Love of the Bird Variety

This is one of those random posts, but I like to write these now and then. Last time I said that I’d share with you one of my favorite things. So here goes. It’s one of those simple pleasures things and I just love it. Okay, here it is…



I LOVE my bird cup!!! You know how sometimes you have a favorite cup or mug and you drink out of it as much as you can? Well this is mine! :-) My bird cup is a fairly new addition to my life around the Yellow House.

Here’s the back story on my fave cup. So, Brit Boy and I were out Christmas shopping a few months back. And as we were searching for gifts, I spotted this cup. Actually Brit Boy spotted a cup he liked first, but it isn’t a bird cup. Anyway, when he got his, I saw mine and I was sold! It's kind of weird looking and that's why I liked it and I'm easily amused ;-)

I’ll tell you, I don’t know if it’s purely psychological, but EVERYTHING tastes better in this cup. LOL. I drink green tea, white tea, chai latte, coffee, hot chocolate…everything under the sun in this cup. It gets a varied workout. But here’s what I love…it’s a good size to have soup in too. One note though, this photo makes it look huge...it's not. LOL. This is just an extreme close-up. Anyway, it’s my standard go-to favorite these days. I may be a bit obsessed with this cup, but who cares. Gotta have some pleasures in this life, right? ;-)

My next post will be a foodie post. I’ve been in the kitchen again. As I mentioned before, I’m not a great cook, but I love giving it a try from time to time and I promised to share the hills and valleys in my culinary adventures. Well, yesterday I had a bit of a high point, so I’m gonna share that. But don’t worry, I’ll still share my kitchen wrecks too….LOL. That’s really funny stuff sometimes.

Have a great weekend!

Presidential Medal of Freedom

I had planned to blog today about one of my new favorite things as I mentioned in my previous post. However, that has now been bumped to my next post. Something happened yesterday that I want to highlight because it warms my heart every time. I guess in a roundabout way you could say this is a post about a favorite thing after all :-)

Yesterday, President Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to fifteen honorees at the White House. This is the highest civilian honor given in the United States. I always love when this ceremony comes around because I love getting the chance to see who is honored and also to really “see” these people. When I watch this ceremony I always look at each and every face and it’s like you can almost feel the honor along with them. Their life’s work is laid out in front of them at that moment for the world to see, but most importantly, for them to see the great expanse of their own lives. In those moments, I see their humanity and I feel my own.



Often I will know several of the recipients, but there are many that I’m usually becoming aware of for the first time. I’m always drawn afterwards to learn more about the contributions of these extraordinary people. That is what I love about this award…you have the well-known and the unsung who are honored. These people have just been themselves and served in their own ways and that is a what life is all about as I see it.

The honorees this year are as follows:

Rep. John Lewis – civil rights icon (He was called early in life to do the right thing)

Maya Angelou – poet, author (I’d love to have her gift for words)

Yo-Yo Ma – amazing cellist (Listening to him play makes me want to play music again, even more. By the way, I played the flute in a former life ;-) )

John H. Adams – Natural Resources Defense Council – Co-founder

Bill Russell – NBA Hall of Famer, basketball legend, and human rights activist

Stan Musial – Baseball legend of the St. Louis Cardinals

Angela Merkel – German Chancellor

Jasper Johns – artist; considered a major influence upon pop, minimalist, and conceptual art

Gerda Weissmann Klein – Holocaust Survivor

Dr. Tom Little – optometrist killed in Afghanistan while on humanitarian mission

Sylvia Mendez – civil rights activist

Jean Kennedy Smith – Former U.S. Ambassador to Ireland

John Sweeney – AFL-CIO President Emeritus

George H.W. Bush – Former U.S. President

Warren Buffett – Berkshire Hathaway CEO, philanthropist

Congrats to all of them and I look forward to seeing the honorees next year!

The Sports Ground Debut!

Hello all! Happy Friday!

Well, in my previous post I talked about watching the Super Bowl. It was a great night here at the Yellow House and we ended up staying up for the whole thing, which was well after 3am here. It was fun!

So I thought that I would mention another ‘sporty spice’ kind of thing to continue this trend for one more post. No, I haven’t taken up a sport…yet ;-) However, my Brit Boy, who is the real sporty one around here has opened a new chapter in his blogging life.



Brit Boy has started a new sports blog called, The Sports Ground, and he will cover a wide array of sports, since this is one of his great loves. He will concentrate mostly on football aka soccer, but he will also be blogging about sports that are enjoyed on both sides of the Atlantic. One of his recent posts was about his take on the Super Bowl, so the transatlantic life of the Yellow House extends into his new blog, just like it does in mine.

So if you’re a sports fan or if you just want to read the knowledgeable musings of Brit Boy on all things sports…take a trip on over and check him out! :-)

*****

As for me, I’ve been doing fine and will be blogging about one of my new favorite things in my next post. I love a cliffhanger…lol.

Have a great weekend!

Collective Experiences & Super Bowls

Hello all :-) I’m so glad that I can finally get a chance to post here. It has seemed like forever since the last time. I’ve been kinda knee deep in studying and various things, so today is a beautiful lull in it all. Today I’ve just been trying to have some down time, although I did cook this afternoon and I even exercised this morning. But both of those things are making things better in the long run, so they sort of work into this whole reconnecting thing that I’m up to lately.

It will probably be a bit of a late night tomorrow night, but that’s customary for me these days anyway. As I’ve mentioned here before, I usually get a burst of energy at around 11pm and then I’m wide awake for a couple of hours at least. So it’ll work out really well for tomorrow night in particular.

As many of you know, tomorrow is Super Bowl XLV. Here in England it will be shown later over into the night, starting a bit before 11pm (my golden hour)…LOL. So the timing is tailor-made for me. Brit Boy plans to check it out too for a while. I doubt if we'll stay up for it all, but you never know. The end will probably get recorded ;-)

Here’s the thing…I’m not really an NFL football fan or really a sports fan at all. LOL. I watch tennis and golf a little bit and dip into baseball sometimes, but I’m not what I’d call a “sporty spice” ;-) Note: I often say this "sporty spice" thing. LOL. It comes from one of the Spice Girls' names and I just kinda adopted that to mean a sports fan or in my case not a sports fan. I'm known to make up names for stuff like that. LOL. I’m quite pedestrian about most sports. Brit Boy is an avid sports fan, with football aka soccer, being his favorite. So anyway, as you see, I’m no sports fan. However, over the years I’ve more often than not tuned in to the Super Bowl at least for part of it. And the halftime show always pulls me in.

I was having a bit of a think about this earlier and I guess that the Super Bowl for me is more about the collective experience of the whole thing. We don’t get many of those nowadays with our attention being pulled in various directions. With so many channels nowadays and the internet, it is rare to share something with so many people. And I think that for me, since I live abroad, it has become a collective experience even more. It makes me feel connected to home in a roundabout way. It’s funny when I think about it. Who knew that a football game would EVER have that kind of pull upon me :-)

So tomorrow night we’ll be watching along with millions of others. We won’t have the special commercials to watch from over here, but there’s still the halftime show and all that exuberance to take a look at ;-) It should be fun!

Then it’s back to business on Monday, but the weekend has so far been just what I’ve needed. Have a great weekend! :-)