Gracefully

I always thought I'd grow old gracefully.  I thought I would great the wrinkles and grey hairs with dignity.  After all they add character.  They are evidence of my expressions.

I loved my Nana's wrinkles.  The way her forehead rippled when she laughed.  There was one particular day that I remember.  It was not long before she passed on.  We were out in the car with my mum, taking a day trip out to the country.  I was drinking a can of lemonade Tango.  My Nana looked over and requested to have some.  I of course shared willingly, but let her now that it was a bit sour. Nana didn't care about that, so she took the can, took a swig, then all of a sudden her whole face wrinkled up.  I became aware of more wrinkles than I 'd ever seen on her before.  I started to giggle.  Then she also started to laugh, and her face again changed.
At that point in time I had nothing against wrinkles.

Now, time to fast forward 16 years later.  Well I woke up the day after my wedding day, and woe and behold, yes my first wrinkles. I can't decide if its wedding planning that did it to me, or if you just get them when you become a wife.  Maybe its an unwritten part of the vows.

"I vow to obtain wrinkles.  I, (insert bride's name) take you, (insert grooms's name), for my lawful husband, to have and to hold, from this day forward,  for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part. "

I have one, that is becoming like the Grand Canyon on my forehead.  It took a while to realise what had caused it.  It's not a frown line, its not a smile line.   But then, with some work, I figured out what it is from.  My husband is about 6ft 7, I am 5ft 3, I spend a lot of time looking up towards him.  Sometimes I don't tilt my head, and yep, that's where the wrinkles are from.  They are actually from my husband.

I am trying to accept them, its more tolerance than acceptance right now, as I know they are here to stay, and before long there will even be more wrinkles moving in.  I just thought/hoped they would come later.  There is really very little graceful about wrinkles.

Once upon a time

There was a young lass who began a blog.  She did so as she knew she had words she wanted to share, and she knew there was at least one other person out there who would be interested in reading them.
However, as time went by, she found herself drifting away from her blog.  Much of this was due to the increased work load that she had.  Long days in the office left little time for her to express herself on her blog.
Eventually her posts became infrequent until she slowly left the blogging world behind.

Well, today, she has returned.  She has made a decision to make time, and get back to writing.  Many wonderful things have happened in this lasses life over the past couple of years, and she's happy to finally be back to share her song of happiness.

Beep Beep

What do you know... I passed my driving test today!

Camping Shenanigans

It was a month ago today, so figured I could write about it now. I had a great week leading up to July 4th. A group of my friends go camping up at Timothy Lake every year for July 4th, (as my birthday is July 5, it becomes a week long birthday celebration too). This year I turn 30, so I was determined to have a great time and celebrate. I am sometimes surprised I’ve made it this far, given I am extremely clumsy. I mean… I have been known to walk off a cliff in the pitch black night, fall out of trees and generally just trip and stumble here there and everywhere, luckily never while crossing the road with on coming traffic.

So anyways… we were up the mountain at Timothy Lake, sleeping in tents and keeping warm by the camp fire. The days were gorgeous perfect temperatures in our shady spot by the creek. However, at night… at night it was really cold, so cold in fact that the ice in our coolers refroze and we had to pry our food from the ice blocks. You may think I am exaggerating but I kid you not, it really was that cold at night, you just have to love those mountain summers. OK, to be perfectly honest, it was only that cold the first 2 nights, it did start to warm up a little as the week progressed.

We pretty much spent the week drinking and talking, playing drinking games such as drink while you think. Been as we had a lot of fruit and plenty of vodka and gin, we decided to make up some jungle juice. We thought that one of the empty 2 gallon water jugs would make a great container for said juice, so we got to squishing berries, oranges and limes in Ziploc bags, mixing in a little vodka while still in the squishing process. Once the berries were squished we cut a corner in the bag and poured it into the water jug thingie. Then we added the vodka, gin, lemonade, and pretty much anything else we could find that would taste good. Then we left it in a cooler of ice for a few hours. Oh my, it was so tasty. We purposely didn’t make it too strong either, thinking if people wanted it stronger they could add more berries/juice, erm i mean, more vodka or gin to their serving. Good times.

I spent a total of 4 nights up on the mountain, the wbf came out to join me for the last 2 nights, he couldn’t come sooner because he had to work. Well, when he arrived I was so happy, not just to see him, as I had missed him after 2 lonely nights in a very cold tent, but because he had a car full of balloons. By the way I love balloons, they just make me smile. He originally had brought 10, but 3 hadn’t made it, but I didn’t care, 7 big shiny balloons all for me. I was requested to tie them to my chair, and I felt like the birthday queen. I was all happy, that is until, all the small children started eyeing up my balloons… then started to ask me if they could have one. There were a lot of kids camping with us, and I knew as soon as I gave one away, they’d all be gone. I normally have no problems with sharing, but on this occasion I felt very selfish I wanted my balloons to myself, and I didn’t want them flying off into the woods and up the mountain, or getting popped near the campfire. So, I managed to negotiate, that they could have one (which they got right before bed time, when they went to bed we snagged it back and passed it on to the next child), seemed to be a win-win.

All in all, it was a great week. I’ll tell you more about the week in my next post.

Red Shoes

I am thinking that you may have been wondering what happened to that girl Caroline, who used to write to this little space in the blog world. She hasn’t been around in a few months.
If you thought that I had forgotten about my blog, you would be a little right, but not completely. Truth is the past few months have been a little unsettled. Been as my blog is called song of happiness I didn’t really want to post a bunch of miserable posts. So I saved you from that

I am hoping that things are now settling down some, although I am not feeling very settled as yet, but I don’t intend to bore you with those details.

Instead, I am going to try and think of something else to write about. Maybe one of my public transportation stories.

As you may know I don’t drive (yet – but I have been working on that lately), so I take public transportation to work. It seems I am one of those people that people like to talk to. This morning I was wearing my favourite red shoes. There was a couple of us waiting for the bus, including one lady with a white cane. She checked with me the bus number before we climbed on board and we ended up sitting next to each other.

Now, I learnt something here, as I thought people with white canes were blind, but turns out that is not the case, as she commented on my red shoes - so clearly she could see, although maybe not quite so well. My shoes happened to be the same red as her skirt. Well, by this point she’d heard me talk enough to pick up on my accent, so the discussion began.

She had been to England a long time ago, and had fallen in love with it. We got to talking about where in England I was from, and I was impressed that just by me saying I was from the North East, she was able to rattle off counties in that area, and name landmarks, although she’d never actually got that far north.

Needless to say this was quite a different experience to some of the others I’ve had since moving here, where when asked where I am from and I say England, they think I mean New England…

Caromie is back in town,

I took a break from my blog for a while. Truth is I have been working quite a bit the past few months, and just didn't have much time to write. Seems things are quieting down a little now, and getting back to "normal". So here I am, back for a while at least.

Its not just that I haven't been writing, I haven't even been reading other peoples blogs much lately. The most I have been able to manage is the odd tweet every now and again. But at least that let people know I was still living.

Life is good at the moment, I still have a job, for now at least, my bf and I managed to patch things up and are getting along really well, we are not living together at the moment, and I am sure that helps. We both need a decent amount of space/time to ourselves. Living together we weren't able to find that balance. Of course, we can't go living in separate places forever, although we have spoken about it. Maybe we could buy two houses in the same street, or even next door to each other... it could be the secret to our success. Seriously though, we are taking things slowly and having a lot of fun.

2009, seems to be the year for weddings. I think we have heard about 5 in the past two months which take places over the next 12 months or so. 4 in the mid west, and 1 back in the UK. I haven't even been to a wedding since I was 16, and now 5 in a year... With some luck these weddings will give me something to write about. I mean every wedding has a story right..?

Bullying...

A while back I saw a tweet from Claire requesting that people share their bullying stories at www.bullying.co.uk.
I was bullyied for most of my high school life, so I hoped over there and checked it out, and of course posted my story.  I recieved an email this morning:

Thank you so much for your views on bullying, it has already had impact the BBC One Show has been in touch they are doing an item on the long term effects of bullying and they were very interested in speaking to you.

Of course been as I am now living in the US, this won't be happening, but I was pleased to see that just a short story of something that happened over 10 years ago, at least received some interest.