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You know what I wish? That every Monday was a holiday. Of course then it wouldn’t so much be a holiday as just turning the weekend into three days instead of two, but whatever. I’d be a fan of the three day weekend. It allows enough time for the right mix of relaxation and productivity with the added benefit that now there are only four days of getting up early and packing lunches and doing homework until Friday.

This past Friday night we went to eat Mexican food with Mimi and Bops and my sister and her family. My nephew Luke just started wearing glasses last week and I wish I had a picture to show you because now our normal Friday night dinner feels a little bit special because he resembles a young Harry Potter and when he does something particularly cute, like look down over the top of his glasses while telling us something, it makes me want to announce “TEN POINTS TO GRYFFINDOR!”

On Saturday Caroline had her first basketball game of the season. It was a nail biter that was heavy on defense and the final score was 8-6. Caroline’s team won, but it’s safe to say that both teams need to work a little more on their shooting accuracy.

After the game, P and Caroline headed to the ranch and I spent the rest of the afternoon doing productive things like getting my car washed and going to the grocery store and folding laundry and checking the ants to see if they had left any new messages for me.

(As of this writing, they appear to have settled into normal ant-like behavior with the digging of very average, boring tunnels, but I’m keeping my eye on them because I bet Zuckerman thought that same thing about Wilbur and then RADIANT.)

Then Sunday morning Caroline and I met Gulley, Jon and the boys at her house and followed them to Bryan because the family was throwing a ninetieth birthday party for Nena that afternoon. We had the easiest trip we’ve ever had and didn’t even have to stop for anyone to go to the bathroom. I believe that’s what some people call travel maturity.

(Actually I’ve never heard anyone use that term and I just made it up. I think it had more to do with the fact that Jon was part of the trip and men are not typically big fans of unnecessary road trip stops whereas Gulley and I have been known to stop just because we saw a gas station owned by Willie Nelson.)

We arrived at Nena’s assisted living facility just in time for the party. Honey had arrived earlier to get everything set up and to get Nena ready. She said she’d been preparing Nena for the party all week, calling her every day to say, “Mother, your party is on Sunday” and “Mother, I’m taking you to get your hair done on Saturday so it will look pretty for your birthday party on Sunday” and “The kids are all coming in town for your birthday party on Sunday”.

Yet when she walked Nena into the large room where the party was going to be held and Nena saw the cake and the balloons and the flowers, she turned to Honey and exclaimed, “How on earth did you manage to keep this party a surprise?”

Who says there isn’t an upside to turning ninety? You get to have a surprise party that was in no way supposed to be a surprise.

Then later in the party Nena seemed a little confused and Uncle Johnny said, “Mama, this is your birthday party!” And she rolled her eyes at him and exclaimed, “Of course I know it’s my birthday party. I haven’t lost my mind.”

Here’s a picture of Gulley and me with the birthday girl.

Doesn’t she look good? She told us her hair looked so good because she’d combed it out after the hairstylist at the salon just “ratted it and teased it and curled it until she looked like an old lady”.

A little before five o’ clock, everyone cleared out before the dinner rush at the assisted living home began and headed back to Honey and Big’s house to relax. We went to eat burgers at Grub and then watched some football and that was it. I think we were all in bed by 10:30 or so which is a testament to how tired we’ve all been after two weeks of being back in the real world.

We slept in late on Monday morning and eventually headed back to San Antonio around 3 p.m. And I’m proud to report we only made one stop on the way home and no one got car sick.

See?

Travel maturity.

Maybe it’s a real thing after all.

As long as you overlook the fact that we had to tell the kids they couldn’t have a tooting contest in the car during the last twenty minutes of the trip.

Listen.

Harry Connick Jr. is a game changer for American Idol. He’s funny and engaging and knows what he’s talking about. But Keith Urban has got some serious highlights and flat iron skills. I mean I expected to swoon over J.Lo’s hair because OF COURSE. However, my admiration of Keith’s highlights caught me by surprise.

Oh and there also seems to be a good bit of talent on the show this year.

And now for some things I’ve seen this week besides ants that spell LIE.

1. winter harvest sweater

This is on sale at Anthropologie and one of those timeless things that I’d have in my closet forever. Love the colors.

2. spice market henley

This is also at Anthropologie but for some reason I couldn’t grab a good picture of it so you’ll have to click over there and see it for yourself if you’re interested. I happen to really love the blue. I can totally picture it with white jeans this spring and summer.

3. talia blouse

This is also another great top.

4. perforated suede jacket

5. foldover knit maxi skirt

I love this skirt and it has a ton of great reviews on Piperlime. Plus, it comes in several different color options. If you’ve been looking for a good maxi skirt, this might be the one.

6. ruth necklace by noonday

Noonday is having a sale right now to make room for their spring merchandise and this necklace happens to be one of the sale items. I’m a little in love with it.

7. stay cation weekend button back sweater

This sweater is like a mullet. Business in the front, party in the back.

8. foggy marina double-breasted trench

How cute is this trench with these adorable sleeves that roll up to reveal a little bit of fun?

9. plaid about you coat

I’m a sucker for a plaid coat.

10. petaluma peasant top plus size

I know I’m not great about featuring plus size options, but I saw this top and fell in love. In fact, Lucky Brand at Nordstrom has several really pretty top options in the plus size category. And this also comes in regular sizes in case you’re interested.

That’s it for today.

Have a good Friday.

I realize that maybe the fact I didn’t post yesterday may have led some of you to fear that maybe the ants had changed the L in “Lie” to a D and perhaps carried me off.

Fortunately that isn’t the case.

The truth is that I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown on Tuesday morning. Which might be a slight exaggeration, but I definitely experienced a tad bit of stress.

On Sunday evening Caroline started running a fever. Nothing serious, but definitely a fever. She had no other symptoms except for a slight headache and some nausea. So I kept her home from school on Monday, but then later that evening she seemed fine and I was relieved because I was scheduled to catch a flight out of town on Tuesday at 1:00 p.m.

However, late Monday night she woke up and was running fever again and crying because she felt bad. And so Tuesday morning, which was supposed to involve dropping her off at school and packing my suitcase, became a circus of rushing to get packed and dressed and taking her to the med clinic, feeling bad because I hated to leave while she was sick and lamenting that I haven’t gone anywhere for the last three months and she’s been fine and then dropping her off at Bops and Mimi’s house because P had already lined up work commitments that couldn’t be cancelled at the last minute.

It was all very relaxing.

Anyway, today is one of those days where I’m going to tell you about some things you may want to know about because, honestly, after telling you about the ants there is no where to go but down with this week.

1. I’ve been meaning to mention that if you want to buy a copy of my book, Sparkly Green Earrings, it’s now on sale at LifeWay for $5.00. FIVE DOLLARS. For that price you could just buy three of them and use them as a doorstop. Click here if that sounds like a plan.

2. I saw these Mossimo sonora flat sandals at Target the other day and fell in love. They’re so cute and only $19.99.

3. So my blog has a Facebook page that I don’t really talk about because I forget about it. But with The Antelope in the Living Room coming out, there are going to be some fun contest things going on over there that you may or may not want to know about. Here’s the link to it.

4. I loved this post by Edie about How to Find God’s Will for Your Life. So much wisdom there. And you really should just check out every post she’s written for the past week or so because there is some great stuff.

I have racked my brain for anything else to share and I’m out of words and thoughts for now. Plus I have to go watch Harry Connick, Jr. on American Idol.

See you tomorrow for Fashion Friday.

Before I even get started with the real story I have for you today, I have to ask a question. What is happening here?

Honestly, I don’t hate it. And Julia Roberts is as beautiful as ever. She could wear a burlap sack and be stunning. So my question isn’t so much about style as it is about function.

How does she have that white button-down shirt under that fitted strapless dress without any unseemly bulges or bumps? I can’t even tuck a white button-down into a pair of jeans without all manner of issues and I’m just trying to understand. Did they cut the shirt off and is it all just an illusion? Inquiring minds (specifically mine) want to know.

I remember learning years ago that the secret to a sleek tucked in shirt is to tuck it into your underwear first. Which I guess is fine except for the wedgie potential and also the fact that people will most likely see your underwear before the day is over. I’m perplexed.

In other news that you aren’t going to believe, I think I may be living out my very own version of E.B. White’s Charlotte Web.

I know. It’s very exciting.

It all started early Saturday afternoon. Actually, it all began at Christmas when Gulley and the boys gave Caroline an ant farm. We went online a few days later to order our supply of ants because the alternative was to find our own out in the yard or something and, let me just say, yeah right.

The confirmation email let us know that our ants would arrive in approximately 2-3 weeks depending on the weather in our area because it can’t be too hot or too cold or the ants might die in transport because apparently being in transit with the U.S. Postal System is harsher than living out in nature. And so it makes sense that our ants arrived this past Saturday afternoon after all the Polar Vortex brouhaha.

However, I found myself on the horns of a dilemma because the package said the ants needed to be placed in their new home IMMEDIATELY and Caroline was at the ranch for the day with P and I knew they wouldn’t be home until much later that night. And so the sole burden of placing the ants fell squarely on my shoulders.

(I later learned I could have waited and IMMEDIATELY didn’t so much mean IMMEDIATELY as it did just sometime in the next 12 or so hours. But it’s too late now.)

I carefully read all the instructions to make sure I did everything the way it was supposed to be done to ensure our ants safe arrival in their new home. The first step was to poke three holes in the gel farm which I guess helps them get started in their new environment. The second step was to place the test tube full of ants into the refrigerator for fifteen minutes so they’d be lethargic when I dumped them in and thus not as likely to try to escape from Alcatraz.

And so I finished folding some laundry and straightening up the house while the ants chilled in the fridge. I mean that literally.

After fifteen or maybe thirty minutes (I lost track of time. Get off my back.) I opened the top of the ant farm and dumped all the ants into their new home with fear and trembling. And, well, the scene was exactly what you’d expect. Ants everywhere. Ants milling and crawling and trying desperately to find a way to escape their new enclosure filled with gel.

I spent the rest of the afternoon checking on the ants’ progress and I was afraid I’d basically killed a bunch of ants because they weren’t doing much of anything. Maybe they were stunned. Or maybe it’s because they’d been in the fridge longer than necessary. In all fairness if someone put me in a tube, mailed me, stuck me in an igloo and then dumped me out on a beach somewhere, I’d be a little shellshocked too. It might take me a day or two to find the will or courage to make a sandcastle or to quit rocking back and forth in the fetal position.

But by the time Caroline got home later that night, the ants had begun to dig some tunnels. They’d piled their dead ant friends (I know. They didn’t all make it. Tragic.) in a corner and were working furiously in some type of assembly line formation.

Sunday morning we awoke to find they must have worked all night in an effort to make their new place feel like home.

However, it was what I saw yesterday morning that stopped me in my tracks.

This is the part where it gets like Charlotte’s Web in case you’re wondering when this whole drawn out story about some ants is going to come together.

Because the ants have clearly sent me a message.

LIE.

I know. What does it all mean?

Do they think I’m lying? Are they lying? Is their whole life a lie now that they’ve been subjected to a life of hard labor on an ant farm? Did the people at Uncle Milton and the U.S. Postal Service tell them they were going to a place with green pastures to roam around and cows to milk while wearing jaunty straw hats and perhaps a tiny pair of overalls?

Then, as if that wasn’t enough, I settled in on the couch to go through my email and saw this.

Do you see that? Do you see that it says SALUTATIONS? That’s exactly how Charlotte greeted Wilbur. It was her fancy way of saying hello.

What are the odds that on the same morning the ants wrote LIE that I’d get an email sending salutations? And it’s not a real email. It’s a spam email from an unknown address and, I can’t say for sure, but I think the ants sent it. How else do you explain it?

All I know is if I wake up tomorrow to find the word RADIANT spelled out in the ant farm, I’m either throwing them away or taking them to the county fair.

I’ll be honest about this podcast. I really have no idea what we ultimately talked about because we spent the first thirty minutes or so discussing an awkward experience Sophie had at Panera and various beauty products I have recently bought and/or been wanting to try.

But, alas, it was sometime after that we discovered none of it actually recorded. Which is tragic. A first world tragedy, granted, but tragic just the same.

And then we had to rebound and find new energy and new topics and I think I went on for too long about my feeling regarding school projects. I apologize in advance.

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

On a totally different note, Sheaffer at Pinterest Told Me To has a cool thing going on today with an online boutique called Goodnight Macaroon. You can read more about it here. It’s a chance to get some cute things at a 20% discount along with an opportunity to win a $100 gift card. Just thought you should know.

Have a great Monday.