Back to Nature

I like pretty pictures.

You like pretty pictures too right?

I thought so. Everyone likes pretty pictures.

I wanted to talk about how soothing nature is and how much I love it. I wanted to talk about my recent camping trips and how much I have enjoyed them. I wanted to say something special about how it feels to be out in nature and how relaxing it can be. Things about how beautiful it all is and how your troubles seem to not be quite so important anymore. But for some reason my words today are not working well enough to be able to describe my feelings to you like I want them to.

So, maybe I should just show you instead. Here are some pictures from some of my most recent camping trips. We went to North Toledo Bend State Park and Hodges Gardens State Park. Those links are to the Reserve America website because they had pictures but the Louisiana State Parks website has good information too. If you live within a reasonable distance I recommend you making a visit to Hodges Gardens. It was created by A.J. Hodges and he did some really neat things. He made his own botanical gardens with numerous waterfalls and built his house on an island in the lake. R agrees that this has been his favorite place we have been camping together thus far. We visited the gift shop before touring the gardens and noticed someone who had signed in said they got engaged there that weekend. While we were walking in the gardens we noticed a rock with a heart and some familiar initials and a really recent date and guessed that it was the same couple who got engaged. While I do not necessarily condone the defacing of property, it was kind of nice to think of getting engaged in such a wonderful place. So I want to to just enjoy some pretty pictures. Relax and imagine yourself there or wherever your favorite places to be in nature are.

I Am Still Alive, Part Deux

Hey there, how are ya?

I have been good. I know I have been gone a while. And I am sorry :(. Fortunately it was not due to any problems from storm damage or anything like that. It started when I went home to Baton Rouge to get away from Hurricane Ike. And I had Internet access while I was there. Then it continued as I had time off work because my work building was damaged by the storm. So there has been no excuse for me not posting. In fact I have been reading blogs but just not blogging myself. I have begun this post many times only to not finish it. I have thought about it often. The fact is that I just do not feel like I have much to say. Of course things have been happening and I enjoyed my unplanned week long vacation from work. I could be talking about the mundane but honestly nothing has inspired me. I suppose I went away for too long and then I was out of any sort of habit of writing here. I do not know why I feel like I am in such a funk. Hopefully it doesn't last.

I am looking forward to going on a short weekend trip soon. I still do not know where we are actually going though. It seems the trip curse has struck again. I like to jokingly blame most of it on R, but the truth is its not his fault or mine. Bad things just like to happen to us whenever we try to make plans. Something will inevitably come up and affect our plans. He has tried to surprise me with trips before and they just didn't work out. I have tried to make plans only to have something happen and we can't do them either. It seems that often we do not have plans but the minute we try to make any we then suddenly have 3 conflicting requests for our time. This upcoming trip is honestly no different. He is going to be training in another state next week and then I was going to fly out and meet him for the weekend after and we were going to go to the Nascar race. We made sure that we both had nothing that would conflict with this time and I went ahead and booked my ticket out there. Then R gets a call that he is needed for a meeting on the first day of his class which is out of the question and he is annoyed because this was supposed to happen well before his class. Also we had plans for the weekend and were getting some tickets for camping and now those tickets do not exist anymore. Which sounds bad but we can get free accommodations and did not truly need the tickets in the first place. But it is just typical of our luck that the tickets are not available for us anymore. It is always something last minute. But since we were never really that overly excited about the race we are thinking of maybe just skipping the whole thing and going camping somewhere else. Thing is it is still a last minute decision because we need to have stuff packed and in the car that R will be taking this weekend. And the place I really want to go is all booked up because we were forced to make this decision last minute. And we just don't know what to decide anymore. You just get to a point where you have tried and been shot down too many times that you just don't feel like trying to make plans anymore because what is the point...But we want, no we NEED the vacation and just to get away. Maybe the time off will help us get some enthusiasm back for trying to do things again. But right now we are just both fed up, with pretty much everything. So I suppose that may be why I have no desire to write anything. I do not feel the urge to do anything for anyone but myself, and even then I make excuses not to take care of myself.

When you get in a funk because nothing is going right...How do you get out of it? What makes you happy again? What makes you want to do things again? What makes going back to work any better than before? How do you change your attitude back to normal? Does anyone have any suggestions?

I Like Shopping, Sometimes

I do like shopping, I really do. But only sometimes. Normally I am content to just go shopping. I like looking at things, picking up a few, putting most of it back, and buying what I really want/need/have to have. I am actually kind of frugal and like to wait for things to go on sale before I buy them. The reasoning behind that being that if I really like a shirt but it is $50 I will come back to the store later and if they still have my size on the sale rack then it was meant to be and I get it, Yay! If they no longer have my size on sale, oh well, no great loss. This generally works pretty well and I am not a very impulsive buyer. I am an impulsive want-er, and often see things and think, Ooo I want one of those! But then I stop to think do I really need that and will I really use that, or do I need that much of that? And usually this stops me from ever putting the item in my shopping basket. Then near the end of my shopping trip I do a mental tally of what I would be spending if I bought everything in my basket and if I do in fact really need everything in there. Inevitably I always pull a few items out and leave them behind. Usually this works just fine. Sometimes though I will get home and a few days later start looking for what I think I bought, only to remember I never actually bought it.

And I don't mind shopping as long as I am happy. If I am happy and rested, I love shopping. Let me stay in one store too long though and I will get bored and tired and just want to leave. This happens often in large stores like home improvement stores and malls and whatnot. I just start to get tired and my back hurts or my feet hurt and all I want to do is sit down. Or I get hungry because we have been there too long. Or my head just starts to hurt form thinking about things too much and I don't want to talk about ideas and potential uses for such and such anymore. Some stores are better when you take them in small doses. But those stores are also some of the best because almost everything you could ask for is already there in that one store. I like going to stores like that alone so I can take my time to look at what I want and then leave when I get tired of the whole charade.

Well this past weekend I discovered a new humungo store that I can have a love/hate relationship with. It is one of those stores that is a warehouse store. It is so big that they have more states in the U.S. than they do stores, and I just moved to a city that has one. It is a European company. People take trucks on day trips to other states just to visit this store and be able to carry home all the stuff they will buy. They have everything you could think of that you might ever need to furnish your home. They have fairly good prices and are all about the space saving capabilities and versatility of their products. Have you guessed it yet?

Well here it is!
Dun Dun Dun! Yes I have discovered IKEA and I love it. I spent 3 hours there this past weekend! We walked around until we were exhausted. We really only saw everything on the top floor in the showroom. I will have to go back to look around the ground floor which held kitchen and bath accessories and other nick knacks. We were so tired we just kind of glazed over everything downstairs on our way out. I was silently happy that my boyfriend actually got tired of a store too, and before I ever asked to leave! So yes, I am declaring my love/hate relationship with IKEA official. It is one of those stores that I will have to take in small doses but that I know I cannot help but patronize. I love it and all its great design. If you have the opportunity I suggest a trip here. They even have a cafe with super cheap prices like Sam's Club and an awesome playland where you can leave the kids. So when you have a few hours, or a day to spend, make a trip to your "local" IKEA. I promise you will be overwhelmed and satisfied!

Let the Love Begin

Tradition, what makes us want to follow it and never break it?

Well in the short time I have been reading blogs I have discovered that many of the people I read most often tend to participate in what is known as Love Thursday. There are plenty of other traditions in the blogosphere such as Works For Me Wednesday and the like. Yet, the only one I have been really drawn to is Love Thursday. The funny part about traditions is that lots of people do them because that is just what you are supposed to do without knowing why. I tend to question the whys and what-fors a lot, it's just who I am. I am often thinking about things and wondering how they work, how they are made, or who was the first person to think of something. But then again there are some things I just do out of habit, or tradition and never question why. I am sure we all have some funny stories about traditions and the truth behind them.

I remember going to the grocery store with my boyfriend before we were dating and having an argument about the milk. We had bought some ice cream and milk and a few other things. As we walked out to my car to load up everything we got into an argument about where to put things. I remember him popping the trunk to load things. As he was putting things in I kept out the milk and told him we would put it on the floor of the passenger's side of the car. He asked why and all I could really say was that the floor is where I had always put the milk. He thought it would be in the way in his feet and wanted to know the reason behind putting the milk on the floor rather than the trunk with everything else. I told him that's what my mom had always done and that's just how I do it too. But he wanted to know WHY? What was the reason for it? I realized I had never questioned it and had just always put the milk there. He was starting to make me mad, and when he makes me mad I get irrational and cannot think straight or formulate answers very quickly. So for every reason I started to come up with he would immediately tell me that my reason still didn't make a whole lot of sense and he didn't see why we couldn't just put the milk in the trunk. I told him I had no idea why my mother did this and was only trying to come up with potential reasons. Of course since I was flustered already and just kind of talking my way through things I wasn't really coming up with anything good enough to prove to him why it couldn't just go in the trunk. I was saying how the milk sweats and it would make the things in the trunk yucky with condensation and it would be better on the floor. Plus there is air conditioning in the car and not in the trunk and you can keep the milk cooler by keeping it in the car on the floor near the ac vent. And my main reason and I really do think this was my mother's reason was, what if it starts to leak or something. If it was on the floor near you you could see it and do something about it; if it was in the trunk you wouldn't know and it would get all over everything. But none of this was good enough for him. If it was on the floor it would still sweat and then just get all over his legs. And if it leaks then it is still all over everything and I am driving and there is still nothing I can do about it. Blah Blah Blah. Point is he made me so mad that he questioned me and how I do things and was basically telling me my way was just stupid and I was really mad. He was really mad because I couldn't formulate and answer in a normal amount of time because I was mad. So he told me to just put the dang milk in his feet and lets just go home, and I told him no to put it in the freaking trunk. I don't remember where it went but I know we went home mad. And as I was calming down I could think better so I kept coming up with more answers all the way home until he got really mad and just told me to drop it.

I guess if he hadn't made me so mad I might have seen the sense in his questions then. Honestly I never really had anyone ride in my car with me so it was never a problem before for me to put my groceries on the passenger's side floor because there were no legs and feet to worry about. And I had just never questioned my mother's reasoning behind it but I knew I didn't want the milk sweating and condensating all over other things in my trunk. (Yes, I make up words like condensating because I think they describe the situation better than being grammatically correct, get over it.) But it sweating and condensating on the floor of my car was no different really I suppose. So it really wasn't that big of a deal to change my habit/tradition and put the darn milk in the trunk with everything else. It so shouldn't have turned into such a huge argument. But he made me feel like he thought my tradition was stupid and that my mother was silly for doing it and I was silly for doing it too. And I had to justify it! Only I couldn't really other than saying that's just the way I want to do it.

So I guess what I am really wondering today is what makes us hold on so firmly to traditions that make no sense but that we have never even bothered to question? I once heard about a woman who always cut the ends of the pot roast off before cooking it. Her new husband asked her why and she said that her mother and her grandmother had always done it that way. She called the mother, who called the grandmother to find out why it started because surely it was just an old technique to make the meat more tender and flavorful. The answer they got was that the roast would not fit in the pan unless the grandmother cut the ends off so that's why she did it. So, since they had never questioned why and just done things as their mothers' had, they had been cutting off the ends of roasts for years for absolutely no reason. Granted cutting the roast did no harm either, there was just no real reason to do it.

As I have admitted I am usually one to question things. But sometimes I just don't, and I really am not sure why. What makes some things different from others? Why does it bother me that some people follow pointless traditions while I follow some of my own? When you actually sit down to reason things out you realize that your tradition and habitual way of doing something might not always have a reason behind it. So why do we hold so fiercely to our ideas of the way things should be? The only thing I can come up with is that some traditions are so mindless and we are so set in our ways that the repetition and simplicity of not having to question something is just comforting. I mean nothing says that everyone has to put up our Christmas Trees or Menorahs or whatever traditional holiday items your family uses on the same day at the same time right? Yet each family has certain ideas of what time is right for them and they make a tradition and follow it year after year. And there is really no problem with some children opening presents on Christmas Eve and others on Christmas Morning. So why do we find it odd when other families do not celebrate the way we do? I think tradition is comforting. I know I take some comfort in the ease with which I just know what to do sometimes and I just know the way things should be and how I just know what others are expecting of me. That's not to say it stops me from doing things my way just because I know others will disagree, because it most certainly does not. But I think a certain degree of tradition and habits are comforting for everyone.

So in the sense of tradition I think I will participate in Love Thursday, even though I don't really know why it happens or why it started. And I am not promising to be faithful and only post blogs about love on Thursdays. I will be a rebel and post blogs about love on any day I so choose, and Thursday posts will not always be Love Thursday posts. But that is okay by me. I just want to have some sense of tradition here and I think Love Thursday is a good one. It is one that will make me think about things I love and what makes me happy and makes my heart sing. I think that is a really good tradition to start. So from now on I plan on thinking about things that make me happy and sharing them with you in the hopes that I can make you a little happier too. Traditions are good for sharing the love and happiness! And I suppose I started a tradition with talking about tradition, ironic much?