The Reunion and a Meme

Finally, I'm going to talk about the reunion like I promised. I know you were all of the edge of your seats just waiting to hear what happened. Right.

Dineen and Ronie both tagged me with the same meme, so we'll get to that too. It's a good excuse to take a break from painting nearly the whole stinkin' house.

We spent the early part of the day at the beach. At this time of year, the water off the coast of Southern California actually gets warm enough to go into without a wetsuit. For the first time in all my beach going, I experienced a rip current. We were in the water with the kids and the undertow was really strong so life jackets were mandatory for them to be in the water. Then the life guard called over the bullhorn for all of us to get out of the water because there was a rip current just behind us. It's hard to see when you're in the water, but as soon as we got on shore and gained some elevation, you could see the roiling surface that indicated the competing currents.

While we were sitting on the beach and the kids were making a giant sandcastle, we saw three dolphins swim just outside the break zone. My daughter was particularly pleased to see that.

After the beach we left the kids with my mom and Peter and I headed up the coast to Long Beach to check into our hotel and get ready for his high school reunion, West High, Class of 1986, Torrance. I noticed while I was getting ready that my legs felt shaky. I attributed this to fighting the undertow at the beach all day. But then I got dizzy. Surely I just needed to eat. Peter ran to a corner market and brought me back some munchies. Didn't help. By the time we got to the reunion, I was sick. Nothing like trying to act interested in someone's conversation when you're trying not to throw up on them. Still, there were many people I knew through Peter (PK--pre-kids) and we enjoyed getting caught up.

And yes, my broken arm story came back to haunt me again. One of Peter's friends, John, was production assistant in Hollywood when we knew him. He videotaped our wedding. He came up to us at the reunion and the first thing he said to us was about my broken arms at the wedding. Then he had to tell everyone in hearing range about it. I'm definitely getting a lot of mileage out of that story.

One thing they do at these reunions is put together "bio books" on everyone. You submit a photo and a little blurb about what's going on in your life. In Peter's he put the link to my blog. So if any of you reading this are West High alumni, "Hi!" I thought that was sweet.

So the next day we drove back to Arizona, a miserable seven hour drive. Believe me, I'd rather have had the broken arms than the flu on that trip. Ugh.

On to the meme. I'm supposed to answer one these three questions and then tag five people. So, without further ado, here goes.

1. If you could write a novel about any subject, what would it be?
2. If just the thought of having to write anything gives you hives, what would you like to read about in a novel that you’ve never seen done before?
3. If you hate reading fiction (you can get counseling for that, you know), what subject might make you change your mind or try it anyway?

We can't possibly have any people of the no. 3 persuation reading this blog. Obviously, I'm going to answer no. 1. I think I'd like to write something about SpecOps. I don't have any plot or characters to go with that subject, but I think it'd be fascinating. I'm also playing around with a Walter Mitty-esque kind of character. And I think she'll need to constantly injure herself. I won't have to do any research for that part.

Hmm, who to tag? Jeanne and Mike, of course, because looking into their brains is always fun. And Malia, Sabrina, and Jenny, though I don't know if any of you have the time.

Back to painting the house. I'll post pictures when I'm done . . . If I'm not dead.