I am a Ford

Today for a luncheon, some colleagues and I went to Stew Leonards for lunch, for those that don't know, Stew Leonards is a "higher class" grocery store with all sort of interactive things for kids and a lot of free samples. Anyway, I was walking through the store and I saw this beautiful woman grocery shopping with her small son.

This woman (on the surface), was everything I always wished I was. She was beautiful by every meaning the word could possibly cover. Her son was an adorable, well behaved little boy (oddly enough, named Randy, one of my favorite boys names).

Me, I've been battling being overweight (VERY overweight) my whole life. I'm at the skinniest I've ever been right now, but I'm still about 40 lbs from where I'd really really like to be. After 14 years in my field, I'm finally starting to achieve what I want. I've gotten a recent promotion so I'm quasi-management, and I'm secure in my position at my firm. I'm still single, but goodness knows I've tried. Just not much luck on that front.

So anyway, back to this woman. As luck (or as I call it, cruel fate) would have it, she was walking out the same time I was and I watched as the perfect woman with her perfectly behaved son wheeled her cart to...you guessed it...the perfect car (to me anyway). She drove my dream car, a brand new black Cadillac Escalade. The car was clearly tricked out with everything.

For some reason, this particular "have" made this "have not" feel awful and I was bummed out for the rest of the day.

On my drive home today I passed a red Escalade and it made me think of the woman again and I started to get depressed all over again. Then out of nowhere, it hit me...I'm a Ford.

Now I'm sure you're all sitting there scratching your head, but please, let me explain. I bought my new Ford Explorer a few weeks ago. The buying process included dragging my best friend to a bunch of different dealerships to sit in every type of SUV I could to make sure I got the right one.

Naturally, one of the dealerships I went to was Cadillac. I had to drive my Escalade and I loved it. I even figured out that if I made my payment for 5 years, I could afford to buy it. Wow, imagine that, my dream car...then, reality set in. Yes, I could afford to buy it, but, I couldn't do anything else for a long time, the insurance alone would kill me and I'd be in big trouble repair time once the warranty was gone. And, since I put about 40,000 a year on my car, this just wasn't practical.

So, being the responsible girl my parents raised, I went and bought myself a beautiful red Ford Explorer, which, I must say, I LOVE!

Back to my original statement...I'm a Ford. As I'm sitting in my car I realized something. The woman in Stew Leonards, she was an Escalade. Me, I'm an Explorer. No better or worse than the Escalade. Just different.

I'm a little rough around the edges, although I try. I'm tough and built for work. That's who I am and there's nothing wrong with it. I may not have all the bells, whistles and fancy chrome, but I'm nice to look at, reliable and have something for everyone.

Took me 32 years to reach that realization, but today, I did and I think I'm a better person for it.

It pays to be a packrat

I finally decided I can't stand the site of my overstuffed closet anymore, so towards the end of last week I started to clean it out. Well in my closet I found an old photo album that my Noni had put together. It was from 1973 and it contained the newspaper article that ran when my parents got engaged, one of their wedding invitations and a bunch of pictures from my Mother's shower, the wedding and the reception.

The articles were getting yellow and tattered and you could see it was just a matter of time before everything in the book was lost. As my parents don't have a wedding album per say, I thought this would be perfect to scrapbook for them.

Well, needless to say, I still haven't finished cleaning the closet out, but I am almost done with their book. I figure by this weekend I should have it done.

I also found some pictures I took when Joan and I went up to Montreal to celebrate French Fry's 30th birthday party. We had so much fun. I keep trying to scrap them but I'm having a hard time because I get a little sad that such close friends are so far away.

Random Wrestlers Part 2

Heidenreich was from New Orleans so I decided to use a Mardi Gras theme on his page. The masks are cut from foam and the other set of masks are just drink sticks with feathers glued on to them.

The Dusty Rhodes page is designed off of the t-shirt he's wearing in some of the pictures I used.

Sandman's page was fun to do. It's not often you get to scrapbook with barbed wire

For Al Snow's page, I reproduced the large snowman head that he has airbrushed on his motorcycle.

A few years ago I got a bunch of foreign money from my grandfather and wasn't sure what I should do with it. JBL being into stocks and such was the perfect chance to allow me to use this.

Even simple things like a childs Burger King crown can make great page accents. This is one of my earlier pages.

Random Wrestlers

My biggest spread to date...Randy Orton...

This spread took me forever. The hardest thing was to come up with a theme.

His character is "The Legend Killer" but that didn't lend itself to well to the pictures I wanted to use.

Then my friend was throwing out an old movie book and I saw the "Now Showing" marquee and fell in love with it.

My decision was made then and there. Randy Orton got a movie theme. It worked perfectly because I had a lot of things I wanted to write about the road trips my friends and I took to meet him.

So I decided to do "And the Winner Is..." envelopes like the Oscar's and put the pages of journaling in there. The ones that I've finished journaling are sealed with wax with an "O" for Orton (I picked it up on clearance at Michaels, I was so excited).

Rated RKO Transition Pages

To keep the book running smoothly I inserted this spread. It's a transition section from my Edge spread to my Randy Orton spread and it was also a nice place to put the pictures of me and my friend with both of them.

Edge Spread

For the life of me I can't explain why, but this is one of my favorite spreads. I think some of it has to do with the fact that I did the spread in red and black, my signature colors and I have to say, the whole "Rated R Superstar" and "Sex and Violence" gimmicks are alot of fun to do.

The "Sex & Violence" logo that I did was all done freehand. It was NOT easy at all. I had the t-shirt spread out on the kitchen table as I tried over and over again to reproduce the image. Maybe next time I'll just take it to the local copy store and shrink it down and trace it!



I was so excited because not long after I finished the spread I found out that he was doing an autograph signing in Toronto and we were going to go. The signing ended up turning into him throwing out the pitch at the Jays game.


As my friends and I aren't big baseball fans, we stuck around a little to watch him throw out the pitch, get some nice pictures then decided to leave. As luck would have it, as we're heading to the elevator, who do we bump into...you guessed it, EDGE! How funny is that!

I did end up getting the page signed, but all he had was a black sharpie (poor planning on my part) so he signed it and when I got home I traced around the signature with a gold pen. It gave a really cool effect.

A few months later "Rated RKO" came to a mall less then 10 miles from where I live. Well I certainly wasn't going to let that opporunity pass by, so I had him resign the page in silver. The Rated RKO signing brings me to my biggest spread to date...Randy Orton...