Name one thing about yourself that...
- Thread starter RealtorGal
- Start date
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2004
People are always surprised when they hear I have written three fictional skating romance stories (2 self published) and have another two books in the works.
So much for my friends thinking I'm 'quiet and reserved'. You have to be careful with us soft spoken ladies... still waters run deep and passion runs hot! lol
So much for my friends thinking I'm 'quiet and reserved'. You have to be careful with us soft spoken ladies... still waters run deep and passion runs hot! lol
I'm a pretty good cook and have a few signature dishes that are quite nice. I'm also very good on the outdoor grill and usually do all the grilling (my hubby is also a good cook, but tends to overcook meat on the grill). This is not a big deal but since I'm a doctor with no kids, people seem to automatically assume I'm too busy to cook and that I can't even boil a pot of water!!!
I'm an award winning fantasy costumer, although I pretty much gave it up a couple of years ago. (My costuming efforts concentrate on middle eastern dance and skating dresses now).
Most of my skating board buddies know this, but people still look shocked when I explain I'm not only a figure skater, but a bellydancer. I'm currently taking lessons in American Tribal style, which is kind of like "synchro bellydance." You have to match the movements of your fellow dancers exactly, or mirror image them.
My hubby and I have been married for 18 years, together for 28, and he was my one and only serious relationship. (We met just after I started college). I chose well!!!!
I'm an award winning fantasy costumer, although I pretty much gave it up a couple of years ago. (My costuming efforts concentrate on middle eastern dance and skating dresses now).
Most of my skating board buddies know this, but people still look shocked when I explain I'm not only a figure skater, but a bellydancer. I'm currently taking lessons in American Tribal style, which is kind of like "synchro bellydance." You have to match the movements of your fellow dancers exactly, or mirror image them.
My hubby and I have been married for 18 years, together for 28, and he was my one and only serious relationship. (We met just after I started college). I chose well!!!!
- Joined
- Jul 26, 2003
Yaz-that sounds just like me and my hubby. I've been with my husband for 25yrs and married to him for 21yrs. He is also my college sweetheart
Other things about me that people don't know:
1) You could say I was a professional child actor for a short period of time. Had an agent and all. Made one "Head & Shoulders" commerical and almost a Carnation milk one. Just when I was getting started my parents pulled the plug, too much driving around and they had to work!
2) Favorite TV show is "Judge Judy".
3) Was a competitive baton twirler in my teens.
When my girls were little, I would entertain them by telling them what the cats were thinking. I would have the cats tell about their day, gripe about the squirrels, answer their questions etc The kids loved it. The problem is the kids are 16 and 18 and I am still talking for the cats. As long as it's not in front of their friends, the girls have promised not to ship me off to a nursing home, yet.
I may be deluding myself by thinking this isn't obvious, but I can't get the #%§?!! VCR to record anything I actually want to see, ever. I have a huge selection of wrong channel, wrong time, and Lord-knows-what tapes.
My VCR hates me, but the cats think I'm swell!
I may be deluding myself by thinking this isn't obvious, but I can't get the #%§?!! VCR to record anything I actually want to see, ever. I have a huge selection of wrong channel, wrong time, and Lord-knows-what tapes.
My VCR hates me, but the cats think I'm swell!
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2003
LOL! I'm not such a weirdo....Susanbeth also vocalizes her pets' inner thoughts! I've always done that with my dogs for my nieces and nephews....they absolutely love it! And, as you said, they are now 13 and 15 and generally don't find it as amusing as I do anymore.
Kara Bear said:
Actually, my eldest cat, Pitters, reminds me of Judge Wapner from that old tv show. Pitters is passionate about animal rights, but can't understand why we have to have them in the house. A smart kitten watches his manners around Pitters. He also loves his people, especially his human children. He's just never seemed to figure out why.
So, yes, I have imagined what they would look like as humans. I could write biographies about them.
- Joined
- Jul 28, 2003
A few years ago, my grandmother did some babysitting to earn some money. She would always talk to her 5-year old charge about cats like that. Then, one day, her employer asked her to stop doing that because the girl would talk that way about cats in school, and other kids teased her.:\SusanBeth said:
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2003
Kara Bear said:
No, but I've often wondered what humans would look like if they were pets!
That's so sad. It's also a little frightening that even young kids should be discouraged from using their imaginations. Imaginative play is so important for healthy development. My girls never had a problem knowing what was real and what wasn't. They are intelligent, well read, young ladies and very good writers.
Mob rule is really starting young these days. We're going to be turning out generations of human ''robots'' if that keeps up.
Mob rule is really starting young these days. We're going to be turning out generations of human ''robots'' if that keeps up.
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2003
Oh, here's a little gem I thought of today: I used to play on the chess team in my high school. I was the only girl on the team, and I actually had a pretty good time. Now I play with RG Jr., who really challenges me!
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2003
What a cool thread. Who would have thunk it.
The 1960s! To everything there is a season, and it was the season to rebel, the season to revolt, up the establishment, join the Movement. The times, they were a-changing and we were the ones who were a-changing them.
Three years after the Sit-ins of 1960 and two years after the Freedom Rides of 1961, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) undertook its most ambitious crusade: to energize the potential political power of the black people of Mississippi to bring about a new day and a New South. It might seem like there was nothing very radical about registering people to vote. But in that place and time it was a radical thought indeed, that the right to vote should be extended to the black population. And when three of our little cadre, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in the first week, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, that brought home pretty dramatically just what we were up against and how resistant people were to change. (There was a 1988 movie, Mississippi Burning starring Gene Hackman, about the eventual trial in these murders).
So here we came, a bunch of naive, starry-eyed young students from Ivy League colleges, to overturn, by passive resistance, the Jim Crow laws that disallowed black people from registering to vote, as a matter of law. Some of the leaders in the movement were James Forman of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), who organized the Freedom Rides for equal access to public services such as drinking fountains; John Lewis (now Congressman Lewis of North Carolina) who organized the Sit-ins in Greensboro, N. C., to allow black people to sit at public lunch counters; Bob Moses, who headed up the Freedom School literacy project for the Council of Federated Organizations (now he runs the Algebra Project in New York); and Julian Bond, who later went into main stream politics and is now the national chairman of the NAACP.
Of course we all thought then that Martin Luther King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was too boozhie (bourgeois) for us. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, a protest for the right to sit on the seats of the public buses without having to get up when a white person got on board, was already 7 years old (1955-56), and King's famous "dream" speech in Washington that year (1963) -- well, let's just say that we were more into "any means necessary," LOL. (OT, I have met Rosa Parks quite a number of times in Detroit over the years. As for Malcolm X, poor guy, he would be turning over in his grave if he knew that he had been so co-opted by the establishment (we said stuff like that a lot back then, LOL) that they put him on a postage stamp.
Anyway, the new fastest gun in town was Stokely Carmichael, a radical firebrand and an intellectual (as opposed to H. Rap brown who was then and is now, little more than a thug). Stokely was our fearless leader that summer. Later he married South African singer Miriam Makeba and spent most of the rest of his life proselytizing for the "back to Africa" movement.
I worked that summer in Greenville, Mississippi, which was fairly liberal in those days, relatively speaking, largely because of the influence of the newspaper publisher, Pulitzer prize winner Hodding Carter II. His son, Hodding Carter III, whom I got to know a little, was later press secretary to President Jimmy Carter. We did succeed in pressuring the local government to allow open registration and to stop using literacy tests in a discriminating way to prevent blacks from registering. (Black applicants were required to read and interpret sections of the state constitution, for instance, while white applicants read paragraph from the newspaper -- unless the white applicants were illiterate, in which case the country registrar read it for them.)
At the end of the summer I decided to stay in the state, postponing my sophomore year at college (it eventually took me 7 years to get through 4 years of college, LOL), moving to the rural areas of Issaquena and Sharkey Counties (county seat, Yazoo City) in the delta. Here. as you might imagine, things got a little rougher. We spent the year organizing a legal challenge to the Mississippi delegation to the Democratic Party Convention, held in August, 1964. If you are old enough to remember the old Dixiecrats, you know that in those days the "Solid South" always voted 100% Democratic, but the Southern Democrats then proceeded to oppose everything that the national Democratic Party supported. They had power disproportionately to there numbers because they often represented the swing vote on many issues of contention. Needless to say, no black people were allowed to participate in the caucuses and conventions of the Southern Democratic Party, hence the legal challenge at the Democratic Convention. Our candidate for Congress was Fannie Lou Hamer.
Well, as you might suppose, this went down about as well as the WSF against the ISU (although we did get a resolution passed to seat two of our representatives). Not only that, but many of the indigenous black people who attempted to register to vote or to involve themselves in the political process, suffered greatly for their temerity. Many lost their jobs or suffered other economic retaliation, many awoke in the middle of the night to see crosses burning on the lawn, sometimes shots were fired into the churches where we were holding our meetings, many people were beaten, a few were killed.
I left Mississippi after two years quite in despondency. We had not brought about any change in the power structure, and certainly we had not brought about any change in the minds of the people. We had only brought greater suffering on the very people we naively thought we were trying to help.
And yet, fifteen years later I came back to Issaquena County for a visit. The mayor of the county seat (Mayersville, population 150) was black. So was the deputy sheriff of this rural county, where the majority of people -- now the majority of voters -- were black farmers who owned tiny family farms. Much more important, the Farm Board, which decides among other things which farmers would be paid by the government to let their land lay fallow (you have to be a farmer to appreciate why this is HUGE in terms of the economic viability of your farm) had a black member. The little Head Start program that we had tried to start up was a growing concern, employing five people at real salaries, a teacher, assistant teacher, cook, bus driver and part-time secretary (again, unless you have lived in a town of 150 people mired in unimaginable poverty, you cannot conceive of what five real jobs means to the communty).
Well, that was then, this is now. Looking back, I am astonished at how young we were, how innocent and how full of our own importance, to think that we were going to move the world.
Then again, looking back, maybe we did give it a tiny nudge.
Mathman
For any young people reading this, here's more on the life and times of Fanny Lou Hamer.
http://nd.essortment.com/fannielouhamer_rgrh.htm
Excerpt: While in (police) custody, (Mrs.) Hamer and other (civil rights) workers were beaten unmercifully. Hamer suffered extreme injuries, which bothered her throughout the rest of her life. She said of the incident:
"Three white men came into my room. One was a state highway policeman…They said they were going to make me wish I was dead. They made me lay down on my face and they ordered two Negro prisoners to beat me with a blackjack. That was unbearable. The first prisoner beat me until he was exhausted, then the second Negro began to beat me….They beat me until I was hard, 'til I couldn't bend my fingers or get up when they told me to. That's how I got this blood clot in my eye--the sight's nearly gone now. My kidney was injured from the blows they gave me on the back."
Five years later this great hero was recognized by Mississippi Magazine as one of the six most influential women in the state.
May you live in interesting times (old Chinese curse).
The 1960s! To everything there is a season, and it was the season to rebel, the season to revolt, up the establishment, join the Movement. The times, they were a-changing and we were the ones who were a-changing them.
Three years after the Sit-ins of 1960 and two years after the Freedom Rides of 1961, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) undertook its most ambitious crusade: to energize the potential political power of the black people of Mississippi to bring about a new day and a New South. It might seem like there was nothing very radical about registering people to vote. But in that place and time it was a radical thought indeed, that the right to vote should be extended to the black population. And when three of our little cadre, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in the first week, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, that brought home pretty dramatically just what we were up against and how resistant people were to change. (There was a 1988 movie, Mississippi Burning starring Gene Hackman, about the eventual trial in these murders).
So here we came, a bunch of naive, starry-eyed young students from Ivy League colleges, to overturn, by passive resistance, the Jim Crow laws that disallowed black people from registering to vote, as a matter of law. Some of the leaders in the movement were James Forman of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), who organized the Freedom Rides for equal access to public services such as drinking fountains; John Lewis (now Congressman Lewis of North Carolina) who organized the Sit-ins in Greensboro, N. C., to allow black people to sit at public lunch counters; Bob Moses, who headed up the Freedom School literacy project for the Council of Federated Organizations (now he runs the Algebra Project in New York); and Julian Bond, who later went into main stream politics and is now the national chairman of the NAACP.
Of course we all thought then that Martin Luther King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was too boozhie (bourgeois) for us. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, a protest for the right to sit on the seats of the public buses without having to get up when a white person got on board, was already 7 years old (1955-56), and King's famous "dream" speech in Washington that year (1963) -- well, let's just say that we were more into "any means necessary," LOL. (OT, I have met Rosa Parks quite a number of times in Detroit over the years. As for Malcolm X, poor guy, he would be turning over in his grave if he knew that he had been so co-opted by the establishment (we said stuff like that a lot back then, LOL) that they put him on a postage stamp.
Anyway, the new fastest gun in town was Stokely Carmichael, a radical firebrand and an intellectual (as opposed to H. Rap brown who was then and is now, little more than a thug). Stokely was our fearless leader that summer. Later he married South African singer Miriam Makeba and spent most of the rest of his life proselytizing for the "back to Africa" movement.
I worked that summer in Greenville, Mississippi, which was fairly liberal in those days, relatively speaking, largely because of the influence of the newspaper publisher, Pulitzer prize winner Hodding Carter II. His son, Hodding Carter III, whom I got to know a little, was later press secretary to President Jimmy Carter. We did succeed in pressuring the local government to allow open registration and to stop using literacy tests in a discriminating way to prevent blacks from registering. (Black applicants were required to read and interpret sections of the state constitution, for instance, while white applicants read paragraph from the newspaper -- unless the white applicants were illiterate, in which case the country registrar read it for them.)
At the end of the summer I decided to stay in the state, postponing my sophomore year at college (it eventually took me 7 years to get through 4 years of college, LOL), moving to the rural areas of Issaquena and Sharkey Counties (county seat, Yazoo City) in the delta. Here. as you might imagine, things got a little rougher. We spent the year organizing a legal challenge to the Mississippi delegation to the Democratic Party Convention, held in August, 1964. If you are old enough to remember the old Dixiecrats, you know that in those days the "Solid South" always voted 100% Democratic, but the Southern Democrats then proceeded to oppose everything that the national Democratic Party supported. They had power disproportionately to there numbers because they often represented the swing vote on many issues of contention. Needless to say, no black people were allowed to participate in the caucuses and conventions of the Southern Democratic Party, hence the legal challenge at the Democratic Convention. Our candidate for Congress was Fannie Lou Hamer.
Well, as you might suppose, this went down about as well as the WSF against the ISU (although we did get a resolution passed to seat two of our representatives). Not only that, but many of the indigenous black people who attempted to register to vote or to involve themselves in the political process, suffered greatly for their temerity. Many lost their jobs or suffered other economic retaliation, many awoke in the middle of the night to see crosses burning on the lawn, sometimes shots were fired into the churches where we were holding our meetings, many people were beaten, a few were killed.
I left Mississippi after two years quite in despondency. We had not brought about any change in the power structure, and certainly we had not brought about any change in the minds of the people. We had only brought greater suffering on the very people we naively thought we were trying to help.
And yet, fifteen years later I came back to Issaquena County for a visit. The mayor of the county seat (Mayersville, population 150) was black. So was the deputy sheriff of this rural county, where the majority of people -- now the majority of voters -- were black farmers who owned tiny family farms. Much more important, the Farm Board, which decides among other things which farmers would be paid by the government to let their land lay fallow (you have to be a farmer to appreciate why this is HUGE in terms of the economic viability of your farm) had a black member. The little Head Start program that we had tried to start up was a growing concern, employing five people at real salaries, a teacher, assistant teacher, cook, bus driver and part-time secretary (again, unless you have lived in a town of 150 people mired in unimaginable poverty, you cannot conceive of what five real jobs means to the communty).
Well, that was then, this is now. Looking back, I am astonished at how young we were, how innocent and how full of our own importance, to think that we were going to move the world.
Then again, looking back, maybe we did give it a tiny nudge.
Mathman
For any young people reading this, here's more on the life and times of Fanny Lou Hamer.
http://nd.essortment.com/fannielouhamer_rgrh.htm
Excerpt: While in (police) custody, (Mrs.) Hamer and other (civil rights) workers were beaten unmercifully. Hamer suffered extreme injuries, which bothered her throughout the rest of her life. She said of the incident:
"Three white men came into my room. One was a state highway policeman…They said they were going to make me wish I was dead. They made me lay down on my face and they ordered two Negro prisoners to beat me with a blackjack. That was unbearable. The first prisoner beat me until he was exhausted, then the second Negro began to beat me….They beat me until I was hard, 'til I couldn't bend my fingers or get up when they told me to. That's how I got this blood clot in my eye--the sight's nearly gone now. My kidney was injured from the blows they gave me on the back."
Five years later this great hero was recognized by Mississippi Magazine as one of the six most influential women in the state.
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