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Thursday, March 31, 2011

WSU Adventures

Well, we made it to and from the State of Washington last weekend. My son and I saw people we wanted to see and places we had never seen before.
Washington is a beautiful place from the east side to the west side, and that is what we did--flew into Spokane (SpoCANE or SpoCAN), you hear both pronunciations; but SPOCAN is what the locals say. Of course, Westley picked it up very quickly. I, of course, struggle with it still. He plans to live there in Pullman at the awesome WSU campus. I just say, "Show me the Money," and you can.
We drove the five hours across the terrain to Renton, a suburb of Seattle. Again awesome mountains, tall trees, and snow. My middle son and his wife just moved into a new house set on a hillside overlooking the lights of Renton. Beautiful house, cute son and daughter-in-law--everything was good. Had to leave and drive back over the same trail to the college, only the GPS kept sending us on the back streets in the residential part of this thriving little community, just in time to hit the main highway when a gushing rainstorm hit us hard.
Westley was a little rattled by so much rain at one time (he is used to Colorado High desert rain--you know, little splats, maybe for an hour, then it is gone). Not Washington rain; I told him it reminds me of Oklahoma rain storms. Any way we made good time until we got to Pullman. No one told us to expect one way streets going up the hills to the university.
Westley was driving. THe sign pointed left for WSU. He turned into the left turn lane when I called out, "NO, no. That is a one-way street. Turn at the next left." But it was too late. We couldn't pull to the right lane traffic, and Westley was already turning the wheel. THree lanes of cars were pulling up to the light. No where to go, so he just takes our little Hundi rental car over the curb and down the (thank goodness) extra wide sidewalk, between some trees and back over the curb behind a business block that backed up to a cul-de-sac. I could say nothing until after, by then it was too late to say anything.
Westley kept driving, hoping no policeman saw us. HE made it to the correct street, turned left and went up to WSU. He did ask one question, "Did you see that bench? I know I saw a bench back there under the trees." Next day we went back to check it out, and yes there was a bench over to his left under more trees in a little park there. I took pictures of the narrow opening in the sidewalk.
I wonder if any one else has taken that detour when they discovered that that is a one-way street?

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Wednesday, March 23, 2011

WSU, Here we come

Two more days and "We're leavin' on a jet plane. Can't wait til we get there." (Sorry to John Denver for messing with his lyrics to a great song.) Any way. My son and I are off to the state of Washington to check out a college. Ever heard of Washington State University Cougars? Me either, until Westley said, "I want to transfer there."
So I learned a little geography and played with the math to get the money for this weekend trip. We are also going to see my middle son and his wife. They have a new house in a new town called Renton, a suburb of Seattle, I think. Again I had to brush up more on my geography. Found out it is completely on the other side of the state from WSU.
More March Madness, don't you think?
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Tuesday, March 22, 2011

March Madness

It must be March. One day is springtime: light, fresh and warm. The next is back to winter: rainy, foggy and cold. Madness swings in my soul and in my actions. Making plans is crazy. I want to get out; I want to stay in. I want to get a part-time job; I enjoy my retirement freedom to not have to work.
So I have determined to write a book. Sounds like that scene in Julie and Julia, when Julie Powell tells her husband, "I can write a book. I have thoughts." First I have to finish a short story for my creative writing class by April 28th. Then I will keep writing and turn it into a full length book. This must be done!!!
Since this blog is supposed to be public (to my friends and family whom I invite to read it) and no one has read this or responded YET, I am considering this blog as a private confession of my thoughts, plans, dreams and screams.
Maybe it is just the almost spring attitude. I want to do things, but usually money stops me. Remodel the house/sell this house. Move to Branson, MO or Ft. Worth, TX/stay here in GJ, Colorado. Get a paying job at the library/volunteering now at two libraries. Start a business (a book store)/here or somewhere else?
I'm just vacillating, not getting any where, so what happens? Life happens, and I get pushed into actions that I really had not planned to do. Byron wants to build his cabin of his dreams up in the mountains; I want to buy the house of my dreams near the grandkids. Youngest son wants to go to college; I want to help him do it without his burying himself deep in debt, but I am retired and on limited income.
I just need to make some decisions and make them happen; come hell or high water. Oh, this is what I meet about having "March Madness."
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Monday, March 7, 2011

Baseball Musings

February has flown and during last month came Little League registration. Since I am a "retired" baseball mom, I don't have to worry about all that money, time and energy now. My three baseball boys are college-bound or older. But I miss it.
Good thing that Spring is coming to the Western Slope of Colorado; there will be lots of baseball practices and games --- Little League, high school, college and in May --- JUCO.
Oh, and I can't forget my Rockies baseball.
If you are a novice to baseball, you probably don't know what JUCO is. That's okay. A lot of people in Denver (including the Denver Post sports writers) don't know and don't care about the JUnior COllege World Series in Grand Junction, Colorado each year.
I am going to enlighten you about this wonderful final tournament of championship teams from around the United States.
So keep reading and check back for more postings about my favorite sports stories.
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Westley's Graduation - One Year later

Westley's Graduation - One Year later
Westley gets a hug from his mom the minute after he receives his diploma from Fruita Monument High School, Class of 2010.

He's BACK! Billy Crystal is 2012 Oscar Awards Host

Remember Bohemian Rhapsody Mountain Dew parody Ad

The Help: the film dividing America

By Philip Sherwell 7:30AM BST 23 Oct 20115 Her book has sold 1.3 million copies in Britain and 10 million in the States, the film adaptation has already earned $160 million as the movie hit of the summer in America, and now Oscar buzz is mounting ahead of its release in the UK this week. These should be heady days for Kathryn Stockett, author of bestselling debut novel The Help, a publishing phenomenon that earned the devotion of book clubs and legions of predominantly female fans on both sides of the Atlantic. The Help is the emotive story of black maids in the segregated world of Sixties Mississippi at the height of the civil rights struggle – their narratives recounted by a sympathetic, young white woman who rejects the virulent inbred racism of her old school friends. There are clear autobiographical parallels with Stockett, 42, herself, a blonde Southern belle raised by a beloved African-American nanny in Jackson, the Mississippi state capital where the story is set. And her success is all the more remarkable, as the manuscript, five years in the writing, was rejected by some 60 literary agents (she stopped counting at 45). The Disney film version is being marketed as an inspiring mixture of chick lit and civil rights, based on a heart-warming sorority between the races. And there is growing speculation about Oscar nods for Viola Davis (who plays the central character, Aibileen Clark), Octavia Spencer (her feisty friend, Minny) and newcomer Emma Stone (as white socialite Skeeter Phelan). But not everyone in the US is feeling so good about the “feel-good” juggernaut that is The Help. Certainly not Ablene Cooper, the black housekeeper for Stockett’s brother, who brought a lawsuit against the writer, claiming she was the unwitting and humiliated model for the similarly named lead figure. Nor a leading black actor, or the commentators – many of them also African-American – who view the book and film as patronising portrayals that sugar-coat one of the most violent eras in modern history. Those visceral responses reflect deep and enduring fault lines about race in a country where the horrors of segregation, a painful living memory for many, were not washed away by the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president. In Mississippi, the scene of some of the most brutal acts of the freedom struggles five decades ago, those sensitivities are particularly raw. And that violent past reared its ugly head again recently when a black man was viciously beaten up by a gang of young whites and then mowed down and killed by a pick-up truck in what prosecutors claim was a racially driven hate crime. Against that turbulent backdrop, Stockett was perhaps always courting controversy. Most poignant among the objecting voices is that of Mrs Cooper, who sued the writer for $75,000, a humble sum by America’s litigious standards, for using her likeness without permission. She said she was distressed that in the book Aibileen lost her son – just as she had – and that in one exchange the maid said her skin was blacker than a cockroach. The case was thrown out under the statute of limitations, as Mrs Cooper failed to lodge it within a year of being sent the book. Still, she was not alone in her complaints. Wendell Pierce, New Orleans-born star of The Wire and Treme, launched a blistering attack on the film after watching it with his mother, who told him afterwards for the first time that she too had once worked as “the help." In a series of scathing tweets, he called the film “passive segregation lite that was painful to watch”, said his mother thought it was an “insult”, that it was a “passive version of the terror of the South” and a “sentimental primer of a palatable segregation history." Mr Pierce was at pains to praise the cast, particularly Davis and Spencer, but added that Hollywood often seeks films with black actors as long as there is also a “great white saviour." The most damning verdict on its allegedly saccharine version of reality was delivered by Max Gordon, an African-American, New York-based writer, who described his outrage as he watched the film. “The phenomenon of The Help is so depressing, as it undercuts the real heroes of the era by ignoring the real horrors,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “This is not the South of lynchings and beatings, it’s the comfortable Hollywood take of the civil rights era. “I don’t think you can compare suffering and oppression, but what would people say if there was an executive decision to make a movie about the Holocaust and the Nazis without brutality, featuring only German officers’ wives and Jewish women, with no concentration camps or trains to Auschwitz?” But the two black stars are defending the film. Spencer, a friend of Stockett, was particularly combative. “We’ve gotten so PC and we’ve gotten so weirded out. We start labelling. You have to be a black person to write about black people, you have to be a white person…” she bemoaned in one interview, not needing to finish the thought process. “I have a problem with the fact that some people are making that an issue.” The book also received the imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey, the Mississippi-born talk- show queen whose views carry great weight with her overwhelmingly female and African-American audiences. The Help was described as a “favourite book” on her website. Stockett, a recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old daughter who worked in the magazine industry in New York before moving back to the South, is now working on her second novel, another tale of women, this one set during the Great Depression. The writer addresses some of the criticisms of The Help in a newly published version of the book. She denied that, despite the coincidence of names, her brother’s housekeeper was a model, saying she had barely met the woman. Rather, she wrote that the inspiration for the character was Demetrie, her beloved childhood maid who largely raised her after her parents divorced when she was six. “The Help is fiction, by and large,” she continued. Yet as she wrote it, she wondered what her family would say – and also what Demetrie, by then long dead, would have thought. She acknowledged that she was breaking what some have seen as a cultural and literary taboo. “I was scared a lot of the time that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person,” she said. “What I am sure about is this: I don’t presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the Sixties. I don’t think it is something any white woman at the other end of a black woman’s paycheck could ever truly understand.” But, she concluded, “trying to understand is vital to our humanity”. Loyal readers and cinema-goers might agree with these motives. Her critics, as adamantly, do not. As British box offices prepare for a lucrative new release, the polarisation shows no signs of abating. 'The Help’ is released on Wednesday in Britan.