Marilyn's Mussings

My family comes home for the Fourth of July. This year I put out a jigsaw puzzle of Lady Liberty. We love jigsaw puzzles. It is a great non-competitive, non-threatening place around which to congregate. No ones knows how long it has been since you found a piece to fit (except for the sudden exclamations of "I finally found one!") and conversation is easy. They helped me with Lady Liberty while they were here, but I was left to finish all the blue sky alone.  There are two issues here that you may notice, both of which slowed down the progress of finishing the puzzle. My sister gave me the puzzle and she has a dog who might very well have enjoyed the puzzle before me. There is a piece completely missing just under her arm and there is a  "chewed up" piece in the top right corner. Here's the problem with that. I looked everywhere for the missing piece and tried desperately to make other pieces fit in the empty place. Worse than that, I completely ignored the che...

It was our first Independence Day in Birmingham. The day had been busy and fun so we thought we would top it off with a low key observation of fireworks. We had heard that they did a great show from Vulcan Park called "Thunder on the Mountain." We left home about thirty minutes early thinking we would go to a building top, but noticed almost immediately that traffic was creeping along like rush hour going in the wrong direction. Miles before our destination, traffic was almost completely stopped and people were pulling over to the median and the side of the road. We managed to find a place to park just in time to hear the police come by with a loud speaker telling people they were not allowed to park in the street. This was a bigger deal than we knew. In the end, "Thunder on the Mountain" was great. We had gotten as close as we could and got to see the fireworks leap into the sky. Someone turned up the accompanying music on their car radio and it seemed all of us ...