Weekly Photo Challenge – Today

The photo challenge this week was to walk outside wherever you were when you opened the email and take a picture.  So this is my dreary cloudy entry of today:

A “Poo-tiful” Tale

This week’s writing prompts for Mama Kat’s Almost World Famous Writer’s Workshop were:

1.)   Write about a time your child embarrassed you in public.
2.) You got duped. What happened?
3.) List 10 things you’d would love to give your husband or Dad for Father’s Day.
4.) Share a picture that you think captures Spring for your family this year.
5.) What about school do you miss the least?

I chose prompt #2.

Several years ago our middle daughter was in a very bad car accident where she was knocked unconscious.  In this area where we live if you are unconscious and have a possible brain injury they take you to the nearest trauma center which in our case happens to be Grady Memorial Hospital which is located right smack downtown Atlanta.  It’s not a very savory part of downtown either.  But it is the best trauma hospital in the area.

Every day we would go down to see her first thing in the morning and I’d stay until I had to go to work and I’d try to go back during my lunch hour and then back after I got off work.  I would try to find street parking nearby and I learned quickly to try to avoid the pan handlers because there are LOTS of them in downtown Atlanta.

One evening on my way into the hospital I was stopped by this older and obviously down on his luck gentlemen asking for directions.  He handed me a sopping wet piece of paper and asked me if I could please help him find the address.  I took the piece of paper from him and looked at the address but didn’t recognize the street name.  As I handed it back to him with my apology, aiming to head on into the hospital, he looked at me with his pitiful brown eyes and told me he had just gotten off a bus from Louisiana and that he had cancer and was HIV positive and had travelled up from there for treatment and was supposed to go to his “hospice” the next day but it wouldn’t be ready until the next day.  He said he needed to find this address because it was a “halfway house” he was supposed to stay at for the night and if he didn’t get there soon they wouldn’t accept him.

I freely admit that my first thoughts were that I was just holding a sopping wet piece of paper handed to me by an admittedly HIV positive person and my mind was wondering what the heck it was wet from?  My first reaction was to wipe my hands on my pants but didn’t want to insult this poor little sick man!  I’m trying to listen to him all the while my mind is racing trying to remember where the first and closest bathroom inside the hospital is and do I by chance have hand sanitizer in my purse?  I know I shouldn’t feel that way but hey!  He kind of caught me off guard.  I’m am trying to be solicitous and I feel really awful for this poor man but at the same time I’m trying to remember the guidelines for body fluids and hoping I don’t have any open wounds on my hands!

Then he continues to tell me how he was so poor he had to take the bus because he couldn’t afford a plane ticket or even train fare.  My heart is going out to him and I really wanted to hug him but my ignorance of protocol and fear kept me from it.  Then he proceeds to tell me how he just wanted to find his “shelter” because he couldn’t help himself and he was on the bus so long that he had “pooed” himself.  I was quickly getting grossed out by the whole sordid affair so I quickly reached into my purse and grabbed some money (I think it was either a ten or twenty) and pressed it into his hand, told him I was sorry for his plight and fairly ran into the hospital as I said a silent prayer for this poor lost soul.

Fast forward about two or three days and I’m sitting in the hospital room with our daughter late one evening when hubby comes strolling in.  He has a depressed downtrodden look on his face, I think he may have even had tears in his eyes, and proceeds to tell me about this poor pitiful little man he had met outside the hospital and how he was sick with cancer and was HIV positive and he had just gotten off the bus from Louisiana and I looked up and said “How much did he take YOU for?”  He looked shocked and asked how I could say such a thing about this obviously poor pitiful little man and I just looked at him and said “Let me guess….. he pooed himself on the bus?”  Hubby’s eyes got really big and he said “How on earth did you know THAT?”  I said… because he gave me the same story outside THREE NIGHTS AGO!!

Yes, I guess there are some people who will use any story to take you for a ride. Just please don’t let it be on a bus from Louisiana sitting beside someone who just “pooed” themselves!

Wordless Wednesday – New Moon and North Star

Hating to Hate

Hate

I usually try NOT to be a negative person.  In fact, one of the things I “hate” is people being super negative.  The more negative people are, the more obnoxious they appear to me, which makes me angry and negative and I hate it!  I sort of become what I hate.  Weird, huh?

There are lots of things I dislike, but I still try to maintain a positive attitude.  Most of the time even when I don’t feel very positive on the inside I try to appear to be positive on the outside and give off positive vibes, mostly in the hopes that it will take my lousy rotten mood and turn it around and then I actually WILL start feeling better and more positive.  I like being happy and positive.

I have found in the last few weeks of our restaurant ownership that there are lots of people in the world who seem to thrive on negativity and being unhappy.  It almost seems like the only thing that makes them happy is to make other people miserable.  They only get happy when those around them are brought down to their level. 

At our restaurant I make it a point to try to hug everyone who comes in.  I either get them coming in or I get them leaving.  Sometimes I will even walk over to their table and give them a hug right where they are sitting.  I find that the majority of people seem to appreciate the gesture and it seems to lighten their mood.  The other plus is it makes ME feel better.  I love giving hugs and hubby says if I’m not careful my whole front is going to turn into one big callous from hugging so many people.  I say you can never get too many hugs.

I have noticed that there have been a few (and I do men a VERY few people)who seem to shy away from the physical aspect of being hugged and there are a couple of people who have come in who come in negative and just seem to thrive on trying to make everyone else around them absolutely miserable.  I refuse to give in to their negativity.  In fact, I take it as a personal challenge to break through that barrier and MAKE them be in a better mood. By golly they are going to be happy even if I have to MAKE them!

Case in point, there is one lady who has come in several times in the last week.  She comes in and kind of avoids me like the plague.  When the servers come to her table she is short and curt with them and says no more to them than she has to.  When they (or I) go back to the table to make sure everything is okay, she will usually throw up her hand, as if to stop you, while you are still two booths away and usually won’t even take the time to say anything.  Just throws up her hand and then looks back at her plate.  It might seem mean and rude, but, I have taken it as a challenge to break through her barrier and get a smile out of her.  Every time she leaves I make sure I give her an extra long hug!   Those are the ones that usually need it the most.  And it must not be too traumatic because she’s been back twice since the first time I forced a hug on her!

Another time a man and his wife came in and I hugged them both when they  came in.  When they went to leave I hugged the wife and before I could hug the husband he threw up his hand and said, “No, thanks, I’m good.”  I admit I was taken aback a little but I didn’t let it ruin my night just because one man refused my friendly gesture.  Of course my daughter took this as an opportunity to tell me I was being weird and I should stop “freaking people out”.   I told her that everyone needs a hug now and then and that obviously if someone felt weird about it, as this gentleman must have, they would let me know.

A few nights later he and his wife came in.  I let them go to their table unassaulted and waited for them to leave.  When he came up to leave I walked around him and told him I remembered that he didn’t like hugs but I was going to hug his wife.  He looked confused for a moment and then said “Oh, NO!  That was a total misunderstanding!  When we got out to the car my wife said ‘I can’t believe you turned down her hug’ and I was like ‘What are you talking about’ and when she explained what had happened I told her I thought you were offering me a to go tea.  I NEVER turn down free hugs!”  So, I gave him a big hug and we had a good laugh and turned a possible negative situation to a positive one. 

So, yes, I will keep giving my free hugs and I will continue to try to be positive and turn negativity into positivity because I HATE negativity.  What do YOU hate?  Take your thing you hate and put your spin on it and hook up with Gretchen and Second Blooming.

Share Your World – Week 24

1. Are you left or right handed?
   right
2. What is one thing you love about being an adult?

    Making my own decisions

3.  What do I need to unlearn?

Bad habits (especially biting my cuticles)

4. What is success for me?

For me, success is doing what you enjoy and being happy.  I feel I am so blessed to have a wonderful husband who loves and supports me, wonderful children who are well adjusted and happy in their own lives and a roof over my head.  We have been so blessed to start our own business and give back to the community.  I still have both my parents who are relatively healthy for their age.  Life is great and I consider that to mean I am successful.

Weekly Photo Challenge – Blue

Don’t Make Me Bleu

Let me set the record straight.  I hate blue cheese.  Or more correctly, should I say bleu cheese?  I don’t like the lumpiness of it, I don’t like the look of it, I don’t like the smell of it and I especially don’t like the taste of it.   Heavens to murgatroy! The very thought of tasting it makes me throw up a little in my mouth.

I blame it all on my fourth grade teacher and her efforts to force refinement and class upon a very country school, 99% of whom had NEVER even heard of bleu cheese.  When Mrs. Krauss mentioned it to us we all wondered why in the world anyone would eat cheese that was blue?  Didn’t that just mean it was moldy?  That was my take on it… Why in the world would anyone want to eat moldy cheese?

She had told us she was going to broaden our tastes and horizons.  All she did was make me detest bleu cheese.  I think it was the way it was presented that made it so bad.  If we had been given a tiny bit in salad or something it might have been different but she had brought several different cheeses, mostly ones none of us had ever heard of.  As far as most of us were concerned there were Kraft singles and there was Cheez Whiz and that was about it!  Most of us had never heard of any other kind of cheese.

She brought them in and left them out in the room all day so that by the time we got around to actually eating them they were pretty ripe.  The bleu cheese smelled to high heaven, even before you ever got it close to your nose.  You could smell it as soon as we walked back in the door from lunch and it was in a container but it couldn’t contain that smell!

She had brought some of those dinner wafers that tasted like they were made from flour and water ONLY.  No salt, no butter, no taste.  It was like eating a hard piece of cardboard.  That was bad enough but then add that stinky bleu cheese and it was almost more than my stomach could handle.  I literally gagged trying to get it down and she threatened us within an inch of our lives if we spit it out.  She had glopped a huge chunk of bleu cheese on top of the tasteless cracker and forced us each to eat the entire cracker and cheese.  I was gagging and choking trying to get it down.  I’m pretty sure I had my eyes filled with tears from the sheer force of trying to keep from projectile vomiting the entire atrocious mess on the back of the head of the person sitting in front of me.

Yes, Mrs. Krausse, you totally ruined bleu cheese for me for life.  I can’t even stand the thought of eating, no, not even SMELLING it.  So, don’t tell me that things that happen in fourth grade don’t stick with you.  This has been a lifelong aversion that I don’t think I will ever get over and it happened in fourth grade.

This post was brought to you by Mama Kat’s Almost World Famous Writer’s Workshop and prompt #1.)  Share a story from fourth grade. (inspired by Wild Life in the Woods).