Well, clearly I need to take a tip from Paul Harvey and tell y’all the rest of the story from yesterday’s post about Lee.

We invited her to our wedding but she was in very poor health and told me she just wasn’t going to be able to make it. Right after we got married, P’s mom moved into my old apartment at Village Oaks because she had recently sold P’s childhood home and hadn’t found a new house yet. She’d been living with P in our townhome in the days leading up to the wedding and so we just switched places. Little did she know she’d be living in Village Oaks for the next year.

She also didn’t know that a new neighbor had moved in below me who liked to have very loud fights with his girlfriend, which led to my mother-in-law having to resist the daily temptation to catch this young girl in the courtyard, shake her by the shoulders and say, “MOVE ON, SISTER. HE’S BAD NEWS.”

Anyway, Lee adopted my mother-in-law as her new best friend and they talked daily until Lee’s health became too bad for her to live alone and she moved out of town to be closer to her daughter and ultimately passed away.

And that’s the rest of the story.

With a few more details than you probably really care about thrown in for no extra charge.

In other news, look what I bought at the store yesterday.

It’s like I don’t even recognize myself in the mirror.

What happened to that sweet girl who craved nothing more than Fritos and bean dip not even two weeks ago?

I’ll tell you what happened. She realized she is a mere eleven months away from her 40th birthday and maybe it’s time to think about health and fitness.

At least for the next few weeks.

Apparently you can put tofu in a smoothie and it tastes good and adds in protein to get you through the day. I’ll let you know tomorrow if any of that is actually true.

I have fifty dollars that says it’s not going to be as tasty as bacon and eggs with a side of blueberry pancakes.

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Post 4 for the Kellogg’s $100 gift card giveaway is posted over on my giveaway page. Click on over for the chance to win $100.

Back when P and I were dating, I lived in a delightful little apartment complex for the bargain price of $395 a month all bills paid. I was essentially paying a dollar per square foot. It was a tiny apartment, but for a single girl, barely living above the poverty line, it was a little piece of heaven. I could set the thermostat to sixty-five degrees and leave it there all day. I wrapped myself in a down comforter all year long, drank hot chocolate, and pretended it was winter while I watched with the rest of the world to see if Ross and Rachel were ever going to get together.

I quickly noticed within a few days of moving into my little apartment that I was the only resident under the age of eighty-two. I’d inadvertently stumbled onto some sort of semi-assisted living arrangement reminiscent of Melrose Place for the elderly. All the apartments were situated around a common courtyard area with a pool and a landlord constantly tending to the plants while wearing a surgical mask and toting around her oxygen tank. From time to time she’d pull the mask away from her face long enough to take a hit of her cigarette or yell at one of the residents for parking their Cadillac too close to her hedge of red-tip photinias.

Needless to say, I stood out in this land of Geritol and they were fascinated with me. There were nights I would go out and arrive home long after the ungodly hour of 10:30. P would walk me to my door, past all the clotheslines hung with large girdles, and we would see thirty-two sets of mini-blinds throughout the courtyard pop open as they watched the only entertainment they considered better than Walker, Texas Ranger.

Lee Vernon was the neighbor I knew the best. Mainly because I had to walk past her apartment every time I went to my car and she spent most the day sitting in a lawn chair right outside the door with her oxygen tank and her Chihuahua named Penny. Within two days of my move into the complex, she knew everything about me, and, most importantly, everything about P. I suspect she had some sort of CIA connections based on the amount of information she was able to gather about us in such a short amount of time.

I soon learned she was the eyes and ears of Village Oaks. She knew everything about everyone and would tell you whether you wanted to know or not. It became part of my after work ritual to stop by Lee’s apartment and catch up on the latest gossip, which usually included juicy information about whose Social Security check had yet to arrive in the mail or who the Bradford widow was trying to seduce. I determined the main reason she always sat outside in her lawn chair was to ensure she didn’t miss anything. It was reminiscent of how the paparazzi camps out whenever there’s a chance they might spot Britney walking barefoot out of a 7-11, except she was waiting to see if Dorothy Wilson and Evelyn Moore were going to get into a fight over imminent clothesline domain.

Lee was the first person to find out P and I were engaged. He proposed to me in my apartment and as we left for dinner we shared the news. By the time we returned, everyone in the complex knew about our newly engaged status and celebrated by staying up late to watch Murder She Wrote while intermittently peeking through their mini-blinds to see how late he’d stay at my apartment.

Since my parents lived out of town, I arranged for all our wedding gifts to be delivered to my apartment because I wanted to see if I could make five hundred square feet seem even more claustrophobic by packing the place with silver gift-wrapped boxes filled with breakable items. Every day I would return home to a porch full of boxes and I’d carry them into my apartment while being careful not to trip over the punch bowl set with matching cups that I was using as a door stop. (Incidentally, that was the last time it was used for anything.)

Lee appointed herself as watchdog of all my delivered gifts. She had a clear view of my second floor apartment from her lawn chair and kept lookout all day to make sure that one of her fellow senior residents didn’t try to make off with a shiny, new toaster oven because everyone knows that those octogenarians love nothing more than some toast.

One day I had to work late and then met some friends for dinner so I didn’t get home until after midnight. When I walked up the steps to my apartment, I was relieved to see I didn’t have any packages to be hauled in. I fell into bed and slept until the shrill sound of the phone ringing woke me up at 6:00 a.m.

Reaching past the boxes of new towels, I grabbed the phone and sleepily said, “Hello?” The raspy voice on the other end said, “Honey, it’s Lee. I got worried when you weren’t home at your usual time last night so I picked up all the packages that got delivered yesterday and brought them down to my place. You know these people around here won’t hesitate to steal something.” Yes, I have no doubt I was living in an apartment complex that merely served as a front for an elderly crime ring specializing in pawning stolen wedding gifts to pay for their denture cream and support hose habit.

Lee continued, “Honey, you can come down here and get these gifts whenever you want. I’ll be here all day.” I had no reason to doubt the validity of her statement so I rolled back over and went to sleep. When I finally woke up around 10:00 a.m., I threw on some clothes and went to retrieve the gifts. I walked down the stairs marveling that she even managed to make it up to my apartment, collect gifts and get them back to her place all while toting her oxygen tank. It made me shudder to think about what a precarious journey it must have been. Lee was stationed outside her front door, but stood up when she saw me coming and led me inside to get the packages. There were about three or four things sitting in her living room. As I picked them up to carry them upstairs, she told me I’d need to come back down because there was one more in her refrigerator.

Her refrigerator? Did someone send me a ham? Did P register for a selection of Hickory Farms smoked meats when I wasn’t looking? I walked back down to her place and she brought the box out of the refrigerator. Sure enough, it was a big cardboard box with the words “Refrigerate Immediately” stamped all over it. I couldn’t imagine what was in there.

I thanked Lee for taking care of my gifts and then ran upstairs with the package because the curiosity was killing me. Normally, I waited until P and I were together to open a present (at least that’s what I told him, but in my defense he really didn’t show the enthusiasm I was looking for whenever we received another crystal vase or a set of steak knives) but I couldn’t wait to see what this was, not to mention there was no way the whole box would fit inside my refrigerator.

As I delicately ripped open the box, I continued to speculate about what might be inside. Maybe some bacon? Imported caviar? The first installment in a membership to a cheese of the month club? (Please God let it be a membership to a cheese of the month club) I pulled out the tissue paper to reveal a perfectly refrigerated wooden salad bowl with matching tongs.

Apparently someone had packed and mailed their gift using whatever box they had on hand. Lee ensured that our new wooden bowl remained perfectly chilled all night long.

Bless her heart.

I’d finally found someone as enthusiastic about our wedding gifts as I was and vowed that, when the time came for P and me to pour the first drinks from our new crystal decanter, we would make a special toast to Lee. Unfortunately, we didn’t receive a crystal decanter, so the only toast we ended up making was the kind we could make in our shiny, new toaster oven.

Which really worked out because I believe that bread covered in butter and grape jelly is actually more festive than whiskey anyway.

File this under better late than never. You can click over to my Giveaways page to see the winners of Bethany Dillon’s new CD Stop and Listen.

Yesterday was a big day full of lots of adventure and activity. In fact, I was so tired that I went in to lay with Caroline while she went to sleep last night and Gulley came in and woke me up an hour later. What can I say? The zoo makes me tired.

We started the day with some tattoos.

Rode public transportation which was a great reminder to me of why I am not a fan of public transportation.

It would be fine except for all the people.

Then we made it to the Dallas Zoo. Everyone warned us that the Forth Worth Zoo was so much better than the Dallas Zoo, but we didn’t feel like driving an hour to Forth Worth so we took our chances with the allegedly far inferior Dallas Zoo.

It totally paid off because the kids got to see penguins and a gorilla, both of which cannot be found at the San Antonio Zoo.

Other than that, they rode the carousel and we saw a bunch of birds. I am convinced that birds are basically zoo filler. It’s basically a cheap way to provide something else for people to look at with minimal investment. Why pay to ship in a tiger or a hippo when you can just put some brightly colored pigeons in a “natural habitat” and call it an exhibit?

After paying $8.00 for a zoo cheeseburger that Caroline didn’t eat and realizing the temperature had reached 101 degrees, we decided it was time to take our lives in our hands and hop back on the DART system to get back home.

Later, we headed to the pool to meet our dear friend, Hite, for some swimming and the hopes of flat wearing the kids out so they’d go to bed at a decent hour.

Unfortunately, somebody’s kid decided she needed to go to the bathroom after ten minutes at the pool so we left in search of a restroom and ended up at a neighborhood park with a splash pad.

And after a full day of activities and fun, we all still love each other.

We’ll even share towels.

At least until we get in a big argument over whose turn it is to sit in the “way back” of Hite’s car and it all turns ugly. Fortunately there is no photographic evidence of this unfortunate turn of events.