Day 19: Name

There are a couple places my mom said she got my name from. First, I have a great aunt named Ellen and, as far as I've been told, she was a firecracker. She wrote poetry occasionally and I have one of her pieces in my special box full of nice letters and memories from my life.

The other reason I was named Ellen was just because my mom liked it. Which is a very understandable reason because I plan on naming my kids based mostly on how much I like the name and then partly because someone else awesome has the name or not because whatever, you know? A name is a name and we should learn how to define it for ourselves and not let someone else define it for us.

My blog name, Bottled Pop and Picnics, comes mostly from when Sean and I were dating. One of the things we liked to do most was to go to various grocery or novelty stores and buy a couple bottles of soda to try and then we'd keep the caps and Sean would make magnets with them. We'd also go on picnics a few times. When we were engaged, we gathered all the kinds of soda and used the bottles as centerpieces of our tables:

Also, our 2nd Valentine's together was mostly watching a movie and having a floor-picnic with sushi and glass bottled soda. Hooray!

Okay, I've got to go clean the house before Sean gets home.
love, Ellen

on beverages

People think it's weird when I call drinks beverages sometimes. It's just a thing I've always done.

Anyway, Sean and I are drinkers. Not the alcohol or coffee type, but anything else, you might just find in our house. We have a mini fridge mere inches away from our couch stocked full of cans of root beer, American Classic cola, Mountain Dew (or off-brand type), Dr. K (off-brand Dr. Pepper), glass bottles of Crush Grape, and then a couple 12 packs that didn't fit in the fridge.

Tonight at Walmart, we went to get gatorade, a thermometer and possibly more meds and brake fluid (turns out we already have those last two things) and came home with an 8 pack of gatorade, a gallon of milk, orange juice, 3 propels, 4 cans of chicken noodle soup, a can of chicken broth,  a box of salted caramel hot chocolate mix (that I can't wait to try!), cereal, a lemon, honey, and a thermometer. Not a single one of those things does not have to do with a drink (except the thermometer, unless you count saliva). I guess we're just overly thirsty.

How about we throw some literary spin on all of this and call it a metaphor. We're always thirsty. Thirsty for creative flow. We always want to pour creative juices onto canvases and pages via paint and words and other vehicles and we just need liquids to quench the thirst from constantly pouring. or not. it could be that we are just occasionally dehydrated and need to quench our actual thirst.

to sum all this up, here's a picture of some of our art:

love, ellen