Family

Holidays have always been an important time in my family, regardless if we were getting dressed up to go to midnight mass on Christmas Eve or ordering from KFC on Easter (because my gramma was sick of cooking that year...and every year after), we always made incredible memories. Food and laughter seemed to go hand in hand and no one ever failed to get a whole bunch of good pictures.

Wait, did I just write that we always get a bunch of pictures during the holidays? Yeah that’s what I thought. Because I brought a camera to Easter dinner at my aunt’s house last Sunday but it never made it out of my bag.

And neither did anyone else’s after the family arrived. The only photo I saw from this most recent holiday was my aunt posting on Facebook a picture of the beautifully set table that had a caption something like “Ready for all those hungry animals to get here and wolf down in fifteen seconds something it took me 3 hours to cook!”

Or something like that.

But this puts me in a tough spot because I fully intended on using this holiday photo extravaganza to my advantage today. Since the request is literally for a photo of me and a family member, I didn’t want to have to intentionally pick someone randomly. That's why I was just going to go with the excuse that as the most recent holiday it was the "obvious choice" (feel my air quotes).  So what to do?

Why post a completely non-related photo of course!

This is me with my grampa Ed on the day he got his high school diploma.  He fought in World War II and gave up graduating to defend the country instead.  Back in the early part of the new millennium, Massachusetts was the first state to institute Operation Recognition and the program allowed my grampa to get his diploma sixty some-odd years after he originally should have.

It was a cool day but, of course he wasn’t about to get all emotional about it.  He was way too much of a comedian for all that.  So it looks as if he’s in a really contemplative gaze here but it was all a show for the camera.  In fact, I’m surprised he didn’t grab his lapel with his free hand and dramatically toss his chin up just to give the extra punch.  And yes, that is a bucket hat which reads Cape Cod that he's wearing with his suit and tie.

Not to say he wasn’t honored, because he did come thisclose to welling up a little bit when he actually walked across the mock stage to get the diploma in his hand.  But in true grampa fashion once it was over there was no need for all the dramatics and pomp and circumstance anymore.  He just wanted to get back to his chair to watch the Sox game. 

I’m thinking it was probably because they held the thing in a cemetery. 

Way to go there Massachusetts.  The irony of 80 year olds receiving their high school diploma in a cemetery is so outrageous I can’t even find a way to mock it more than it already mocks itself.

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Catch up on anything you missed  30 Photos, 30 Days
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Spelling it Out on Eleven Eleven

This is not going to be about my book and the hell known as week two but I still want the search engines to find me if its related to writing, so bear with me while I pimp it for a second then read on for something really swell...

NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo10, National Novel Writing Month, writing a book in 30 days is a freaking recoculous idea, wtf did I get myself into (again), I hate all my characters, I think I’ll kill off all my characters in a tragic blimp accident, let’s see what’s going on over at Facebook/twitter/blogger/NaNo forums/my eBay watch list/the inside of my refrigerator/the Wiki about common beans, perhaps this writing thing is a load of crap, I suck at typing, word count can kiss my big old ass, dictionary.com is my homepage…

Okay, that’ll do.

Now onto other more enjoyable topics such as the fact that today is my very favorite day! Today is eleven eleven! (Yes, I spell everything out for word count now). It isn’t my favorite day because it’s Veteran’s Day (which would have been sooo fitting to have been yesterday on the anniversary of the Marines inception don’t you think?) but because of the number itself: 11/11. Isn’t it just cool?

Mystical, magical, I don’t know. There has just always been something about the number eleven since I was a kid. A little kid. Recently I was sorting through a whole bunch of crap that I’ve held onto over the years and I found this wonky survey that I made up that only my sister and I took. Of course favorite number was one of the questions; I wrote 11. I don’t think I was much older than that at the time.

Let me back up for a second and explain, for those of you who didn’t spend half of your tween years folding up pieces of notebook paper into clever little fortune telling devices, just what the survey was. Remember that scene in Sixteen Candles where Samantha (Molly Ringwald, before the dance so aptly named for her became a global phenomenon) is answering the ‘have you ever done it’ survey and then she’s supposed to pass it on to a friend? Yeah well it was just like that only for ten year olds so ya know, the sex questions turned into stuff like ‘who’s your favorite movie star’.

Okay in all fairness I know that most ten year olds these days know more about sex than I probably still know, but back then we were all idiots and stupid surveys were our version of the internet.

But, as usual, I digress.

When Drew Bledsoe came to New England as our quarterback pretty much the only reason I liked him at first was that he proudly wore number 11. Of course when he started to kick our sorry ass team back into gear he became that much more awesome but still, the eleven was what really compelled me. I guess you could say it Drew me to him…haha, oh I just kill me.

It is pretty much a daily occurrence that I look at a clock at 11:11. Sometimes in the morning, sometimes at night. Sometimes both. And I always point it out by literally pointing at it and saying ‘oh look, its 11:11, well of course it is.’

Nothing major happened when I was eleven…

Okay wait, that might not be entirely accurate.  That was the year I met my BFF who is still my oldest and closest like-family friend in the world, I finally left the hell known as grammar school (truthfully my least favorite years, I even enjoyed junior high school more) and I also went to Disney World for the first time so I suppose one might argue that I had a pretty significant year that year. 

Significant, at least, to an eleven year old who’s sitting around making up silly surveys that I intended to pass around to my friends but never did.

There are some who say I should make wishes when I see something that reads 11:11, that it is fortuitous, coincidence, or really special.  But to me it is simply a time of day, another reason to notice my favorite number.

Then again, maybe eleven is the magic number.  My magic number.  Guess what time I’m going to schedule this to post today?