“Cast” ing Away Keepsakes

My parents are redoing my old bedroom in their house to convert the room into a guestroom. My room had 2 twin beds and was painted in a buttercup yellow color with lattice and ivy wallpaper along the bottom half of the walls. The “new” room is painted a breezy blue color and the new cherry bedroom suit includes a queen size bed, which will be a nice improvement from the twin beds on the occasions that Aaron and I spend the night. The new Cape-Cod style room is going to be really nice, but in order to get it looking nice Mom and Dad had to clean out the whole room, including the 2 walk-in closets, so the woodwork could be painted. In cleaning out the room, Mom found TONS of my old keepsakes. I went to her house to get some of my stuff over the weekend. The keepsakes ranged from diaries from my grade school years, to marching band memorabilia, to formals from high school dances and the most recent addition… my wedding dress and veil. Among the keepsakes were a couple boxes of t-shirts from all of my high school activities, band, drama, cheerleading, etc. There were trinkets from school dances and marching band contests. All the usual keepsake kind of stuff. There was also an unusual keepsake among the piles of items. This was a keepsake that I didn’t even know I had kept…

It was my cast from when I broke my leg the summer before 7th grade!!!! I would have been around 12 at the time, which means that the cast is 11 years old!!!! Amazingly, for being almost half as old as I am, the cast wasn’t toooo terribly disgusting. It was packed in a clear plastic bag and I laughed as I read the signatures that covered it. The signature from my mom, near my toes, that said “WOW” instead of “MOM” to me when I was wearing it. The signatures of two foreign exchange students, Pedro and Liza, that went to the Indianapolis Zoo with mom and me and pushed me in a wheelchair so I didn’t have to walk on crutches the whole time. (Pedro kept acting like he was going to push me into things.) Nick’s signature, signed “Nick, Class of ’95.” (He had just graduated from high school.) A touching signature that read “Fratello” written by my best friend Amanda’s dad, who has since passed away. (Amanda’s dad, Dave, had an Italian restaurant named “Fratellos.”) The list could go on and on. It was amazing that that old, somewhat gross cast sparked memories that otherwise may have been lost. That’s the whole reason behind saving “keepsakes” isn’t it?

Unfortunately, I have way too many keepsakes from my younger years and my house isn’t nearly big enough to store everything that my parents are purging from my old bedroom. So, my mission for the next couple weekends (if I’m lucky enough to have any downtime during them) is to take pictures of my memorabilia and create a whole “Keepsakes” photo CD. All the memories on a little CD that will help keep my house from a state of total clutter. Wish me luck on completing this project : )

I'll post pictures of the cast when I get a chance...

The Return of Closed-Toe Shoes

I’ve been lucky this year; thanks to the warmer than usual weather I’ve been able to stretch my sandal-wearing season for a couple extra weeks. However, there is a chance for snow flurries tonight so my less comfortable, higher heeled, closed-toe shoes will be making an appearance tomorrow. Oh, how I will miss the airy feeling of exposing my French pedicured toes to the world. Oh, how I hate making sure that I have socks clean to wear with my closed-toe shoes. Oh, the misery of living in a climate that forces me to store my sandals during the winter months.

Attention Target Shoppers

The last couple times I’ve been in Target on my lunch hour I’ve made an interesting observation. Apparently the hours between 11:30 and 1:30 are “Pregnant Lady and Lady with Small Children” hours at the retailer. If Target was ever to have a promotional opportunity, like handing out flyers for “healthy nutrition during pregnancy” or “potty training your toddler” (sponsored by yet another company trying to capitalize on women who are in this stage of life) the hours of 11:30 to 1:30 would be the time to hit the right demographic! I would venture to guess that it may be the largest collective group of stay-at-home moms outside of mom's club.

The Yearly Candy Dilemma

I decided that I wanted to make my Halloween candy purchase and get that out of the way for the year. Of course, buying Halloween candy early can pose significant problems for my waistline, so I had to have a Halloween candy shopping strategy. That strategy was 1.) Go to Dollar General to buy the cheapest candy possible 2.) Get generic brand candy that’s not terribly appealing to my taste buds and 3.) Get enough candy so that we don’t run out like we did last year. Last year we had to dig into a bowl of candy that we had left from Easter (yes Easter) to stock the last few trick-or-treaters at our house! It’s amazing how long Hershey kisses stay fresh. At least I hope they still tasted okay. Oh well, if not, we’ll have fewer trick-or-treaters this year.

“Don’t go to that yellow house down the road. That lady gave us stale Hershey kisses last year.” I can hear the neighborhood children whispering.

I don’t think we’ll have to resort to using Easter candy this year. My shopping is complete. I bought 2 large bags of candy for $7. One bag is a “kiddie mix” with gum, sweet-tarts, and caramels. The caramel chunks will be slightly difficult to resist, but I don’t usually overeat caramels like I do other yummy treats like miniature Snickers and Twix bars. The other bag of candy is full of generic peanut butter cups and chocolate crunch rounds all wrapped up in that dorky Halloween print foil. Normal peanut butter cups (of the Reese’s variety) and Crunch bars would be hard to resist, but I can resist the generic kind…I hope.

Enough candy talk. If I keep it up I’ll start craving chocolate and have to resort to eating generic foil-wrapped mummies and witches.

Finally, a picture of Baby D and Me!

I wrote a blog entry a couple weeks ago about the fact that there are very few pictures of me with my nephew, Derek. Since there is a severe lack of Baby D and Aunt Cassie pictures, I took matters into my own hands while watching Derek on Saturday. I tried to get Derek to smile for the picture but when I talked he would turn his head toward me so I decided I would just take the picture anyway. I love that he's looking right at the camera with his big blue eyes. His cuteness is neverending:)

A Three Hour Tour

It wasn’t exactly a tour. It was more like a 3 hour headache! Last Tuesday I left work at my usual time, 4:30 and took my usual route to get onto I-465, which means taking I-65 to 465. As I branched off 65 to meet up with 465 I noticed that the cars in front of me were all stopped. I immediately regretted that I hadn’t stayed on 65 and made my way home through the downtown area. As I came to a stop in the long line of traffic, I was glad that my script for my weekly church drama performance was in the car with me. I picked it up and started rehearsing my lines. Occasionally I would have to stop rehearsing to put my car back in “drive” and move a whopping foot or two down the road. After being at a nearly dead stop for about 35 minutes, a traffic report finally came on the radio. “A semi has tipped over and spilled its load on 465 at Crawfordsville Road. No injuries, but extensive clean-up.” It was then that I realized I wasn’t going to be getting home ANY time soon. After sitting in traffic for nearly an hour on the ramp from 65 to 465, I finally merged (at a snail’s speed) onto 465. By this point I had all of my lines memorized for the drama performance and there was no end in sight to the traffic. Suffering from boredom, I decided to start making phone calls. I couldn’t get a hold of mom, and Aaron was at work so I called Nick. I complained to Nick for a little while and then he had to hang up because he was going out to eat with a friend. Now, I’m an hour and a half into my traffic experience and I wasn’t even to the 38th street exit yet (which is about 2 or 3 miles from my office.) I bet you can guess what happened next…if you guessed that I was well on my way to a near pants-wetting issue then you were right! I was thankful that I had gone to the bathroom before I left work, but unfortunately I had A LOT of water to drink that afternoon! I was praying that I would make it to the 38th street exit soon so that I could run into McDonald’s and use the restroom before I had another disaster on my hands (or rather, on my seat). As I got a little closer to the 38th street exit, some cars started speeding (meaning that they were going about 20mph) by me on the right shoulder. I followed their lead, which I normally wouldn’t have done, but this was an emergency! Halleluiah! I made it to McD’s just in time and only 2.5 hours after leaving work! After the bathroom break, there was no way that I wanted to get back on 465 and sit for another 2.5 hours so I decided to cross over 465 on 38th street and work my way home through downtown roads. You won’t believe what happened next! As I passed over 465 the traffic was completely clear!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In the 5 minutes it took me to get off at the exit and go to McDonald’s, the traffic completely cleared! Of course, at that point it was too late for me to get back on 465 because I had passed the on-ramp. I continued heading east and decided to cut back south to catch the next road that had a ramp onto 465. I turned onto a road to take me south and went for about .5 miles then I found myself at a dead stop AGAIN! I was furious at this point and called Nick again to complain once more. He said, “Just another reason that I don’t want to live in a big city.” Let me tell you, I was hating city living at that point! FINALLY, (after also making a phone call to Sarah to complain) I made it back to 465 and was on my way home again. At 7:40, after my 3+ hour adventure, I finally arrived home…and went to the bathroom again, just because I could…LOL.