For the past several days I have felt like crap. I have ached. My throat has felt as though it was lined with the hair of a Greek man’s back. My head has felt heavy, and my hearing was minimal. I am finally starting to feel like me again.

I watch quite a bit of news, and this past week I watched even more. My favorite stories of the week? Here you go:

In Texas you can now be arrested for public drunkeness…inside a bar.Helen Thomas and George Bush…her question, his expression when he responded.

I feel so much better today, but I’m still watching the news. I’ve been switching back and forth between MSNBC, Fox, and CNN for the past two hours, and I’m sure it will continue throughout the night. I’ve got the wife killing the preacher husband story that’s got me roped in now.

Finally, my blog is up and running. I feel like I’ve just gotten over some dreaded illness that’s been plaguing me for days.

A bug has been hanging out our house. Ethan ran a fever for three days, with no other symptoms. Now I’ve got it. Fever. Just a fever. I left work early today. That’s not an option tomorrow.

We leave for our Vegas trip in a little over a week. I feel lucky. We’ve got a good little gambling budget in our pockets. I know how to walk away. My husband does not.

April Fools’ Day is quickly approaching. My older kids need to get ready.

My son had a great trip to NYC. He had chance meetings with Matthew Broderick and Cynthia Nixon.

Cold Stone’s For Coffee Lovers is the best.

Virginia Beach, once known as the World’s Largest Resort City, turns 100 today.

In the early 1900s, well-to-do tourists in wool and mohair bathing suits frolicked by the ocean at the elegant Princess Anne Hotel, the four-star attraction of its day. The four-story hotel, advertising fine dining, a grand ballroom, bowling and golf, stretched from 14th to 16th streets . It’s gone now.

Stately brown-shingled cottages, the summer homes of some of Virginia’s most prominent families, stood to the north and south of the hotel among rolling sand dunes at the edge of a pine forest. Most are gone now.

The Boardwalk, barely six blocks long, was made of boards, not concrete. It’s gone, but it’s been replaced by 42 blocks of concrete boardwalk and a paved bike trail.

Atlantic Avenue was a dirt road, Virginia Beach Bloulevard and Shore Drive didn’t exist. Day-trippers and out-of-town vacationers arrived from Norfolk by electric rail cars on a track that ran along present-day Pacific Avenue.

That’s about all there was to Virginia Beach when, on the evening of March 15, 1906, the first mayor and council of the newly incorporated resort town gathered inside the Princess Anne Hotel for their swearing-in ceremony.

And then it all changed, and it changed quickly.

On Wednesday, those with an interest will gather to celebrate the 100th anniversary of that day at the 31st Street Hilton – one of the Oceanfront’s modern stars.

It’s hard to catch more than a glimpse of the early beach these days. Between all the souvenier shops, t-shirt stores, high-rise hotels and copycat vinyl sided homes, you have to look pretty close to see the charm of those early days.

Places like the Virginia Beach Dome and the Peppermint Beach Club, once famous for attracing world-class mu

Eighty-eight years of memories were demolished when the Peppermint was razed to make way for a parking lot.

Long a watering hole for the fun-loving old and young, the Peppermint once offered premier national musical entertainment such as Fats Domino, Roy Orbison and Joey D and the Starlighters. In more recent years some of the best Punk and New Wave bands played this venue. It’s been recreated in a hotel this year, but memories made in the new Peppermint will never match those created in the early years of the original Peppermint.

The Dome, like the Peppermint, became renowned for the entertainers that passed through its doors in its early years.

Names like Louie Armstrong, Blood Sweat and Tears, Hendrix, the Stones, the Beach Boys, Ray Charles and Johnny Mathis lit up the Dome marquee in those days.

The Dome too bit the dust to make way for an expansion of an existing parking lot.

From the Virginian-Pilot:

Historians and longtime residents say only two buildings of that era have escaped developers’ bulldozers as the resort strip has grown into a $700 million industry attracting 3 million visitors a year.The buildings are anachronisms amid the resort’s glass and concrete landscape. One of the survivors, known as the deWitt Cottage, was built in 1895 by B.P. Holland, a businessman who later became the town’s first mayor. The two-story brick building, topped with a distinctive cupola, sits on the Oceanfront between two hotels that tower over it at 12th Street. It now houses the Atlantic Wildfowl Heritage Museum.

I hope she’s happy with her face-lift. I’ve lived here since the start of the 60s, and I have seen many of the changes. Some are good, and some have sucked out every ounce of her character. Once a fun-loving city, now just a way for the city to collect more and more taxes. I guess they call it progress.

Happy Birthday Virginia Beach.

The famous F-14 Tomcats ended their final mission last Friday flying into Oceana Naval Air Station.
I have a good friend working on a construction project on the base, and he must have called and e-mailed me twenty times reminding me to watch the flight in that day. He sent me the photo above, and I decided the story of the F-14s was worth sharing. I was able to catch them flying in on my way to lunch, and it was pretty amazing.

From the Virginian-Pilot:

They ended their final mission with wings swept back, 22 abreast, at 300 mph in about as perfect a formation as anyone had seen the Tomcats make in their 36 years of flying.
Screaming above a crowd of 1,000 people who turned out to cheer and cry, the returning F-14s ended an era Friday.
“If you could look behind the sunglasses of these pilots out here watching this, you’d see a lot of wet eyes,” Cmdr. Mark Black said.
“I know that’s why I wore sunglasses today.”
Black is a former F-14 pilot, with 3,500 flight hours, and now skipper of the “Red Rippers” of Strike Fighter Squadron 11, an F/A-18 Super Hornet Squadron at Oceana Naval Air Station here.
He and scores of other Tomcat aviators and supporters, including 78 foreign photojournalists, were drawn to Friday’s flyover, which signaled the return of Carrier Air Wing Eight from a six-month deployment aboard the carrier Theodore Roosevelt. It returns today to Norfolk Naval Station.
The spectators will never again see such a formation of F-14s.
It is likely, as well, that the 44 aviators in the Tomcats never saw the admiring crowd below them, Black said.
“You are working ,” he said. “You are not looking outside seeing the crowd.”
The 22 planes that returned are all that remain of 712 F-14s built by Northrop Grumman. Eleven each made up Fighter Squadrons 31 and 213.
Those in VF- 213 will be retired next month while squadron members transition to the F/A-18 Super Hornets.
The aircraft in VF-31 will fly through the summer, retiring in mid-
September when that squadron also will convert to Super Hornets.
The crowd included old warriors such as retired Cmdr. Bruce “Dog” Doyle, who flew one of the first F-14s in 1973 out of Miramar, Calif.
His was the ninth plane built.
“The first plane was delivered in the fall of 1972 and John Warner, who was then Navy secretary, flew in the back seat from Point Mugu to Miramar,” Doyle said of the current U.S. senator.
“When he got out, I think he was green.”
Doyle was one of the few to earn “green ink” in his F-14 log book over Vietnam aboard the carrier Enterprise in 1974. Green ink is used to signify combat.
“That was our first cruise, and we lost three planes in VF-1,” he said.
The planes sustained mechanical failures. No one was killed.
The Tomcats took some anti-aircraft fire, but none was hit, he said. It was the waning days of the war, and they patrolled overhead as Saigon was being evacuated.
Retired F-14 pilot Roy “Flash” Gordon, commanding officer of Fighter Squadron 31 from 1991-92, has an extended view of the F-14 through the eyes of his son, Roy “Rip” Gordon, 25, an F-14 aviator who is a member of the same squadron.
“I spent six years in that squadron and have a soft spot in my heart for that plane,” the elder Gordon said.
“I flew (F-4) Phantoms , too , and saw those go away,” he added. “It’s all for the better, but the Tomcat is still very, very valuable with all the upgrades. We could take it into combat tomorrow.”
His son, who will transition to the Super Hornet, was able to get 500 flight hours, 100 arrested cable landings and 75 combat hours in the Tomcat.
Griff Williams was an 18-year-old aviation electrician when he first worked on an F-14 at Oceana in 1975. “The plane was brand new and we were the new kids on the block,” he said. “Then the ‘Top Gun ‘ movie came and everybody came out of the woodwork wanting to fly it. Boy, were they jealous of us.”
Actor Tom Cruise starred in the 1986 movie that featured the aircraft. It was so successful that it noticeably raised Navy recruiting rates.
Williams spent nearly 30 years with the plane, retiring in 2004 as a maintenance master chief.
Now a civilian contractor working on the V-22 tilt rotor plane in California City, Calif., he came back for the fly-in.
“Today is bittersweet, but I feel like I am a part of that still. I am part of that,” he said.
While the Tomcats’ arrival overshadowed the return of Strike Fighter Squadrons 15 and 87, both F/A-18 units which arrived back at Oceana as well, even those families seemed willing to share the limelight.
Aging airframes, high maintenance costs and 30-year-old technology in the Tomcats caused the Navy to replace it with the family of Hornets, which use digital computers, cost less to maintain and can be used in a variety of roles, including fighters, attack mode, electronic jammers and tankers.

Ethan’s turn.

School pictures came in, and yes, you did see the same bunny here. I thought we had the same bunny last year, but I guess you can’t expect one bunny to last more than a season. Can you imagine what his life must be like?

I didn’t buy the pictures from the fall session, and I won’t buy them this session. There’s no need to when I’ve got a great scanner and photo printer at work.

I’m not sure what they were telling Ethan when they took this one, but it looks like they gave him a little something to smoke before picture time. He looks high as a kite here:

My oldest son leaves for Spring Break on Monday. No, he’s not doing the typical trip to Florida or Mexico. He won’t be drinking himself into a stupor, vomiting off a balcony, waking up with a silly outfit on, and later seeing a picture of that night here. Instead he will be going with his girlfriend and a few other friends, and staying here in New York City.

I always knew he wasn’t the typical kid. Looking back at his childhood I smile realizing just how different he really was. And now I realize just how lucky I am to be his mother. He’s the perfect son.

He’s a mass communications major now. He’s Program Manager of the school radio station, writes a music review column for the newspaper, a reporter for the television station, and has started taking film classes.

You can check out one of his news stories here. Look to the right, and click “To watch the most recent episode of VCU InSight, click here.” Once the film starts move ahead 23 minutes into the episode and you’ll catch him.

Now do you get the hint?

I’ve never been a fan of clowns. I rarely find their antics amusing, and I’ve always wondered what would drive an adult to choose clowning as a profession. In fact, they sort of creep me out.

I have always found it difficult to keep my likes and dislikes private. I don’t hesistate to try and persuade friends and family members to come to my side. That being said, it’s been difficult for me to keep my distaste for clowns away from Ethan. I knew that the day would come when Adam would want to take Ethan to a circus, or that he would be invited to a party and a clown would show up. Knowing this, I zipped it. That’s a hard one for me, but I did it.

On Saturday we attended such a party, and I was so happy that Ethan was excited about the clown. More than excited. He was first in line to get his face painted, while many of the other kids stood back and just watched. I had accomplished what I had set out to do, and that was to make sure that Ethan enjoyed something that could be fun, even if I saw it differently. And to be a really good sport, I even got my face painted.

Snips and snails, and puppy dog tails.

Eyes courtesy of my daughter, Cristin.

March is Eye Donor Month. Your vision may be less than perfect, but you can still help fight against blindness. All you have to do is sign the back of your driver’s license or join the online donor registry and, most importantly, tell your family about your decision.Even though you wear glasses, your corneas can be recovered after death to help restore sight to people in need. Thousands of people receive a sight-restoring corneal transplant every year, including almost 3,000 residents of Illinois and Michigan. But before anyone can benefit from this procedure there must be a donor — someone who can see beyond the end of his or her own life to make these precious gifts available for those who live on.