Where Have I Been/Eight Weird Things About Me

Weeeellllllll ... I haven't blogged lately, cuz' ...

My brother and sister-n-law drove up from Texas to visit me here in Michigan. This past weekend, DH and I took them to:

• touristy faux-German community here in Mid-Michigan featuring the world's biggest kitschy Christmas store, German food and German beer
• drive over the Mighty Mac bridge and see 2 of 5 Great Lakes for the first time
• visit a wonderful victorian era island, home of fudge, horse-poop and unsteady bicyclists
• meet and spend the night with DH's brother
• wade in the third prettiest lake in the whole wide world, or so DH claims
• eat at what must be Michigan's one and only Cajun restaurant [and it was wonderful!]
• visit Michigan's wine country, sample and buy a half-case of Michigan wines --every bottle came from a different store
• visit a Michigan cheese factory/store and purchase fresh cheese curds to be deep-fried at home, as well as some other stuff, including a loaf of cheese bread which did not make it to my house intact
• eat Koegel's hotdogs

But before they arrived here, we put in a new, orderly, colorful flower bed where once wilderness and chaos and overgrowth reigned. This included pulling 7 or 8 old shrub/tree stumps with DH's pickup and a heavy duty chain, spading and turning the soil by hand with shovels, installing flower bed edging, hoeing big clods of soil, adding 25 bags of top-soil, transplanting some hostas and some ornamental grasses, planting a dozen new perrenials, planting 4 flats of annuals and spreading 20 [?] bags of mulch, as well as setting out about 8 planters and a few items of yard-art.

I hope to post before-after pics before I leave for our denomination's General Conference next Thursday --maybe Rainbow Pastor and/or I will have the opportunity to blog a little from there. I've been preparing for that trip a little ...

But in the meantime, when I have had opportunity to snatch time here and there to read blogs, I have thoroughly enjoyed reading the "8 weird things about me" meme that many RGBPs have posted, and I'm going to take Will Smama up on her offer to consider myself tagged and go for it ...

1. My second name is my real name. I don't use my first name. My first name is the same as my mother's name --she didn't go by her first name either. My first name is also the same as my grandmother's first name --and she didn't go by her first name either. Why they named me that first name is beyond me!

2. I have performed in two drag shows as a drag king.

3. I have moved 17 times in the last 18 years.

4. I have tasted gasoline [quite by accident]. Contrary to what DH says, whiskey does not taste like gasoline ... Nothing tastes quite like a nice Octane 87, Chateau Du Texaco.

5. I have tasted dry dog food [because the same older brother that recently visited me fed it to me when I was a toddler]. It's mostly salty, as much as I can remember. I think I liked it, because they had to break me out of the habit of eating it. Parents, take note.

6. I rear-ended a Pinto [gas tank in rear] with my mother's VW beetle [gas tank in front] and lived to tell about it. I have a crescent-shaped scar in the center of my forehead as a permanent souvenir.

7. When I moved up here to the Land of God's Left Hand, I became suddenly allergic to the red ink in my tattoos, and scratched them in my sleep until all of the red ink disappeared.

8. One of my great-g-g-grandmother's name was Freelove, which took me forever to figure out from the census image on Ancestry.com. I think she came from Puritan stock, not Hippie ... I also have a G-g-g-g-g-g-grandfather Tunis. On second thought, maybe I'm glad my first name is what it is --it could be worse!

Th-t-t-t-t-that's, all folks! Now I am leaving for Big City in Southeast part of the state for a Creating Change meeting. Ciao!