4th of July means dinner and a zip line!

Tere's kids were at Seaworld with the G-parents yesterday and Jonathon is out of town. Much to our surprise, Tere showed up at our house around 7 just as I was contemplating dinner.  She'd made soup and invited us down.  As we all know, I'm the first to try to get out of cooking, so I was all for it!

The soup was an Italian sausage soup, and chock full of tons of veggies.  Tere just came back from a trip to a spa in Tecate was feeling very virtuous and healthy.  The soup was very, very good and even better once I'd dumped some cheese on it. Yum!

And even better, the Beckers have a zip line!!! How awesome is that?  And how did I not know about it? It's 20 feet up onto a tree platform and then you can zip probably 50 feet down to the yard.  Very cool.  I'm going back tonight to do it again, while Tere snaps pics for the blog... check back!

What I like about me (I really know how to dance)

I woke up this morning in the mood to blog.  I can't decide what to blog about because at least three topics jumped to my mind, but I'm going with this title.  I'm not really that great a dancer, so if the title confuses you, either I'm too old to be blogging or you're too young to read my blog!

I have the ability to see humor in the oddest places.   And it's something I DO like about myself -- I can find joy in the mundane, I laugh at inopportune times.  I'm witty, I'm irreverent, and I am appropriately inappropriate.  Have you read my blog "MEMs"?  Read it.  Because at the very end, when the lights went up, I started laughing.  And laughing.  And I'm still laughing today. 

Laughter helps me cope with some of life's tougher times.  It can turn a tragic moment into a gentler memory, a softer memory.  When my mom was in mid-stage Alzheimer's, she came out of the bedroom  one day and said very seriously, "I think I have a problem."  Of course, my heart about stopped and I said, "What's up, Mom?"  At that moment, she yanked her shirt up to show me that she had her bra on backwards," Does this look right to you?"  I immediately started laughing and said, "Mom, unless you have boobs on your back now, I think we better turn that around."  And we both had a good laugh.  It sure beats crying...

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Somehow, whether through nature or nuture, both Larry and Jess own similar traits.  Here we are getting ready to decorate the Christmas tree.   This was about three weeks after I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  I was undergoing test after test and everything was topsy-turvy.

You would think that we might be a little subdued, or least a little more traditional in our celebration.  But, not us.  It's not in our nature.  As the kids are trying to straighten the tree and put the lights on, I decide we need to document our holiday and go with an anit-drug theme -- "Say No to Crack."

Here's Jess with her first attempt with the tree.

Then she realizes that I really do have the camera.

Now it's becoming too difficult to work on the tree while holding one belt loop, so Larry steps in...

(ooh, maybe I should offer to wax that for him)

Allan refuses to part of this idiocy and stays on the sofa... he's a real stick in the mud sometimes.

And that's us.  I'm not sure we have any pics of the actual tree once it's decorated.  But I look at theses pics and I laugh.  It's a good memory. It's how we roll.

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(P.S. I also rule with spelling and puncuation.)