After Coffee I stopped by Illinois Beach State Park. I was the only one there and the entire beach was lined with a shelf of ice, snow, and sand packed together and being eroded away by the waves leaving these caverns full of icicles. Even with the backdrop of a spent nuclear power plant, it was magical.
Gulls with Nuclear Power Plant
Boy with Nuclear Power Plant
Meet Teresa. Teresa was my undergrad internship supervisor. She is an amazing school social worker and I used to spend hours with her in her Ford Explorer traveling between schools watching her put out metaphoric fires and reminding her to eat.
She was my supervisor during a pretty difficult time in my life, and being the intuitive social worker she is, she picked up on that. For the five years since my internship ended, we have kept up routine coffee chats anytime I return to Chattanooga.
I am convinced that the Universe wants Teresa and I to get together every few months. I wasn't planning on being in Chattanooga again for six months, but she made a trip to Wisconsin to see her family. I took the day off work today and met her in the middle. The middle being Zion, IL which, according to Wikipedia is one of the few cities in the world to have been completely planned out prior to building.
We met at a great little cafe named Its All Good. Our meetings seem to have a natural life of 3 hours. This time was the same. Long enough to discuss politics, religion, alternative medicine, and work out some issues in my personal/professional life. I'm lucky to know Teresa.
I bought a car last Friday. It's a 2006 Scion xA. I feel so mobile.
When we walked into Target I asked Mike if we should get a buggy.
He asked if it would be horse-drawn.
Shopping cart, shopping cart. They are called shopping carts.
From my Ringgold series, this documents a church my mom always referred to as Our Lady of Erosion.
Last time I was home, my sister picked me up from the airport along with my cousin, Mark, and his wife. Mark lives on the mountain in a house that belongs to the Forester Sisters. There are several mountains in North Georgia, but each is referred to by it's inhabitants as THE mountain. On the way home from the airport one of his stories from the mountain began as follows:
We were in Eton going hog hunting when we realized we only had one lugnut...
I wish I remembered the rest of the story, but I never got over the richness of the opening line.
Our office administrator is a lovely lady who expresses her feelings through newspaper clippings. I have to be careful of which pop culture events I express interest in because I will be inundated with related newspaper and magazine articles. Over the course of my time here I have received no less than 15 articles about Harry Potter. This week, I received around 10 articles about Lost. For a while she would cut out any article related to texting. I'm really not sure how this one happened, except that she had seen me texting. She didn't even own a cell phone, but started trying to work texting into office policy.
"Oh, we should let Dave know that he doesn't need to come in tonight. Kevin, can you text him?"
"I think it's probably better if you just call him, Linda".
I did finally convince her to get a cell phone. She has digital camera and she wants an ipod. As her technology guru, I keep trying to explain to her that these things are pretty useless without a computer, but she just isn't ready for that yet.
