Blue sweats and sunburns

Yup, you guessed it. That's me. And the boy standing next to me that has my same face, that's my older brother Carter.

I went home for Easter and found some old things of mine. My parents had what used to be my room recarpeted so there are piles of my old photo albums, scrapbooks, and school projects stacked on the furniture.

I was looking for a different picture when I came across this one. My friend Ilene posted something on her blog a couple weeks ago about the bad outfits she used to wear, and she had a picture of her in her overalls. Ilene, I couldn't find the one we talked about with my overalls and the apples. You might have to send it to me.

I've been trying to figure out how old I am here. I can't be older than 10 or 11. This picture made me laugh though because I know my Grandma took it. My family and my mom's parents went to Pacific Grove in California for a week and we stayed in a cottage just across the street from the ocean. And I guess we bought a crab and this was before Grandma cooked it for dinner. I can just hear her telling us to go stand in the kitchen so she could take our picture. "Laura...Doll, hold on to the crab."

Anyway, check out my aqua blue sweats! And look how cute those sheep and tulips and hearts are, huh? I bet my mom painted it.

As I was flipping through photos I also came across some old poetry books of mine, and since it's still National Poetry Month, I thought I would post a poem of my own. I wrote this when I was thirteen for Mrs. Christensen's English class. I bet I wrote it after my dad made me clean out the fridge. I remember having him help me with some of my adjectives, the word "putrid" in particular.

"Twelve Spoiled Surprises"

After vacation in my fridge I saw:

Twelve shriveled carrots,
Eleven moldy yams,
Ten smelly cold cuts,
Nine gushy apples,
Eight brown bananas,
Seven dried up biscuits
Six stinking salmon,
FIVE...ROTTEN...EGGS!
Four putrid peas
Three bad beans,
Two unpleasant plums,
And a dripping can of Diet Coke.

I loved writing poetry when I was little. I liked to rhyme. I wrote a lot of poems for extra credit. It's funny because back in February I mentioned how I'm not really a student of poetry, and I don't claim to be now, but it seems I've been talking about it a lot lately.

I hope you all had a good Easter weekend. I had a good time. I went sailing at the Great Salt Lake on Saturday. Well, there wasn't a whole lot of wind, so it was more like drifting. It was kind of a spontaneous activity, and had I known when I left the house I'd end up on a boat, out in the sun for a few hours, I would have brought sunblock. Fortunately, for my face, I wear SPF 30 every day. But my poor arms don't get that kind of pampering, so yesterday they looked like this. This picture isn't the best for color contrast, but I thought I should record my first sunburn of the year.