Liebster Award for TellingFamilyTales – Part 1

Posted on January 2, 2013 by tellingfamilytales

Liebster-Blog-Award (Photo credit: dont ✗ kaysiao)

Last month Mom (also know as Kassie) of Maybe someone should write that down. . . nominated this blog for a Liebster Award. Not unsurprisingly I didn’t have a clue what a Liebster was so I had to look it up. Liebster is a German word meaning dearest. I’m thinking it should be renamed to the Yakira award because Yakira is a Hebrew name that also means dear or precious. Anyway I’m getting sidetrack. The basic idea behind the Liebster is to promote small but hopefully up and coming blogs. To accept this award there are four requirements.

post 11 things about myself
answer the questions the nominator made up and create 11 questions for the blogs that I will nominate for a Liebster
link the 11 blogs I choose to nominate
go and tell the nominees that they have been nominated

I’m going to tackle this task list in four parts so stay tuned for me to fulfill all the requirements. I’d like to procrastinate posting 11 things about myself but it doesn’t make much sense to my semi-orderly mind to go out of the order above, so here goes.

I was born in Hawaii (yes, I’m a Navy brat)
I’m the youngest in my family (I have two older sisters)
I’m much taller than average (over 6 feet)
I love all flavors of ice cream (except maple nut – it’s a childhood thing)
growing up my dad told us that we were tall because we ate spaghetti
I played the flute in Jr. High
I won the gold medal in high jump at the state track meet when I was in high school
my basketball team went undefeated my senior year of high school
Starbursts and Skittles are my favorite candies
I once did a multimedia (slide show) project in college that was just photos of hundreds of Skittles
I used to own a custom picture framing shop with my sister

I’m so glad I survived that step. It wasn’t nearly as painful as I imagined. Check back tomorrow for the next task, answering Mom’s 11 questions.

50 for 50 #39 – USNS Gaffey

Posted on October 5, 2012 by tellingfamilytales

USNS Gaffey

This week to celebrate my 50th year I decided to do some research on the ship we sailed on when I was almost three years old. My dad was in the navy so we took the U. Sl Naval Ship General Hugh J Gaffey from Hawaii to the main land. All our household goods were packed up, including our car. I was young enough that I’m not sure I remember anything but I have an image of a slide that I think was on the ship. But one of my sister’s remembers my mom buying us a sack of play dough that we played with on the ship instead of taking a nap. It took five days for us to reach Oakland, California. My other sister remembers a little lizard that hitched a ride in our car and we found it when we picked up our car in California.

I don’t have much information on the Gaffey but I know that there is lots of information on the internet about ships from researching for the Europe 1952 book. Typing “USNS Gaffey” brought up over 13,000 hits. It seems that this ship was originally named for Admiral W. L. Capps and then was renamed for General Hugh J. Gaffey.

A collection of photos taken on or of the Gaffey.

A bit of the history of this ship.

Here is a blog post on NASA’s sight about another military family sailing to Japan on the Gaffey.

This trip has been my only ocean voyage to date. Though I’m looking forward to a cruise to Alaska next year. I have an extravagant dream of sailing around the world in a leisurely fashion and spending time at lots of ports along the way. Has anyone else taken a ship like the Gaffey?

50 for 50: #1 – Pineapple

Posted on January 7, 2012 by tellingfamilytales

This year I turn 50 years old and so I’m going to celebrate the whole year by doing 50 things. Each thing will symbolize something in my past or else something to celebrate the future. So today I did my first 50 for 50. I ate fresh pineapple in memory of my birth in Hawaii. I took photos of the pineapple and the dishes that I’ve fixed with it so far. And I’ll post those here later. I’m really excited about this 50 for 50 thing and I have a list of over 60 ideas to do in the coming year. I plan on doing one each week. That gives me a couple of weeks of leeway if I miss a week here or there.