Family Ceremonies and New Beginnings

Ceremonies of life happen every day - celebrations of birth, memorial gatherings at deaths, christenings, and, of course, marriages. In the old days - those dark ages that still may exist in some cultures or families - marriage was forever. Thank goodness that's not always the case any more. These days, in most areas of the world, marriages can be ended and lives can continue on separate pathways. 

Life Bridge Brewing Co took its name from the bridge that
used to cross the St Croix River from Stillwater, Minnesota to
Houlton, Wisconsin. Although the old bridge has been
replaced by a newer one, it lives on as a pedestrian
bridge and a well-loved symbol of this riverfront town. 

Tonight, DH and I will head east to join our larger family at the wedding and celebration for our youngest nephew. It's his second marriage and he's found a really lovely person to share his life with. He has a son, I think Ian is around eleven years old now. His new bride has a daughter, a year or three younger than Ian. Together they're making a new family and I'm hoping this one will be good for everyone. They deserve it - they're all really nice people with some really cool kids. 

Founded in 2008, Lift Bridge Brewing has established itself as a
serious player in the craft brew market. They expanded their
taproom in 2018, and offer tours and other events at the brewery
throughout the year. I haven't been there before, so I'm looking
forward to this. 

The wedding itself and the celebration afterward will take place at a craft brewery in Stillwater, near the banks of the St Croix river. I dressed up for his first wedding, a large and rather pretentious gathering of two very disparate families. I'm dressing down a bit for this one - it's in a brewery, and it's a lot more laid-back and fun. So, leggings, a mustard-colored shirt and a fabulous knee-length heavily hand-painted jacket DH purchased for me in Santa Fe, New Mexico many years ago. It'll be good, and I'm looking forward to the celebration and getting together with my relatives once more. 

In addition to their beers, they also brew a non-alcoholic
root beer, some different cream sodas, and several
hard seltzers. I suspect there's something here for
almost anyone's taste buds. 

Of course, when I last saw everybody, I was fighting with my alopecia and hadn't been able to see my dermatologist yet, so I was wearing silken scarves. Now I'm bald and bold - a certain change for everyone who hasn't seen me. It should be a fun night, and I'll have a chance to see the new tattooed sleeve my youngest niece's husband was in the process of getting when I last saw him. All good. 

The old Stillwater Lift Bridge still exists, but it's restricted to pedestrian
or bicycle traffic only. The entire center section is raised to allow river
traffic to pass underneath. This would lead to long traffic jams as cars
waited for the bridge section to lower once again. A new bridge now
spans the St Croix River nearby and raising the bridge no longer causes
massive traffic backups through town. 

So have a great weekend. I'm unsure whether we'll go to the final day of Renaissance Festival or not. There's really no reason to go - we've been there each weekend and have seen it all by now. I wouldn't mind catching up on some sleep and working on the house until the football game starts in the late afternoon. We'll see. What I DO know is I'll be back on Monday. Have a truly fabulous weekend! 

A Typo, A Storm, and Le Tour - My Personal Merry-Go-Round

Hmmm - not really sure about that crazy typo in yesterday's post, but no - no 17 marriages for me. I've only been married once, to my one and only DH, and we will be celebrating 40 years this fall. We're in it for the long haul. Glad I could offer a smile to all of my friends who commented on my marriage-go-round - LOL. 

Although many of you will think of a carousel when the words
merry-go-round are spoken, I remember hours upon hours
playing on merry-go-rounds similar to this in my local
playgrounds and parks. I loved making it go as fast as possible. 

Today is my "day off", which of course I don't get since Chickie is in Montana. She's missed some rather torrential rainstorms, so I hope her house is in one piece when she gets back in a week. Since I have no time off this week, laundry is being pushed into odd days and times. It's not quite 4:00 am and I have a load in the dryer and dinner in the crock pot. No gym today because my PT wanted me to take an extra day (besides my normal Sunday) off. I decided Wednesday would be a good choice, so I'm grumbling while missing my daily exercise. I see my PT again next week and will see if I can just change my type of exercise so that I don't have to miss my day completely. 

Today's stage is pretty flat, one of the last good chances for Peter
Sagan to get points for the Green Jersey. The ride is from
Albi to Toulouse and 167 km long. No real challenges
here. although it will be interesting to see if we have yet
another new stage winner at the end. So far it's been ten
days with ten different stage winners. Quite unusual. 

On Le Tour today, it's flat, flat, flat (relatively), but those mountains are looming ever closer and begin tomorrow. Four days in the Pyrenees (including the individual time trial on Friday), and then, a rest day on Monday before the riders begin their move towards the grand climax of the Alps. Whoot! Mountains! 

After the storm had passed, we went to the patio for a
while. Without power, we had no fans, and the house
was extremely hot and stuffy. The sun spotlighted
the tall tree at the southeastern corner of my property.
It was absolutely stunning! 

Every other tree around it was dark and in shadow, but this
single tree was bathed in sunlight and after-glow. The sky
was promising a rainbow - it was just that quality of light - 
but we couldn't see one yet. 

I decided to pepper this post with photos from the storm we had yesterday - the one that knocked our power out both at home and at the shop. The sky was amazing, once the rain had passed. My camera (phone camera, so not the best in the world) just couldn't capture the amazing robin's egg blue against the orange skies in the final picture, but that sky had us (and others) stopped in our tracks, amazed at the beauty. 

Our creek, the eastern border of our lot, usually trickles at the
bottom of a steep draw. It was running extremely high after the
rain, though. Across the creek you can see trees that are normally
on the bank, now playing 'mangrove tree' with their roots and
lower trunks completely in the swift-flowing water. 

Around 8:30 pm we gave up on power and decided to head to
McDonald's for a late meal. There was my rainbow, finally,
against the eastern sky as we exited the car. If you look
carefully, you can see the hint of a second rainbow to the
left of that first tree. 

I took photo after photo of the western sky but the
colors just overwhelmed the abilities of my
camera. The sky was an intense orange/peach/gold
and the unclouded sky was a true Robin's egg blue.
If I had painted that no-one would have believed
it to be a true color combination. My camera
certainly had its issues. But I tried. 

So there you go, our crazy storm on Monday night. One more thing - our alarm company finally notified me that we had no electric power to the system during my workday on Tuesday. Apparently they had been moving our account (along with lots of others) to some new equipment and software, causing a time delay for minor items. The company assured me that we would have been contacted immediately if it had been something of more consequence. I guess I'll have to trust them on that, but I wasn't super happy. It was more than twelve hours after the power was lost that I got the phone call. 

So, have a great day. I'm off to check on my dinner which is cooking upstairs, and to do some other things since I'm actually right on time today, but no gym to go to right now. This 'day off from the gym' thing is going to drive me crazy! I'll be back tomorrow with a Le Tour de France update and a look ahead at MOUNTAINS! YIPPEE! 

Prejudice and Backlash - I Thought We Were More Grown Up

Are we reverting back to the 1950's? Or maybe even earlier than that, into the turn of last century or even the time of the American Civil War? I'm flabbergasted, because I thought as a nation we had moved beyond senseless hatred and the inability to look beyond racial stereotypes. I guess I was seriously mistaken and I'm stunned.

I liked this ad and thought the couple looked like a great
family unit in it. I fail to see why there should be such
controversy about it, but I know people around the world
would be upset with an interracial marriage. 

Old Navy is a clothing store for casual clothing at low prices (i.e., they're not good quality and won't last for a long time, but they're affordable, especially when kids grow out of clothes faster than budgets allow). They recently ran an advertising campaign featuring the couple and child in the photo above. The implication, of course, is that it was an interracial family, and it comes across as a loving family unit. The backlash the company received on social media because of this photo was ridiculous.

Here's a protest occurring in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1970. Have we
 really not moved past this point? It seems that protests today are
saying the same or quite similar things and protesting for the
same rights. Have we wasted the past 40+ years on nothing? 

When I was in high school I fully admit that people were a lot more uptight about interracial unions. But that was in the late 1960's and early 1970's and I thought we have grown beyond that outdated attitude. When I was in high school, one of my school acquaintances fell in love with a black man and a few years later, while I was in college, she married him. Her family disowned her and, to the best of my knowledge, they never reconciled. Her marriage was happy and she never regretted her choice of partner.

Domestic violence is still prevalent with one in four women
being abused by their spouse in any given year. In some areas
of the world, it is almost an expected part of marriage. To me
that is shocking and something that should never be tolerated, but
I have had co-workers in abusive relationships and I know how
hard it can be to leave them. 

On the other hand, another school friend, Ann, was the perfect Jewish daughter. She was obedient, soft-spoken, very well dressed (her parents had a higher income than most of the rest of us experienced) and did I mention obedient? Yeah. She married the man her parents chose for her - a good Jewish man who married her and took her to Israel. Once there, she was beaten and traumatized, eventually ran away from him and returned home. She divorced the abuser and married a second time into a better situation. But her parents were unforgiving. She had left the man of their choice and they could no longer hold their heads up in Temple. They turned their backs on her for leaving the husband they had chosen.

When are we going to learn that love is the key. We sing about love
all the time, but don't really seem to subscribe to that in our
lives. Posters like this and books showing choices are a good beginning, but that's
all they are - just a beginning. We still, after more than half a century,
have a long way to go. 

My parents, thank goodness, thought both sets of other parents were treating their children poorly for the choices they had made. I'm not sure what my mother would have done if I had expressed the desire to marry a black man, but she knew I was dating one for a while. I had him home for dinner and the folks were great. It just seems to me that getting angry about the people we love is beyond reason. If two people fall in love, marry, and forge a family together, and the marriage is strong and healthy, who really cares if the marriage is interracial, gay, lesbian, or otherwise? What's important are the words strong, healthy for both partners, and loving. Here's to a loving Tuesday for all.