It's Coming ... Vacation Detritus

Have you noticed when you are on vacation, it is absolutely impossible to return home without a souvenir tucked safely away in your suitcase?

Vacation trips are magic carpet rides into different worlds.  I think we have a primordial need to possess at least a little piece of that magic.

The good news is that it is not your fault if you carry home something useless, ugly or embarrassing.

Look at the choices you have in the souvenir shop.

The ashtray

The cup and saucer.

The seashell thingy.

The wooden plaque.

It's even worse now.  In earlier souvenir shopping days, everything was not made in China.

Everyone Has a Mom to Thank

I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

Men are what their mothers made them. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If  you ever become a mother, can I have one of the puppies? ~ Charles Pierce

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own. ~ Aristotle

Tell her you love her, even if you don't. 

You won't always have the chance.

Let's See More Cowgirls, Hollywood

Our concepts of women in the frontier west have been shaped by movies and television. Women are portrayed as either helpless, long-skirted domestic drudges ...

or as buxom, sleazy, saloon strumpets. 

So where are the cowgirls, Hollywood?

In the real frontier west, ranch women performed all the same cowboy work that the men did.

Women went along on cattle drives and some, like Lizzie Johnson, The Queen of the Trail Drivers, were trail bosses. 

Legendary cowgirl and horse dealer, Kittie Wilkins, is said to have brought 3000 wild mustangs from Idaho to Missouri.

This is where we get the expressions … you're driving me crazy and you've driven me to my wits end.