Y'all, I think this is real cool, the photo and what I've got to tell you about it. Then, there's a bunch of tag stuff.

The day I took the second photo in yesterday's post, as I lowered my camera I noticed a small white sign in the window on the red wall. I stepped closer to read it.

Now it's your turn. I hope you get the same great big grin and warm feeling that I got. Creativity does that for me.

Since I cannot read Braille, I hope the graffiti is suitable for an almost-60-year-old woman's CDPB.

First, I'm thrilled to say that I've now been tagged eight times. Eight is the number of my favorite NASCAR driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr.! Next year he'll be 88, twice a nice. Go, Junior!

Now for the cold hard truth.

I cannot figure out how to make a link appear in my posts, even with the gracious help of Marie and JB. After trying off and all all week and a steady hour and a half of trying just now, I'm going to stop.

Instead, I'm going to tell y'all who has tagged me. I hope that you'll find the link to their CDPBs in my Favorite Blogs stack on the right side of the screen. They've got great photos waiting for you--that's the earnest warm truth.

So, in tag order, here they are:

Montpellier Daily Photon (France)
PaB Daily Photo (France)
Nashville Daily Photo (Tennessee)
Mainz Daily Photo (Germany)
Fort Lauderdale Daily Photo (Florida)
Miami Every Day Photo (Florida)
Mt. Hood to Portland OR Daily Photoblog
Forks and the West End, Olympic Peninsula, Washington US

I'll go ahead and put the rules here in case someone out there wants to tag someone else. I won't be tagging anyone, though, but I will encourage you to not only look at the blogs of the eight who tagged me but also to take a look at any blog that strikes your fancy in my stack. Or go to the City Daily Photo Blog and browse to your heart's delight.

These are the rules.

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. List eight (8) random facts about yourself.
3. Tag eight people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving them a comment on their blogs

Since I got tagged so many times, I'm going to take the liberty of posting a plethora of random facts, arranged in several categories:

Sports

1. I went to my first NASCAR race at Talladega Superspeedway in April, 2006, where I took probably a thousand photos.
2. With one of those photos from my trip to Talladega I won the Kodak Easy Share Best Race Moment Ever photo contest and a trip to Homestead-Miami Speedway in November, 2006. It was to the last races of the season in all three divisions of NASCAR--Craftsman truck, Busch car and Nextel Cup car. I blogged from Miami at Mama and Me from PDX in November, 2006. You can read all about my reaction to winning and see the winning photo on my Sept. 5, 2006, post on that blog.
3. For the five years before September, 2001, I attended every football game, home and away, of the high school where I worked as an English teacher and/or librarian. After September 11, 2001, I just couldn't get myself to the field that Friday night, and I've regretted it ever since.
4. At that same high school, I kept score for the girls' and boys' basketball teams, at the officials' table at home games, and on the bench at away games, for over five years.
5. As a result of #3 and #4, I've ridden many a school bus full of mostly wonderful teen-agers.
6. I went in the family car to see my sons play soccer games for at least 15 years, extremely proud to be there for them.
7. When my older son Lamont was two and a half, we lived in Kansas City, Kansas. With my husband's blessing, I got two tickets right behind home plate for that little boy and me to a Kansas City Royals' game. We rode the Royals Express (I think they called the bus that, or at least something like that) from the Country Club Plaza out to Royals Stadium, along with all sorts of other baseball fans. From our seats, Lamont got to shake hands with his favorite Royal, George Brett. (Every time the Royals were on TV, he'd yell, "Hit it, George!") That night the attendance at home games reached some sort of huge number, a milestone worthy of one of the longest fireworks shows I've ever witnessed. Excited, Lamont called them firecracks. On the ride back to meet my husband, a quartet of nuns on the bus fell for my beautiful little son and his delight in the Royals and George Brett.


Travel

1. I'm lucky to be able to say that I've been to London, Windsor, Paris, Versailles, Lucerne, Zurich, Munich, Frankfurt, Venice, Florence, Pisa, Rome and Pompeii as a teacher with students and/or adults in my charge. I'm still in awe of that fact.
2. In all of that traveling between 1994 and 2001, I am proud to say that I'm the only one who got hurt. I got six stitches beneath my right eye at the hospital within walking distance of Notre Dame Cathedral, in Paris after tripping on a street barricade and landing on my face on the Rue de Rivoli, after a visit to the Louvre in June, 2001.
3. From the age of three until around the age of 10, my family and I lived in 26 states, moving every three months or less due to my Daddy's job, building cooling towers for industries that used water in their manufacturing. I have memories that I cannot quite connect with a place or how old I was, but that really doesn't bother me. Seeing the USA this way with my family made me the person I am today. During those years, we lived in three different trailers and today I have framed in two-sided glass the brochures for the second one, a Spartan, and the third one, a Pacemaker. Talk about memories! Just looking at those brochures and talking with Mama and/or my brother is a blast. (There's no brochure for the Goshen Cruiser, the trailer we left Jackson, Mississippi, with. Mama says it was really something! Before I was born, she and Daddy had built the first trailer we lived in from scratch. Daddy worked for a Chevrolet dealer then and knew all about building things; Mama says she painted and sanded and nailed and made the curtains for the windows. This trailer stayed in Mississippi when we started our trek across America.)
4. In June, 2006, my younger son Leland climbed behind the wheel of a jam-packed UHaul truck towing our 1996 Buick LeSabre and proceeded to drive me, our miniature dachshund Duncan and all of the worldly belongings of Mama and me the 2500+ miles from Jackson, Mississippi, to Portland, Oregon. The sweet guy drove every single mile all by himself, through hot, humid Mississippi and Louisiana, across hot and dry Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, north up Colorado beside the Rockies, west across windy Wyoming, into a bit of Utah, slanting northwest across Idaho, and then into Oregon, across the state on Interstate 84 which actually ends in Portland. We left Jackson at 7 p.m. Central Daylight Time on Friday night, June 9, and arrived at our destination--his and his brother's apartment in Southeast Portland--on June 13 at 9:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Can you say determination? It's spelled L-E-L-A-N-D.
5. With the help of Dramamine which took away the queasiness of motion sickness, I've thrice been up Pike's Peak in Colorado, Mt. Pilatus in Lucerne, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I've been to the top of the Arch in St. Louis, on a cruise of the Inside Passage from Vancouver, BC, to Skagway, Alaska. On the rest of that trip, I rode in a narrow gauge railcar, a tour bus, a huge sort-of-yacht on the Yukon, and a regular railroad car from Fairbanks to Anchorage.
6. With the help of my motion sickness bracelets, I've flown seated backwards in business class of British Airways from Chicago to London.


Writing and Reading

1. For about three years, I interviewed people, wrote stories, took photos, copy edited and made corrections for the Jackson Free Press, an alternative newsweekly in Jackson, Mississippi. You can still read all sorts of articles that I wrote on any number of subjects at www.jacksonfreepress.com. I had a blast!
2. Reading is just about the best thing in the world, as far as I'm concerned. I always told my students you can go anywhere, be anything, do anything, and be home to sleep in your very own bed--no matter what happens in the book you're reading.
3. I'm proud to be a Mississippian, home state to so many fine writers. When I Googled "Mississippi writers" just now, in .15 seconds, I got 21,300 hits. That ought to tell you something right there.
4. The best independent bookstore in the USA is Lemuria Books in Jackson, Mississippi. Second best is Powells right here in Portland, Oregon. Since I'm a Southerner and Lemuria brings one great Southern writer after another to read and sign their books at their annex, I think I'm wholely justified it selecting it as the best in the USA.
5. Besides Southern writers, my other favorites are mystery/thriller writers.

Random Fun and/or Facts

1. The two songs that I've performed most at karaoke are "Eight Days a Week" by the Beatles and "Hot in Herre" by Nelly.
2. In 2004 and 2005, I marched in Mal's St. Paddy's Day Parade in jackson, Mississippi, as a Sweet Potato Queen Wannabe Wannabe, wearing a long red wig, a kelly green sequined swimsuit sort of thing, a pink satin cape, a rhinestone tiara and some black cat's eye sunglasses with rhinestones in the outer corners. You can see me in all my glory in a post at my other blog Mama and Me from PDX, in March, 2007. Thank you Jill Conner Browne, Boss Queen herownself, and Donna Ladd, SPQ Wannabe and editor of the Jackson Free Press.
3. I like to make what I call miniature art cars, using small toys and toy vehicles all glued together and brightly embellished.
4. When my sons were little boys, to nurture their creativity every year for Christmas I gave them a roll of Duct tape, a ball of twine, a flashlight and new batteries for it.
5. I absolutely love to do the Electric Slide, any where, any time, as long as the beat's right!
6. I get carried away when I'm enthusiastic about something.
7. I might be crazy--Mama says I'm a mess which means lovable and weird, but my motto is "It's better than dull and boring."

Bye. Hope your eyes quit hurting real soon.