Category: Blogger Challenge

Hubby and I are National Park people. By that I mean we like visiting national parks throughout America. We’ve been to quite a few, too.

Recently, I came across images from a national park in Ohio that I’d never heard of: Cuyahoga Valley National Park (CVNP).

It looks really pretty, and it’s relatively close to home. This link might (should) work if you want to see pretty pics from the park. They’re not my pics; I’ve never been to CVNP.

I included a few Flickr images from other photographers below. Click on each for credits.

 

 

This is post #11 in this year’s Brave, Bold Blogger Challenge. Check out the other bloggers participating this year…

• Two Wheels Two Feet
• Highway Lass
• Ride North
• CurvyRoads
• The Biker Wave
• FuzzyGalore
• Richard’s Page
• Scooter in the Sticks

 

Memory is a strange thing. It can be both fleeting and long-lasting, pleasant and terrifying, accurate and ever-changing, clear and distorted. I have memorized lyrics to countless songs during my lifetime, but can barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday.

I’m not about to go into a long discussion of why memory is so strange. It just is. But there are different types of memories and varying degrees of and reasons for strangeness.

One strange thing I believed as a kid was that chocolate milk came from brown or brown-and-white cows.

I don’t think I was unique in that belief. Lots of parents told their kids things like that, right? And why not? It’s funny to have your kid believing things like that. And it’s pretty harmless, too. Mostly. I distinctly remember getting into a heated discussion about chocolate milk cows with my kindergarten teacher. She insisted that all cows’ milk is white. I insisted brown cows’ milk was chocolate. Afterward, when I told my parents what she’d said, they told me she was wrong.  And said that that particular nugget of “information” wasn’t known by everyone. That I should just keep it to myself from then on.

I did. And I can’t remember how long I believed that secret.

A more-unique, terrifyingly strange thing I believe as a child was that Hell was underground, and that the Devil could sneak out through holes in the ground to get me. Sometimes, he could even push through the ground, if he tried really hard. Why would he try so hand? Perhaps if I was particularly bad on a given day.

That sounds pretty innocuous, right? It was terrifying. I’m not just talking about holes in the ground, but holes leading through the ground. Like pipes.

When I was a child, our bathtub’s overflow was covered by a metal grate. If I looked through the grate, all I could see was darkness. If I put my ear to the grate and listened, I could hear things. Scary things. Moving things. I imagined they were dark, wet, squirmy, evil things, because it was a gateway to Hell, of course. Sometimes, if the light was right, I could see the Devil looking at me. Or one of his demons.

If I sat very still in my bath, I could hear whatever or whoever it was breathing.

I had dreams about the Devil coming through the ground to get me, too. Dreams I still remember vividly to this day. He never actually came through, though. I never actually saw Him or his demon. But they were there. I KNEW it.

How scary was it? Believe it or not, I feel vaguely unsettled now having written about It/Him. Weird. I should have stopped with the cute-strange chocolate milk cow.

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This is post #9 in this year’s challenge. To read about the strange things other Moto bloggers believed in as a child, check out these awesome blogs…

• Two Wheels Two Feet
• Highway Lass
• Ride North
• CurvyRoads
• The Biker Wave
• FuzzyGalore
• Richard’s Page
• Scooter in the Sticks

This is post #7 in this year’s blogger challenge (scroll to the end of this post or look right to see the list of other participants). For this year’s challenge, I randomly came up with 28 writing prompts, one for each day of the month of February, the shortest yet LONGEST month of the year. Having to write a post daily sort of makes the month go by faster.

I’m sure some of the challenge participants have been scratching their heads about some of the more unusual prompts I chose. Today’s prompt is a good example. It’s “vegetable.”

I don’t know why I chose vegetable as a prompt. It’s just a word that came into my mind, so I added it to the list.

I always look forward to reading other bloggers’ posts to see how they interpreted each prompt, but I try not to read others’ posts before writing my own. You know, so I don’t steal any ideas, intentionally or not.

Some of these prompts are just as hard for me as they are for others. What kind of prompt is vegetable?

As it turns out, today’s prompt was easy for me. Yesterday was my birthday, you see. And, since I’m the health conscious type that I am, I celebrated my birthday with a vegetable, and some fruit, too. All baked into one delicious carrot cake.

I like cake. Many different kinds of cake. I especially like cakes with icing. Not that whipped cream-based crap some folks call icing. I like the real, sugary, calorie-filled icings. The ones that are so sweet they almost make your teeth hurt. Cream-cheese icing is good, too, and that’s what usually adorns carrot cake.

I’d told Hubby I wanted a carrot cake from Harris Teeter. HT was sold out. So my Hubby went a bit further afield and got a cake from Wegman’s instead.

It was delicious! Truly. A birthday isn’t a birthday without cake. It gave me something to write about here today, too.

If you’d like to see how others interpreted “vegetable,” check out the other bloggers participating this year…

• Two Wheels Two Feet
• Highway Lass
• Ride North
• CurvyRoads
• The Biker Wave
• FuzzyGalore
• Richard’s Page
• Scooter in the Sticks

If you visit my Moto blogging brethren, do tell them ToadMama sent you. Please.

Unfortunately, I’ve learned quite a few hard lessons in my time. These are life lessons I’m  talking about. Some were a bit harder than others. Most involved pain. Some were more useful than others, too. All were memorable in their own way.

“Not everything is as it seems,” is probably one of the most useful lessons I’ve learned. It applies to  things like this storefront.

That not a reading room, it’s a people-trap. I’m pretty sure if I went in there, sat down, and read a book, it wouldn’t be long before someone came over to talk to me. Who can read when someone’s talking to you?

It applies to people, too. Those lessons are usually the hardest. Love a man you think is faithful, he cheats. Befriend a person, learn to trust them, they betray you. Follow a country road that looks promising, sometimes you reach a dead-end.

So what do you do? Assume all people are liars? Fakes? That unknown paths never provide interesting journeys?

Do you shut yourself down, close yourself off, trust no one, no thing. Or do you keep on keeping on.

The hardest lesson for me has been realizing that lessons never end.

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This is post #5 in my second annual Brave, Bold Blogger Challenge.

This is post #4 in my second annual Brave, Bold Blogger Challenge. Simply put, that’s a way for me and fellow bloggers to get through February more quickly.

This year, there are eight other bloggers participating (see list on right). Check out their blogs, it’s an entertaining group.

Today’s prompt is “annual mileage goal.” It’ll be interesting to see how people react to that one. It would seem as if I’m asking people to share their mileage target so I can compare it to mine. But I don’t usually set goals or targets. I did at the end of last year because I just wanted to see 20,000 on my odometer, to feel like I’d done at least some riding in a year where I felt as if I hadn’t been out enough.

I’m really more about the riding experience, not seeing how many miles I can cover. I’m much happier puttering along on scenic back roads, enjoying the landscape, than about covering long distances. I do like speed, however, but will choose a more curvaceous, less-crowded road any day over a slab.

The only thing odometer miles do for me is remind me thatve I’ve spent time doing something I love. The higher the number, the more time I’ve spent in the saddle.

Hubby loves covering long distances in short amounts of time. I love wandering. Usually we can balance the two, but sometimes I like to go my thing and he likes to do his.

I’m glad we understand that about each other. 🐸

 

 

My birthday is Monday. I was just going to let it slip quietly past, but some folks had other plans. One folk, to be specific. My youngest daughter, Amy. She arrived this afternoon. She drove all the way down from Indianapolis to surprise me. ❤️❤️❤️

So I’ll keep this post short.

I don’t like housecleaning, but the chore I seem to try and avoid most is emptying the dishwasher. I don’t mind laundry, I’ll clean if I have to, and even do most other things. But putting those dishes away? Nah. I’ll put it off as long as I can before doing it. I don’t know why. It’s not like it’s hard.

Now, back to visiting. 🐸