Monday Musings.

Recently, I've been musing about trust.  I am trying to decide whether I am naturally distrustful, or only incapable of delegating.  Are the two any different, really?  Since we are told by the Nobs that all of our fears, weaknesses and strengths, too, are learned from birth-on, I've also been trying to find a reason for it.  This has brought up some interesting memories.  Yes -- here we go, back to childhood!  Which, alarmingly, is causing me to have to travel further and further back!

While most of my friends went to various camps during the summer, I went to northern Ontario, Canada, for my two weeks of Childhood Heaven.  Except for one year.  I don't remember the circumstances, and I may have gone to camp AND Heaven in the same year, but I went to an overnight camp for one week the summer I was 12 .  It was a very big deal.  I packed carefully, making sure to include my precious collection of plastic molded horses.  This collection was my prized possession - especially the rearing Palomino.  Those were the beginnings of my Cowgirl Days.  If I had to describe myself as a child, I would say that I was melodramatic, overly sensitive, stubborn, shy, and romantic, in a very child-like way.  I was also bossy, and prone to tantrums.  Geez, what a mess - no wonder my mother warned me about children like me.  If that makes any sense.

Back to camp.  So, there I was in my cabin with my camp-mates, of whom I remember almost nothing.  I remember weaving the obligatory bracelet, the emotionally-charged atmosphere of a cabin full of 12 year-old girls, playing by myself with my horses outside the cabin, but I especially remember the counselors.  Our cabin's counselor was named Amy.  I adored her.  I worshipped her.  She would have been in her early twenties.  She was tall, blond, tanned, and part of some wacky group within the counselors that believed they would be contacted by aliens and beamed up to a better life on a certain night due to fall on the night before the last day of camp.  Can I pick them?  Whether this was true or just a large hoax played on a bunch of het-up little girls, I don't know.  All I can tell you is that most of my camp experience was wrought with anxiety that my favorite counselor would be beamed up by a bunch of bug-eyed, green-skinned aliens and whisked away forever.  On that specified night they did all disappear.  But they were back in the morning.  My read today?  They were whisked away over the lake to the boys' camp counselors for a night of non-alien romping.  But it jarred me completely.  My worry for her had been so real - so purple-prosey-sopped in anxiety.  And then there she was, the morning after B(eam) U(p) Day -- over it, moving ahead, on her way to better things than soppy little girls.  Ouch. 

I am starting to hyperventilate just thinking about it.  Darn counselor girl.  As Monty Python so aptly put it (and as I  probably paraphrase), "And now for something totally different".  Let's talk about the necessity of "CUTE ALERTS".  Or "Cute Ratings".  I have had the occasional start, when opening a post or an email, there, without warning, was something so cute it made my eyes pucker.  But this is so painfully cute that it almost hurts to look at.  It should be illegal.  Don't say you weren't warned:

Baby Mini Pig

I want 20 of them.  I would give this tiny, fuzzy, morsel of cuteness a 25 on the Cuteness Rating Scale of 1 to 10.  Wouldn't you?