A Rainy Day

What I do on a rainy day, this being of no particular interest but me. When I was a young girl my rainy days consisted of cutting out recipes from my Nanis' torn-out-of-magazine collection. Then I would carefully glue both the picture and recipe on one page and put it in a notebook. This was the start of my all-consuming passion for cooking.

I would go through the Sears catalog and, having 4 brothers and 2 parents, with a counting system I can't remember, initial the product that each of us would get. Kind of like eeny-meeny-miney-mo. Out of the 7 products, whoever got the best, won. Anal you might say. This was the start of my passion for shopping on the internet.

I read the dictionary cover to cover. We had the kind that used the words in sentences so I also built a little bit of a vocabulary as well, not to mention learning to spell pretty well. This was the start of my passion for reading more interesting things, like fiction.

Flash forward to the present and in the same little house, I might add, I have new rainy day favorites. I now cross stitch for no one in particular, just the things that appeal to me. They might go in a drawer, or if someone likes what I've done, they can take it. I just finished a Christmas stocking for Cade, Dori's son; a ballerina for Claire, Derrick's daughter; and am doing an outside scene with a gold bird landing in a field of wild grass.

I still read fiction voraciously with my taste leaning toward action thrillers, same as my movie taste.

I plan trips on Microsoft Streets and Trips, both camping and bed & breakfasts. This I would say is my greatest passion and most probably comes from my childhood unrainy days. When we took trips to Minnesota, Washington and California with many states between, as we arrived at a gas station, we 5 kids would pile out of the car, into the office, and get a state map apiece (they were free). I proceeded to mark our course as we traveled along the highways (there were no interstates then) which is something I still do to this day. I have an atlas that I mark when I get home and there are road tracings in every state except Alaska of vacations I've been on.

I love rainy days! They are when all my passions crash together.