When I went to pick up my mail at the Post Office today, there was a slip informing me that they were holding a box too large for my mailbox. It was an early birthday gift from one of my best friends, the lovely Cara! She’s spending this year of her life working at an orphanage in Ecuador and, really, let that sentence sink in for a minute. She’s living. In a foreign country. To take care of babies.
If I didn’t already love her for that, I’d love her for the fact that, in my box of birthday gifts, she sent a hammock with a note explaining to that I am to hang it in the 18 feet that separate my house from Clay’s. What a fun gift, no?
Well, the weekend update is here once again. First of all, Beth’s hair did not disappoint though I did notice that it was higher on Friday night than on Saturday. I like to think that she did that on purpose, basically using Friday night as an example of how high we should fix our hair and then giving all of us mere viewers the chance to attempt such great height the following day whilst she kept her hair height under control so those of us who weren’t able to get it so high didn’t feel bad.
But it’s just a hypothesis.
The conference was great and by “great” what I’m trying to say is I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO CONVICTED IN MY LIFE. The message was encouraging and yes, I was encouraged, but I was still more convicted than anything. Beth talked about how some of us repress and some of us rebel. Now, up until very recently in my life, I’ve been a “repress-er” but lately I’ve noticed a little streak of rebellion in me.
And not the good kind, either.
At one point Beth started talking about sin in our lives and said the following: “God didn’t say ‘do it less’ or ‘slow it down’ — He said ‘STOP IT.’” She paused and the the camera zoomed in on her face and she said it again, in the slowest southern drawl you have ever heard: “STOP IT.”
I just looked at the screen in front of me and, with the widest eyes you can imagine, whispered “yes, ma’am.”
I took a nap once I got home on Saturday and then woke up with all of 20 minutes left to spare before the oil change place closed. Have I ever told y’all how much I like to get my oil changed? I know it’s weird, but it makes me feel like such an adult. As a bonus, I went grocery shopping afterwards, another little errand that makes me feel like I’m finally an adult.
After coming home and fixing dinner, Clay came down and we put together a couple of pieces of furniture for my office and by “we put together” I mean Clay put it together whilst I handed him the correct tools upon his request. Whilst he was putting together my desk chair, I took advantage of the moment to ask him a few questions about the male mindset on various topics dating. We also discussed hot topics such as abortion, capital punishment, etc. but don’t worry, I always found a way to bring the conversation back around to BOYS, NOW WHAT ARE THEY THINKING, CLAY?
I woke up in the night on Sunday knowing I was catching whatever has been going around my office lately, so I decided to just turn off my alarm and sleep as long as possible which turned out to be 13 hours and yes, you read that correctly. Actually, it would have been longer than that if Katie, our former blushing bride, hadn’t texted me to see if she and Eric could stop by the house seeing as they were in town.
We had a great time catching up and it was almost like we were roommates again, other than the fact that her husband was sitting by me on the couch. We talked for a good hour before they had to hit the road. I lasted for about another half hour after they left and then fell back asleep for the next four hours and yes I’m embarrassed to tell you that. Even worse? I went to bed early last night and STILL had a hard time getting out of bed today. I don’t know what my problem is, but at least I’m not the only one feeling the need for extra sleep lately.
First things first: I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this before today, but guess who gets to see Beth Moore’s hair LIVE tonight?!? Sure, it’s via simulcast but like that really matters. Basically, when Beth turns her head and her hair does its little bounce thing, GUESS WHO’LL BE WATCHING FROM THE FRONT ROW AT FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH?
When I woke up this morning, I felt like I was a kid on Christmas morning. I also made the executive decision not not even attempt to put volume in my hair because, hello, we all know that it’s a little silly to try to pretend like you know how to have big hair when Beth Moore is in the room, even if she’s just on the screen in front of you. Listen, kids, there are some battles you just shouldn’t try to fight and this is certainly one of them.
I’m also hoping her message is good, too. Of course. Highest priority. Definitely.
Anyway, I know we have a lot of former Starlite volunteers who read ye olde blog, so I just wanted to tell y’all that Cate and I will definitely be at First Baptist Downtown (within walking distance from the university!) tonight and tomorrow for the simulcast. I’ve heard that tickets are still available, so check here if you’d like to come. And if you don’t live in Cleveland, but want to see if a church in your town is hosting the simulcast too, check this huge list here.
Now, with that settled let’s move onto other, less important items of business.
When I got off work last night, I decided that I felt like cooking dinner which may or may not be related to the fact that I went to see Julie and Julia last weekend and, whilst watching Meryl Streep throw around ingredients sprinkled with a lovely French accent, decided that really, cooking, how hard could it actually be?
Obviously I have trouble remembering that history repeats itself, especially when it comes to my (lack of) culinary skills.
I decided to make baked lemon pepper chicken, mainly because I’m really in love with lemon pepper right now. I also decided to go a little crazy and create my own little potato dish. I already had the aluminum foil out, so I cut up a potato, put some spices on it (okay, more lemon pepper), added some butter and rolled it up into a little kangaroo pouch. I then decided to wrap the chicken in aluminum foil, too, as well as the corn and rolls. So, literally, every item I was cooking had aluminum foil wrapped around it AND NO, I ALSO HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I WAS THINKING. But my pride prevailed and, by the time I slammed the oven door shut, I was basically ready to start a blog about how to cook basically anything with a roll of aluminum foil and some lemon pepper.
I promised that dinner would be ready at 7 p.m. which means that I sat the food on the table at precisely 7:43 p.m. Things were already a bit tense by that point because, upon walking through my front door, Clay had told me that my Mariah Carey iTunes playlist had to go and, well, that just made me mad because HELLO, IT WAS OLD SCHOOL MARIAH AND HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO COOK DINNER WITHOUT IT PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND?
But I am nothing if not Holly Hostest with the Mostest, so I turned Mariah off with the sweetest fake smile you’ve ever seen and switched it to a little something I thought he might enjoy more. That Céline sure can sing, can’t she, Clay?
The food was, of course, horrid. At one point the chicken was burning, the rolls were smoking and the potatoes were falling out of the little kangaroo pouches I had so lovingly created for them. I don’t drink, but I suddenly had a new understanding of why some people feel the need to consume alcohol whilst cooking dinner.
I was nervously watching Clay and Cate’s faces when they took the first bites and, sure enough, I saw them give each other a look that seemed to say “Get those puppies in here so we can feed them under the table.” The food was awful — it’s okay, I can admit it. But everyone was totally polite about it, of course. Totally.
After hearing me remark that I wished I had stationary for Snuggles y Cuddles to use when they send thank you notes to their puppy-sitters, our former high school intern at Starlite made a set of these cards for me. We got to use the cards for the first time today when I — I mean, they — wrote Clay a note thanking him for putting up with them while I was out of town this week. Doesn’t the ribbon just make it darling?
Christan’s mom is still very sick, but I had to head home last night to be back for work today. I cannot even begin to describe how tired I was when I pulled in my driveway (remember, I don’t typically do well on no sleep). Clay came over to give me my house key back (he watched the puppies for me) and proceeded to show me how Snuggles y Cuddles are now answering to the names Paco y Taco, a little trick he taught them whilst I was gone. He’s determined for them to be called anything but Snuggles y Cuddles because he says those names aren’t “manly” enough for male dogs.
I can’t imagine why he would think the words “Snuggles” and “Cuddles” aren’t manly.
Speaking of hospitals, those of you who have been reading the blog for any length of time probably remember the almost two weeks I spent going in and out of Children’s Hospital last summer when my baby cousin Avi was hospitalized. It’s been a little over a year since we were facing some very long days as we waited for doctors to figure out what was causing her to be so sick and then treat it. Today Avi is a very happy, very healthy three year old and, by goodness, I just felt like it had to be captured on camera when we were together a couple weekends ago.
Well, see for yourself.
To see more photos from our weekend together, go here.
When I left math class on Monday afternoon, I called one of my roommates, Christan, from my freshman year of college to chat as I walked back across campus to my office. I told her about a conversation I had earlier that day with a new freshman who was feeling a bit nervous about the life she was suddenly living and had asked me about my own freshman year. Thinking back over those memories had made me miss Christan, and I decided to call and tell her so.
As I walked across campus with a cell phone connecting us over hundreds of miles, we took turns going over different memories from our eight year friendship: sharing a bathroom that was way too small for four girls; sneaking out the window to sit on the dorm roof after curfew had been checked; my walking down the aisle at her wedding; her standing beside me on stage at the first Starlite sleepover; the day I held her baby daughter and then day I held her baby son, too. It was an unusually deep conversation to have at 1:15 p.m. on a Monday afternoon, but that’s just the thing about our friendship: it’s deep.
Deep calls out to deep, and it recognizes its own voice when it hears it.
It’s 3:17 a.m. right now and I’m sitting on a pile of blankets on a hospital floor somewhere in Augusta, GA. Christan called me about nine hours ago, frantic. Her mother had been rushed to a hospital and she wanted me to pray. I talked to her for a minute, told her I would pray right then and she promised me she’d call me back. I headed home and began packing a bag, knowing that if she needed me, I wanted to be ready to go. I could pray, yes, but I could pray just as well while driving towards her.
An hour and three phone calls later, she was on her way to an airport in Memphis while I started driving towards an airport in Atlanta. I convinced the airline representative to give me a gate pass so I could meet her flight and, as I walked up to the gate, she walked off the plane. We didn’t say anything, instead just standing there holding each other while everyone else walked off. We were holding each other for a lot of reasons, but I think the main one was because we both somehow knew that we were about to take a step into adulthood that we don’t quite feel prepared for yet: the parenting of our parents.
I drove as fast as legally possible towards the hospital while she told me about how she fell on the floor at her office when she got the call. We talked about what the doctors had said so far, what questions needed to be asked when we arrived. And finally, some three hours after we left the airport, we pulled up to the hospital and rushed inside.
They gave us masks and gloves and I think it was right then that I became a little more of an adult. It isn’t my mother, of course, but I was still there with Christan, still pulling a blue mask over my face. I was still hearing the machines beep and seeing the IV lines. I was still hearing that she had coded, still feeling the anxiousness of waiting for the doctor to say something, anything.
If you could see us here tonight, two girls barely in their mid-twenties sitting in a hospital room in the dead of night, you’d think we were back in elementary school playing some silly game of doctor or hospital. There’s a part of me that wants to run to the nurses’ station down the hall and confess that we’re not old enough for this, that we need a parental guardian here with us, that they shouldn’t leave us alone in that room filled with the quiet hum of medical machines we can’t even identify.
But instead I walked the halls a few minutes ago, quietly praying scripture that I didn’t even realize I had memorized until it came out one verse after another, spilling over each other before I could finish the one before it. Promise after promise, prayer after prayer, hallway after hallway.
As of today, I’ve had a grand total of two math classes so far out of the 29 I’ll be taking this semester (OH YES, I HAVE A COUNTDOWN GOING) and I already have a list of things to tell you about.
No, really. I wrote things in the margins of my class notes so I wouldn’t forget to tell you:
1. My professor is hilarious, even if he doesn’t always mean to be. He’s been teaching at the university for quite awhile now, but you wouldn’t know it from how passionate he still is about math. On the first day of class, he asked us to raise our hands if we don’t like math. My hand was first in the air, which he happened to notice –
“You there, in the back? Your arm shot up so fast that I thought it might have been knocked out of its socket!”
I’m sorry, sir, it’s just an involuntary reaction when someone asks about not liking math.
2. My professor likes video games, but just the old school ones — none of this new junk that the kids are playing these days. So, he was playing one of his old school video games one day and got to the final level and kept winning it. He decided to keep going as long as he could and played that one level 65 times without stopping. He told us his score, and I tried to write it down for you, but I didn’t know how many zeros went with the number he said because — AND THIS JUST IN — I am not good at math. But I was totally impressed because the only video game I can play is Dr. Mario and if that isn’t old school, well, I don’t know what is.
3. Speaking of Dr. Mario, have I ever told y’all about playing that game with an ex-boyfriend of mine? He found out I loved it, so he bought it so I could play it on his Wii when I’d come over to his place. I was totally obsessed with it and we spent many nights sitting beside each other on the couch playing a video game from the early nineties (though, um, this was a relationship that took place just last year). One night he asked me if I liked playing Dr. Mario more than being around him and I had to take a few seconds to really think through my answer. Sign #7,298 that relationship was coming to a quick end.
4. Back to math: the fact that I have a double name has helped my professor learn it rather quickly — i.e. before anyone else’s name. This could be good or bad, I suppose. Good if he needs to remember which name to put a grade of “A” beside; bad if he needs to call on someone to solve a problem.
5. Speaking of problems, he informed us yesterday that he doesn’t like to call our homework, um, homework. He prefers to call it “playing with exercises” because the word “playing” makes it sound like fun. That’s a direct quote from the margins of my notes on exponents and radicals, two words commonly associated with “fun,” right?
6. Another direct quote: “Our first class was about going over the syllabus. In today’s class, I’m going to mess with some minds.” He then proceeded to write an equation on the board that looked a little something like this:
n+8=9-15(789)x938439089402859034825940258234905
Okay, I just typed a bunch of numbers for that last part. But you get my point.
I’m happy to report that he is well on his way towards meeting his objective of messing with our minds.
Well, at least with the mind of the double-name girl sitting in the back of the room.
Cuddles kept Cate company whilst she researched Cher tickets online tonight. Cate’s top life dream? Seeing Cher perform live sometime before one of the two of them dies.
Cuddles is gonna make it happen, one Google search for concert tickets at a time.
Let’s begin this Monday morning with a true confession: I really don’t want to write this post simply because I want last night’s picture of my cupcake holders and favorite pink mixing bowl to continue to be the top post on my blog so that when I open my browser, that’s the picture I see each and every time.
And yet I shall push through the desire to never write a post again so that I can tell you about my weekend. I’m here to tell you that I had a FABULOUS weekend, mainly because I decided on Friday evening that I was taking a break from my inbox (and work in general) during the weekend.
That meant I had plenty of free time to do important things like spend time with Clate, the due formerly known as Clay and Cate. Basically, Cate and I have Clay backed into a corner because, seeing that he’s new in town, he doesn’t have a whole lot of friends here yet and therefore we can monopolize his time, especially by forcing allowing him to play Monopoly with us.
Clay’s only been living here a week, but I’m already seeing MAJOR benefits to having a boy in our midst:
1. On Saturday morning, Clay came to my door and said he had something to show me. He had gotten up and taken a little yard tool (um, like I know the name of it) and FIERCELY attacked the large bush that separates our front door. He demonstrated that now I can see if he’s home from my driveway and he can do the same. FURTHERMORE, he also purchased rat traps AND PUT THEM OUT AROUND MY HOUSE FOR ME.
2. Yesterday afternoon, I had to go to a Very Formal Bridal Shower at which I was a hostess with the mostest. I was running late and, upon getting my dress on, suddenly remembered that this was the dress I always have to have help zipping up because I can’t reach the zipper when it gets near the top of the dress. I realized that there was only one viable option and, with a deep breath, called Clay.
“Um, can you come down here and help me out with something?”
“Sure, what?”
“Well, you see the thing is, I NEED YOU TO ZIP MY DRESS UP THE REST OF THE WAY.”
Dead silence. And then –
“Wow.”
For the record, it wasn’t a “I’m really excited WOW.” It was a “WHY DID I MOVE HERE WOW.”
Clay shows up about 20 seconds later (he obviously understood that time was of the essence) and proceeds to look at the back of the dress and say those eight dreaded words that no boy should ever say to a girl:
“I don’t think it’s going to zip up.”
I flipped around with the heat from a thousand fiery suns radiating from my eyes and ASSURED him that the dress was going to zip up AND SO MAYBE HE SHOULD JUST GET TO ZIPPING, NO?
I was ready to walk out the door 30 seconds later with the dress fully zipped up, thankyouverymuch.
3. Before coming over for dinner with Cate and I last night, Clay texted to tell me he’d bring the salad to go with our pasta and then walked through the door holding this:
That’s right. He went and bought three side salads at McDonald’s. How awesome is that?
You know, before Clay moved here, Cate and I were kind of wondering what it was going to be like to have a boy in our midst. We wondered if it might be a little awkward at first and if we could be ourselves around him, if we could really just let our true selves show through. This weekend let us really test the waters as it was pretty much non-stop Clay + Cate + ABB and, if the zipper story above wasn’t enough to let you know that things are going swimmingly, perhaps the following 24 seconds I captured of our evening together last night will give you a little peek into just how much we’re enjoying having Clay here now.
Call me crazy, but I think the three of us are going to be just fine being ourselves around each other.
