Taking my cue from Shauna Glenn: What are some of my favorite things lately

Word Warp on my iPhone. It is addictive!

Sweet tea from Chick-Fil-A.

Moo business cards. They have the coolest graphics for business cards.

Handmade silver jewelry from Etsy designers. Like this ring from Christinapdesigns :

Hummus & chips. This is turning out to be the summer of hummus. Danny and I have been snacking on it every day. Our current favorite is the spicy roasted red pepper hummus. I know that I can easily make my own hummus but lately we've been buying it ready-made.

Sunday I spent a good deal of time cleaning one of our vehicles. It was overdue for a good detail job. Of course, that reminded me of a story:

One evening when Danny and I were just newlyweds, living in our first apartment, he asked me for my car keys. He was going to the car wash to clean my car for me. Never one to complain about someone cleaning my car for me unasked, I handed them over as fast as I could.

It was about 7 in the evening when he drove away. I figured he would be about half an hour so I ordered pizza to be delivered. This was back in the day when Dominoes delivered in 30 minutes or less. And pizza delivery was quite a novelty to me because that was the first time in my life I had lived in a place with pizza delivery. Don't laugh! I had always lived in small towns.

8 pm - Danny wasn't back yet. Pizza had been delivered. I ate my part.

8:30 - Wondering where he is. This was back in the years before we had cell phones in our possession so I couldn't just call him.

9 pm - How the hell dirty was my car anyway? It shouldn't take that long to clean it.

9:30 pm - Oh My God! What if he's out messing around on me with another woman and the "cleaning the car" thing was just an excuse? I'm mad. Really mad. He's gonna hear about this when he gets home.

10 pm - This is ridiculous. I would go look for him. But where to look?

10:30 pm - I drink a beer or two. It helps calm my nerves. Should I call his friends? Nah. Should I call my friends? Surely there is a reasonable explanation for taking this long to clean a car? It really wasn't that dirty, I thought.

11 pm - Danny walks in the door. I'm asleep on the couch and I wake up and give him a piece of my mind. He claims to have really been at the car wash cleaning and detailing my car. I storm off to bed.

The next morning I go downstairs to my car. It looks brand new. I mean it looks really really good inside and out. Not a speck of dirt or grime anywhere. I guess I have to believe him because here is the proof. And sure enough, over the many years we have been together, he has continued to clean our vehicles to utter sparkling newness. It just takes him hours and hours. But now I know that his attention to detail is boundless when it comes to cleaning. And organizing. But that's another story. Maybe I'll show a picture of his closet soon. The hangers are all matching and lined up EXACTLY 1 inch apart.

For the past three weeks my daughter attended a summer program for gifted and talented children. The location of the program was an hour away from where we live and I drove her there each day. I would drop her off each morning and then take my laptop and work from a local coffee shop all day. Traffic was not lovely. At all. But it was rather nice to get out of my regular office.

Part of the summer program was teaching them how to get by in the world as a gifted person. Because gifted children are different. They think differently. They are very creative and smart. They are the future leaders of our world in so many areas like arts and sciences. But sometimes other children pick on them because they are different. I appreciate that there is a program available for these children. I was also a gifted child. But we had a gifted program in our school so I went to the classes every week during the school year.

At the end of the program there was an entire day of show-and-tell where the parents and family members got to see the amazing things the children learned over the three weeks. The children wrote computer programs using object oriented programming, they learned entire tap dance routines, they put on an Iron Chef competition, and they designed houses from the blueprints to the decorating. Those are just a few of the many many classes the program offered.

I snapped a picture of a particularly funny item on the show-and-tell tour. It is pictured above. It is a Cross Bow Flyer that was created in the Inventions class. The young man who made this intended it to "help the Air Force" in the "Protection of Bombers." It was one of the fancier inventions because it featured gold coins! Just think what these children will create someday if their imaginations are continually encouraged.

My daughter downloaded an app called DoodleBuddy onto my iPhone. It makes for great fun when we are waiting to be seated at a restaurant. Last week she took pictures of everyone in our party and "decorated" them with DoodleBuddy. Unfortunately, they all made me promise on everything that is important, not to post their pictures on my blog. But of course, I can post my daughter's picture:

I am having a glass of chardonnay, which I don't normally drink since it tastes too "oaky" for me. But the bottle was left over from my BlogHer 2010 planning party last week and god knows we can't let alcohol go to waste around here.

I finished mowing the backyard at 8:30 this evening.  I have one of those eco-friendly push mowers that my friends and family think I am completely crazy for owning. You charge the mower by plugging it into a standard outlet for 12 hours. Then you get about 1 hour of mowing time out of it. It costs about 40 cents to charge it for 12 hours. And truthfully, I am such a wuss that I can't mow for more than an hour at a time anyway. I mean really. The Texas heat and humidity will kill you in an hour. I have no idea how the construction workers around here stay alive. So I wait until 7:30 at night to even begin mowing.

And yes, I have a lawn service sometimes. But I use the mowing as way to get my exercise. I hate hate hate to exercise. So I have a mower that is not self-propelled. Yes, I push the thing around in 100 degree heat. It is an amazing workout! And there is something very satisfying about mowing the grass. I can't explain it.

And it is very satisfying to NOT be contributing emissions from my yard equipment.

Danny did the weed-eating while I mowed this evening. Bless his heart, after a 12 hour day at work and a 2-hour round trip drive, he still had enough energy to weed-eat the back yard.

And I made tacos for dinner. Because I was tired. And I was working all day too. I got home at 4:30. And this keeping-the-house-spotless thing is driving me crazy. When you have your house on the market for sale, you have to keep everything perfect and I hate it. We never really have a messy house (mainly because I live with one of the greatest Neat Freaks in the world.) But this is something else altogether. We have to keep it show-room ready and it is grating on my nerves.

So that is why I have my glass of chardonnay. I know. You had to read this whole thing to find out why I am really drinking the chardonnay this evening. Well, there it is. Now I am going to bed early.

I have been strangely captivated by the Doctor Who series on BBCAmerica lately. I watched a couple of episodes of the old Doctor Who many, many years ago. And I was not impressed at all. But the new Doctor Who, that I like.

Last Thursday Danny and I watched an episode we had recorded on the dvr called "Blink." It was an episode from 2007 and came highly recommended by Danny's dad. In fact, he told us that it was the best Doctor Who episode he had ever seen.

So we watched it. And we liked it. But it was creepy. And sad beyond words. There are these stone angels that come alive when you aren't looking at them. Hence, the title of the show was Blink. Because you don't even want to blink when one of these things is coming after you. If you blink or look away, they kill you by sending you back in time with only the clothes on your back.

I couldn't stop thinking about this episode. I even woke up during the night Thursday and had what might have been night terrors. I didn't go back to sleep for about 2 hours. I'm telling you that whole episode with the stone angels was creepy. And I still can't figure out why this resonated so strongly with me. But I can sleep now. And I am not scared to get up in the night to go to the bathroom in my own house. Because that would just be silly, right? And yet, Blink still sits in my mind and pokes its stoney fingers into my consciousness every so often these past few days.

Well, here we go. The first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season 2010.

Living here on the Texas gulf coast, I pretty much have weather.com opened up on my computer screens daily during hurricane season. Yes, I am a Weather channel junkie too.

I watch the storms closely. At some point we have to make the decision to ride it out or evacuate. Danny and I have a plan for both instances. If we evacuate, we know what is going with us and what to do to the house to prepare. If we stay, we have a stock of water and supplies as well as a generator and gas to run it. And we have good wind storm insurance and flood insurance!

Making the decision whether or not to evacuate depends on many factors like the category of the hurricane, whether we just don't feel like making the drive to the in-laws in Arkansas, etc. The category of the storm is a pretty big deciding factor but we've had mere tropical storms here that did much worse damage than a hurricane.

So for now, we sit and wait and watch.

Some interesting posts I have read this week:

10 Signs You Are Addicted to Social Media by Jeff Bullas

One of the best cakes ever, Texas Sheet Cake. Click here for the recipe.

Need a query letter to obtain for yourself a new literary agent? Shauna Glenn wrote the perfect letter.

Six Ways Blogs Are Changing the Web by Jim Lodico at SocialMedia Examiner

No one can say New Orleans doesn't have a wry sense of humor:

I saw this ad in the recent copy of Houston Press.

My dad died of cancer 3 and half years ago. So I can't tell him Happy Father's Day today. But I'd like to thank him for a few things. These are just a few. I have a whole lifetime of thank you's for him but they wouldn't fit in a blog post.

• Thanks for working so hard when we were kids. Many times you held two or more jobs. You taught me the value of good work ethics.
• Thanks for teaching me kindness and generosity. Many are the times I witnessed you paying for a poor elderly person's groceries at the check out line when you knew they didn't have much money.
• Thanks for keeping my crazy 1979 Fiat X19 running while I was in high school. That car was a maintenance disaster but you uncomplainingly spent many hours fixing it every single time it broke down.
• Thanks for helping me build a telegraph machine out of an old phone and some wire for my 6th grade science project.
• Thanks for teaching me how to install a light fixture, how to use just about every woodworking tool in existence, and for explaining what exactly a plumb bob is.
• Thanks for taking us to Disney World when I was 10, even though there were six of us crammed in a 1977 Chevy Nova and we were cranky as hell and suffering from Florida-beach-sunburns on the 12 hour drive home to Mississippi.
• Thanks for teaching us that the entire family should get in the kitchen and help prepare the meals. Those are some of the best memories I have.
• And speaking of food, thanks for making the best barbeque ribs on the planet.
• Thanks for loving my mother and being married to her for 39 years.