Miss Wisabus

Spider

Posted on 27 October 2010 | 7 responses

I used to be so scared of this particular type of spider when I was little. It’s one of the biggest you’ll see in the area around my parents’ house, but nothing compared to those big brown tarantulas that come crawling out of the ground after the yard has been mowed and right before a rainstorm.

May our eyes be opened.

Posted on 26 October 2010 | 3 responses

Thanks to Critty Joy for bringing this to my attention.

I ran across this video a few weeks ago. Please watch it. The imagery and content is striking.

The Candy Shop Trailer from Brandon McCormick on Vimeo.

This is a film being produced to raise awareness of the growing child trafficking problem in Atlanta. I, for one, never knew that Atlanta was one of the largest trafficking cities in our country. From the website:

The Candy Shop is a thirty minute film that Whitestone will release in November. This film is being made for the Doorpost Film Project, and with support from 12Stone® Church and Street Grace.

The film is a Fairytale/Parable about the child sex trafficking epidemic that has overrun our city of Atlanta. We are using the film to not only raise awareness but provoke meaningful action towards this issue taking place in our own backyard.

Up to 500 underaged girls a month are trafficked for sex here in our city of Atlanta.
It’s the number one city in the country for child sex trafficking..
The 10th in the world.

This plague has gone on for too long, and now we at Whitestone, in cooperation with Doorpost, 12Stone® Church and StreetGrace want to put a stop to it.

This film represents the spearhead of a citywide and possibly a nationwide campaign.
It is not a documentary. It is not a PSA. It is the beginning of a movement.

Atlanta isn’t the only place with a problem.

This is happening here, in Oklahoma.

We sit at a crossroads, both literally and figuratively, and we must choose to act. We will either stop this or allow our state to continue to be one of the main thoroughfares for sex traffickers in the United States.

It is well-known that where I-35 crosses I-40 a lot of things are going on. It was just a few years ago that 23 girls were rescued from Oklahoma truck stops during a sting operation. The youngest was just 13.

At this time, there is no way to know how prevalent the problem is. According to Oklahomans Against Trafficking of Humans,

To give you some idea of what we do know: FBI’s Innocent Images, ICE Cyber Crimes, OSBI Internet Crimes Against Children and the Oklahoma City Police Predator Unit has multiple cases around the state occurring in most every county.

Emphasis mine.

Be aware of the signs.
Do whatever you can to help.
And if you are a victim, please do not be afraid to ask for help.

We can stop this and we must.

Farewell, you old poop.

Posted on 20 October 2010 | 1 response

When I got out of the shower this morning and walked into the living room, my husband had a sad look on his face.

“Bad news,” he said.

“What?”

“Tom Bosley died.”

I frowned and sighed. Like a lot of people, I grew up watching him on Happy Days (reruns) and later on Murder, She Wrote and Father Dowling Mysteries, favorites of my Granny and Mom, respectively. So of course it was sad news to me on that level.

But I spent one of the most important evenings of my life watching Tom Bosley perform in On Golden Pond as Norman Thayer Jr. One can’t help but think of Henry Fonda’s moving performance while watching this play, but I was very interested to see what Bosley would bring to the stage.

He did not disappoint. The man I’d always thought of as “Mr. C” was gruff in his attempt to be grandfatherly; tender in the moments when he opened up to his daughter; touching, as he and his wife illustrated a marriage in its sunset years.

This was the night of my third date with Kevin — the evening that we sat on the hand-me-down couch my Granny bought in 1986 and talked and made things official. The night I realized that if I let this one get away, I would be crazy.

Though we’re not quite as cranky as Norman and Ethel Thayer, nowadays it’s not out of the ordinary to hear one of us refer to the other as “you old poop.” I imagine that for some guys it would be terrifying to watch something like On Golden Pond on one of your first dates. For us, it set the tone. I hope that we’re that feisty, that fiercely devoted in our final years. And I’m glad to know that when it’s time for either of us to go, if at all possible, the other will be there holding on as tightly as they can.

Thank you, Mr. Bosley. I hope you know how much joy you brought to so many people.

Why I Should Be The “Target Lady” For Halloween

Posted on 20 October 2010 | 6 responses

Don’t know who she is? Here.

You see, I have a history with the haircut. And I’m good at squealing “ernaments.”

That, combined with the fact that my husband does an awesome impersonation of Justin Timberlake as the stock boy (not featured in the clip I linked) — “I hope a third thing doesn’t happen to them!” We’d make quite the duo.

Window to the Past

Posted on 19 October 2010 | 5 responses

I’ve been busy.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been logging some graves, doing some research, falling into happy accidents.

I’ve learned my mother’s ancestors didn’t make it to Texas from North Carolina in what I’d consider the “normal” fashion. Instead of a wagon, (according to the journals of one of the people on the trip) they took a flat bottom boat around the tip of Florida, up through the Gulf of Mexico, up the river, all the way to Texas.

As of last night, I think I have found the man we’ve been searching for this whole time. He went by the nickname of “Shader” and no one seemed to call him by his real first name. That makes trying to find a person pretty tricky. But I believe I’ve got him and more importantly — his wife. She is our link. Her name was Susan and now I have to find her.

On the other side, my Nannie’s folks, I know practically nothing. Stories my Granny has told me and things that Nannie shared with me when she was still living. I lived next door to her my whole life until she was moved to the nursing home and I feel so lucky that I was afforded the chance to spend that kind of time with her. Not many people get that with their great-grandmother.

This weekend I was back home and Granny drove me out to what had been the Garvin family farm (in Garvin County, but as far as we know we are not related to any of the Garvins that the county is named after). I had been there before, but it’s been years. Back when Uncle Erbie was alive and living on the farm. A distant relative still lives on the land so we didn’t drive all the way back to the house.

It was a perfect October day. The sky so blue and bright, Granny sharing stories from her mother’s childhood, just barely a breeze (a wonder for out here)…perfect.