Other

Caroline got out of school at noon yesterday because it’s teacher conference week. And so we went out for a girls’ lunch and to buy new jeans and, finally, went to go see Cloudy with A Chance of Meatballs 2. I have to say it wasn’t my favorite but I do have to respect whoever came up with the concept of a taco-dile and a shrimpanzee.

Anyway, in the midst of this Sophie texted to see if I wanted to do a podcast and I said yes. As usual, we had no specific plan or topic in mind. I can’t even remember everything we talked about but I vaguely remember an entire discussion on my lack of a rug in the living room, our flights to New York, and Les Miles.

So, you know, all things that are obviously related.

You can click here to listen. Or here. Or, as always, you can subscribe on iTunes.

And here’s the video of Les Miles in case you’re interested.

So it seems that I entirely missed that the dog in the picture from yesterday was wearing a foam finger that was making a questionable gesture. All I can offer in way of explanation is that’s how tired I was by the time I posted that picture and, also, I was entirely focused on the tennis shoes.

I finally walked in my door around midnight last night. And I headed straight for the shower because there is no way I could have crawled into bed with all the airport smell on me. You know? Airport smell? That combination of stale air and stranger germs?

Since everyone in my house was already asleep, I opted to use the guest bathroom because there was less chance of waking anyone up. Unfortunately I don’t keep a razor in the guest bathroom plus I’d forgotten to bring a razor to New York. And here’s something you may not know, I’m a little compulsive about shaving my legs every night. I cannot stand stubble.

So you can only imagine my angst at having to go to bed with two days worth of growth. I felt like a muppet.

And that might have been why I tossed and turned all night in spite of being exhausted. It didn’t help that I used my airplane ride to watch the first few episodes of Homeland and all that terrorist activity must have slipped into my subconscious because I had weird dreams that terrorists were after my maroon skinny cords from Gap.

Obviously this dream makes complete and total sense. It’s what I’ve quietly suspected all this time. That it’s all about the corduroy pants.

Needless to say, my Tuesday will not go down as one of my more productive days although I did manage to unpack my suitcase and throw in a few loads of laundry. I also made beef stroganoff in the crockpot because I maintain that nothing will make you feel as accomplished as having dinner taken care of by 9:00 a.m. And I went to the grocery store because the dogs probably needed something to eat besides a slice of cheese and, well, we all enjoy toilet paper.

But I didn’t even mention my weekend yet.

On Friday night I went to Women of Faith in San Antonio with my friend Michelle because she works for Women of Faith. And I found out about a really great event they’re doing in Houston on February 21-22 called Unwrap the Bible with Beth Moore, Priscilla Shirer and a few others along with Kari Jobe leading worship. You can find out more about it here, but I think it sounds amazing.

And then on Saturday I slept in because Caroline didn’t have a soccer game until 2:00. I cannot express how much I love the afternoon soccer game, except that it didn’t feel like an October day as much as a July day.

Saturday night we went over to Gulley’s to watch the Ags play Mississippi. And I died a thousand deaths between 7:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. At one point I put my head between my knees and began to take deep breaths and P had to tell me to get a hold of myself.

And then Lambo kicked that field goal.

I really need the Aggies to start winning more decisively so I can relax a little more on Saturday nights. As it stood I was so wired by the time that game was over that I barely slept at all before leaving my house at 7:00 a.m. Sunday to catch my flight to New York.

Which explains why I’m going to quit boring you with mundane things like my need to have shaved legs and head to bed. I have some sleep to catch up on.

Well I took the day off yesterday to celebrate Columbus Day in style because I feel like it’s what Columbus would have wanted. Especially after Caroline declared a few weeks ago that Queen Isabella of Spain couldn’t have been that popular since she’d never heard of her.

And so I spent the day in New York City watching the Columbus Day Parade on 5th Avenue. Except that’s not really true because this is all I saw of the parade.

That’s the end in case you can’t tell.

But I also saw this dog wearing a Yankees cap and tennis shoes so it’s not like the experience was a total loss because A DOG IN WEE TENNIS SHOES.

If there was ever a day I was going to quit blogging forever this would be it because what else can I do now that I’ve given you the gift of dog tennis shoes?

In truth I wasn’t in New York to celebrate Columbus Day. It just worked out that way.

Several months ago, our editors at Tyndale emailed Sophie and me to let us know that Jane from Barnes and Noble wanted us to come to New York for lunch. Of course I said yes because that’s slightly more exciting than my normal lunches that usually involve whatever cheese I have that hasn’t gone bad and some Triscuits. Sometimes I’ll have a side of grapes if I’m feeling fancy.

We made all the arrangements and Sophie and I flew into New York on Sunday afternoon. She flew into La Guardia, but I flew into JFK. And, thus, she was spared the sight of me fighting carsickness in the back of a very erratic cab on my drive into the city. It caused me to have flashbacks to the bus in Ecuador when I threw up in front of Ann Voskamp. I had to totally mind over matter myself while taking deep, cleansing breaths to avoid having to pay a $50 cleanup fee for getting sick in a cab.

On Sunday night we walked through Times Square and enjoyed fall weather that actually feels like fall as we made our way to an incredible Italian restaurant called Morandi. I had the pasta with bolognese. Not that you really care about that detail but that’s what I eat in New York. All pasta, all the time. It’s important to carb load for all the walking.

Sadly, Monday morning I awoke to what was apparently an overzealous door closer staying next to me in the hotel. Because if they closed their door once at 6:45 a.m., they closed it seventeen times. Over and over again. Part of me really wanted to go out in the hall and lecture them about hotel etiquette, but I remembered I was in a very large city and that’s how people end up being the subject of a “ripped from the headlines!” episode of Law & Order.

But then I fell back asleep and Sophie brought me some Starbucks later in the morning and it redeemed the beginning of the day. We walked from our hotel near Times Square to Craftbar down on Broadway. That’s where we met Jane and she was just as delightful as I hoped she’d be. We talked about books and Texas and New York and television. So it was pretty much the perfect lunch. And I haven’t even told y’all about the cheese plate yet.

It was a top three cheese plate of my life moment.

And the best part is we didn’t have plans to order the cheese plate. It just showed up and we’d dug in before the waitress told us she’d made a mistake. But there was no turning back because you don’t get between women and their cheese.

This is Sophie and me with Jane. I know it looks like I have spoons in each hand ready to eat that dessert but I assure you only one of those hands belongs to me.

After lunch we took a cab back to Rockefeller Center. We looked at the ice skating rink, went in the MOMA store and the NBC store. And then. AND THEN. We went in the biggest Free People store I have ever been in. Like it had ALL the Free People merchandise. I could have stayed in there forever. I could have tried on various clothes forever. But we all had flights to catch.

So we went to grab our suitcases from where we’d stored them at the hotel and get cabs. Sophie and Carol from Tyndale were both heading to La Guardia, but I had to go back to JFK and, frankly, I was dreading the cab ride with all my being.

But then the bellhop at the hotel said there was a town car heading to JFK for the same price as a cab and I felt the heavens open and angels began to sing. I jumped in that car so fast it would make your head spin and had a wonderful ride to JFK driven by my new friend Miguel who is originally from the Dominican Republic and the second oldest of thirty-five kids.

Thirty-five kids.

Let that sink in for a moment.

I felt like Miguel and I understood each other when he immediately told me how to turn down the A/C when I got in the car. But I knew it for sure when he turned on what was obviously some kind of 80’s Greatest Hits music for us to listen to on our way to the airport and asked me if I enjoy the music of Lionel Richie.

Umm. Who doesn’t? Not anybody I’d want to know.

But the best was when we made a shortcut to the airport to avoid some traffic and wound our way through a neighborhood in Queens and I asked if we were close to Archie Bunker’s house and Miguel totally acted like he got my antiquated pop culture reference. I appreciate that in a person.

Now I’m sitting in JFK waiting for my flight. I’m supposed to get home at midnight tonight so I’m sure I’ll spend tomorrow feeling as fresh as a daisy. Assuming you’re thinking of a daisy that has been run over by the lawnmower. Twice.

And just to make you laugh, here’s the official logo from our trip to the Big City provided by the folks at Tyndale who never fail to have a sense of humor.

Is it just me or has the Statue of Liberty never looked better?

Yesterday morning I dropped Caroline off at school and then drove to Georgetown to speak at a MOPs group. For those of you keeping track at home, that makes the third time in a week that I have utilized the I-30 toll road around Austin. I cannot adequately express my love for it and especially the fact that the speed limit on it is eighty miles an hour. This makes Sammy Hagar and I so happy.

It totally saved me yesterday because I didn’t properly estimate the amount of time it would take me to get there due to unforeseen circumstances such as Caroline’s current bang woes and that my gas tank was almost on empty. Fortunately, the gas situation was far easier to remedy than the bang situation. Honestly, I can’t even keep track if we’re growing them out or going to get them cut again. It changes by the hour. And that hour is usually between 6:45 and 7:45 a.m.

Georgetown was great. And on my way home I saw a large billboard advertising something called The House of Torment at Highland Mall. According to P, this would describe any mall experience, particularly an hour with me in Anthropologie. But I realized on second glance that this sign was referring to a haunted house at the mall.

Here’s something you may not know about me. I hate a haunted house. I’ve always hated a haunted house. Because I give new meaning to the words scaredy cat.

In fact, I remember in elementary school that there was a big Halloween carnival every year and there was always a haunted house in Mrs. Montgomery’s music room. And I’d always walk through it because, well, all my friends were doing it. Hooray for peer pressure! In hindsight it couldn’t have been that scary but I remember thinking it was the most terrifying thing ever. I hated every minute of it.

I think I managed to avoid haunted houses completely until some point in college when I went with a group of friends to the haunted house the KA’s did every Halloween. Obviously the only reason I was talked into this was CUTE BOYS. But I will tell you it didn’t end well. All of my friends and I were so scared that we basically ran through the last three rooms and then tripped and fell like dominoes on our way out, landing unceremoniously on the sidewalk. I can’t imagine why none of us got a date with a KA after that.

Anyway, I realize some people enjoy a haunted house. I am just not one of them. I do not care to stick my hand in things that feel like brains or to be chased by anyone with a chainsaw. Call me crazy.

I drove straight to pick up Caroline from school and she reminded me that I’d told her I would drive her to Learning Express because she wanted to purchase a Rainbow Loom with her own money. Did anyone see this coming? That bracelets made out of rubberbands would become a cottage industry? I have no vision.

So we went to Learning Express so she could buy the Rainbow Loom and assorted bags of rubberbands in various colors. And then we came back home where I informed her she had to finish all her homework before she could craft any of her fine rubberband jewelry.

I am the worst.

She started with a reading comprehension worksheet and then moved on to math. This required me to google “Division Terms” because I couldn’t remember which number was the “dividend” and which was the other thing that I had no idea about because I have a calculator on my phone. It’s called the “divisor” in case you’re interested.

The next thirty minutes were spent inhaling and exhaling all the air in the room with deep sighs until she finally finished the last problem. And then it was time for science.

Science homework involved a paragraph that discussed the properties of various things. There are physical properties that can be observed and then some other type of properties that require tools to measure. She needed to write an entire page about all the properties of an apple. And I know it had to be an entire page because she had the same assignment last week except it was supposed to be about mixtures and solutions found at the beach. I told her surely 3/4 of the page was good enough but I was wrong. Her teacher wanted the entire page filled out.

Judge me if you want to, but I encouraged her to use her largest handwriting to extol the properties of an apple because, seriously, how much can you say about an apple? They’re red and delicious in a pie.

(If you are her science teacher and happen to be reading this, I’m totally kidding. It’s just a little writing device called humor.)

(If you’re anyone else reading this, I’m totally not kidding. I absolutely told her she needed to write bigger.)

She sighed and blew her bangs out of her face multiple times and asked who invented homework in the first place and shared her theories about government conspiracies to ruin the lives of kids. And that’s when it hit me.

This is why I don’t need a haunted house. Because I’m already a rubberband-withholding head of a house of torment.

I’ll just tell you right now that if you’re prone to jealousy then you may just want to click away from what is sure to be a fascinating tale of how we spent the last weekend of September.

We ate Mexican food.

I had a cold.

C played soccer.

I’m sorry to make it all seem so glamorous and thrilling but it is what it is.

To make it even worse I’ll go ahead and confess now that I also cleaned our toilets.

If you can set aside your envy for a few minutes, I’ll share all the details.

Last Thursday I was positive I was coming down with the cold/virus/plague that Caroline and P had a few days earlier, but my body never really committed to it. I had the scratchy throat, the congestion and the fatigue but avoided the fever. And after a generous dose of Benadryl on Thursday night, I woke up Friday morning feeling significantly better. Which worked out because I had accidentally committed myself to spending the entire day at Caroline’s school.

She was on the morning announcements and so I drove her to school and stayed to watch. Then I’d promised her teacher that I’d make copies of the worksheets she’d need for this week’s lesson plan. However, I am not skilled in the copy-making process because, let’s face it, I went to school in the age of mimeograph sheets. (Shout out to the smell of a freshly mimeographed worksheet. Top 5 smell ever.) And in recent years I have largely avoided making copies whenever possible, especially anything that involved one-sided copies to two-sided copies or what have you. I mean, what am I? A rocket scientist?

(I’m not even exaggerating when I tell you I had to go to Kinko’s a few months ago to get something laminated and broke out in a dead sweat because I was so intimidated by the laminating machine.)

So I made 75 copies of a packet that consisted of at least ten pages and then proceeded to begin the laborious process of stapling them BY HAND before Caroline’s sweet math teacher happened to stop by, noticed that I’m an idiot who can’t be trusted with grown up tasks, and showed me that the copier has the capacity to not only collate these copies but to also staple them. It’s like I was a monkey at NASA. I had no idea.

Needless to say I spent the better part of ninety minutes sorting and stapling all these packets due to my lack of copier comprehension and finally finished just in time to leave the school and go pick up lunch for Caroline because I’d promised I’d eat lunch with her on Friday earlier in the week. I sat and watched her enjoy her BLT sandwich from Subway (I can’t really talk about the Subway bacon. It just doesn’t seem like it’s a color found in nature, but she finds it tasty.) and then drove back home for thirty minutes until it was time to meet her at the Book Fair in the school library. So it was basically an all-day affair for me at the elementary school on Friday and by the time I picked up Caroline and we drove home I felt like the cold/virus/plague was really beginning to set in. Or it could have just been psychosomatic because I’d spent all that time in the petri dish known as elementary school.

But we went to eat Mexican food with Mimi and Bops because I’m not one to let a scratchy throat stand in the way of chips and salsa. P had left town earlier in the day to go to a friend’s ranch for a big bachelor party weekend. And when I say big bachelor party weekend I’m sure it might bring to mind all manner of possible shenanigans, so let me just tell you that, when P called me to check in on Saturday night (at 9:00 p.m.) and I asked what they were doing, he said “Watching videos of Kate and Avery waterskiing.” Kate and Avery are the six and four-year-old daughters of one of the bachelor party hosts. Clearly this bachelor party was like something out of that old Tom Hanks movie. Rumor has it they even stayed up until almost 10:30.

Anyway, P did drive back in town for a few hours on Saturday to watch Caroline’s soccer game. It started on time but two strikes of lightning right by the field caused everyone to scurry like it was the apocalypse and the game got delayed for forty-five minutes until the storm passed. The refs finally signaled it was all clear and the girls could resume play. The game started again right as the sky opened up and it poured down rain. But there was no lightning or thunder so we all sat in the driving rain and watched the girls play. I have never had so many regrets about having my purse with me. The good news is that I think pleather can handle inclement weather.

After P left for the ranch again, Caroline and I headed over to Gulley’s house to watch the Aggies play Arkansas and eat pork ribs because what else would you eat when you’re playing against the Hogs?. (Sadly this same strategy doesn’t work when you’re playing the SMU Mustangs or the Vanderbilt Commodores because I hear both horse and navy officers are tough and chewy.) I’d been nervous about the game all day and watching it didn’t make me feel any better. I was glad to see the Aggies get out of there with a win. I don’t know what to think of our defense but something tells me our defensive coordinator isn’t planning to contact me for a consultation so I really can’t worry about it.

But I obviously went to bed with football on my mind. That combined with a generous dose of Mucinex Max Strength cough medicine caused me to have weird dreams all night long, especially the one where I was watching some guys paint their chests for a football game and realized they’d spelled a word wrong but it was too late to tell them.

I know exactly where this dream originated because a few weeks ago I was watching Texas Tech play and they flashed to a group of guys in the stands who spelled out “T-E-H”. The “C” was missing. Or they didn’t know how to spell TECH. I’m not sure which.

But I really can’t judge because until Friday morning I wasn’t aware that copiers were capable of stapling documents.

I’ve lived in Texas all my life. I just want to clarify that in case my next statement causes any confusion.

Why is it still so hot at the end of September?

Every year I’m surprised that it’s still in the 90’s. You would think after 42 years I would have managed my fall expectations, but no. I am an optimist.

Last weekend I was in Chattanooga when a lovely cool front blew in. It was slightly chilly last Saturday evening in Tennessee and, even better, slightly cool when I landed in San Antonio on Sunday morning. But it was all just a big ruse because it was 98 degrees here yesterday.

I can’t talk about it anymore. It’s too depressing.

So let’s talk about fashion instead. And look at all the lovely fall things I won’t be able to wear until November.

1. go rings

A sweet girl named Dru emailed me a while back to tell me about go rings. She and her friend Darcie originally launched them in November 2012 to fund Darcie’s mission trip, The World Race. Since then they have grown in popularity and the proceeds now go to fund other trips for missionaries that are living out Matthew 28:19 and going out to make disciples of all nations. You can find out more here.

2. arroyo vista printed top

I thought this would be really cute under a jacket. Or maybe just by itself if you live in Texas and the heat will never end.

3. fair isle blanket sweater

I love this sweater. I am a sucker for a fair isle pattern.

4. rugby stripe cardigan

It’s a cardigan that looks like a blazer. So clever. And it comes in a few different colors. I just happen to really like the blue and green combo.

5. fable yarn cardigan

This is one of those things that I’m going to have to have. I just need to decide on the color, but I’m leaning heavily toward this charcoal gray. I would wear this all winter long.

6. gap legging cords

So last weekend at DotMom, Lauren Chandler led worship and she was amazing. She also happened to wear a pair of maroon jeans on Saturday that proved to be a fashion revelation for me. All of a sudden I felt that my life wouldn’t be complete without a pair.

And so I ran out on Monday and bought these at Gap. Even better, they were 30% off. Best of all, I am already amazed at how many things I already have in my closet that go with them.

7. daisy lace dress

I wore this dress at DotMom last weekend and it was perfect because it kind of feels like pajamas. It is so soft and comfortable.

It also comes in red or black.

8. cabin retreat lace detail sweater

I’ve had my eye on these sweatshirt type tops with lace detail. And I’ve been skeptical. I don’t know how I feel about them. Honestly, it’s a little reminiscent of my Madonna period in eight grade.

However, this one might be a winner. There’s something about it that appeals to me.

9. faux leather moto jacket

This is also the year I want to invest in some type of leather and/or pleather jacket. I think this one could be the one, but I haven’t seen it in person. But I love the cut and the zipper detail. And the price.

The last time I had a leather jacket I loved it got stolen out of my car in a parking garage in downtown Austin. I don’t know if I was more sad about the jacket or the fact that I had to drive back to San Antonio with cardboard and duct tape over my passenger side window.

That’s a lie.

I was definitely more sad about the jacket. Especially because the car was a company car.

10. reawakening curvy plus blouse

I’m telling you that maroon (or wine or burgundy or oxblood) is the color of the year. This is a gorgeous plus-size top with gold button detail. I think it’s a must have.

That’s it for today.

Have a good Friday.