I’m getting letters again. I know. But stay with me, I promise I’ll get back to some creative work, but there are other things calling to me, that I can’t ignore, and oddly enough, some of these things have taken me back to some very early chapters in my life. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. More fuel for my work.
Anyway, Monday and Tuesday, you might have read in the newspapers (or experienced if you live in the northeast, was brutal. I was saved by the 90 degree heat wave over the weekend, since I was at the Jersey shore, but Monday and Tuesday I couldn’t have blogged if I had wanted to, my dripping fingers would have short circuited my wireless keyboard! 🙂
We didn’t turn on the airconditioning. Pointless really, since we knew within a few days we would need the heat on again, and sure enough, it is back to 60’s during the day, and 40’s at night. Back to the winter jammies. So mostly on Monday and Tuesday, I sat in the shade, with my ice-tea, and read my HTML manual, preparing to write my new seminar on Website Success, which I will debut at the Michigan Conference in August. I’m loving this book, Ian Lloyd is a Brit, with a wicked sense of humor for a techie, and I understand what he is writing, and much of what I wasn’t completely connecting with before, is all coming together. I almost have a feeling I sort of could possibly know what I’m doing? I think that’s being overly confident, I have so much more to learn, but I have a foundation to start writing the seminar. Talk about putting the cart before the horse…
Wednesday, yesterday, was a really special day. First, the temperatures dropped about40 degrees to where they should be in April. It was a beautiful day, and with the heat, my entire yard exploded in color, EVERYTHING was blooming! But yesterday was a different kind of special day. It was my 31st wedding anniversary. Whew, it is hard to imagine we made it this far, there’s no turning back now!
Sidebar: I married my husband Kevin on a similarly beautiful April day in 1978, at a little church in Southern Jersey where I grew up. There were two Kwanzan Flowering Cherry Trees in front of the church, and we had our official wedding portraits taken 
in front of the trees. I can’t look at a Kwanzan Cherry without thinking of my wedding. So we planted one in the front yard of our house when we bought it in 1982, and since we still live in that house, it fills the front yard with spectacular blooms every April 29th.
Every year for 30 years, on my anniversary, my husband would send me a bouquet of roses, one for every year we were married. Last year the bouquet was almost unmanageable! So I highly encouraged him, sweet and romantic as the gesture was, he could retire the concept and just get me a lovely vase of spring flowers, they usually last longer than roses, and I’d be perfectly happy.
This is what arrived at the door yesterday. A huge explosion of color now sits on my cutting table, and it still has a couple of token roses, but the palette makes me want to open my dye cabinet and get cracking! All in good time.
For an anniversary treat, fueled by my stepsister’s love of Bruce Springsteen, the three of us, all loaded in the car yesterday afternoon and drove to the old Spectrum in Philadelphia. Now, it hasn’t escaped my coincidence radar, that I was married in Southern NJ, and our wedding night was spent at a Philadelphia airport hotel, since we were flying out in the morning to Disney World for our honeymoon! So last night, we were back in Philadelphia on our anniversary for the first time in 31 years. And what did we see? Bruce Springsteen’s 31st 
appearance at the Spectrum, his last before it is torn down in September. As he said during the concert, these old arenas have such character, the perfect venue for a rock concert, it was filled to capacity, which was pretty obvious during the half hour wait in line for the woman’s room, where some enterprising women decided they could hurry things along by passing the roll of toilet paper ahead down the line, so it would speed up the visit to the stall, having your toilet paper in hand before you entered. Gotta love those Springsteen fans.
The building was rockin’, and I will admit, after the opening chords of the three hour non-stop concert, I put in ear plugs, which was actually great, because it filtered out peripheral noise and allowed only what was being projected from the complex speaker system through at a decibel level that wouldn’t damage my sensitive hearing. We had great seats, as you can see from the photo, because we were high enough opposite the stage to see the mass of humanity and the wash of color lights as they flooded the crowd with fabulous palettes depending on the song. My favorite combination was the persimmon color followed by aqua. You can be sure that my next dye project will somehow incorporate that combination!
Anyway, it was a great evening, and Bruce Springsteen is a brilliant musician, showman, and song writer, and it was a privilege to listen to him, and watch him, and the E Street Band. The drummer for more than half the show was an 18 year old prodigy, son of his regular drummer. To watch the close-ups on the monitor was to watch raw talent exploding from the stage.
We got in very late, you can imagine, concert until 11:15, an hour to exit the arena parking lot, and a two hour drive back to Northern Jersey. But it was worth it, it brought back great memories, and as my husband and I opened our cards to each other, waiting for the concert to start, I knew in a heartbeat I’d do it all over again, when we both realized we had picked out the same card for each other.
PS. Placemat exchange score, Mom 4, Brianna 3. Loom warp beam is holding!