More on Friendship

I thought I would add a little more about friendships and include some more pictures. All of my old pictures are packed away and unavailable at this point so I can't show any great old ones like some of you are. I have really enjoyed seeing everyone else's though. I mentioned my long time friend Marylou in my last post. I can only offer a recent photo but she really hasn't changed much since we were kids. She is one of my friends that I packed shrimp with that I told you about in our posts about previous jobs. We became friends at the ripe old age of seven!

Here are a couple of collages of people I have worked with at the University over the years and have remained friends with even if it is just on FB. Some of them I do see on a regular basis for lunch, etc.

 

 

Thadd and I are good friends with my ex and his wife Kim. We spend a lot of time at each other's houses and Thadd plays golf with Don almost every weekend. Kim plays as well but unfortunately, I can no longer play. A lot of my other friends think it is weird that we are all such good friends but it has made the kid's lives easier because of it. Kim is such a sweet, kind person, you can't help but love her.

 



I thought I would also put an updated picture of my son, niece and great nieces that was taken when he went to visit them in Arizona where they live. He was there on business.

 

And last but not least a new picture of Spencer and Henry. I'm sorry, I can't help myself. I guess to say I am a proud grandma is an understatement. LOL! Spencer is just now starting to get real food and he is enjoying it as you can see.

 

 

 

The stores here are already gearing up for Christmas and have their aisles loaded with toys. My daughter took this today of Henry trying out his very own Mini Cooper! Though he looked right at home in it, I seriously doubt Santa will be bringing it for him.

 







I am leaving for Arkansas on Monday to go take care of my grandson Zach while his mom and dad go out of town. I will try to post if I can get on their computer. I don't like to take my laptop with me when I have to fly. Take care everyone. xxxx

September Friendship Challenge

Lynne's quote and challenge for us this week:

“Love is Like a friendship caught on fire”   by Bruce Lee
 
What is important to you in a friendship?

Tell us this week about some friendships that have grown over the years.

About friends you have lost touch with and why?

During the week take photos of some things you have been doing or something that you found interesting.

A lot of the friends I have made over the years have become lost. For whatever reason, they stopped responding to my attempts to keep our friendship alive. I guess we all just get too busy in our own lives sometimes to afford time to others. Some of my friends have passed away which saddens me greatly. My oldest friend is Marylou. We have been friends since we were about seven years old. We haven't seen each other f or quite a long time but we stay in contact via email and Facebook. Our last attempt to get together ended in cancellation due to an illness. She lives several hours away but we are going to try to get together before the year is out.

I am Facebook friends with a lot of friends I had in high school even though we do not see each other or talk otherwise. I get to see pictures of their families and hear about their adventures. Facebook is very good for that.

My BFF is my hubby Thadd. We started out as friends, then dated for awhile, and now we will have been married 23 years in November. I can talk to him about anything. We are very much alike in some ways, yet very different in others. We argue very little and have the same sense of humor.

I will write more about friendships later.

As for what I have been up to this week, we went to my daughters for my SIL's birthday then we babysat so they could go out for a while. I took some new pictures of Henry and Spencer and thought I would share.

More later....take care. xxxx

A Little More Nostalgia

After reading other posts, I decided to write a little more about how our schools have changed since I went. Back in my day, your elementary schools (primary to some of you) went from first grade to sixth grade. I went to Grover Cleveland Elementary from first grade until the third grade when we moved. Here is a picture of Grover Cleveland. Most schools seemed to have been name after presidents or other famous people.

After we moved I sent to Stephen Foster Elementary until I finished at the end of my sixth year. Here is a picture of that school. It was more modern than Grover Cleveland (which was a very old school).

After elementary school, you went to 'junior high school' which was the 7th, 8th, and 9th grades. I went to Slight Junior High. I walked to all of these schools. They have rules here that you have to live more than a mile away from the school you are attending to qualify for a school bus. I couldn't find a picture of the school to show you.

After junior high school, you went to 'high' school which was your 10th, 11th, and 12th grades. You graduated after completing your senior (12th) year. By this time we finally lived far enough away that I could ride the school bus. But, by then, you didn't want to be caught dead riding the bus, so I would ride with friends who had cars. My parents could not afford to buy me a car. In fact, I did not own one until I was married. The high school I went to was Hillsborough High. It was the oldest and most prestigious high school in Tampa originally built in the 1880's and had several locations before the final campus was built in 1925. It was beautiful with a clock tower and huge stained glass windows. Here are some pictures.

Both of my siblings graduated from Hillsborough as well. It had three stories with stairs you had to climb with all of your books. It was a great time though. I remember all of my school years with great fondness (though I wish I had known then what I know now for I would have done things differently LOL).

As I mentioned earlier, school is very different now. My daughter and DIL are elementary school teachers. Basically all that is taught now is how to pass the government FCAT tests. Teaching as we knew it no longer exists. It is very sad that the kids today can not enjoy school as we did because of this new system.

Take care everyone. xxxxx

September Nostalgia

Since my birthday is in December, I too started 'normal' school at five years of age. We didn't have preschool or kindergarten back then, so you went straight into the first grade which was all day. We walked to school (I had an older brother and sister) which was probably 1/2 mile away. Parents felt perfectly safe letting their children walk to just about anywhere back then. I wouldn't have wanted my mom along anyway as I was an adventurous, independent type kid. We only had one car which my father drove to Lakeland (an hour away) to start his job driving a truck, so that left us with none at the house. It didn't matter, my mom didn't drive. If it was raining, we took an umbrella or our slickers. No rides for us!

I always enjoyed school and had great fun learning. What we were taught back then is very different from today and teachers were allowed to actually give us a hug if necessary and/or threaten to paddle us if we misbehaved. I wouldn't want to be in school today with the way things are now (at least in the US).

All of my pictures from my elementary school days are packed away but I will look for some from my middle school that I think are still around later in the week.

For now I will leave you with a couple of pictures of Henry and Spencer. They always make me smile.

Henry driving his golf cart down the sidewalk. He does a good job too.

My sweet little Spencer!

Take care everyone! xxxxx

Pictures for the Letters E and R

These are the last two letters of our challenge that I have not posted pictures for. Let me see what I can come up with........Okay for the letter 'R' I am using the word "Rooftops". These are a couple of pictures of the roofs of some houses in Greece.

 

 

 

For the letter 'E' I am using the word "Entertainment". My son-in-law Corey has a band that plays at some of the local clubs. They call themselves Caerbannog. If you are familiar with Monty Python and some of those movies, you might recognize the name. The name has something to do with the rabbit in the Holy Grail movie (I think).

That does it for me. Everyone take care. xxxx

Challenge Continued

So, getting back to nicknames. I have always had a nickname for most of my grandsons. I call Zachary, my son's boy, Monkey Doodle. He was always hopping around so, he reminded me of a monkey. Now that he is older though, we usually call him Zachman! He looks like a little warrior in his karate gear. Here is a recent picture of him all decked out in his karate protective, fighting garb.

I call Henry Doodlebug. He is such a cute and entertaining little fellow that the name just stuck. He makes kissy faces and wrinkles his little nose up so you just want to grab him and give him big hugs and kisses. He really is a little ham at times. Spencer, well you have all seen plenty of pictures of him and you know what a chubby baby he is, so he is my Chunky Munkey!

Well, I am now the letter V. I couldn't think of anything that started with a V that would be interesting until I ran across this picture of Johnny Depp. I think that he is so 'VERY' good looking! We played a game once about who we would choose as our 'Hollywood husband' and he was my choice. So, what do you think?

For the letter 'N' I chose some pictures my friend took at the beach as night was falling. The one is a great picture of the moon.

Take care everyone. I am enjoying reading your posts about nicknames and seeing your pictures. xxx

More Nicknames and a Photos for I and L

I'm taking up with some more nicknames. I had two nicknames for my daughter. Her name is Stacey and I used to call her Stacey Lacey. Another appropriate nickname for her was "Pig Pen" like the character from the comic strip "Peanuts". That little guy would leave a trail everywhere he went. She was pretty much like that as well.  I used to have to watch her when she was cleaning her room because she would just throw everything in the closet or under the bed. It's funny because she now is super neat.

My son's name is Donald. The only nickname I ever used for him was "Donald Duck" like the Disney character. He shortened his name to Don now but I still call him Donald. That's never going to change. I'll talk about other nicknames in another post.

My picture for the letter "I" is one of the birthday cake my daughter made for Erik's birthday last month. So my "I" stands for "inventive". She is very clever with cake decorating, etc. This was a take of the game "Minecraft" that Erik likes to play. She made all of the characters on the cake.

"L" is for "laughter" so here  is a collage of the kids laughing.

My last picture for "L" is of Spencer 's little bottom "lip" sticking out like he is going to cry. I was told that wasn't the case though, he was just making faces at his mommy.

Let's Reflect Challenge - September

Our challenge from Anne is as follows:

Let's continue our little trip through the word LINING. Today we reached the letter N and the word I chose will probably surprise you. I selected it because it's a fun word, mostly very affectionate and caring and also it will give us an occasion to learn a bit more about each other again. Our word this month is : 

NICKNAME

According to our Friend Google:

Nickname  : A familiar or humorous name given to a person or thing instead of or as well as the real name.

So maybe you are going to be brave and tell us your nickname or the one you had when you were young, or may be you will do so for your partner, your kids, your pets, or something that belongs to you, like your car, or a piece of garment, or your first toy . . . the choice is yours.

In addition Anne added this side challenge:

If you have a bit more spare time and would like a photo challenge, here we are: This week, take photos of things or people whose names only start with one of the letters we already used in this challenge : S, I, L, V, E, R or N. There are 7 letters for 7 days. You can do in any order you want.

I have never really had a nickname. I always wanted some neat or cute one though! I have a girlfriend whose nickname is 'Pookie". I'm not sure how she got it but I suspect it was her dad because he used to call me 'jurce' when we were kids. That was as close to a real nickname as I ever got I guess.

Hubby had several nicknames growing up but I think the one that stuck the longest is 'BOA' having had something to do a certain body part we won't mention. Can you guess that this nickname came from a bunch of guys he played football with in high school? It was a joke of course!

My name is Joyce but I go by JoyJoy on my blog as it is the nickname I gave myself for that purpose. It would hard to come up with anything else with my short name. I have always hated my name and wish I had been given something a little more exotic like Veronica or Jasmine. Oh well, I guess after 62 years I have gotten used to it. I will pass along some of my other families' nicknames later in the week.

As for the pictures of the letters already used in our challenges, here is mine for the letter "S". The first is my daughter Stacey when she was about 13 months old. I found this as I have been going through my old pictures.

This one is of a sunrise a friend caught on his way to work on Friday. While he is not a professional photographer by trade, he spends most of his time taking some of the most beautiful pictures I have ever seen of wild birds.

That's it for today. I will post again tomorrow! Take care everyone. xxx

Another View

Just popping in to post another view. Everyone always has such beautiful pictures of where they live while I feel I am very limited, but I did manage to catch some of the birds around the golf course along with the changing sky. We had a storm rolling in. The bottom right bird is a sand crane. The top left is a Stork I believe, with some Ibis hanging around.

That's it for today. Take care everyone. xxxx

September Views

Warm September brings the fruit
             sportsmen then begin to shoot......


Well, September is definitely warm here. We are expected to have temperatures in the mid 90's all week. I don't know anyone who hunts so I don't have anything to say about that. Yesterday was Labor Day (the first Monday in September). Labor Day is a day set aside to pay tribute to working men and women and to mark the end of summer. It has been a national holiday here in the US and Canada since 1894. A lot of people used to consider it the last big day for cookouts and going to the beach before school started for the year (which was always the day after Labor Day). Now here in Florida, it starts the around the second week of August, so that old tradition isn't so famous anymore. People still flock to the beach but it just doesn't seem the same anymore. We went over to some friends for a cookout. They have a pool so the kids were happy but it was HOT! Here is a picture of Spencer hanging out at the pool trying to stay cool. He doesn't like the pool (Henry loves it). Spencer is my little chunky monkey!

My view is of Henry wearing his mommy's crocs. She used to do the same thing when she was his age with my shoes though they were usually either my high heels or my hiking boots. She also would not have a bottom half on most of the time as she was famous for pulling her diapers off.

He is such a little ham and so much like his mother was at that age that I laugh at her all of the time and say, 'now you know what I went through'. LOL

I will try to post some other pictures of the outdoors if I get a chance. I cannot say we are headed towards Autumn (we usually say Fall) weather yet.

Take care everyone! xxxx

End of Photos

Sorry, I got behind again. I will post a few more pictures in color and black and white then move on to our next challenge. This is Erik and Reidar's first day of school this year.

To be fair here are pictures of Zachary's first day as well (color and black and white).

So I guess that is all for this challenge. I will catch up on your posts as well. xxxx