Did your favorite fish die and you dream of swimming-er days?

(happier days)

Laundry piled mile high?

Did you have an (UN-NEEDED) stay in the hospital and a week later you still can’t get that blasted IV tape off of your arm?!?

Annoying assigned reading making your eyes and brain turn to mush?

 Do you have a really bossy boss?

Kids all fighting over the same [baby] toy?

  
Someone giving you the evil eye?

Sometimes you can only take so many lemons. Sometimes lemonade is even a bit too sour.

Then what?

Close your eyes. Some fancy piano music starts playing. A beautiful model extends her arm towards Curtain number 2. Wayne Brady is looking at you. “The lemons or curtain number 2??” he asks.

You hold your breath and whisper “CURTAIN NUMBER 2!”

You cautiously open your eyes.

You start to grin. You start to dance.

Before you is the absolutely, insanely perfect remedy for too many lemons!

Oh heck yeah, now that’s what I’m talking about!

A       V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N!

Outer Banks, North Carolina!

Not one but two master bedrooms? Check.

FIVE bedrooms? Check.

A private pool? Check.

An awesome gameroom? Check.

Hot tub, gas grill, pack and play, quiet neighborhood, pool table?

CHECK, CHECK, CHECK, CHECK!

I can smell the air. The water. The relaxation. The vacation.

And the price isn’t half bad for a week.

Take your mom, your sister, your neighbor, your mother-in-law!

OK, let’s not get too carried away there. (But maybe MIL will foot the bill, and in that case, take her!)

Whatever you do, leave the lemons at home where they belong.

Lemonade optional.

One of the weekend traditions at our house is pancake making. Well, we all eat them and Daddy makes them. Wonderful whole-wheat pancakes. The house gets all smokey and he makes millions of them. We wrap them in wax paper and put them in ziploc bags and place them in the freezer so we can eat them for weeks. Love, love, love that man and his pancakes.

Summer is slipping through our fingers. 2 weeks until school begins. 2 weeks from tomorrow, to be exact. We are eating it up. Figuratively and physically.

The bright colors and tastes of summer are something I will miss.

   While the standard 18-55 lens is nice for every day kind of pictures, the 55-200 is very important for those situations where you aren’t able to be right on top of the subject. Specifically, events. Anyway, the amazing thing about this lens is that it has vibration reduction (VR) and you can shoot something pretty far away and don’t have to worry if you don’t have 100% steady hands. I want to marry VR.

   I am shooting a wedding on Labor Day weekend and I NEED that lens! I need, need, need it! So I have been pricing out the lens at different places. Buy.com had one on sale that I am thinking on. While I don’t want to spend the money I’ve been saving for other equipment, this is absolutely a necessity. Really. (That extra really was for my Dear Hubby. haha)

(Why yes, that is his laundry and I aboslutely am not taking it to the laundry room on purpose. I am just dying of curiousity to see how high the pile will get before he does it!)

Most of the books look rather boring and unappealing. This coming from a person that generally does not like to read anything that is longer than 25 pages that doesn’t have the letters N-O-V-E-L in it. That being said, I do love current events, politics, and anything like that. Just generally in smaller portion sizes or in conversational form. However, this particular book caught my eye. Perhaps it was the clean cover design, or the title it’s self: The Myth of American Exceptionalism. But I picked up the book and I started to read. And I’m hooked. Granted, I’ve had to use a dictionary at least three times to figure out the meaning of some of the words (anachronistic being one of them) but I’m getting it.

The author, Godfrey Hodgson, is not an American but professes his intrigue and respect for the country in the book’s preface. He has the unique vantage point of someone who is close enough to America to see her faults, spending years working as a political journalist in Washington D.C. but not having the fierce loyalty to stick up for her when she is wrong. He takes you clear back to the days of the early republic and brings you to current day, analyzing where exceptionalism began and when it started to go corrupt.

I am intrigued by the book because I believe our country is broken and neither ’side’ can fix it. We are too corrupt, too beholden to parties to make real and lasting change. This book is wonderful because the author takes a very unbiased view, blaming not one specific person but a chain of bad decisions and corrupt powers that have created disastrous foreign policy which has in turned mucked our reputation globally.

I am only 1/4 of the way through the book and while it is not easy reading, it is good reading. It really makes you open up your eyes and think about the world behind you. It makes you want to be more fiercelypassionate about fixing this great land we live in and removing the complacency that allowed us to create the mess we are in. If you get a chance to purchase it, I highly recommend it. Check out buy.com — they have low prices (often sales) on books and other things.