vee-pee pick!!

Sarah Palin...wow! I don't know about anybody else, but I think she is one hell of a good choice for John McCain!! She's one of the type of people that make things happen, and I think she and McCain complement each other! How hard must it have been to raise 5 kids, one with Down's syndrome? Geez, I could
NOT raise 5 kids, be a mayor, then a governor, hunt and fish, ride snowmobiles for the upper-body workout...holy shit, it kicked my ass just to raise Tif and be a produce manager for 10 years! And she was the best
& easiest kid to raise! ONE KID! And, yeah, I know she didn't do all this alone (duh), but she did it, nonetheless, and I admire her more every time I read something new about her! Go look her up, even if it's something on wikipedia (fluff reading! lol).
This is the other side of the backyard, you know, just in case his 7 yr old gets 'bored' riding the train! LOL! He called tonight and they were playing Lego's. And he took me to the antique store downtown the other day and introduced me to the owner, I was just amazed by some of the things she has in there! Tom said he's gonna make sure I get in there with her after her vacation, and I can just look at stuff~! I LOVE antique stuff! But this is the kind of neat stuff we always did! He knows more people than me in town...I tell him, "that's only cuz you're older! when I get that old, I'll know everybody too!"...Naahhh, he used to do the city council thing, and everything!
And, yes, we plan on taking his son & some of his friends to Rogue's Hollow, where it all somewhat started 25 years ago, this October! Now that'll be fun!!
All right, I'm outta here...tomorrow night is the 25th class reunion...Tom's going with me...Tif went out to Maurice's today and got me an outfit and shoes (she has impeccable taste...but also expensive!)...but it's stuff I needed anyway.And Nancy emailed me from work today, and said she is looking SO forward to this..."Don't worry, Libby, I know my line!!" hahaha...I'm good!
BoUnCeS!! LibbY!

...yeah!! Nancy came thru for me...(she thinks it'll be as much fun as i do!)

These are the kind of roses you'll only see on a bush in the country!
And, X, this is for you and Slick who thought a pay phone in the house/bathroom was a lucrative idea...





Is anyone else watching the Democratic convention this week? I have been, just because, you know..."Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." lolol...naaahhh...as far as I know, I'm not enemies with Democrats...as long as they're not sneaky, lying, conniving tree-huggers wanting to take away people's guns because, as you know, we aren't smart enough to have them...oh, wow...maybe radical lefties ARE my enemy, and neither they nor I know it yet! Huh...go figure...the shit that just pops out when you aren't expecting it...
I'm already looking forward to TIVO'ing Friday night's Glenn Beck show! It's gonna be a helluva good show! An hour long show with Ted Nugent! He's damn near the only 'entertainer' I can stand to listen to about poliitics...God knows, Tim Robbins & Susan Sarandon just don't do it for me...they can act...but, I hope nobody hires them as political analysts, or anything...
I did see the part tonight where Barack was 'officially' the 'anointed' Democratic nominee, because he got 2,025 votes. That is a totally historic event!! A black man's first nomination for president! This honestly is a huge "moment in history". I'm not trying to write a history report here, or anything, but, just sit and think on that for a second...[Emancipation Proclamation [January, 1863] only freed those slaves in states that were in rebellion against the Union.] How many people, black or white, ever would've thought that they would be alive when this happened??
Wow! How cool that I picked right now to change channels!! I went past PBS, and there's a neat show titled "The 60's...The Decade That Shaped A Generation' Good stuff...wish I had it on earlier, but that's ok, it's not over til 4 am.
Dang, I'm so totally off the subject! What was the subject, anyway? Oh, ok, that's it...yeah, I am excited to be around in the year that Barack Obama is nominated by the Democratic party...now, mind you, I'm not excited enough to hope that he wins the general election, or anything...I'm not against the fact that he's a young, good looking black guy (that can't dance...ever seen that youtube video? LOL!). I'm just against his SOCIALISTIC ideas of how this country should be run!

I'm looking forward to seeing who McCain picks for vp. Most probably it's gonna be Mitt Romney (for the sake of the economy, he needs to pick him!). But I really hope that Mike "Huckleberry" gets put somewhere in there...he is SO friendly & 'real'.
All right, it's 3:43 AM, & I'm pretty sure I'll hafta get up at around 10...
BoUnCeS!! LibbY!

...back to normal...well, as close as i can..

My 'spare room'...cool, huh?

"I got a room...I got a room with a view..."
--Lou Rawls

Is this a little boy's dream backyard??

Hamburgers, Harvard beets...and freezer pops! *slurp!*

My weekend in the country..gaaaaahhh...sounds like a second grader's report....
But anyway, it was "more fun than a barrel of monkeys". And yeah, that's Tom at the top...I've picked on him since he was 22 for weighing what I did (at 14!)!
His whole entire house out there in the country looks like a museum, honestly, I was awful surprised to see a microwave in the kitchen~!!
But now, that was just a necessity...for the popcorn to watch 'The Red Green Show' with Luke, ([Jerry] springer spaniel, and his 7 yr old boy, who is great. And he also let me know in no uncertain terms, that I might be his Dad's girlfriend, but, I still have cooties...The above picture is part of the bathroom (enormous!)! Of course, he has a pay phone hanging in there, and when I was a little unsure about being able to take a shower because of my balance, Tom promptly picked up that green wooden chair, & put it in the bathtub..."Work for ya now?"lololol! I made sure I said "So you're saying I stink now? (you didn't say that last night, now did you??? hehehehe...joke!)
When I got out, I went to the kitchen, and he was making pumpkin waffles, cuz he said I need vegetables, I don't weigh enough! look who's talkin!
Anyway, I had an amazing time this weekend! Hopefully, I wasn't an obnoxious houseguest, or anything, and I'll get invited back! He is gonna be my date for the 25tth class reunion Aug 30. And we're still arguing about the fact that I say he took me to my 10th grade dance, and he says nope...must've been someone else...nope, I was desperate & dateless, after all...I'll die laughing if (ooooh, maybe I'll get my friend Nancy to walk up and say "Weren't you with Libby at the 10th grade dance??" ...must do some plotting here...)
Okay...more tomorrow...I have a 9:00 AM breakfast appt tomorrow...
BoUnCeS!! LibbY!

life in general...

...and what it all comes down to is...everything's gonna turn out fine...
got one hand in my pocket, and the other one is smokin a cigarette....


Intersections...

Never mind...I'm just thinking about how when you get to an intersection and there's a 'STOP' sign at it...unless it's only a 3-way stop...there's sometimes a big decision to make, especially if it's about 3:23 AM...very dark, pea-soup fog...E, W, N, S....well, okay, if you're headed south, which I usually was at that time, you've only got 2 or 3 choices. Hard to do, sometimes, if you're kinda lost in the country...So you take the one that looks smooth and easy to navigate. Go down about a quarter of a mile, it turns left or right, and go under the trees..and all of a sudden the branches are grabbing at your car! You decide that's not the way to go, and turn the car around and take the one that looked 'second best'. That one's really good for a really really long time, about 5 miles, then you go around a blind curve, and...those damn trees are there again!! This time there are so many of them, you can't do anything, except make a turn, like a detour, down the road that goes through a cornfield...you're blinded, except straight ahead on the road you're on, and you end up staying on that road, just because it looks easier than any of the others. No blind curves, it just goes straight through the corn. Then when you see the sign for the town you were looking for, you see that it says it's 25 miles away...one more blind curve, and there's a big ol' frikkin' pile of logs and sticks, some with big thorns! But there's a couple of feet at the side where you figure "I can make it through there, this is a little car!" You try, but just as you get started again, you realize there's a really big fat tree growing out of the middle of the road, immediately in front of your car!! And you look and look, but there's absolutely no way you're going to navigate this road! Time to do a U-turn in the middle of the road, thinking all the while "%#$#^^$%&*&~!! I thought this was it!!" Go backwards, all the way back to the 3 way stop you were at at the beginning! Then you turn one more time, thinking the same things you've been thinking forever, it seems like! This is the road that looked 'uncertain' when you first saw it. Time to take a deep breath, and think 'this better be it (at least to get me farther, g*dammit!!)". And you go down that road, and realize it's actually a really fun drive! All kinds of curves, and hills, nothing's the same on this road as it was a half mile ago!...
and you keep going on this road, cuz it's nothing but a good time, and, God knows, after all you've been through on this road, you deserve it!!

BoUnCeS & HoPs! LibbY!

Crybaby bridge again...kiinda...

Okay...T and I were on the phone for about 3 hours last night, (it HAS been about 15 years since we last talked, after all!), but I forgot to even ask him where the bridge was!! He came over for a few hours this afternoon, and I actually remembered to ask him, and he told me 'Rogues Hollow'...I can't believe I forgot that name! As soon as he said it, I remembered! There's a really cool website about it here, and if you get a chance, read the book on there, it's really interesting! And check out the pictures, and you'll see why it was scary over there! The only thing I was wrong about is that there are railroad tracks everywhere over there, if you check out the maps on there, it'll show them EVERYWHERE! And I never realized, it was about 15 minutes away from Massillon, where I was born!
I guess I'm just starting the Halloween season a little bit early, cuz, I'll miss out on seeing all the trick or treaters this year, I'll be busy at the rehearsal dinner!! But, I still wanna go see Hell, MI sometime! I did actually try to talk Tiff & R into making the rehearsal dinner a costume party, but...no luck...
I actually got my biggest surprise email a few days ago from an old friend, not someone from my school! It was from the first woman I ever started emailing with, back in 1998, when all I had was WebTV!! She and I are a lot alike, and got along great from the beginning. She and her husband lived up by Cleveland, and, since I was still driving at the time, we used to drive back and forth to visit each other about once a month for a while! Then they ended up moving a while later, and we lost touch...but then a few days ago, I got a message through my myspace page, and it was from her!!Wow!! That's just so cool!! Now, they've bought a farm, and have a bunch of animals, and she has about 5 or 6 German Shepherd dogs, and 2 little boys, and such. And a pretty horse! When I used to go up there, they had a big house in town, and no animals or kids! Neat!
BoUnCeS!! LibbY!

...ago...

...please, everybody, note the date at the top of one of these Far Side cartoons. Now THOSE were the 'good ol' days' of cartooning!! Yeah, Calvin & Hobbes and Peanuts are great too, but absolutely NOTHING will get a guaranteed belly-laugh out of me like the Far Side!! I'm really glad I bought all the Far Side books I saw in the 80's! Last count, I have 3 great big Far Side Anthologies, & 6 or 7, regular-size books of them beside my bed. Cuz I like to read books that make me laugh before I go to sleep. Last night I was reading "Angela's Ashes"...about halfway through, I realized 'this is some of the most depressing shit I EVER read'...but I'm reading it cuz Mom always talked about how good it was, and it's one of the ones I have from her, and it'd kinda be a dishonor to her memory not to read it, ya know?) But after a couple hours, I rolled over & got a Far Side book, then the movie "Arachnophobia" was on, and I had to watch it again...(it started at 3 am), but I fell asleep a half hour into it.

Okay...I promised...Crybaby Bridge...

We were out driving around one night (I guess summer), and couldn't think of anywhere to go to cause trouble or anything, Tif was at Mom & Dad's for the evening, and T knew how fascinated I was by ghost stories and stuff like that, so all of a sudden he said "Hey, you wanna see something really scary?" & that was even BEFORE Twilight Zone movie! Of course I said yeah! So we left town and started heading northeast. After about a half hour, I said Where are we headed?? And he told me the crybaby bridge story, which I had never heard before (naive!), and I was practically jumping up and down in the car. It was about another 45 minutes away, and we went out on a lonely country road in the middle of woods, and went down a little, like, horsetrail, towards a small suspension bridge...out in the middle of nowhere! How weird is that?? We could see it, but we were a ways away from it, in the middle of the woods. We just sat there in the car with the windows rolled down, and the radio off. And all of a sudden, I did hear what sounded like a baby crying! I don't know, maybe it was just that I was so spooked out by talking about it all the way over, and hearing the legend from him, but, wow! We got out of the car to listen better, and in about 2 minutes, we heard like an old train on some tracks (no tracks anywhere nearby though!)! It sounded like one of those old steam-engine trains, and we could hear the wheels on the tracks, and a train bell (you know, like a big old one, clang, clang! No horn, or anything). That right there scared me even worse than the crybaby thing! I turned around and tried to run to the car, and of course, tripped over the sticks & stuff on the ground (we WERE in the middle of the woods!), and fell promptly on my face! I got up, & looked back, and T was standing there laughing his ASS off at me! However, he WAS walking (actually 'meandering') after me toward the car! Once we were in, he said "Neat! You wanna ride down closer & see the bridge, & look for the tracks?" Ha! Are you kidding me? I want to go home! To my big scary apartment (the first one I rented, with just me & Tif living there, a 2 story apartment, with the locked attic that had a hand painted on the wall with the fingers on fire & the number 13 on the palm of it.)...but it was MY apartment, and MY ghost that I knew!

The crybaby bridge legend is, like I said, there's one in every state, but like in the 1800's a girl had a baby and her parents didn't know. So she gave birth to it by herself out in the woods, and threw it off the bridge so nobody ever knew. But you always heard it cry at night...

BoUnCeS!! LibbY!

...what's gonna smack me next?

I finally caught the beginning of my favorite commercial ever!! It's the one where a lady is interviewing a guy for a job, & it must be an important job, cuz she's looking at his resume, and says 'Oh, I see you're flatulent in three languages,etc, etc,' then she's told by an assistant "Your son, Rip, is on line toot."

Okay, I guess I'm done with the present for awhile (easy to turn your back on it when people are calling you evil. hmmm...I'll go with bad or smartass, but evil?? Don't overestimate me, but never, ever make the mistake of underestimating me, either!)

A lot of people here in town got my email address off the reunion page link, and I've gotten quite a few emails from old friends, and that's been really neat! One from a tough black guy (well, he was in high school...by the way...he's currently a coach in a school!) wrote, and started off the letter with "Libby, Libby, Libby!!" That was hilarious~! Extra hilarious, cuz I was like everybody else in school, kinda scared of them all, and intimidated!

Another was from a guy I was really good friends with since, like, I was 14. I met him when I was walking home from my boyfriend's house at about 4:30 am on a Sunday morning after Kim & I had done one of our regular "We're staying overnight with Denise" and my parents drove us across town, drop us off at Denise's front door, and we'd go in the front door, say hi to Denise & her parents (parents were clueless about our plan), and go out the back door to the carryout that sold us beer without asking for id, then we went to our boyfriends' houses, which were all the way across town in 2 different directions! I did do a helluva lot of walking before I could drive, I guess. So, the next morning when I left Kevin's house (yeah, he was a Kevin too) walking home to meet Kim (& compare notes on the night, of course), I was walking by the radio station and the dj in there sat behind a great big glass wall that faced the street. He saw me walking by the front, and he ran through the building, and caught me at the back door...we talked for a couple minutes, then he said he had to go change the record, come on in...so I did. And we've been friends since! And, I guess this is where I started getting into radio broadcasting...and then Tif ended up volunteering at the local one in town a couple years ago...remember "Tiffany Tuesdays"? And the time they did "laundromat lotto", and went to a laundromat and Tiffany got in a dryer with 40 ping pong balls, and they'd shut the door & let her spin for a few times, then open the door, and have her hand the dj a ping pong ball with a number on it...she did such good shows on there! But it was a volunteer thing, and after the dj moved to Akron, the other guy wasn't as much fun, so she didn't want to do it anymore.

His email brought back all kindsa memories from when we hung out after my first divorce...I'll hafta write about those some other time, like when we went to Crybaby Bridge over by Canton, or when he wanted me to see this cool biker bar he found once when he lived in Winston-Salem...we left here after we ate dinner that night, and drove straight down, went in the bar for an hour or so, then turned around and came right back home!

BoUnCeS!! LibbY!

8,8,08!!

Letter to the editor, 2nd this month!!


Dear Editor:

I would just like to mention that this summer is the time of a lot of people's class reunions. I'm actually trying to urge as many people to go, if you can! Yeah, maybe it's only the five-year one. Okay, I can understand if you don't care about that one ... but, now it's my 25th reunion ... that's HUGE! My high school years weren't the "dreamiest," most fun, of my life. Most people's weren't, if they're honest about it. But the people in my class of 1983, Marion Harding, have worked SO hard on this reunion, from all across the country! And the more I hear about the people that are coming, the more excited I get about seeing everyone! So. thanks in advance, for everybody's hard work and dedication to the Web site - http://harding 1983.myevent.com
Looking forward to it!!
Libby Stevens Bill
Marion

okay...Tuesday, then!!

Today is pretty much a gray-blue day, outside, anyway.

So, last week, on Sunday night, my freakin' refrigerator quit working! So I called Sears, where it

came from...15 years ago...and they advised that a refrigerator that old really wasn't worth fixing. All salesmen worth anything would say that, I'm quite sure, aren't you? Being a former department manager at a retail store, to NOT have said it would be grounds for instant 'discipline'! To anyone who's never had the pleasure of retail, 'discipline' does NOT involve bondage or anything (come on, guys, focus on story!)...it's just a matter of cutting or scheduling undesirable hours, incredible rudeness, unbelievably tough jobs to do, etc.
So I ordered a new fridge that Monday, had all kinds of problems with having it delivered...it was promised to be here between 3 and 5 pm...got here at 8 pm...also wasn't the fridge I had ordered, but I took it, just cuz I needed one, but told the delivery guy I'd be calling to return it the next day...he just kind of shrugged his shoulders, as if to say "Like I give a shit?"...that's okay, it would've been my attitude by then, too!
So, after a couple days, and talking to the HR dept, it's gonna be replaced as soon as they get the one in that I need.
That was only the first couple days of the week!
The rest of the week was good, but busy. I got my scooter batteries today, from UPS. I saw the mailman up on the porch right after that, & asked him to bring the box inside for me, please? He said "Sure", and brought the box in. Then said, Damn, that's heavy! Where do ya want it? I said Right there is good...my ex said he's coming over to put them in for me tonight. He looked at me, winked, said Good luck with that. What a smartass! I must attract them...
Then, I've actually returned my RSVP for the Saturday night (august 30) get together for my 25th class reunion. That's the only part of it I'm going to, even though the activities last from the football game Friday night, followed by a big bonfire at one guy's house, Saturday golf, & get-together/dance Saturday night, Sunday brunch! WoW! I've had a few calls & emails from some of the people, so I'm actually getting excited about it. Heck, there's already about 150 people committed and already paid to go! We've had a good website up for about a year, and I think that helped a lot!!

BoUnCeS!! LibbY!

Monday, my best day of the week...

TTFN...bunny, bunny...

...oh, shit...RABBIT, RABBIT!