Sunday With Our Family

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Last weekend we were in Indiana to attend our little ballerina diva's first ballet.

She was of course cute as a button and a real show-stopper.
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While we were there we got to spend time with our family:  kids, grans, and my dad Peepaw.
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Silly - - - what Broyles do best.

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Mad/Sad face - - - the photographer (me) was taking way too long with this whole snapping pictures thing.
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Uncle Kelly photo bomb.

LOL - - - look how little Pipes isn't the least bit surprised by Uncle Kelly's antics but rather EXPECTS them.
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Dinner with Peepaw, Korie and Chris. 

This is the "sedate" branch of the Broyles Clan.

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 Awfully pretty in pink.

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Korie Nae - pre Flying Pig.

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Antics right on cue.

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Get your gator chomp on.

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A very rare subdued Kelly moment.

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And pretty little miss headed off to her final day of preschool.

Family.

That's what Mother's Day is really all about - - - 'cause nearest and dearest to every mother's heart is her family.

Well, every mother worth her salt that is.
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I'm joining Unknown Mami

For Sundays in My City.
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My city is Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin
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Please hurry over to Unknown Mami's to see

What's happening in other cities around blogland.
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Sunday at the Flying Pig AKA Though None Go With Me

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This will not be my typical SIMC post as it isn't coming from my city, nor the city that I am currently visiting, nor even from a city where I've ever spent much time.

BUT - - - it happened TODAY and it involved my youngest daughter so I'm claiming it for my SIMC post.
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Our youngest daughter, Korie has been a feisty spunky little gal from the day of her birth.

When she was toddling I had a TIME keeping her from eating the dry cat food or pouring cake flour all over the floor.

Once she took it upon herself to walk across the top back of the couch and shouted out:  "Look what Ornery's doin'"   

A little over a year ago she and her hubby decided to run in a mini marathon.  At the finish line, hubby announced he was over that.  Korie was just charged up to run a full.  

So, she did - - - alone.  She trained and ran in the Indy Marathon all by her lonesome 'cause none would go with her.

At the end of that marathon she was ecstatic to have finished and very disappointed with her time.

Before the sweat had even dried off her brow she began planning how to train for her NEXT marathon and cut an hour off her time.

Enter the NEXT marathon - - -
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Called the Flying Pig, and held TODAY in Cincy.

I walked into a lowly little ole Dollar General the other day and saw this flying piggy bank and KNEW it had Korie's name on it - for a memento of this race.
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After all, her MIL (whom I love) thought of sending flowers, something which never even entered my mind - - - so I had some scrambling to do to catch up!!!

Flowers will die, but this flying piggy can hold her race medal FOREVA!!!
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This morning - - - long before the sun dared to show his face - - - Korie was all lined up and ready for the starter's pistol.  (Do they even USE a starter's pistol at a marathon I wonder??)

She texted me that she was soooooo nervous 'cause Cincy is a very hilly city and she trained in flat ole Indy.
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Just about the time the sun arose the racers lined up and were off on their 26 mile grueling run.
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At the 5 mile mark Korie flew by so fast SIL Chris couldn't even capture her on digicam - - - so he snapped this sign for my blog post instead.
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She flew past the Half Hog marker without even registering a bleep on radar.
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So, SIL Chris positioned himself where she would run toward him at the 17 mile marker and was finally able to catch this image of her for posterity - - - she's the one checking her watch to see if she's bettering her time.

She was - - - but I'll get to that later.
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Noticed the strained, "I'm working really hard" look on the runner in the background at 17 miles.

But not our Nae Nae!!! (endearing and short for Korie Renee)   She was all smiles every single time she sailed past hubby Chris.

What a girl.

How did she GET this hard driving yet always pleasant and uplifting personality I wonder???

Brings tears to her momma's eyes.
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And after just 3 hours, 53 minutes, and 52 seconds she sailed right over the finish swine - - - nearly cutting the desired hour off her first marathon time of 4 hours and 45 minutes!!!
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And here she is - - - looking as fresh as a cucumber and as rested as a momma bear just emerged from her hibernation den.

But I'm so worn out from following her progress (from my couch I might add) that I feel I really should take a nap.

SO PROUD OF OUR FEISTY LITTLE KORIE NAE.   She may be blond, but she's no Barbie Doll.

And many thanks to SIL Chris for keeping us in the loop with texts and pix.

I'm joining Unknown Mami

For Sundays in My City.

Today my city is Cincinnati, Ohio
And the Flying Pig Marathon
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Please hurry over to Unknown Mami's to see

What's happening in other cities around blogland.
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Photo Credits:

Start Swine and Finish Swine line photos from race tweets

Flying Piggy Bank photos by moi

All others by our wonderful SIL Chris

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On The Frag Again

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It's Friday and I'm on the frag again.  Double entendre there 'cause I'm fraggin on the road so I stole the old song title and made it my own.

Why not check out my frags, then click on one of the links at the end of this post to join the party over at Mrs. 4444's place and see what everyone is fraggin about.
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I'm on the road again down here in Indiana for the sole purpose of attending our gran's FIRST ballet recital.

Her mommy captured this shot one day at ballet class of all the little ballerina feet.  Isn't it priceless?
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Being on the road with Fisherhubby is an adventure.   This is how he took care of his dirty clothes yesterday after his shower.

"Do you want those in the dirty clothes?"

"No"

"Are you going to wear them again?"

 "No"

"What are you going to do with them?"

"I'm going to keep them right there."

"Not on my watch."  And I put them in the dirty clothes.
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I've tried for nearly 38 years to train Fisherhubby and so far all that's been accomplished is I've been well trained to put up with his antics and clean up after him.

Colossal FAIL on my part.

Good thing I can see the humor in it.
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Do you think I travel with enough recharging devices???

That pile is all mine, Fisherhubby has equally as many somewhere else in this room.

Couldn't some wonderful techno geek invent ONE COMPACT UNIVERSAL charger for travel?  I mean we've sent men to the moon, how hard could it be to make a universal charger?

Oh yah, I forgot, some people think that whole moon thing was one colossal hoax.
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Yesterday morning while we were enjoying 80 degree temps here in northern Indiana a Wisconsin friend sent me this picture of his deck.

That all fell yesterday.

And enough more besides to total 17 inches.

If I'm lyin' I'm dyin.
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Little ballerina doesn't know we're here.  She doesn't even know we're coming.  So the other day she had her momma send me this spring greeting pic.

Isn't she a doll baby?
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One of the very best parts of fraggin on the road again is getting together with old friends.  Wednesday night shortly after we arrived we met Mike and Diane for supper followed by a round of euchre.

You're going to have to be satisfied with this one photo 'cause I've forgotten to snap our other friend hook-ups.
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I showed you this pretty Lutheran church in the background of one of my travel pix on Wednesday.

Cass, who is a bloggy friend AND a Lutheran said most Lutheran churches she'd seen were ugly, so I just wanted to show this closer-up of it so you could all see just how beautiful it is.
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The other day our daughter Keri and our grans delivered a load of "out grown" clothing to this donation center.

Little Miss Piper had to hug and kiss her favorite jammies good-bye.

Hmmmmm - she must be related to he Aunt Korie who always felt sorry for ANYTHING she had to weed out or throw away.
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It is amazing to me that a country whose Founding Fathers established it on a Biblical platform of faith can have come so far that now those who are most loudly criticized and called haters are those who still adhere to the Christian faith.

I have never hated anyone in my life, but since I am a Christian I have felt that labeling many, many times.
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Ta Ta for now!   That's all the road frags I've got for today.

I HAVE had another colossal FAIL here, I found this cute photo being tweeted out yesterday but when I saved it to my phone I completely forgot to mark the source.

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Please hurry over to Mrs. 4444's place

Where you will see LOTS of other frags
Either from the road or from home.

Why not write your own frags and
Join this Friday Party!!

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Choices

I can either take a nap or blog.

So sorry mes blogging amis but nappy time is winning.

All In a 9 Hour Day AKA Seen Along the Way

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Today Fisherhubby and I made a 7 and a half hour trip in 9 hours.

Yes, we are just "good" like that, able to take twice as long to do something as normal people would need.

This is a pictorial saga of our day.  Come along and ride with us.
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First things first.

Before anything else went in the luggage hatch, Fisherhubby made SURE his fishing gear was stowed away.

Can you imagine how I LOVE riding along with fishing poles poking me in the ear?   Well, imagine away.

Anywhere we go, the fishing gear goes with us.  This trip he's MAYBE going to use it for most of Friday when he fishes with his buddy Mark.  Of course Mark also has TONS of fishing gear, but I guess SHARING that gear simply isn't "done" by REAL fishermen, so this stuff goes with us wherever we go.
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Fortunately Fisherhubby DID save room for "less" important things - - - like our luggage.

By 7:30 this morning we were off and running.  

AND, after circling back home once to get the back pack FH forgot (yes, on top of all that OTHER gear he simply HAD to have his back pack too) and one stop at the ATM we were on the road again..
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About an hour from home we stopped at a Micky-D's for some breakfast and coffee in this quaint and cute little berg.

I must here confess that I took a little extra time talking to some locals (who me???  TALK??) and getting closer to that awesome Lutheran church in the background to snap a closer-up of it.

In retrospect - - - I MAY have saved us 10 minutes or so of a long grueling day had I curbed my tongue and spared my camera clicking finger.
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A few minutes later I snapped this photo of the "adult male maximum security prison" in Portage, Wisconsin on the fly-by.

It's a very interesting, even pretty, place to have housed some horrific criminals not the LEAST of which was Jeffrey Dahmer.

A little later in the trip, this prison spurred a "google and discuss" session of Wisconsin Serial Killers - - - and we have some doozies, folks.  At Halloween we have no need of fictitious ghosts stories, we have had some real live ghouls of our own.  

GB, also known on this blog as Fisherhubby, has a morbid fascination with the subject.  Today our "investigations" covered:

Ed Gein
Jeffrey Dahmer
David Spanbaur

If you don't know about these men, google away if you've the stomach for it.
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Next we hustled past Madison, our state Capitol - - - and I do mean we hustled.

I was hoping to capture the Capitol dome on the skyline, but for some odd reason Fisherhubby frowned on the idea of slowing down in the Mad Town traffic on I-90, I know not why.  ;-)

Needless to say, because of our haste, the dome slipped behind something in every shot I attempted.

So - - - just imagine it back there on the skyline, will ya??
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About that time Fisherhubby needed a "pause that refreshes." 

I TRIED  to talk him into waiting until the Belvidere Plaza (where we had to stop to switch drivers so I would drive through Chicago) and thereby save one stop - - - really I did - - - but alas and alack, his eyeballs were floatin' from the coffee he'd been drinking.

This stop also probably added another unnecessary 10 minutes to our trip.

Let me clarify - - - unnecessary to those of us whose eyeballs could go another hour or so before they floated. 
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Upon leaving the rest stop, I espied this formerly famous I-90 landmark.

The orange pumpkin now lying on the ground like a fractured Humpty Dumpty used to adorn the silo for years and years.

However, when two successive storms turned it into a "smashing pumpkin" the owners stopped repairing it.

I miss that pumpkin!!
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As we traveled along I marveled at the beauty of the morning sun shining on the now quickly greening Wisconsin landscape.

This was not the prettiest vista through which we traversed, but it is the one I captured.
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And then, just like that, we were in Illinois - - - the land of Lincoln, toll roads, and
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Highway construction.

I snapped this photo from the window of the Belvidere Plaza, looking down at the portion of I-90 we had just traversed.  I thought at the time how "lucky" we were that the traffic hadn't been backed up by that roadwork.

I thought too soon.
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As luck, or fate, would have it we pulled into the Belvidere Plaza just as these two buses were discharging their loads of "age challenged" folks for a wee bathroom break.

I rushed into the plaza and all the way to the other end where there were no long Ladies' Room lines.

Then, by some freak accident (like I was probably looking down at my phone texting) I saw FH go INTO the Men's Room, but not come out.

I sat and texted away happily for perhaps 10 more wasted minutes before I realized I had missed him and he was back in the car waiting for me.

Sigh.  30 minutes of our trip already wasted in a wanton manner and the worst was yet to come.
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No sooner did I take over the driving duties than the Illinois scenery began to look like this.   Road construction on our right, traffic before, traffic to the left, and
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Traffic behind.

All of it STOPPED.

Let us digress a moment:  
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Is it really  necessary to have a "slow" traffic sign flag lady in the median when traffic is at a dead standstill???

DEAD STANDSTILL???

Don't you worry about me being unsafe snapping away with my camera in all that traffic.

DEAD STANDSTILL.  

Not too dangerous to snap photos from a DEAD STANDSTILL.

And this is where the OTHER hour was wasted on our trip.  That's how long it took us to go 10 or 15 miles until we came to the place where they had narrowed ALL the traffic down to one skinny lane.

Really????

Chicago traffic down to one lane?  What were they thinkin'???   Oh yah, THEY WEREN'T!!!

Fortunately once we got through the block or two of SINGLE LANE traffic, things picked right up - - -
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And before we knew it we were in Indiana and making one last stop at this oasis for a potty break and to get a little petrol, as the Brits might say.

With nary another pause or delay we were off and running on the last leg of our trip, arriving in our former home town of Marion by 5:30 Indiana time.

What we will do with the rest of our time in Indiana may (or may not) be the subject of subsequent blog posts.

Although I really think there will be more posts, 'cause why would I want to waste all this good bloggy fodder?

And now, my head really needs to hit the pillow.

If only I'll be able to sleep as well as the snores coming from FH indicate that HE is sleeping - - - what with his snores and the sounds of many baseball players feet, which said baseball players are sharing this hotel with us tonight afore they play in a tourney tomorrow - - - it is NOT a sure thing that I will, be able to sleep the deep sleep of a snorer.

TTFN