http://www.capturedbydestinyllc.com/

Captured By Destiny LLC, 33596, Valrico, FL (2026)

08/23/2026

💫 Sunday Morning Mug Shots

This mug was given to me because apparently my friends and family enjoy irony.

I am not a morning person. At all.

I worked my ass off in Dallas all last week, and now my body has officially filed a grievance.

I am not a ray of fu***ng sunshine today.

I would like my coffee, my cave, and approximately one week of uninterrupted troll behavior.

See you next Sunday. ☕️

08/16/2026

💫 Sunday Morning Mug Shots

Well.

I suppose it’s finally time I explained the name.

Because before there were coffee mugs, there was this.

My actual fu***ng mugshot.

I was 20.

My parents’ marriage had been quietly imploding during my high school years. By my senior year, my mother had moved into the guest room, my parents mostly stopped speaking to each other, and our house had become the kind of uncomfortable where nobody is technically screaming, but you’d almost prefer if they would.

I was 18 and wanted out as soon as humanly possible.

So three months before graduation, despite being a good student, I disenrolled myself from high school and went to adult ed. My mother was less than pleased.

They informed me I’d have to repeat my entire senior year.

Cool.

I finished it in ten working days.

Spite has always been an excellent motivator.

Then I moved to Tampa, got a job at a mortgage company, eventually got my own apartment and started taking classes at St. Petersburg Junior College.

One day, I wrote a check for about $98 at the college bookstore for two textbooks.

One for American Sign Language.

One for English.

My dad was supposed to put money into my account to cover it.

He didn’t.

He was a little preoccupied with the implosion of his marriage at the time, and depositing money into his daughter’s checking account apparently did not make the priority list.

So the check bounced.

I had absolutely no idea.

This was also the era before everything followed you electronically everywhere you went, and I was moving approximately every seventeen minutes and apparently unfamiliar with the concept of a forwarding address.

I moved from the address on the check.

Then I moved again.

One apartment lasted exactly two weeks because the maintenance guy was letting himself into my studio while I wasn’t home.

Then there was another apartment.

Then college housing.

Then summer arrived and I needed somewhere temporary to live.

Enter Jessica.

Jessica seemed fun and normal.

Jessica was neither of those things. Jessica was the definition of psycho bish.

Within days, my stuff started disappearing.

At first I assumed I was losing things because, frankly, that remains completely believable.

Then bigger things disappeared.

Eventually I noticed a ceiling tile in the loft was crooked.

I moved it.

There was my s**t.

My jewelry. My clothes. A piece of the Berlin Wall my dad had brought me home. A charm bracelet with charms from places he’d been deployed. My Brother word processor—which, children, was basically what we had before laptops and was a VERY BIG FU***NG DEAL.

So I got the f**k out.

Again.

I found another roommate, moved into another apartment and went about my life completely unaware that somewhere in the background, that stupid $98 check had apparently become A Situation.

Eventually someone came looking for me with a court summons.

Except they found Jessica.

And Jessica signed my name.

I knew none of this.

So naturally, I did not attend the court hearing I did not know existed.

The judge issued a bench warrant.

Still knew nothing.

Life continued.

I went back to USF. I taught dance. I worked for a medical supply company. I still worked part time at the mortgage company.

Basically, I was working multiple jobs, going to school and doing a spectacular job of being a fugitive from a $98 college bookstore check.

Then came one particular Friday.

I had just started working at a brand-new Applebee’s, and it was the restaurant’s official opening night.

I was driving my blue 1984 Volvo 240 DL—which was essentially a Swedish tank with headlights—to work when I stopped for gas.

While turning across an intersection, a woman came flying through and T-boned me.

Hard.

My car spun around about a rotation and a half. I smacked my head against the window.

Police came.

My boyfriend showed up.

With a fu***ng video camera.

Because apparently my personal tragedy needed archival footage.

The officer was incredibly nice. He checked on me, took my information and asked if I thought I needed to go to the hospital.

My head hurt, but I told him I thought I was okay.

He asked again.

I said I was sure.

Then he said:

“Okay. Well, I’m going to have to take you to jail now.”

Excuse me?

Apparently there was a warrant for my arrest.

I told him he had the wrong girl.

He did not.

He pulled out the handcuffs.

I promptly slid down onto the gravel beside a major highway during Friday rush hour and started SOBBING.

“Please don’t take me to jail. Please. Please. Please.”

The poor officer kept telling me he was sorry, but he didn’t have a choice.

Meanwhile, across the street, my boyfriend was filming the entire fu***ng thing.

And laughing.

Men are such a gift.

Off to jail I went.

I arrived at booking looking exactly like what I was: a terrified 20-year-old who had absolutely no fu***ng idea how she had gotten there.

There were drunk people.

High people.

People screaming.

People who looked significantly more experienced at being arrested than I was.

I stuck out like a sore thumb.

I called my friend Christy.

Yes.

Dick Mug Christy.

The automated system announced that she had a collect call from an inmate at a correctional institution.

I heard:

“What the F**K?”

Then it asked me to state my name.

Through hysterical crying, I somehow communicated that yes, it was actually me, yes, I was actually in jail, no, I did not know why, and PLEASE CALL MY MOTHER.

Thankfully, Christy speaks fluent Girl Crying.

Eventually I reached my mother.

She initially had roughly the same reaction any reasonable mother would have when her daughter calls from jail claiming she has absolutely no idea why she’s there:

Bulls**t.

Except I genuinely didn’t.

Then they told me there was no bond.

I had a mandatory 30-day stay.

Thirty.

Fu***ng.

Days.

They took my clothes and gave me an orange jumpsuit.

I somehow managed to keep my own bra and underwear, which at that point felt like my greatest legal victory.

There weren’t enough cells, so for a while several of us were put in a hallway on what were essentially kindergarten nap mats.

Dinner was a hot dog and some unidentified slop.

I couldn’t eat.

I had been crying and throwing up basically nonstop.

A very large woman looked at me and said:

“Give me your hot dog.”

Ma’am, you can have the hot dog.

You can have the slop.

You can have the fu***ng tray.

Whatever keeps us friends.

Eventually I got moved into general population.

And that’s when I discovered something horrifying.

You know those jail cells on Law & Order where the toilet is just…

right there?

I always assumed that was television.

It is not television.

I decided immediately that I would simply never use the bathroom again.

My kidneys would have to understand.

Thankfully, some women took pity on me.

“Come sit with us, baby. We’ll protect you.”

So I played cards with my new friends while everyone explained why they were there.

Some were s*x workers.

Some had drug charges.

One had stabbed her boyfriend.

Fair enough.

At one point I asked why one particular guard seemed to hate me so much.

One of the women pointed across the room.

“You see that girl?”

Yep.

Apparently a few months earlier, that inmate had grabbed the guard, hung her over the second-floor railing by her feet, and cut off her hair.

Oh.

Well.

That explained the general hostility toward the inmate population.

I immediately stopped taking it personally.

I also put my own waist-length hair into a bun.

Because apparently hair had already become a liability in this establishment, and I wasn’t taking any fu***ng chances.

Eventually someone finally explained why I was there.

The bounced bookstore check had gone to court.

A summons had been served.

Records showed that I had signed for it.

Then I saw the signature.

“That’s not my signature.”

I told them to get my driver’s license out of my property.

I signed my name in front of them.

The signatures weren’t even close.

They believed me.

Wonderful.

Could they release me?

Absolutely fu***ng not.

Only a judge could fix it.

I went before a judge by video and pleaded not guilty.

Still no bond.

Still looking at 30 days.

Meanwhile my mother had gone into full Mom Mode and contacted an old high school friend who had some political/legal connections.

Someone finally looked at the summons, looked at the signature on my license and apparently said the governmental equivalent of:

Well, s**t.

Bond was issued.

I still had to deal with the case later, but I was getting out.

Eventually.

Twenty-eight and a half hours after I entered that jail, they finally released me.

To get out, you had to pass through several locked doors.

One opened.

I stepped into a tiny space.

It closed behind me.

Then the next door wouldn’t open.

I could SEE MY MOTHER.

And immediately thought:

THIS IS A TRICK.

This is one of those movie situations where they make you think you’re free and then drag your ass back inside.

So naturally, I started sobbing again.

The door finally opened.

I collapsed into my mother’s arms.

And standing nearby was my boyfriend.

WITH THE FU***NG VIDEO CAMERA.

Again.

Nearly 30 years later, I can laugh about it.

At 20?

Not one goddamn thing about it was funny. Am I still traumatized?
Abso👏fu***ng👏lutely.

It was terrifying. Humiliating. Demoralizing.

And I left absolutely certain of one thing:

I never, ever, ever wanted to see the inside of a jail again.

Ironically, years later, my daughters’ all-star cheer gym ended up directly across the street from that same jail.

Which gave my children years of entertainment.

“Hey Mom, wanna go visit your friends?”

As****es.

And of course they’ve taken every opportunity over the years to circulate the photographic evidence.

Which brings us back to Sunday mornings.

For weeks now, I’ve been posting pictures of my coffee and calling them Sunday Morning Mug Shots.

There was always a reason for the name.

So yes.

Every Sunday, I post a mug shot.

But this?

This was the original.

And next week, we’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming of innocent—or not so innocent—coffee mugs.

☕️See you next Sunday.

08/14/2026

💫 Somewhere off the road, in an old bus swallowed by the trees.

No schedule.

No audience.

Nowhere else to be.

Just two people with entirely too much time alone together.

Some stories are better when nobody behaves.

08/09/2026

💫 Sunday Morning Mug Shots

This one has a dick in it.

But we’re going to have to go back almost 30 years before we get to that.

I met my best friend when I was in college.

She had just moved to Florida from Chicago and had been hired at the same dance studio where I worked.

I came into work one day and discovered that our entire back office had been reorganized.

Teacher boxes moved and relabeled.

Things bedazzled.

Decorations everywhere.

It was LOUD.

Basically, a craft show had exploded in the staff room.

I remember standing there thinking, What the actual f**k happened in here?

I asked my boss, who informed me she’d hired a new teacher. She had been Miss Illinois, had just moved down from Chicago, and apparently decided our staff room could use some organization.

Now, she wasn’t wrong.

Our boss was a wonderful woman, but she was a hot-ass mess and that office desperately needed help.

Still.

Beauty queen.

Rhinestones.

Bedazzled teacher boxes.

I had already made some big-ass judgments about this woman before I’d ever laid eyes on her.

About twenty minutes later, she walked through the door.

And goddammit.

She was absolutely gorgeous. She had the biggest smile, the best laugh, and one of those personalities that just lit up the entire room.

Every stupid assumption I’d made about her disappeared almost immediately.

And somehow, just like that, we became best friends.

For the next twenty years, we did life together.

College.

Marriages.

Surprise babies.

More babies.

PCS moves and deployments.

Miscarriages.

Marriage problems.

Mental health.

All the beautiful parts and all the absolute s**t parts of growing up together.

And somewhere near the beginning of all of that, before I had children, I went to visit her in Chicago.

It was fu***ng freezing because… Chicago.

She asked if I wanted hot chocolate.

Obviously.

She brought me this mug piled high with whipped cream and sat there with her husband while I drank it.

And the two of them started laughing.

Not normal laughing.

She was absolutely losing her s**t.

Tears streaming down her face. Makeup everywhere. Barely able to breathe.

Meanwhile, I’m drinking my hot chocolate wondering what the hell is wrong with these people.

As the whipped cream disappeared, I started noticing something in the middle of my cup.

At first I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at.

Then a little more appeared.

And a little more.

Until finally I looked down, looked at her, looked back into the cup and said:

“WHAT THE F**K IS THAT?”

That was it.

She was gone.

I genuinely thought the woman was going to give herself an asthma attack.

Because sitting in the middle of my hot chocolate was a ceramic dick.

And that is how this ridiculous thing became one of my favorite mugs.

Years later, our friendship fractured.

Badly.

We stopped speaking.

And for about fifteen years, we didn’t speak at all.

There are parts of that story that aren’t mine alone to tell, and parts I still don’t particularly like revisiting.

Losing a friendship that old didn’t feel like having a falling-out.

It felt like a death.

There was real grief attached to it.

Twenty years is a lot of life to share with someone and then suddenly have them become someone you used to know.

But I never got rid of this mug.

Not once.

Because however painful the ending was, it couldn’t erase everything that came before it.

Those twenty years were still real.

The laughter was real.

The babies were real.

The marriages and deployments and miscarriages and middle-of-the-night phone calls and absolute disasters were real.

Hell, the story that eventually inspired this entire Sunday Morning Mug Shots series involves her.

When I acquired my actual mug shot at the ripe age of 19, she was the person I called from jail.

Her phone rang and a recording announced that she had a collect call from an inmate at a correctional institution and instructed her to press one to accept.

I needed her to call my mother.

Nearly thirty years later, that fu***ng recording is still something we laugh about.

So no.

I wasn’t throwing away the dick mug.

Even during the fifteen years when looking at it sometimes reminded me of someone I had lost.

Because I hadn’t lost the memories.

And then recently, completely out of the blue, we found each other again.

There wasn’t some grand reconciliation.

No dramatic conversation where we unpacked fifteen years and magically put everything back where it belonged.

We just started talking.

Slowly.

Carefully.

I think we’re both a little tentative with it.

Because when you’ve grieved a friendship like a death, having that person suddenly standing on the other side of a conversation again is… strange.

There is history there.

There is hurt there.

There are fifteen years there.

You don’t just pretend none of that happened and go charging back in like nothing ever broke.

So we’re taking our time.

But here’s the part I wasn’t expecting:

The ease was still there.

Immediately.

The back and forth we’ve always had.

The same humor.

The same shorthand.

The same ability to say something completely inappropriate and know exactly how the other one is going to respond.

That comfortable rhythm we’d had for twenty years didn’t need to be relearned.

It was just… there.

And I don’t know how to explain that except to say that apparently there are some people your nervous system remembers before your brain has decided what the hell it’s doing yet.

A couple of weeks ago I sent her a picture of this mug.

She immediately said:

“Oh my God. I can’t believe you still have that cup.”

Of course I do.

It’s one of my favorites.

And then she said:

“You were always my favorite best friend.”

Well.

F**k. 😭

She’d sent me a selfie of herself and her daughter standing in front of my studio building.

Her daughter is a senior in high school now.

The last time I saw her, she was a baby at her baptism, and I was signing her Bible as her godmother.

Now she’s nearly grown, standing beside her mother in front of this enormous part of the life I built during all those years we weren’t in each other’s lives.

And I’m looking at the picture thinking:

How in the hell are you standing in front of my studio?!

Turns out her oldest son lives one block away.

They all live in Florida now.

Almost thirty years after a beauty queen from Chicago walked into a Florida dance studio and completely destroyed all the opinions I’d formed about her based on some goddamn bedazzled teacher boxes…

Here we are.

Her babies aren’t babies anymore.

Neither are mine.

Fifteen years happened without us.

We can’t get those years back, and pretending they didn’t happen wouldn’t make any sense.

But here’s the strange thing about finding each other again:

We didn’t have to figure out how to be friends.

We already knew.

Somewhere underneath all those years and all that hurt, that familiar rhythm had apparently been sitting there the entire time.

We just fell back into it.

Maybe that’s why I kept the mug.

Not because I knew we’d ever find our way back to each other.

I didn’t.

I kept it because losing someone doesn’t require you to erase the time when you loved them.

And maybe some relationships become so woven into who you are that even fifteen years of silence can’t completely undo the stitches.

Sometimes people come back.

Sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes the babies you remember are suddenly seniors in high school.

Sometimes your former best friend sends you a picture standing outside the building where you built an entire life she never got to see.

And sometimes, after fifteen years apart, you discover that “former” was never quite the right word.

💫See you next Sunday. ☕️

08/08/2026

💫Romance was never supposed to become polite.

Not after the vows.

Not after the years.

Not after knowing every version of one another.

There should still be moments that feel a little reckless.

A little dangerous.

Like falling for the same person was never something you quite finished doing. 🔥

08/06/2026

💫If you know, you know.

“Nipples in the wind. Courage in my heart.” has made me laugh since the first time Jen said it.

But that’s not the only reason I bought this sweatshirt.

She created this line to help women who want to leave unhealthy or abusive situations but don’t yet have the resources to do it. Every purchase helps support organizations that give women a way forward.

That’s a cause I can get behind.

So yes…the sweatshirt makes me laugh every time I read it.

But what it stands for matters even more.

Here’s to courage—in whatever form it has to take. 💛

08/05/2026

💫Three years is a long time to stay away from something you once loved.

Sometimes coming back isn’t loud.

It’s quiet.

It’s walking back into the light on your own terms.

Finding your own atmosphere.

Finding your own light.

And knowing it belongs to you.

08/02/2026

💫 Every Sunday, the mug changes.

The coffee doesn’t.

Same coffee.
Same creamer.
Same playlist in the car.
Friends on in the background while I edit.
Same morning ritual.

I’m wildly adventurous when it comes to almost everything else. I’ll book a trip, photograph strangers, crawl into abandoned buildings, or rearrange an entire room because the light moved six inches.

But my coffee?

Absolutely not.

Some people collect routines.

I collect mugs.

See you next Sunday. ☕️

08/01/2026

💫There are moments that only exist when no one is watching.

Somewhere between unpacking the camera and packing for the next city.

Between exhaustion and inspiration.

Somewhere between who everyone else expects me to be…

…and who I am when no one is asking anything from me.

So somewhere in an old Airstream, after midnight, I made photographs that didn’t need a reason.

No audience.

No performance.

They don’t sell anything.

They aren’t for an algorithm.

Sometimes the quiet tells the story better than I ever could. ✨

07/31/2026

Can’t wait!!! Get your ticket 👇https://peculiarcollective.us/conference

Captured By Destiny LLC

08/23/2026

08/16/2026

08/14/2026

08/09/2026

08/08/2026

08/06/2026

08/05/2026

08/02/2026

08/01/2026

07/31/2026

Address

Telephone

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Listing takedown request