Girls' Weekend

My bff Carol and I just had our super fun girls' weekend. She got here Thursday and left Sunday afternoon. We had SO much fun. After being "new" for almost three years in AR, it was so great to get to hang out with such a good friend that I've known for so long. (Notice how careful I was not to say OLD friend.) Carol and I met in the fall of 1989 (almost TWENTY years ago) during Welcome Week at ACU. I was 18 and she was 17. We were just kids! We were great friends that year, then roommates for two years, I found her a husband and we were each others' maids/matrons of honor. And we've managed to stay friends even though we haven't lived in the same town since 1993. (Maybe that's WHY we've managed to stay friends. ha ha)

Here we are as college sophomores in 1990.












Until last Thursday, Carol and I have only seen each other for a couple of hours in three years. In September 2005, my family evacuated to her house during Hurricane Rita. Despite the natural disaster that prompted our visit, we had a great time. (Even though both families got quite ill that week.)

Then we moved to AR, then Carol got pregnant with their third child and had some complications, then she had Katie, then the mother of her husband Patrick was diagnosed with cancer, and she passed away last November. I went to Texas for the funeral and Carol and I decided we should get together some time when something bad is NOT happening.

So she flew in Thursday and we ate out a lot, talked a lot, laughed a lot (Carol laughed so hard at Capriccio Grill that she had tears running down her face. And that was before we even got our drinks) and ate out some more. Saturday we shopped before going to stay at the Peabody. The next day we slept late, skipped church (oh yes, we did) and went to lunch at Cheeburger Cheeburger. Then back to the airport and back to real life.

We had so much fun that we didn't really care that it rained the whole time she was here. When I got home, Chad said, "You two should do that once a year." I said, "Once a year? She's coming back next weekend!"

Not really. But that would be cool.

Tales of the Crypt

Last night, our house church went to Mt. Holly Cemetery in Little Rock for "Tales of the Crypt." It's an annual production put on by students at Little Rock's Parkview Arts & Science Magnet High School. Mt. Holly Cemetery is the final resting place of a number of Arkansas notables, including 11 Arkansas governors and several Confederate Army generals. For "Tales of the Crypt," the audience walks in groups to different graves, where students act out a short dialogue about the historical figure they are portraying. Last night, we heard from the wife of James Dibrell, who started the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences; William B. Worthen, who started the bank that eventually became the Bank of America; and several others. The actors are all in period costumes and perform at the actual grave of the person they are portraying. That photo up there is of Mount Holly Cemetery in the daytime. Pretty creepy, huh? And we got to walk around it in the dark! It was a lot of fun and very educational. Julia wanted to see David O. Dodd, the young Confederate martyr who reportedly haunts a house not far from our church, but he was on a different part of the tour. We'll try to catch him next year.

In non-Halloween news, I've invented a new sandwich. I want to announce it to the world so I can get full credit. It's a grilled cheese with pepper jack cheese and banana peppers. SO YUM. And vegetarian, to boot! (For those of you keeping score at home, I've been meat-free for over two years now.) I'll never eat a boring old regular grilled cheese again.

Thugs at the airport and other Little Rock fun

Yesterday I learned two things about our fair city.

1) Gangster thugs at the Little Rock airport may not react too kindly if you politely ask them to watch their language in front of your kids.

2) The people who work at Subway in Wal-Mart on Baseline Rd. may not react too kindly if you politely ask them to put pepperoni on your child's sandwich. (Yes, I know the kids' menu says only turkey, ham, roast beef or tuna. But my 3-year-old doesn't like any of that stuff, which the employees at both Subways in our small community just outside Little Rock seem to understand just fine.)

The truth is that Little Rock is full of friendly people. I just happened to find the few that aren't.

On a happier note, I've found two new products I love.

I bought these Vlasic roasted sweet peppers for a recipe I made last week (a salmon/fettucine/spinach thing, which was really good) and had more than half a jar left over, so I tried them on one of my veggie sandwiches. YUM. I probably ate seven sandwiches this week, just to have an excuse to eat the peppers.


Attention, all pickle people! (You know who you are -- you're the ones who polish off a jar of Claussen whole dills the day your spouse brings them home from the store. And you take sips of pickle juice from the jar when no one is looking. I do it, too.) These Pringles are for you! I've been trying to find dill pickle Lays in Texas, then in Arkansas, for years after I saw them in Colorado on a ski trip. No luck, but Pringles finally came through for me.

They're here!

We've been having insane amounts of fun with Meagan, Julia's best Baytown friend, and Meagan's mom, Toni. Here are Meagan and Julia at the airport with the sign Julia made. We spent yesterday shopping and today we're doing the Clinton Library/downtown Little Rock/State Capitol thing before they fly back tomorrow. We've also been staying up past midnight playing Apples to Apples and Dance Dance Revolution. Both girls start school on Monday so this is a fun way for them to wrap up the holidays.

More Miley!

Because you just can't have too much of this stuff, here are more pics from the Hannah Montana show Dec. 1.

Julia painstakingly made this sign and then had to leave it outside Alltel because it was too big. The only downer of the day.


Some Jonas Brothers. (I still don't know which one is which.) Look at what great seats we had!


Another Jonas Brother.


Rock Star! Hannah opened the show with this song, which was cool because it's Julia's favorite.



Julia and Elizabeth pumpin' up the party.



"I'm gonna put on my old blue jeans..."





One of the bajillion mom/daughter pairs at the concert.


"I Miss You," a song Miley wrote for her grandpa who died. It made for a very sweet encore.


Back over the Arkansas River on the Little Rock streetcar after the show.

Ewwww...

I subscribe to Better Homes & Gardens. It's got great articles, photos and recipes. Plus I figure if I keep a copy of it and a couple of Williams-Sonoma catalogs on the coffee table, I will appear to have better taste than I actually do. Anyway, I never see anything in the magazine that scares me. That is until I opened up the latest issue and found this:



It's a gelatin salad containing celery, green onions, cucumbers and vinegar. Some people who reviewed the recipe online said not to judge it by the way it looks because it really is good. But I think I'll keep my veggies separate from my Jell-o, thank you.


Scary recipes aside, here are some things we have been doing this month. Here's Jenna performing at the children's program at the Bible study I go to every week...

... and here's Julia outside the Clinton Presidential Library last weekend.

We also visited Little Rock's River Market that day...

...and spent the afternoon hanging out downtown. Isn't downtown Little Rock cute?

I love seeing the father of my children carry around their girly stuff. Jenna is relatively new to venturing out in big-girl panties, so we have to carry a clean-up kit and complete change of clothes everywhere we go.

Then Tuesday we headed down to Houston for Thanksgiving. We gathered with my brother Brian at my parents' house and met my aunt and uncle from Beaumont for dinner on Thursday. On Saturday, we drove through Baytown on our way home and met Julia's best Baytown friends, Natalie and Meagan, for lunch.

The countdowns are on -- Hannah Montana this Saturday and Meagan and her mom coming to visit exactly one month after that!

Dilemma

Well, I started one book and got all into it and then I started another book and got all into IT. So I have to make the heart-wrenching decision to postpone one until I'm done with the other.

The first one is "Turn Away Thy Son" by Elizabeth Jacoway. Jacoway was a student in Little Rock during the 1957 desegregation crisis. Her uncle was the superintendent of schools, but Jacoway was sheltered from the turmoil of the crisis. It wasn't until graduate school that she realized the gravity of the situation she had ignored as a teen. About this discovery, she wrote:

"My intellectual awakening began with the realization that I had mindlessly participated in and benefited from a racist culture."

So she wrote this book -- the most exhaustive account of the Central High School crisis that has been written. I want to read it because the 50th anniversary of the crisis is this fall, and, since it happened so close to where I live, I want to understand more fully what happened. And more importantly, I want to get my mind a little more around the continual quest for freedom that exists and I think will always exist in this country of ours that has always, strangely, been called "free."

The other book is "Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith" by Anne Lamott. Lamott is pretty much the only Christian writer I like right now. Think of Joel Osteen and what he preaches. Then think of the exact OPPOSITE of that. That's Anne Lamott. She writes of faith from a very real perspective. She shows that faith can be found in the midst of the cesspool that is real life. She gripes. She complains. She curses. Quite a bit. But she always leads us back around to where God fits into the chaos. Here's a bit from her description of when she first found God -- when she first realized he is everywhere -- , while she, an alcoholic drug-user, attempted to hitchhike home from a former boyfriend's house:

"I remember standing there at dusk with my thumb out, euphoric and exhausted as if I'd been at the beach all day, then taken a long, hot shower to wash off all the sand."

Lamott can be quite profound, but also sarcastic and funny and irreverent and downright crude. I think this is why I identify with her so much. Here's her description of a town in California where she lived during her hippie days:

"Bolinas was a great place for ritual and celebrations -- it was nearly as exotic as India, if you thought about it, but without all those dying animals in the streets and people defecating in the holy waters, which doesn't really work for me at all."

Oh, and I have four deadlines looming. So I may not be reading anything at all.

A Life is More Than a Moment

"I still find it difficult to believe that this display of racial hatred was happening in front of my high school and my camera." -- photographer Will Counts from his book, "A Life is More Than a Moment."

The front page of the Style section in today's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has a feature about Will Counts, the photographer who caught this well-known image and many others during the Little Rock's desegregation crisis in the late 1950s.

These pictures remind me that although our country has always held freedom in the highest esteem, so many of us -- over the past 200 years or so -- have not understood what freedom is really supposed to be.

Hangin' with Mom

I still can't figure out, with this WONDERFUL new Blogger, how to put pictures where I want them in the post. So I'm just letting you know that the above pictures have to do with something later in this post; I just can't get them down there where they go.

This week my mom came to visit for a few days on her way back to Houston from a conference in Baltimore. Mom was a big help: She helped me grocery shop with Jenna, she helped me pick out a window treatment for the living room and helped me catch up on laundry. (I had several big deadlines the week before we moved, and then I was very sick the weekend before we moved, so Chad and I ended up moving big trash bags of dirty clothes to the new house.) She also went with me to CBS (Community Bible Study) Wednesday morning, and to Refuge (our weekly teen event at our church) that night. Before she flew out yesterday, we hung out at Midtowne Little Rock (love the Williams Sonoma there. Not that I've ever BOUGHT anything, but still) and had lunch at Pei Wei. The restaurant was pretty crowded so we got it to go and walked down to the tables outside Starbucks and ate really good food outside on a nice Little Rock day. Then I took Mom to the airport and my dad greeted her in Houston wearing a suit (just for her, since he was off work yesterday) and holding a dozen roses. How's that for almost 44 years of marriage?