it is good enough for Einstein, it is good enough for me!

 

 

 

Dream Happy

Dream-Daily Prompt

“What do you dream about?” the angel asked.

“I don’t know,” the little girl answered.

“You must dream,” the angel replied softly.

“So you will know what will make you happy.”

“I will dream I want to be happy,” the little girl said.

“Are you happy?” the angel asked.

“Yes,” the little girl replied.

“Then you are living your dreams,” the angel said.

There are now 4 of us!

Week 2, Day 1 of our 12-week workout program

If today’s workout is any indication, our 12-week program is going to be amazingly insane. It started this morning at 6:00am when Tonette showed up for spin class. Honestly, that woman never stops. “I’m doing two workout a day, starting this week,” she said.

Sheila and JB

At 6:50 am Sheila showed up. Sheila is also Tonette’s mother. This is the best part of living in a small town! Seriously, it is just like in the movies—everyone does know everyone!

 

Sheila and I like quiet for our yoga, so we booted Tonette out—not an easy task. I basically had to push Tonette off her bike. The day was just getting started.

JB pushing Tonette off her bike! (LOL)

 

Workout time for “The Three of Us” was 1:30 pm. When I arrived at the gym, Tonette was busily revising our workout and told me that Alisha’s sister, Jazmyn, was joining us. “Now we are four,” she said. Tonette is madly scratching through her planned workout, reorganizing and restructuring. She enters in pencil every exercise, reps, sets and weight in a small notebook she carries from station to station in the gym.

“Let’s just go,” I said. “We’ll figure it out.”

Tonette loves to be in charge, and I love to let her take over planning our workouts. As a personal trainer, I am so ready to not be in charge of a workout. But even by my standards, and I tend to be a little obsessive about planning workouts, Tonnette is over the top.

Jazmyn, Alisha (photographer), JB, Tonette

We decided to partner up. Jazmyn and I would be together; Tonette and Alisha would pair up.

 

We love our gym, but it is small and has limited equipment. This usually isn’t a problem, even when the gym is crowded. But today it was. We all wanted the same weights, the same bench, the same everything! Tonette changed the order of the exercises and moved us around, and we still argued. It was laughable.

At one point, after Tonette had told me three different things to do, I balked. “I’m doing cross cable flies,” I said.

“That’s not the fly we’re doing,” she replied.

“It’s the fly I’m doing,” I said and set up the cables for the exercise. Smiling, I looked over at her and said, “Bitch.”

“You’re the bitch,” she smiled back pointing her finger.

Like I said, amazingly insane. Workout time tomorrow, 2:30 pm.

 

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“The Three of Us”

We are three amazing women who like to be fit. We met and work out at Snap Fitness in El Centro, CA.  If you saw us, you probably wouldn’t match us up as workout buddies, but we make a great team.

Our ages are 33, 51, and 67 and we have differing levels of strength, flexibility, and endurance. One thing we have in common is our stubbornness. Things can get very interesting! Our goal is to keep each other motivated and committed to at least four workouts a week.

Each of us has one or two little body issues—hip replacement, arthritis, exercise-onset-migraines, bone spurs, sciatica—you get the idea. We modify the exercises to accommodate our bodies.

Last week we started a twelve-week workout program. Here’s our workout for the first three weeks. We do three sets of 12 reps for everything except abs, where we do 20 reps.

We determine the order of our exercises based on the location of equipment in the gym and how crowded it is. We do super-sets rotating through three exercises, unless I can convince my partners to include an interval component—fat chance, but I keep trying.

I like circuit training and abs. Tonette hates circuit training and abs. I like body weight exercises. Both Tonette and Alisha like to lift heavy weights. We compromise.

Share the upcoming three months with us! We’re planning on having some fun. We’ll share our workout and nutrition tips and look forward to hearing about yours.

The Summer of ’66

The Summer of ’66

“Roll down the back seat window. It’s hot!” I shouted over my shoulder, my hands slippery with sweat on the steering wheel of the 1961 Chevy Bel Air station wagon. The window at the rear of the wagon didn’t roll down, so what little air there was floated to the back and became trapped. Even if every window was open, no air could circulate in the cave-like behemoth.

Against Mom’s wishes, Dad let me have the station wagon, telling her it was a tank and virtually indestructible. “She’ll be the last one standing,” he smiled and gave Mom a hug.

McDuff hollered over the wind, “It’s so neato you got the car!”

“Bitchin, McDuff,” McDuff was what everyone called Mary McDuff. She wasn’t really my friend; she was my best friend Bernie’s friend. Bernie’s mom wouldn’t let her ride in a car with another teenager driving. “Not enough driving experience,” Bernie’s mom had her. McDuff’s mother obviously didn’t object, and I had lied to my mother about where I was going and who was going with me.

I had been afraid I wouldn’t get the car. Mom and I had argued this morning.  “What’s the point of having a driver’s license and a car if you never let me go anywhere.”

“Please,” I begged. “I’ll be careful.” She wasn’t budging.

“Dad will be okay with it. Let’s call him. Come on, Mom.” I sidled lovingly up beside her and felt her weaken.

“Fine,” she said. “But you have to take Susie. And, you have to stop at the Winn Dixie to pick up the roast I ordered.” What a bummer. Susie was my baby sister and five years younger than me. Taking her along would be a real drag.

“If you tell Mom anything, I’ll kill you,” I told her as we walked to the car. “And don’t say anything dumb in front of McDuff.”

“I won’t. I promise,” she said. Susie was sweet and she worshipped me, but she was incredibly stupid about what not to tell Mom to avoid getting in trouble.

“Whatever,” I thought as I stretched out my legs and adjusted the seat. Coming through for my friends was all that mattered. This was my chance to win McDuff over. She had been doing more and more things with Bernie and not including me.  My plan was to become the indispensable member of a threesome. I would be the friend with a car.

“Get in the back,” I told Susie when we pulled up to McDuff’s house.

“Who’s this” McDuff asked as she slammed the heavy car door.

“My sister. I had to bring her or I couldn’t have the car.” I shrugged apologetically.

“It’s cool,” she replied.

“Where are we meeting them?” I asked. “Them” referring to the three boys McDuff had met the previous weekend at White Lake, a summer hangout twenty miles from home. McDuff swore they were very cute, smoked cigarettes, and liked to lay out on the pier tanning. They had promised to treat us to burgers at Hardees.

“It better be on the side by the pier,” I said, “or we’ll have to drive around forever trying to find a parking space.”

On the pier side of the lake was a paved parking lot with pull-in spaces. If the lot was full, sweaty drivers squeezed their cars bumper-to-bumper on either side of a two lane road that edged the lake. I could barely park the wide whale of a vehicle in a pull-in space. Mastering the clutch with the gearshift on the column was much more difficult than I thought it would be. Parallel parking was a requirement to get a driver’s license, and I had barely passed the test in a much smaller sedan. The jutting, high profile tailfins on the wagon made it nearly impossible to see the car behind me. The all steel body was difficult for me to maneuver, and even the thought of backing up terrified me.

“They’re saving us a space,” she said.

Relieved, I turned the volume up on the radio. It was the summer of 1966 and my favorite song by the Troggs was playing. The three of us tunelessly belted out,

“Wild thing, I think  I love you

You make everything groovy, wild thing

Wild thing, I think I love you

But I wanna know for sure

Come on and hold me tight I love you.”

We leaned to the center of the front seat and curled our hands as though holding microphones. We rolled our eyes at each other and laughed. It was working; McDuff liked me. Bernie, McDuff and I were going to be a trio of friends.

 

 

The Writer Within

The Writer Within – Daily Prompt

               Reading books about writing make me believe I can write.  Every sentence inspires me and creates a mental picture of my hands flying over the keyboard generating thought provoking prose. Taking that picture one step further, I see a reader pause and make a pensive turn of the head to contemplate a particularly poignant passage.  At that point, when I am enthused about writing and my abilities, I should put down the book and reach for my computer. But I continue to read.

               It is so much easier to read about writing than to write. I started blogging to find the writer that I know is deep within me. She was there when I was ten years old and every experience was new. I had to share them with the world. I wrote every day. I wrote short essays in my precise printing and then later in the cursive script that was required in elementary school. I wrote poems. I wrote imaginative stories about little girls with hats and silly fears of  being sucked down the drain with the bath water. There was always something to write about.

               In the eighth grade I won first place in the school essay contest and received a blue ribbon, which I still have, for an essay that included the phrase, “the pitter patter of little raindrops.”  At the end-of-the-year assembly the winners from each grade read their papers aloud.  I squeezed the words “pitterpatter” together and spoke them in a quick staccato voice mimicking the sound I heard in my head. I felt so creative.

               When I got to high school, the only class I liked was Creative Writing. I was dismayed to discover that I wasn’t the best writer in the class. Each week the teacher would select an essay to read aloud to the class. Where did everyone come up with their ideas? How did they manage to make everything so interesting? I kept writing and writing, and one day it happened. The teacher picked my paper to read!

               Writing made my days better. It brought me joy. Writing helped me discover more about myself.  I loved writing! And then, day-by-day I wrote less and less. It happened slowly, and I barely noticed that I wasn’t writing any more. I still thought of myself as a writer even though the only thing I wrote were “to do” lists and research papers.

               It’s been five decades since I heard my essay read to my high school Creative Writing class. That’s fifty years! How could I have gone so long without writing? Is she still there? Is that young girl with all the ideas and need to tell her stories still there? I’m looking.

              

              

 

              

              

                             

Getting Ready for Church

 

Getting Ready for Church-Daily Prompt

           It was Saturday night. My sister and I heard the high-pitched sound of insects being electrocuted as they were lured to their deaths by the hazy, yellow light of the bug-catcher in our carport. Occasionally one of us would swat at a mosquito who was more attracted to our tanned, bar arms than the bug-catcher’s eerie glow. Georgia should have made the mosquito its state bird instead of the Brown Thrasher, my character in the school play.

               The two of us sat side-by-side on the scratchy bench of the picnic table Dad built last summer and hoped Mom would forget we were outside. Once inside it would be baths for everyone and Mom’s soft Southern drawl telling us to get our things ready for Sunday morning.

               Sundays were a big deal in our home. It was an all-day family extravaganza that began the night before, sometimes even days before if there was shopping to be done or food to prepare for the frequent “dinners-on-the-ground.”

               Tonight was “plain.” That’s what my sister and I called it when we didn’t have to do anything extra. We figured Mom might give us a little more time outside. It didn’t take us long to get ready when it was “plain.”

               “Come on in girls.” Momma’s voice was soft, not soft like you couldn’t hear her, but soft and sweet. It made both of us want to make her happy. It was easy to make Mom happy. Anything we did, well almost anything, made her smile. She loved us.  Even when we didn’t want to take the time to lay our little white gloves and black patent leather shoes, we did it because she so obviously enjoyed the fun of dressing us up.

               We didn’t race inside, we weren’t that eager to make her happy, but we didn’t lollygag either.

               Mom already had our matching pink chiffon dresses laid out on the toy box at the end of the bed. Each pile was placed in the order we were to put them on, starting with a clean pair of white panties. Depending on what dress we were wearing, a thin white cotton slip and maybe even a crinoline, would be next. Next was the dress. Tonight it was the pink chiffon.   It was a very, very pale pink. There was a three-inch ruffle around the bottom and a matching ruffle around the bodice.  The ruffles had two layers, thin enough to see through. And finally, the shrug. We loved our shrugs. There was pearl beading around the edges and short sleeves.

               Black patent leather shoes were placed on the floor beside the toy box, with a pair of white lace trimmed sox inside.

               Our white gloves and our ivory hats, not white, Momma liked ivory, were on the dresser. We each had a black patent clutch that held our Tithe Envelop. We each got four quarters to put inside. We felt very grown up when we sat in the pew between our parents and Momma would hold the collection plate down low enough so we could place our envelopes inside.

               “Now we’re all ready for church,” Momma said beaming. “Let’s say our prayers together.” We all bowed our heads, steepled our hands and recited the words to the Lord’s Prayer as best we could. Sometimes Momma would stop and say a phrase over and we would repeat it again, knowing we hadn’t quite gotten it right.

               We were ready. Our family would look grand when we walked down the aisle of The First Southern Baptist Church tomorrow morning.

              

Running Buddies

            Running Buddies

My tan baseball cap emblazoned with a “reduce, reuse, recycle” logo wasn’t providing nearly enough protection. Rather than protecting me, it imprisoned me. The band squeezed my head, the cap created a sizzling hair sauna, and the bill intensified the shimmering, bicycle spoke-like bands of blinding sunlight.  I weaved awkwardly on the uneven clay ditch bank, worsened by the holes used by the burrowing owls for nests.

“The hat has to go,” I thought. As if reading my thoughts, a small, feisty mama owl swooped down and sharply pecked the top of my cap, not to dislodge it but to defend her babies. “What about my baby!”  My head did an owl-like spin and spotted Taco, my eight-pound Chihuahua who was nearly invisible on the hard-packed, light brown dirt. What if mama owl thought Taco was a desert rodent? I waved my arms and turned just in time to see her descending toward Taco.

Taco and Daisy

 

 

“No you don’t,” I screamed. “Go! Off! Get lost!” I shouted as I reached down to rescue my baby. Mama owl was only about eight inches long and her wing span was only about a foot wide, small for a burrowing owl.  What I saw was a gargantuan, fire-breathing dragon, and I stood as bravely as Beowolf ready to conquer Grendel. Taco barked, squirmed in my arms, and jumped down to chase the fleeing monster.

Sweet victory! We danced joyfully! I tossed my cap in the air, and Taco ran gleefully in circles. The scorching heat was forgotten, the dusty air ignored. Energized and triumphant, our legs running in rhythm, we headed down the ditch bank—two buddies on a morning run.

 

Three Blogging Goals

When I first thought about starting a blog, my goal was to be a resource for my personal training clients. As I’m learning more about what a blog is and how it works, I want goals that can expand my life not just keep it focused on my job.

Don’t get me wrong! I love my job! And as I define my goals, they will overlap what I do in my work, which is all about health and fitness.

What do I want to do? Why did I even think about a blog? The big answer is that I want to write. Before I graduated high school I wrote constantly—short stories, essays, poems. Writing was my release, my escape, my joy. I want that back. I want to write.

Goal 1: Publish three times each week during the next two months.

Because I love my job and my clients, I am energetic and physically active every minute I’m at the gym. It is physically demanding; when I get home I’m tired. I have become addicted to old TV series on NetFlix. This has to stop. Television time is now going to be blogging time.

Goal 2: Read and comment on 3 blogs a day.

Appearance is important to me. I want my blog to reflect who I am as a person and a professional. This means I have to learn more about design and layout and how to put text/videos/photos together.

 Goal 3:  Spend three hours per week experimenting with and implementing different themes, widgets, etc. etc.—all those things that boggle my mind right now.

This will be a good start and help build habits to keep me writing.

I’m glad I kept reading all your posts on bloggingbrading or I would not have taken this step. Thanks.