BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY: SARA'S WEDDING EDITION

Huntsville, AL to New Orleans, LA
10-4-2012

Steve and I left home this morning after kind of oversleeping a bit.  Oops!  He'd gotten home from Albuquerque near midnight after a work trip, and so we'd gotten in bed later than we had intended.  We had to jump up and get everything ready to go, since we were bringing some of Sara's wedding stuff down for her, and we finally got on the road at about 9:00.

We started out with a big WTF this morning when we stopped for gas.  We pulled up to the pump, and right in front of us was a lady with a big leather glove on her arm.  She was holding a giant red tailed hawk!  Wha?  That is not a normal sight at our local Chevron station!  That alone would have been weird, but Steve made it weirder.  When we both saw the lady and the bird, we looked each other and then back at the bird.  Out of nowhere I heard Steve mutter in this tiny, scared sounding voice say, "All I need is to get some gas."  I looked back at him and he was still staring, wide eyed, at the hawk.  I wasn't sure what was wrong, but I thought he might be scared the bird lady would bring the thing over to him while he was out of the car and the bird would attack him.  I had a bad moment thinking he was going to freak out because of a heretofore unknown avian phobia.  Fortunately, he was just zoned out, having an inner monologue, and for some reason he said the last bit of it out loud.

When we finally got on the road, the drive was almost uneventful.  We did see a white, convertible hearse filled with flowers, which is not something you see everyday.  I also got sick to my stomach, which is always a great deal of fun when you're on a road trip.  Luckily I had some medicine with me, so that was almost gone by the time we hit New Orleans.

We're staying in an awesome hotel called Masion St. Charles.  It's an odd little place, owned by the Quailty Inn folks.  The website says that parts of the hotel used to be Antebellum homes, but I'm not sure our particular building is one of them.  THe room has very high ceilings and unusual dimensions, but it could have just been built to look like an old house, I guess.  The room decor is unusual, but more fun than a regular hotel.  We have black and purple striped carpet that makes it look like Tim Burton might have been the interior decorator.  Also there is this painting, and it scares the heebies out of me.  It'll be fun trying to sleep with that guy watching me!

Pleasant Dreams.

When we finally got checked in, we had dinner at Voodoo BBQ, which was delicious, if you like barbecue, and I do.  There were quite a few of the wedding guests there already, so it was a little awkward at first. There were so many new people to meet, but we still had fun getting to know them.  I'd also like to mention that New Orleans is freaking HOT.  I forgot how absolutely humid it is here, and even though it probably wasn't more than 85, maybe 87 degrees, it felt like 95.  Yuck.

Our first outing that was planned was a ghost tour, done by the Haunted History tour company.  We waited forever for our cabs to arrive, and we wound up getting there right before the tours started.  Unfortunately, Steve and I almost immediately got separated from the rest of the group.  We payed our admission first, and we thought everyone else was behind us.  By the time we started walking with our tour group, we realized that everyone else had been put in a completely separate group, and no one knew where we had gone.  Apparently, Sara panicked when she couldn't find us (Sorry!) but we finally got in touch with each other by cell, so she knew we hadn't been kidnapped and sold for parts on Bourbon Street! :)

Our tour was very interesting, although it would have been better if we could have heard everything that the guy was saying.  New Orleans is so freaking loud, even on the quieter streets.  One of our guides was a psychologist/sociologist (I think) that specialized in human perception, which is one of the reasons he is involved in the whole paranormal thing.  He actually works with ghost hunters as the person who goes over their data instead of going on the actual hunt.  Since he isn't tainted by the spookiness of the actual hunt and he knows the things that simple psychology can explain, he can look for truly unusual things without getting floor creaks and regular noises confused with paranormal activity.  He seemed like a fascinating man, and I think he'd be interesting to talk to.  The only bad part of the tour was this jackass (sorry, Aunt Brenda) who thought he was so funny, and he really, really wasn't.  He was annoying, and he kept making bad jokes and being a jerk.  Luckily he, and his drunk girlfriend, left before the tour was over.  Yikes.  At any rate, we heard some really good stories, one of which still gives me chills.  It had nothing to do with anything paranormal, and everything to do with the fact that the people involved were tortured and the husband killed in such a terrible way by people they knew.  We also saw the LaLaurie Mansion, which is famous in ghost lore and supposedly a very haunted house.  I'd read about it many times, and never expected to roll up on it unexpectedly, even on a ghost tour!  The history behind what happened there is awful, but again, mainly due to the human inhabitants of the house rather than the ghosts.  In fact, I'm going to say that the tour, while interesting, didn't really seem like a ghost tour to me.  I mean, yes, we got ghost stories and info on supposed hauntings, but it seemed like we got more regular history about the buildings we saw than anything really spooky.  I'm OK with that, because I enjoyed the tour, but I would have liked a few chills about things going bump in the night!

New Orleans in a truly interesting city, and I wish I could have learned more about it on our tour, but they only had specific places they talked about.  I've also learned that New Orleans smells SO BAD.  Oh, it was horrible.  I have an almost super-human sense of smell, so it was an assault on my nose that almost made me faint.  Luckily we moved around so much that I wasn't enveloped by any particular stink for too long.  The place is dirty, filthy, and completely amazing.  

We finally met back up with everyone and made our way back to the hotel.  We are now chilling - literally- by our excellent air conditioner and are about to go to bed.  I can already tell that this place, like Athens, GA and Savannah, GA, is going to be a two shower a day town. I just hope I brought enough underpants!

Goodnight!

NOTABLE SIGHTINGS:  The gas station raptor lady, a convertible hearse (in north Alabama, not in NOLA), two Eastern European hookers in shorts so short and tight that everyone picked out sympathy wedgies, the looks on Ron's kid's faces when they realized the two women were were hookers, and a cockroach the size of one of my middle fingers crawling in an empty margarita cup. Seriously, I could have forgone the taxi and ridden that guy back to the hotel!

I will never sleep again.

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Why do I have so much trouble when getting my hair cut?  As some of you know (the ones who have seen me in person, anyways), for the past year or so, I've been growing my hair long again.  I'd decided to do it so that when Sara's wedding rolled around, I could actually get my hair styled up, because my regular haircut was too short to really do anything interesting with.

Almost the only thing I'd been doing with any regularity was getting my bangs cut, and even something as simple as that wasn't without its problems.  You'd think that just getting about a quarter of an inch of hair snipped off of a relatively small part of my head wouldn't be difficult, but every stylist who ever cut it managed to do it differently than the last.  After many, many trips to the salon, I'd finally figured out what to tell them to get my bangs to look consistent-ish, and I shouldn't have changed anything.  Alas, Friday afternoon I made one simple request: I asked him to make the edges of my bangs a little bit longer so they would blend into the rest of my hair.  He said he'd have to cut some of my longer hair to make that happen and I didn't argue.

While he was cutting, we began to talk, and I didn't really start paying attention to what he was doing until he'd grabbed a handful of my hair and ran a pair of scissors across it.  Oy.  To make a long story short, I walked in to get my bangs trimmed, and I walked out with a completely different haircut.  Don't get me wrong it's a great cut, probably the best one I've had in two years, but yikes!  At least there is still enough left for me to have fixed up for the wedding.  I hope.

2) I'm so embarrassed.  My Facebook friends already know about this, but I'm going to elaborate a little bit.  I had a very busy day yesterday.  You know, one of those days where your "To Do" list is stupidly long and detailed and you just go from one thing to the other without much of a break.  I can only assume that's why I didn't have any idea that my pants had split right down the back, from my waist to the back of my knee.  It wasn't even a split seam, it was a full on, ripped-through-the-fabric hole that I didn't notice.

I was folding laundry when Steve got home from work yesterday.  I was in our room, standing by the bed when Steve walked in.  He started laughing and told me about my pants.  I almost fainted.  I'd been shopping!  I'd been in public places!  I had no idea when the hole had appeared in my pants, and for all I know it had been there the whole time and no one felt comfortable telling me!  AHHH!

I've been thinking about it, very hard, and there is a chance it happened when I got back in the car after getting groceries.  I remember my pants catching on the seat belt thing in the car.  I also seem to remember sitting down in my office and thinking I sat on something, so it could have ripped when I was at home, but I can't be sure!!!!! It could have just been the ripped edge catching on things!

If you're wondering why I told people about this, if it was so embarrassing and all, I figure if I've got to deal with the embarrassment, I might as well let others get a laugh out of it, too.

3)  Mr. Lee got to see Mitt Romney last week. I don't know if that's actually anything to brag about, but I thought it was pretty neat.  He was traveling for a photo convention and stayed in the same hotel with him one night.  He said the security guys basically just held everyone up while he walked through the hallway, so it wasn't like Mr. Lee got to talk to him or anything.  He said that a presidential hopeful was staying in the same hotel as 400 or more photographers, and he doesn't think any one of them actually got to take his picture. Too bad!  I think he could use all the help he can get! :)

4) I have a lip balm problem.  It's getting out of hand.

If you enlarge that picture, you can see only a fraction of the insane clutter that is my life.  Don't judge me.

ONE OF THOSE DAYS

Have you ever had one of those days where you wake up feeling super confident in yourself?  You know, you feel like you have everything under control, you get to work on time, you don't spill your coffee and you're having a great hair day?

Well, that was my day today...for about an hour.

Today marks the first time during my part-time/part-time employment with the church that we've lost a church member.  When you have people super involved and connected to the church, as some of our elderly members are, when they pass away things tend to get busy. Not only is it a sad day, but arrangements have to be made, phone calls come in and go out, and all kinds of things have to be coordinated if the visitation and funeral are going to be held here at the church. Since I currently only work two days a week, I wasn't here yesterday and I missed the initial rush of information and arrangements.

This morning I got into the office, I sat talking with the current secretary while all of the morning stuff was being taken care of.  She told me about what happened the day before and we just chit chatted about Sunday school rolls and membership programs and stuff like that.  The preacher arrived, looked at me and said "You know you're supposed to sing tomorrow, right?"  Negative.  I did not know that.  Whomever was supposed to have called me to let me know had forgotten to do so.  Honestly, though, that wasn't a big deal.  I mean, singing at a funeral is very hard, but of course I'm going to do it if asked.  My main thought about it was that I didn't even know this man!  Why did they want me to sing at his funeral?  I mean, yes, I know his daughter and everything, but it seemed odd that they'd want me to sing.

About an hour later, it was time for what I call "Trial By Fire," which is a very grand term for when I take over the secretary's desk and left to my own devices.  Basically, she sits back and watches, and I can ask her questions if I need to.  Usually there are very few problems, but today so much was going on that I just lost my brain.  My first problem came when I had to do a recording for the phone tree, which is where we record a message and send it out to church members automatically so that we don't have to call people individually.  I recorded and re-recorded the message until it sounded good, and then started the automatic calls.  I then get a call from someone telling me that I'd forgotten to say what day the funeral would be on.  I felt like a moron!  I had to re-record the message again, which was fifty times harder now that I'd screwed it up already) and send a second message to the people on the phone tree.  There are now members on the list who have two messages waiting, which isn't going to give them much confidence in my ability to do simple tasks.

After that pretty much everything went downhill.  I couldn't get phone calls to transfer (which is something I've never had happen before) and it made me seem completely incompetent to the pastor. I discovered that some disgusting person had clogged up a toilet in the basement and hadn't told anyone, leaving it to fester for two days.  I had to unclog that, and not only did it almost make me puke, but then I pretty much had to boil my hands just in case.  I had people calling and asking for directions, and I couldn't get the mental picture of the roads in my head, so I'm fairly sure that a few people hoping to come to this funeral are going to end up in Tennessee or something.  The worst part, though, was when the pastor came in and asked me if I would look up some information on the deceased man so he could put it in his eulogy.  I said "Is he even a member here?"  He just looked at me like I was insane.  I told him I'd never met the man, and he insisted that I had.  He went as far as looking up an old directory, which has pictures of everyone in it, and he pointed him out to me.  Holy cow, not only did I know that man, I liked him a lot! He was so nice. For some reason, I hadn't connected his face to the name!  He loved to hear me sing, which I suppose is why I was asked to sing at his funeral.  Oh, I felt so stupid and terrible for not realizing who he was, and the preacher must think I'm the airiest of all air heads.

So now I'm just hunched down in my chair, trying not to touch anything else, hoping that whatever bad juju I've got leaves me alone for the rest of the day so that they don't change their minds about letting me work here.

BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY

Talladega, AL
September 8, 2012

I actually thought it would take me a long time to fall asleep in a strange place, but since I felt so lousy, I just sort of dropped off.  Silver lining is that at least I got a lot of sleep!  I woke up this morning feeling almost human again.  I had two alarms set, one on the iPad and one on my iPod.  Unfortunately, I left my ear buds connected to the iPod and the alarm wasn't audible.  I am a genius.  Luckily, I had awoken on my own before the iPad alarm went off, so at least I didn't oversleep.  I lay in bed for as long as humanly possible, though, but finally I had to get up and get ready.

Before I tell you about my day, I'd just like to take a moment to thank the person who decided on using florescent lighting in the bathroom.  Oh, and for also using it over a large mirror where I might accidentally see myself naked, no less.  If I didn't have body image issues before, I have them now.  Oy.  Seriously, cheap lighting or not, no one should ever have to look at their own body in that kind of harsh, unflattering illumination.  I may never recover.  *shudder*  I also had to put on makeup in that room, and I'm fairly certain that I ended up looking like a drag queen.  The light was so bright that I couldn't gauge when I had on too much.  I kept putting more on to cover all of the ugly, but the light had some kind of x-ray quality that shone right through the makeup!  By the time I was done, I had to wipe half of it off before going anywhere.  I couldn't go into a room full of Baptists looking like a hooker!

After finally getting ready, it was time for breakfast. I honestly couldn't stand the thought of eating in the cafeteria again, not after last night.  Blerf.  I was very glad that I had secreted an emergency granola bar into my bag (since I will never again travel anywhere without food, after the debacle in the Charlotte Airport) so at least I didn't go hungry!  Yay!  The first session started at 8:00, but I hadn't found a class that had anything to do with my actual job during that time, I used that hour to clean up my room and pack the car.  When that was done, I grabbed the giant 3 ring binder that they had given us the day before and I went to the main building to wait for the QuickBook classes to begin. 

The QuickBook classes were technically why I had come to the workshop, so I was  anxious to get started.  The program makes my brain hurt, because it does so many things.  I think it's basically like balancing a very complicated checkbook, really, but it's intimidating.  The lady who was teaching the class (or rather a crash course, since it was more of an overview than an actual class) was in her 60s, and I have a feeling she thought I was much younger than I really am.  When she started talking, she said she'd been working with the program since 1999, when everyone thought computers would quit working when the year rolled over.  She looked at me and said, "...but you probably don't remember that."  I'm clearly older than 12, but I wonder how young she thought I was?  Actually, I don't care.  I think I'm going to send that lady some flowers! :)

I'd love to say I learned a lot about the program, but the two classes left a little to be desired.  The instructor was clearly an expert, so it wasn't her fault at all.  There was a lady in the class (who had also been in a couple of the other classes I'd taken) who kept interrupting the teacher with questions specific to her church.  She apparently works for a church unlike any I'd ever heard of, that has some complicated bookkeeping issues.  I don't begrudge her asking the questions, but she talked so much that we pretty much got an overview of how to use QuickBooks for HER kind of church, and it didn't apply to the other 99% of the people in the classroom. Grrr.  In fact, she talked so much that the rest of us had to walk out of the class while they were still talking, because the session was over.  Sigh.

It was lunch time by then, and I still wasn't feeling the desire of eating in the cafeteria, and since there was only one other session after that, I decided to leave.  There weren't any classes for me in the last session anyways, and besides, I had an adventure planned! 

There is a place called Wright Dairy in Alexandria, AL, and I'd wanted to go there for months.  I'd been looking for a local place to buy cheese and milk and had found information about this one during my search.  Since I realized I'd be nearby, I decided to visit!  I suppose it doesn't sound very exciting, but I love the idea of a family owned dairy, and I wanted to get some cheese and milk from them and take it home.  Don't worry, I had brought an insulated bag to carry it in.  I was ORGANIZED!  I set the GPS and drove about an hour out of my way to get there.  I didn't have any trouble finding it, but when I got there, there was a sign that said it was closed for renovations and wouldn't reopen until the 15th!  BOO!  I had checked and rechecked their website to make sure they would be open when I went by, and according to their site they should have reopened on September 1, but alas, I guess their renovations had gone over time or something.  I felt very Clark Griswold-ian at being thwarted, but there was no moose to punch, so I just drove away. :(  Oh well, you never know what is happening with a place like that, and if it is family owned, there are a million reasons why it wouldn't be open, so I forgave them.  Certainly I'll be back down there one of these days.

So I gave up on that adventure and headed back home.  I actually drove into a pretty vicious rainstorm in Boaz that made driving almost impossible, but I passed through pretty quickly.  I remembered that I was going to have to go out later that evening and get a frozen lasagna to bake for the youth's fundraiser lunch the next day, so my adventure turned out to be stopping at a Piggly Wiggly not too far from where I live.  I don't think I've been in an actual Piggly Wiggly since I was 7 years old, and it was classy.  Any place that plays the Bama game over the P.A. must be top notch. After that,  I came home and crashed.  It had been a long couple of days. 

BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY

Talledega, Alabama
September 7, 2012

After getting on the road this morning, I finally stopped feeling so anxious.  I guess I had just freaked out about the whole thing so hard that I'd broken through to the other side. Well, that and I took an anti-anxiety pill. Those things are very helpful!

I had only been driving for about 5 minutes though, when suddenly everything was engulfed in a thick, white fog.  Greeeeeeeeeat.  It was probably the worst fog I'd seen in years and when I ran into it, I was trying to drive along a curvy, mountain road. That was not fun at all.  I kept expecting the fog to lift, because the sun was already up fairly high, but it couldn't get through. It was like Silent Hill. You couldn't see the cars ahead of you until you were practically right on top of them, and you couldn't see anything along the sides of the road, so it was very creepy.  The fog lasted almost the entire drive to Talledega.  I also got behind the slowest people in the universe, so I didn't make it to the campus until later than I had hoped, but I was still there in plenty of time. Yay!

Getting checked in was super easy, and I was given a giant folder full of stuff immediately, so all of the worrying I did about wondering around aimlessly was for nothing. Eh.  My fist class was for new. Treasurers and financial secretaries, and it was fairly interesting. Well, at least my mind didn't wander off while he was talking.  We headed to lunch after that, and while I was standing in line, I got a bunch of text messages all at once. It was weird, because I don't usually get many texts at all. I couldn't ignore them because they were actually about something really important, so I hope the other attendees didn't think I was being standoffish. I'm not usually one to use my phone while I eat, but this couldn't be helped.

The food was sort of bland and industrial tasting, so I couldn't make myself eat very much. I ended up throwing most of it away and going to the chapel, where our next session would be held.

We had a fairly brief session out there, and I had a very bad moment when I thought one of my ex boyfriends was there and about to get up on stage to talk. I thought he was the guy I dated the summer before my senior year who was so much older than me, and there is no way that meeting wouldn't have been awkward, but thank goodness it was just a guy who looked like my ex. Yeesh. I feel bad, though, because I know the man on stage saw me staring at him very intently while trying to decide if he was the guy I thought I knew. I'm sure he thought I looked unhinged.  Sorry, guy!

We had a couple of other sessions, and most of the information just flew right past me. I've been trying to pick workshops that pertain to what I will actually be doing at church, but the thing about tax forms pretty much blew my brain apart. She talked so fast, and she said a bunch of stuff like, "you have to fill out form w-4 and then make sure it has a w-3 cover letter, and then the next thing you have to do is make sure the T-2000 is stapled to the BMX and then filed under purple, because the IRS always checks for purple." She might as well have been speaking in Klingon. I'm just glad I get to keep the book, because I'm going to have to go back and read everything again to see if it makes any more sense.

At dinner, I did something that makes me feel so rude, and it was completely unintentional. I was sitting alone, trying to choke down another meal when a lady asked it she could sit next to me. I think she was just looking for someone to talk to, because almost everyone there had a coworker along, so she was lonely.  I'd eaten about as much as I could make myself, and I sat and did. Little chit-chat with her, but I was starting to feel kind of yucky and I didn't want to sit at the table anymore. I told her, kind of abruptly, that it had been nice to talk to her, but I needs to go back to my room to see if my air conditioning had been fixed. (It hadn't been working at first.) I didn't mean to be rude, I promise, but she looked kind of taken aback. I feel really bad if I was rude, because I wouldn't have done that on purpose.  I was feeling quite awful by the time I got back to my (thankfully) much cooler room.  I had begun to think I was comings own with the flu. My muscles hurt all over and my stomach hurt, and I was cold and  dizzy. Maybe it was the food, who knows, but I proceeded to be unwell in that room.

I was still cold and sore and so very tired when I finally managed to pull myself together again, and since I still had one more class to attend, I went back to the classroom.  I sat there trying not to fall asleep, or get sick again, while she talked. The class seemed to take forever. We were supposed to have some kind of "fellowship time" after the class was over, but I just couldn't do it. I came back to my room, changed into my pajamas, and wrapped myself up in a blanket. These people probably think I'm a huge snob, or at least quite unpleasant, because I haven't been too friendly with anyone. Well, I'm not being mean, I guess, just being kind of to myselfish. I hope no one thinks I'm being rude, I just don't feel well.  Tomorrow I'll be attending the Quickbooks classes, and maybe I'll feel better then and can be more chatty.  Who knows?

THE ADVENTURE BEGINS

OK, so adventure seems like a strong word to use here, but whatever.  Anything can be an adventure, right? :)

I'm on my way (or, at least I will be soon) to the financial workshop I mentioned in my last post.  Whee.  I finally got in touch with someone who would tell me where I needed to go when I got there, so that helped me out tremendously!  Now I know where to check in and where the thing is going to be. 

I've realized that I am not as laid back as most people would be about attending something like this, or at least that's the impression I'm getting.  I don't like not knowing what I'm supposed to be doing!  If this were a vacation or something I wouldn't care. I don't worry about about schedules for that kind of thing.  However, someone paid for me to go to this workshop and I'd rather not be moseying in two hours late to something because I'd been circling the compound, going from building to building asking where I'm supposed to be.  It's been 17 years sense I've been to this place, and since I was in a big van with a bunch of other teenagers, I wasn't exactly paying attention to what was going on when we got there. 

I think I'm way more anxious about this sort of thing than I need to be, honestly.  Part of it is that I don't tend to drive long distances by myself very often (and ever since I ended up in that person's barn, I'm not sure I trust the GPS completely.)  The next part is that I'm worried it'll all be over my head.  Damnit, Jim, I'm an artist, not an accountant!  What if I can't retain anything?  The other part is that I'm a complete flake and I'm worried that I'm going to do something dumb.  That probably speaks volumes about my self esteem, but seriously, I do dumb stuff all of the time without realizing it and I don't want to do anything that reflects badly on my church.  I'm rarely ever appropriate, especially when I get awkward, and since I'm going to be in a room full of people I don't know, I'm going to get awkward. Oy.  Can you get excommunicated from the Southern Baptist Convention?

This is the first time I've ever traveled for work, for any reason.  I've never even stayed in a hotel by myself before, so this is a whole new thing for me!  All I want is to get there and back safely, and hopefully learn the hastared computer program/financial stuff in the process.

Anyways, so there you go!  Keep your fingers crossed for me!  I'll either come back a tiny bit more comfortable with the idea of dealing with our church's finances, or I will have been chased from the place with torches and pitchforks. 

Of course, maybe I'll just skip the whole thing and make a detour to Auburn to watch football with some friends.  Would that be so wrong? :)

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

 1) 

   Yes!

2)  Yesterday we had another "fun" weather day.  It actually didn't get too bad until right before we were going to have to leave for church in the evening, though.  That kind of sucked.  Honestly, we probably wouldn't have gone since the weather was getting ugly, but since Steve plays in the church orchestra and I run the A/V stuff, we didn't just want to not show up in case they had decided to have services after all.  The whole "snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night" stuff also seems to apply to Baptist ministers.

We were pulling out of our driveway just as the guy on the radio was saying "Please take cover now."  Great.  It wasn't raining or anything yet, and it didn't even seem to be that bad outside, so we pressed on.  Of course, by the time we had gone more than half-way, we finally saw the wall cloud of death hanging right over where our church is located.  Honestly, the sky looked like that scene in Ghostbusters when the gateway for Zuul was opening over the apartment building.  It was scary.  We were too close to the church at that point to turn around and drive home, so we drove as fast as we could to get there.  The bottom proceeded to fall out of the sky right as Steve and I were getting out of the car, and by the time we made it inside we were both soaked.  There was a little, crazy old woman standing by the doorway, convinced that she was going to drive herself and her 85 year old husband home through what was now an almost solid sheet of water, and we all but had to tackle her to keep her from trying.  I still don't understand why staying dry in a safe church with a basement was less appealing to her than driving over a mountain through a flash flood/tornado.

We ended up having a short service down in the basement, but luckily the tornado never materialized and we were all able to leave safely afterwards.

3) This is the weekend I'm scheduled to go to Talledega for the conference on the computer program we use at church.  I feel weirdly unprepared for the whole adventure, honestly.  All I was sent was an itinerary.  Maybe I'm just thick or something, but isn't it unusual for a conference of any kind NOT to send you some type of information packet if you're attending?  I mean, yes, I got the itinerary of the classes and lectures I'll be going to while I'm there, but there was zero information about what part of the conference center to go to, what time to be there, when to check into the room, whether or not I needed to bring a laptop and other little things like that.  Is that the way things like this usually go?  I even contacted the people who were running the conference to see if I needed anything else and they said no. I told my pastor that's I'd just show up, but that there had better be signs or something, or I might end up spending the weekend at a youth fellowship.  I could pass for a teenager, right? :)

4)  I've been giving  a lot of parenting advice lately. Of course, my ideas of parenting are not contaminated in any way with experience, so I think that makes them superior, no?  :)  Heh, just kidding!  I'm sure all my friends take my advice with a whole bag of rock salt.  At least I hope so.  Yesterday I offered a couple at my church, who have a troublesome 3 year old, Bear's old kennel to shut her up in when she's having a tantrum.  It probably sounded bad, but come on...throw a couple of My Little Ponies in there, a blanket and a juice box and she'd be fine.  :) 

5)  I've realized that almost every time I go into a building these days, I'm sort of unconsciously scoping it out to see if it would be a good place to be during a zombie apocalypse.   Well, not necessarily just a zombie apocalypse, but any situation where civilization has broken down and I'd have to be able to hide and/or defend myself.  That probably doesn't speak well about the way I see the future, does it?  I think reading "The Stand" at an impressionable age has warped my mind.

6) Oooh, I've been working on more stuff for Sara's wedding and this is a box I've done as a card holder for her reception.  I think it turned out pretty well.

I didn't even know I knew how to decoupage!  I love to decoupage!  This wedding is going to be awesome!*

*Not because of the decoupage.  Just in general.  Still, the decoupage** is also awesome. 

**I also like to say the word decoupage, but it really stops looking like a real word after a while. Decoupage.

ANOTHER QUICKY

Today I knocked a bunch of stuff off of my desk. Not on purpose, of course.  It was cluttered and I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing.

Don't judge me.

Anyways, as I was picking things up, I found one of the bright pink Post-Its that I use to make random notes to myself with while I'm doing things on the computer.  Normally I use these notes when I'm working on graphic design stuff so that I don't forget colors or files or whatever, but the one I found today was apparently some sort of list.  It read:

VBS
Cabinets
YouTube Videos
Spanish
Peaches

I have no idea what any of those things have in common, nor why they'd all be on the same list.

My life confuses me sometimes.

EDIT:  The really odd thing is that everything on this list is marked off.  I must have obviously finished whatever it was. 

A QUICKY

Have you ever been in a position where you had the chance to do a nice thing for someone, maybe even a great thing, but you knew if you did it, it would be a huge mistake?

I wish I could be specific, because I'd love to get some actual feedback from any of you who'd care to give me some, but I can't because it involves someone else's life and business and I have no right to pick it apart even on this insignificant blog.  I'll be as general as possible.

A friend of mine recently sent me an email asking for help. I was torn between wanting to help them and not wanting to disrupt my life for them (which would be the result of doing this favor.) I decided that I am not going to help this person, even though technically I am capable of doing it, because I have since learned that my "friend" is a liar, a thief, and someone who won't take responsibility for their own actions.  I don't want to disrupt my own life for someone who would probably turn on me later.

It probably doesn't sound like much of a dilemma, I guess, but there is a part of me that feels so guilty for not immediately agreeing to help.  Isn't that what we are supposed to do?  Help those that can't help themselves?  In this case I'm probably going to be in a position to watch this person self destruct in a big way because I refused to help them, but I can't make myself responsible for every person with a sob story, right? I don't want to be a sucker, and I know that's what I'd be if I gave in.

Anyways, I've made up my mind that I'm going to have to let this person fend for themselves, but it doesn't make me feel very good inside.  I know it's the right decision, but it still makes me feel rotten.

I guess I just needed to vent.  

MORE RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Y'all, I fell down the stairs while I was at work the other day.  Why am I so accident prone?  Geez.  Actually, I didn't fall down that far, and by the grace of God (and a call from the pastor's daughter, who needed it for an upcoming vacation) I just so happened to be holding a Styrofoam boogie board when I fell, so I didn't end up killing myself.  I was on the second to the last step when my right foot did something weird.  I still don't know if I twisted my ankle, my shoe fell off, or what, but I went flying off of the step. 

I know the fall was over in less than a second, but I seemed to just sort of hang there in midair for a moment, yelling out a slow motion  "Nooooooooooooooooooooo" in that deep, slurry voice you usually hear when someone jumps in front of a bullet in action movies.  It would have been comical if I hadn't been so sure of my own death at that moment.

Of course, then I crashed to the ground.  I landed hard, left knee first on the boogie board.  That was probably the only thing that kept me from breaking my leg.  If I'd landed without the board, I'd probably still be in the hospital getting a plastic knee cap.  My right leg twisted, but didn't take the brunt of my weight, so even though it hurt, it wasn't too bad.  I know I made a lot of noise, and the people in the office HAD to know that I'd fallen.  I didn't want to make a big deal out of it, so I didn't say anything when I went back in, and they were nice enough to ignore my limping progress across the room.  How embarrassing.

2)  I'm still going to the gym, and I've managed to lose some weight, although not nearly as much as I would have hoped at this stage.  At least people can finally kind of see that I've lost some.  It's funny, though, because when they ask me and I tell them that, yes, I've lost some weight, they always tell me that they can really tell it in my face.

It makes me wonder how fat my face was before!

3) Sara's wedding shower was last week and it went so well!  I was tickled!  Sara and I rode down together, which was great because I would have never found the house on my own. :)  One of her other bridesmaids, Hilary, held the shower at her house in Hoover, (there's some alliteration for you today) and she had it all decorated with New Orleans signs and Mardi Gras masks, and everything was so nice!  Hilary is some kind of super woman.  She just had a baby two weeks before, and she still had enough energy to throw a party!  I jumped in to help her prepare the food, and I sugared beignets, stirred red beans and rice, and made grits for the first time ever!  I also learned the hard way that grits will spit at you.  Not only did I burn the hell out of my finger, but I got splashes of grits all over me.  I was wearing a dark blue dress and by the time we got the shrimp and grits in the serving dish, I looked like Monica Lewenski. 

She had lots of guests and got some really nice gifts, and I met a a few of her sorority sisters!

Don't tell her, but I accidentally knocked her cake off of the stand when I was serving it.  I did pick it up and managed to get it back on the cake stand, but it had a big hand print on top.  I cut it all up to hide that, though.  Sorry, Sara! :)

Oh, and speaking of Hilary's baby...  Most of you know that I don't hold tiny babies because I'm fairly sure I'll break them.  I didn't try and hold this one either, but I did approach her while she was sitting in some kind of carrier on the kitchen table.  She was being very good, and so I reached out and touched her tiny little toes that were sticking out from beneath her blanket and said "Hello, baby!"  Right away I felt her feet shaking.  It was violent and completely unnatural and my first reaction was "Oh, no! She must be freezing!" My second reaction was "AHHHHHHH!  I need an old priest and a young priest!"  It scared me because I know babies don't vibrate when they're cold!  I started to have a mild freak out, but then I realized it was the chair vibrating and not the baby.

Things like that do not help my fear of babies.

4) Last night was Steve's end-of-summer concert, which was blissfully held inside the church where they practice.  They sounded amazing.  It was probably the best I'd ever heard them play, and that's saying something.  I'm usually guilted into going to almost every concert, so I've heard them play a lot!  I'll probably have video soon so you can hear.

Anyways, as usual, I was asked to film the concert, so I found an unobtrusive corner of the church's sanctuary and set up the camera.  The first song they played was The Star Spangled Banner, and everyone stood up, as most Americans are wont to do.  Then a bunch of them turned and started staring in my direction.  It freaked me out because I didn't know what to do!  I thought maybe I was being rude or doing something wrong (I always put my hand over my heart just in case, but I wondered if that wasn't somehow wrong) but it just turned out I'd set the camera up right in front of the American flag without realizing it!  The people who turned my way proceeded to stare in my direction for the entire song and I didn't know what to do with my face or my body and I got very awkward.  I was trapped behind the camera and behind a large piece of equipment used to hold music stands, so I couldn't just move out of the way either.  By the time the song was over, my skin had crawled about as far as it could without getting away from me and I know I had the stupidest look on my face from trying to look nonchalant.  I can only hope that everyone who turned around was looking over my head or something and didn't see me.

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1)  Today I'm giving you a link to a new blog that I strongly recommend.  Organized Randomness is written by a friend of mine that I've known since the 4th grade.  Actually, saying that he's just a friend seems kind of like I'm saying he's just a guy I know.  It's way more complicated than that, but I'm not sure I can explain it to anyone who didn't know us back then.  Jordan was my first love.  He was my first real boyfriend and the first guy I ever had a dramatic, heart-rending, break-up with (as only kids who are really too young to understand what is going on can have, anyway.)  We were friends, then enemies, then friends, then dated again briefly in both junior high and high school, then enemies, then friends, then enemies, and then finally friends again and have been ever since.  See, I told you it was complicated!  I think I horrified him in a lot of ways, but he made it up by pissing me off on a regular basis, so it all evened out!  At any rate, no matter what was going on, he was always one of the people I liked the best (even when I hated him - go figure.) Now he's an Associate Dean in the College of Education and Professional Studies at Jax State, he has a gorgeous wife, and two sons who are cuter than they have any right to be.  He's also really freaking funny.  There aren't many entries so far, because he initially started to write the blog to chronicle his experience with a recent tonsillectomy, and work keeps him busy, but I hope he keeps writing. 

2) Oh, heavens, I was so embarrassed at church yesterday.  There is an older man that goes to church with me, and I like him great deal.  He's funny,  he always calls me his "Movie Star" and he's always quick to give me a big hug.  He is also one of my Facebook friends, and he had a question about something I had recently written as a status update. It was during the whole "Chick-Fil-A" debacle, and since I have friends on both sides of the debate, I was trying to alleviate a bit of the tension by making a joke.  Part of what I said was that "I didn't care who my friends were shagging..."  Apparently this dear old man didn't know what the word "shagging" meant.  Of course, when he first approached me he couldn't even remember what the word was, so I didn't know what he was talking about.  However, during the service when we have the time to shake hands and everything, he walked back to the sound booth and said, rather loudly, "Oh, I remembered the word. SHAGGING!"  I almost died.  Not only had he practically shouted the word across the church, I then had to define it for him.  There was just not enough floor to sink into.

3) The other day I was walking through the mall when one of those kiosk people stopped me.  Usually, I try to run away when they get near me because it never fails that they want to smear stuff, spray stuff, or put a device on me.  I don't like it!  This time the guy stopped me because he said he wanted to give me something.  I tried to walk by, but he said "Hey! Wait!" and held out his hand.  I figured I'd just take whatever it was and scram, but he looked at whatever was in his hand and said "Wait." and walked behind the kiosk as if he couldn't give me whatever it was in his hand and had to get another one.  It was a bait and switch, of course, and I felt like a moron for getting pulled in, but I figured that I might as well listen to his spiel, say no to him, and be on my way.  However, before I realized it, the dude grabbed a handful of my hair in one hand and a big flat iron in the other, and he started running it through my hair.  Years of training kept me from slapping the taste out of his mouth and running the other direction, plus, he had a hot iron clamped on my hair.  I thought maybe he'd iron one section of my hair and let me go, but no, he proceeded to do my entire head.  He kept talking about how smooth it made my hair and how straight it was.  All I could think was...duh.

I have the straightest hair in the universe.  I inherited my great-great-great grandmother's Native American hair, and it's almost impossible to even curl it with heat and/or chemicals, so I do not need a flat iron.  I kept telling him this.  He also clamped the thing down on a clump of hair and steam started coming off of it.  He said that it was utilizing the moisture in my hair to allow the iron to do it's work.  However, I'm smart enough to know that what he was doing was frying my hair, as well as flattening it, but it was too late for me to do anything about it at that point.  I finally got away from him, and when I got home I saw that he had made my hair look greasy and flat, which isn't a good look for me.  Not only that, I ended up having to get my hair cut because the ends started to split and break off.

Moral of this story:  If an effete little man with a fake British accent tries to hand you anything in the mall, please punch him in the throat.  Do it for me.

A QUICKY

I was recently listening to the song "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and heard something that was a little weird.

There's a part of the song that says:

"They made him blow the bugle for his Uncle Sam.
It really brought him down because he could not jam.
The captain seemed to understand,
and so the next thing the Cap went out and drafted a band..."

What the hell?!  An entire band got drafted because one trumpet player couldn't get his jam on without back up?

I bet they were piiiiiiiiiissed.

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) So, I suppose you want to know where I'm working now, huh?  Nosy Parkers.  :)  It's not exactly a secret, but I've been holding off saying anything on here because I wanted to make sure I'd be there longer than a week before I got kicked to the curb!  Heehee.  No, actually I am currently in training to take over as our church's secretary! Close your mouths, people.  Indeed, I'm going to be a church lady. Isn't that special?

The girl (woman, really, but she seems so young to me) who is currently there is more than just a little bit pregnant, and she's going to be a stay-at-home mom when her son Owen is born.  She's also a missionary and the wife of a doctor in training, so it's probably inevitable that she will be moving to someplace where they can do their thing once her husband is fully inDOCtrinated (see what I did there?)  Heh.  Sorry.

Anyways, she isn't leaving until late October, so right now I'm there twice a week to learn how to do everything, but I'm almost afraid I'm not quite smart enough to handle the job.  That's not a cry for help or anything, I promise, but the position isn't just answering the phones and filing visitor slips.  I'm fully capable of doing the office work, I know.  However, it's more of an office manager position where I'll be dealing with budgets, paychecks, taxes and important keep-the-church-solvent kind of stuff, and I've never been any good with numbers.  I'm terrified that I'm going to somehow screw something up and all the money will disappear.  I have panic attacks thinking of screwing up taxes and giving the wrong people the wrong money.  That probably sounds silly to most of you but SHUT UP! YOU DON'T KNOW MY PAIN!!!!!  I'm math stupid.  If I wasn't, I'd be a doctor right now.  Honestly.  I wanted to go into medicine, but there are too many ways to kill a person when you can't do numbers. Oy. If I can just keep from panicking, I think I'll be OK, but budget stuff will never not scare me.  They are sending me to a two day class in Talladega to learn QuickBooks and other financial stuff specifically tailored for churches, so maybe I'll learn what I need to know.  I was upfront with my pastor about my math skills, but he still took a gamble.  Hopefully I won't let him down!  I hope not.

I'll let you know periodically how things are going.  I'd have done it long before now, but I'd forgotten the password for my blog and couldn't write anything while I was at work! :)

2) The cabinets are finally done, and they look great, but everything else is a frigging mess.

When I was young, I read a story called "The Most Expensive Curtains."  It was about a 19th century farm girl who's parents let her pick a new set of curtains for her bedroom.  She picked some she loved, but then decided that they made her walls look dingy, so she talked her brother into repainting her room.  The new paint made the bookcase look bad, and on and on.  You can see where the story went from there.

Yeah, I read awesome books as a kid.

Our cabinets turned into expensive curtains.  It wasn't completely a surprise, of course, because any new remodel does cause chaos, but I wasn't expecting the entire house to be affected.  Since the new counters and cabinets are in a different formation than the last, we had to replace the flooring.  We might not have had to if we could have found the same kind of vinyl tiling we already had, but it had been discontinued.  Sigh.  We opted to install a floating wooden floor on top of the vinyl.  The floor turned out great, but we had to remove the baseboards to put it in, so those and a lot of the trim in the kitchen will have to be replaced when we can find matching wood, which is proving difficult.  We will also eventually install the same kind of flooring in my office, the living room and the hallway so that it will all match, but that won't be anytime soon!  The walls look like hell because the old cabinets were hung a bit lower than our new ones are and there are holes and pits and gouges where they were removed.  We're going to have to work magic on what is underneath the cabinets and repaint the rest of the room so that the shades of red will match all over.  Since we had to move the fridge, a big bookshelf was displaced, and so my formidable collection of cookbooks are currently in the guestroom along with a ton of other stuff we had to move and haven't found a permanent place for.  We've got furniture all out of place because we had to reorganize to install the floor and cabinets, but we can't move them back until we get a chance to paint.  We're also going to have to repair the ceiling and replace a window.  You'd think we would have had plenty of time to finish everything by now, but we've also had a lot of other non-kitchen related things going on and when we do have spare time, we like to take baths and sleep and stuff.  Also, we don't want to do like we did when we first bought the house and only halfway finish projects, so we want to be able to do one thing at a time from start to finish, and that is going to take chunks of time we just don't have right now.  I'd say by the year 2015 we will be able to move about freely in our home again!  :)

But hey...awesome cabinets!  Pictures to come!

3) I'm a member of Pinterest, and I've come to have a love/hate relationship with it lately.  I didn't exactly jump on the bandwagon with the site, because I joined it before pretty much everyone else I know.  Oooooooh, that makes me sound kind of hipsterish. Sorry.  :)  No, I honestly didn't know what I was joining when I found it.  I was just looking for wedding inspiration stuff for Sara, and since I couldn't get the pictures from the site without joining it, I joined.  Baaaaaaaaaaaa.  However, it wasn't long before I was using it for the reasons it was intended...a digital bulletin board, if you will.  It's also been an invaluable tool for me so that I don't continue to bookmark a thousand pages that get lost in my bookmark list.  I have too many bookmarks as it is, and I usually can't remember why I saved the page in the first place.

I generally enjoy looking at it, because it's full of a lot of really great ideas in a very accessible format.  I found neato recipes and craft instructions that have helped me learn to do a lot of interesting stuff, and there isn't a day that I peruse the site that I don't find some kind of helpful hint I can use.  I also enjoy the fact that I can figure stuff out about people before they come right out and say it.  I'm fairly certain that on more than one occasion I've figured out who was getting married or having a baby before it became public knowledge.

However, I'm beginning to notice a few things about the site that get on my dang nerves.  For one, I get annoyed when it becomes obvious that the people I follow don't actually read the things from other users that they "re-pin."  There have been tons of "These three simple ingredients do this awesome thing when you mix them together! WOW!" pins that are obviously 100% wrong.  You cannot mix mountain dew and peroxide and make a giant glow stick!  I think those pins only bother me because it should be common sense that you can't make half of those things work with the directions given.

I also get annoyed with the "Pin Now, Read Later" ones because that just seems stupid. How do you know you want to pin something if you don't read it first?  If you pin everything that has a pretty picture and interesting tag line, you are going to end up with a lot of useless garbage cluttering up your feed as well as the feed anyone following you has.  Yeah, I went there... you know who I'm talking to.  ; )

It isn't just the pinners that get annoying, though.  I've started to notice that a lot of bloggers have started pandering to the Pinterest folks.  I mean, it isn't a bad thing to want people to pin your stuff in order to bring in new readers, but it doesn't do to whore yourself out for it.

Anyway, I suppose to nutshell my issue is to just come out and say that apparently I'm the only person in the universe who knows how to properly use Pinterest!  Hah! Yeah, that whole rant made so much more sense last night when I started writing it.

BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY

Gatlinburg & Pigeon Forge, TN
7/22/12

This morning was our "leaving day" but we weren't in a hurry to get back home.

We woke up fairly early, packed, and decided to forgo the hotel restaurant so that Steve could avoid the overly friendly host. Heehee.

(I'd like to tell you which hotel we were staying in, because it was a nice place and a great place to stay if you're in the area, but I've been burned by the random corporate web-bots crawling around and finding my blog, and I don't want to get the guy fired.  Overly friendly host or not, I don't want to be responsible for getting anyone fired!)

We had heard great things about a place called "Log Cabin Pancakes," which is apparently a town institution, so we decided to have breakfast over there.  The parking lot wasn't full, so we thought we'd be able to get something to eat fairly quickly, but I had forgotten a very important detail about staying in Gatlinburg...people can walk to most places!  We got as far as the porch and that is it.  The line was insane, and trailing out the door and down the front of the building.  It was like Clary's in Savannah.  We pretty much decided that no pancakes were worth standing in a line like that, so we left.  It wasn't just that place, though.  Every pancake/breakfast place we saw was completely packed out with a line out the door.  Alas, no pancakes for us!  Oh, well...

We drove out of Gatlinburg and headed towards Pigeon forge so that we could go to the outlets.  I love shopping at outlet malls.  I don't know why, though, because I'm fairly sure that the prices aren't that much less than the regular stores, but it's the IDEA that you can get cheap stuff I suppose!

On our way there, we stopped at what I dubbed "THE MALL 'O CRAP" which was a really big store full of all of those cheesy souvenirs that are the staple and lifeblood of the tourist trade in places like that!  I loved it.  I always love to see the trashy t-shirts and tacky stuff that tourist traps have to offer.  Don't worry, though, we didn't buy anything.  I think the highlight of that visit was a shirt that I'm pretty sure was marketing that reality show "Swamp People" that said "Gator Done!"  Now that's good stuff! :)  When we left there, we hadn't gotten too far when Steve happened to look out of his window and say "HEY!"  Right there, in plain sight of where we had actually stopped yesterday while we were looking for the store that I was convinced didn't really exist, was the store that we had been looking for!  No, honestly, it was right there.  I felt so stupid.  Not only was it in plain sight, it was right next to a restaurant I'd told Steve I wanted to try the day before.  We had just somehow blanked out the whole thing, which is even more amazing since the place is frickin' huge. Even the GPS hadn't found it, so I'm under the impression that it was built overnight just to mess with us.

The store is called "The Incredible Christmas Store" and it contains everything you could ever imagine might be wanted for Christmas decor.  We even saw a life size nativity scene, which my mom would have loved, but we didn't have the trunk space for the entire holy family. ; )  We stayed in there a long time, mainly because the place was enormous.  I found a couple of mermaid ornaments that I wanted to put in my bathroom (nothing for the tree, alas) and I also found a gorgeous music box that I fell in love with.  It was a big, wooden thing that had these giant brass disks that played kind of like a record would.  It was so beautiful.  I don't know if my description makes any sense, but I wanted it so bad.  Unfortunately, I didn't have $16,500 to spare.  Ouch. 

After we left there, we figured we'd go ahead and eat lunch, so we went to "The Partridge and Pear," which was the restaurant I'd seen the day before.  It was such a neat place!  It was Christmas themed, but not in a cheesy way.  It looked like a really lovely home that had been decorated for Christmas, but not with Santas or anything like that, and each dining room was different.  We were in the atrium, which was lined with windows and had an inset, hand-painted pear tree on the ceiling. That painting even had atmospheric distortion, which amazed me.  It was gorgeous and the food was so good!  We ordered way too much, but everything we tried was delicious.  We'll go back on our next trip!

We got back on the road and finally made it to the outlets.  Oh, and have I mentioned that traffic in these towns is horrible?  It took us forever to get to every place we went.  It was frustrating!  Anyways, we walked the entire mall and, surprisingly, didn't buy much of anything.  The prices weren't very low, and it was too hot to try on clothes.  We did get shoes at the Croc store, and before you laugh and point, I need to specify that we got flip-flops, not the ugly kind.  They are the most comfortable shoes on the planet!  The last pair I bought, I have worn until the bottoms have flattened out and the tread is completely gone.  I was lucky to find my size, so I got the only two pairs they had left in a size 7 so that I could stock up. :)

We drove out of town to buy some medicine for Steve (he was feeling better, but still not so hot) and then we decided to head back to Gatlinburg so that we could drive through the national park.  Well, that was the original idea. We got back into town and Steve decided he wanted something to drink, so we walked back to the Parkway to find a place where slushies could be attained.  We stopped long enough to ride a chair lift (and had a picture made like the one we had on our honeymoon) and then we got our drinks.  Back in the car, I asked how far away the park was and Steve decided that he wanted to skip it.  BAIT AND SWITCH!  He really just wanted a slushy!  BOOOOOOO!  Oh, well....Gatlinburg isn't that far away!  We'll go back and look at the mountains one day.  Heehee.

So, we headed home & now we're here.  We'd had a very good trip!

BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY

Gatlinburg, Tennessee
7/21/12

This morning I had to get Steve out of bed before he slept the day away. It wasn't very late, but had I not woken him and made him feel guilty for not getting up, I'm fairly certain he wouldn't have gotten out of bed till noon! I probably should have let him sleep, it is his vacation and all, but this is the only full day we'd have to do a lot of stuff, and I didn't want to waste it. : )

We started out getting breakfast in the hotel restaurant. The host was very, very friendly with Steve. Like, weirdly friendly. He followed us to our table and actually asked Steve some inappropriate questions, like how much he weighed! Wha? It was very strange. I thought maybe he was flirting with Steve, as he was a bit effete, but I noticed he was wearing a wedding band. Of course, that could mean anything these days. My guess is that his marriage may not have been legal in Tennessee, if you know what I mean. :). It is actually kind of funny in retrospect, because Steve was trying to be nice, but you could tell he was very uncomfortable.  I asked him later if he was weirded out because the guy was flirting with him, but he said no.  He was actually more uncomfortable with a complete stranger trying to start a conversation with him! Ha!  I'm sure the guy didn't mean any harm, but he had some boundary issues for sure.

After escaping from the restaurant, we headed towards the Parkway, which is what the main drag here is actually called. We parked and began walking. our first stop was at Cooter's, the Dukes of Hazzard museum and gift shop place. We spent a loooong time in there. Steve is a big fan, remember? The museum was actually fairly small, but had a lot of neat stuff in it. Mostly the things on display were props, costumes and merchandise, but it was pretty interesting.  Steve got a few souvenirs, but he wouldn't let me get a Dixie horn for the Seabring. I was crushed. 

We walked on, popping in and out of different shops that looked interesting. It was really muggy outside, and I was sweating so bad. It was gross!  We visited a Hollywood Car Museum, which was fun (and also had awesome air conditioning.) We walked on along a bit further, but soon decided to cross the road and start heading back. By this time we were really hot and probably more than a little dehydrated, so to remedy that, guess what we decided to do? A moonshine tasting! True story. Did you know that there is a distillery right here in Gatlinburg that makes legal moonshine in many different favors? Did you also know that the distillery's store lets you taste all the flavors you want, for free, like some kind of hillbilly wine tasting?  Steve and I were curious as to what it would taste like, so we showed our IDs and got a tiny plastic cup that looked like the kind we use during the Lord's Supper. I chose the peach kind, while Steve got the plain White Lightening. You know what? Moonshine is gross. No offense to the fine distillers or anything, because I'm sure the product is just not for me, but it tasted like rubbing alcohol that someone had soaked a gummi bear in. Bleh.  Steve was also not impressed.  Needless to say, we did not try another flavor! Oh, and to add some fun to that, I was just dehydrated enough to get a tiny bit buzzed. Honestly, a thimble-full of moonshine and my hearing got dim and my head and nose got really warm on the inside. It's sad, really. We walked a bit further and visited a "mall" where I convinced Steve to get into one of those water massage chambers. He had hurt his back on the golf course, and I thought it would help. Unfortunately for him, he didn't take the lady's advice and drink any water after he was done to flush the lactic acid, so he began feeling bad, but he didn't tell me until way later.

We finally got down to the aquarium, which I was so excited about! Seeing it was the only thing I knew for sure I wanted to do while we were here. Honestly, though, the visit immediately started off being very, very irritating and disappointing. First off, the place was packed. Apparently a lot of people had decided to visit that day, including a very large group from a family reunion (you knew they were all together because they were wearing the same reunion t-shirt.) I knew the place wasn't going to be empty, so the problem wasn't that it was crowded, but the people with that family reunion were so freaking rude!

There is a kind of courtesy I always assume most people should try to follow while in a place like an aquarium or a museum: you go and look at the things, don't surround it so that other people can see, don't shove your way in front of people, and after a reasonable amount of time, you move on.  This family had either never been to an aquarium, or quite possibly had never been in public, before because they did the opposite of all of those things. I approached the first tank, and was immediately shoved out of the way by some kids who apparently didn't think I needed to see the fish. I stood back, waiting my turn, but they didn't move! Seriously, I kept waiting and that knot of people just stood there talking. Ok then, I moved on. At every freaking tank, a knot of people from this family would block everyone else. They'd stand there and talk, scream, laugh, and make camera videos of the fish. Seriously?  That kind of thing is ok if you don't have a thousand people waiting behind you, but to bottleneck a whole room full of people while you pretend you are the only ones there? Unacceptable. To make matters worse, 3/4ths of the women there were pushing strollers the size of Volkswagens. Why would a baby the size of a house cat need a thing so big? Hell even if they did need it, wouldn't it make sense not to bring it into a place so full of people that you can barely move, much less maneuver a stroller? I don't mean to offend any mothers out there, and I speak from the ignorant position of someone who is child-free, but that was the icing on the cake of inconsideration. I'm sure it wasn't meant to be that way, but it would seem like common sense to me.  Anyways...enough about that. Steve and I kept getting separated, so I was basically by myself for most of the time. Boo. We met up and lost each other a hundred times, but we finally managed to get to the moving sidewalk at the same time! Woot! That was actually pretty neat, because it took us through a glass tube that ran through the big tank in the middle of the aquarium, and we got to see the sharks and sea turtles and stuff. The only bad part was that the family got behind us and spent most of the excursion screaming and bumping into us. I ended up walking off of the conveyer belt before it was over just to get away from them.  Luckily, after that things got much better.  It was still plenty crowded, but the family reunion people must have left, because I didn't see many of them after that, and the groups of people that remained seemed to have a better idea how to behave in public.  I enjoyed everything much more after that, and although I was disappointed that there were no otters at this aquarium, I did make friends with a penguin named Riley. He was so cute. I'd never seen penguins up close before, and now I love them! :)

We finally made our way out, and started back to the car. We'd decided to drive into Pigeon Forge and go to a store we'd been told about, but we never found it. We used the GPS to no avail, we drove around forever, and although we saw the buildings that were supposed to be near it, we just never saw it.  I'm beginning to think we were tricked!  We finally gave up looking and stopped in a place to get some dinner.  We apparently got seated in one of the "event" rooms where a small wedding reception was going on, so that was a bit awkward. There were a couple of other people not involved with the wedding sitting in there, too, so it wasn't too bad. I just felt like we were intruding a bit. By the time we were done eating, Steve had really begun to feel bad, so we came back to the room at about 6:00 and he fell asleep. He's been asleep ever since. I hope whatever is wrong doesn't get any worse! I'm still wide awake, though, so I've got to figure out something to do until I get sleepy.

It was a long, and except for a few wrinkles, fun day. :)

BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY

Gatlinburg, Tennessee
7/20/12

Things had been kind of stressful around our house at the beginning of this month, so Steve and I decided to take a weekend to get away.

Actually, we'd been talking about taking a weekend trip for a while, and after dealing with the long, drawn out deal with the cabinets, the whole thing with Bear, me starting a new job (more on that later,) and Steve being generally stressed out from work, we just decided to do it. The sooner the better.

One of Steve's friends from work told him that his family was planning a trip to Pigeon Forge, and that he was going to spend a day golfing. After hearing that we were thinking of going on a trip to Gatlinburg, he invited Steve to go golfing with him one day, if we happened to be close by.

We got up early this morning and, believe it or not, actually left in a timely manner. We had taken Butler to his pet "resort" the day before, so that helped out a lot! Don't tell him I said that. :). We had to drive through a lot of rain, but once we got to Tennessee, the day got much prettier.  We were listening to the audio book "Around the World In 80 Days," and just in case your curious, that is probably not the best book to listen to while you're traveling. The whole time it was on I felt like we were running behind!  We only had to make one stop, wherein I literally got chased around the car by an angry yellow jacket. I'm sure the other cars at the gas station just loved that.  The stupid bug even followed me into the car when I finally got in, but after a short freak out, we finally got him outside.

I haven't actually been to Gatlinburg since our honeymoon, and I had forgotten how gorgeous the Smokey Mountains really are. I also think that my trips out west have made me forget how green everything is out here. Everything is just so beautiful, even the kudzu!  Well, let me rephrase, the mountains and scenery are beautiful, but Pigeon Forge and the main strip of Gatlinburg are typically "tourist ugly." Tacky stores and tourist traps are kind of a scab on the edges of things, but once you get out of that, it's like Rivendell.

It took us forever to get through the Gatlinburg strip, but we finally made it to our hotel. It's right off the main drag, but far enough away that the tacky is not visible. The hotel is tall and cylindrical , and the rooms all surround the middle where the elevators are. The rooms are shaped like a piece of pie with the pointy bit cut off, which is kind of fun, but the bathrooms are tiny! The scenery is first rate, though, so small bathrooms are not a problem.

Steve had to leave almost immediately to drive back to Pigeon Forge to make his tee time, and I'm just chilling in the room.  I walked downstairs to check things out, and the hotel is packed this weekend. There is a huge family reunion being held here that I'm thinking of crashing. Do you think it would be suspect if I was the only white person attending? There is also a wedding, so I could crash that too. I guess.  I'd walk to the strip to shop or something, but we are a bit too far for that.  If Steve is gone long enough, I'm going to get into all kinds of shenanigans.

Right now I'm watching the CNN coverage of the Colorado theater shootings, which is just awful. Mitt Romney is giving a speech about it "not as a man who is running for office, but as a father..." which would be more believable if he weren't on a stage backed with a Patton worthy American flag. His speech was very lovely, though, so I shouldn't make fun.  I hate that this is happening, and it's scary since that is very, very nearby where Josh and Jeoff live.

Hopefully, once Steve gets back we can go and find something to get into. :)

(Later)

Ok, he's still not back and I am so bored!

(Later)

Freaking finally. Steve got back almost an hour and a half later than I thought. I was hungry, but I had waited to eat in case Steve came back early. Luckily it had been arranged for us to have dinner at the Pigeon Forge Mill restaurant with the family of Steve's coworker. That place was crazy busy, but we were seated relatively quickly. The food was delicious and they gave us generous portions. Very generous portions. Almost too generous. :). We were stuffed, but all of us got a chance to walk it off while we walked down the main drag of Gatlinburg's shopping area. It was a fun night, but I'm very tired.

Goodnight!

PLEASE STAND BY

BEAR 2003-2012

I suppose most of you already know that we had to put Bear to sleep yesterday afternoon.  We finally heard from the vet that the ultrasound and the other tests that they did showed that Bear had Lymphoma, which caused him to have an enlarged spleen.  It would have progressed, no matter what, and eventually he would have either starved or bled to death.  We could have brought him home and given him a few last days with us, but Steve and I knew that it would have been cruel to prolong the inevitable.  We got to see him for a while at the vet and love on him, but ultimately we had to let him go. I was there while they did it and I held his head and talked to him, and I cried like a baby. 

It was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, and it feels like I murdered one of my best friends. He trusted me.  I feel like the worst person who has ever lived.

I know in my head that we did the right thing and that he would have just gotten sicker and sicker, and I couldn't stand to see that, and even if we had brought him home we would have eventually had to take him back and have the deed done.  In my heart, though, I feel like I've done something inexcusable and that I'll never really feel good again.  I realize that's probably stupid, but right now I hurt so much that it feels true.

Butler is also taking it hard.  As far as he's concerned, Bear has always been with him, and he's sitting out in the backyard looking for Bear and wondering where he is.  It's heart breaking.

So many people have been kind and it means so much when they say that they're sorry.  I never thought that would matter, but it does.

I know that other people think we're being silly, because Bear was just a dog, but he was more than that to us.  He was our dog, our friend, our child, and a member of our family.  We love him so much, and there will always be a hole in us where he once was. We keep crying, and it just feels so awful, like we will never feel better again.

We're going to miss you, Bear.  We love you.

WELL, THIS SUCKS...

Over the past few days we've been noticing that Bear has been acting odd.  He is very apathetic and he hasn't eating very much.  We put it down to the heat, and we tried bringing the dogs inside during the hottest part of the day, but I felt guilty keeping them shut up in their kennels for so long and I'd let them back out when it got a little cooler. Of course, a little cooler was still really hot, but they always had plenty of water and shade, so I wasn't too worried.

At night, though, he was just acting very strange and he wasn't eating very much at all.  Normally, he eats all of his food, but for the past few days he'd only eat half, or maybe just a few bites total.  I tried giving him other things, like cheese and soft training treats, and he'd eat that, but his regular food was barely being touched.   At first we thought maybe there was something wrong with the food, but Butler had no trouble eating it and it didn't seems to cause him any problems.

Last night, he barely ate at all, no matter what we did, and when I took him outside before he went to bed, he got sick out there and then he just found a place and lay down without moving.  That's not normal for him at all.  After some debate, we took him to the emergency vet clinic to get him checked out.  I wasn't expecting anything big, but he was so pitiful that I was afraid not to have him checked out as soon as possible.

The vet did some tests and took X-Rays, and when they came back it showed that Bear had a possible mass in his abdomen.  Yuck.  Since the emergency clinic didn't have an ultrasound, they couldn't be sure what kind of mass it is, so we were going to have to take him to his regular vet and have that done.

Of course, you probably already know that both Steve and I have been basket cases since we found out. There is a slight chance that the mass is nothing serious, but the vet told us that his blood work was abnormal and that some of his internal organs seem to be pushed aside, plus he seemed to think we needed to get this ultrasound quick, so we don't believe that it is "nothing."  We took him to his regular vet this morning to be under observation and to have an ultrasound, so we won't really know anything until later today.

I'm so worried about him, because he's such a sweet dog and he has no idea what is going on.  All he knows is that he doesn't feel good and that we've left him at the place he hates worse than anything.  I feel so terrible.  If this really is serious, we will have to make a very difficult decision that I'm not sure I could handle.  I'm so soft hearted about animals, and the fact that Bear is like my own kid makes this a million times worse.

I just hope he's going to be OK.  If you don't feel weird about praying for a dog, say a quick prayer for Bear.  We just want him to be OK.