Swimsuit Trauma, Gangsta Shorts, and Clinton's Propeller Beanie

Typical for the Greens, we planned to start our Arkansas vacation at 10 this morning but didn't actually hit the road until 11:30…which is a good half our ahead of our usual lateness.  I guess it's mostly my fault since I don't plan ahead well, but I did hit the ground running early this morning.  There was no dawdling, just lots to do.  I had to finish washing clothes, clean out the fridge, notify the neighbors, make arrangements for the dog, make ALL the travel arrangements, secure the house, then try to remember to pack my own stuff.  Jayson & Taylor just throw some clothes into a bag and they're done.  I asked Taylor if she had everything together and she said, "I have make up, underwear and big hoop earrings.  That's all I need."  Jayson does try to help me by saying "let's go!" about every 10 minutes.  Maybe he thinks that will make my hair dry faster but actually it just makes me want to do everything in exaggerated slow motion.

I knew we would need to take swimsuits on our trip but I must have put up some kind of mental block about it because I know that I can't get one thigh into the suit I have but I didn't bother shopping for another on.  I tried mine on just to be sure and confirmed that indeed, I resembled a tube of toothpaste that had been squeezed from the middle.  Jayson asked me what was wrong after I tossed my suit back into the dresser and slammed the drawer shut.  I explained to him how my swimsuit had shrunk therefore I couldn't take it on the trip.  He said that was no big deal, we'd just buy one along the way.  He walked out of the room before I could go into my tirade about how completely insane that suggestion was.  Does he really think I can just pop into Wal Mart, grab a suit off the rack and be good to go?! I am a 44 year old woman!!!  Buying a swimsuit requires weeks, if not months, of preparation.  I have to whine and complain about it first, that's a must.  Then I have to pre-shop online to prepare myself for the kind of trauma I will face in the store.  Then my friends and loved ones will have to gather 'round and pray for me.  They'll lay hands on me to cast out the cellulite demons and break the bondage of a poor self image. Then of course I will have to wait for a sale because I never, ever buy anything full price.  I will tell myself that if I wait until the clearance sales at the end of the season I can get a really good deal on a nice suit that will last.  Then when the end of the season rolls around I will work up the courage to actually go shopping by self medicating until I'm so numb that a root canal sounds like a happy adventure.  I'll go to the swimsuit store, flip through the extremely picked over selection of suits on the clearance rack, then complain about how they never have my size.  To be honest, no one has my size because not only is my top side a different size than my bottom side, my left side is a different size than my right side.  I have never owned a swimsuit that fit right and probably never will.  This doesn't stop me from blaming the store for not having something to fit me on the clearance rack so I go home empty handed vowing to try again next season.  The swimsuit I have is 9 years old, if that tells you how long I've been using this shopping method.

I was almost ready to go when I glanced at Jayson and saw what he was wearing.  Normally he does a pretty good job of dressing himself mainly because most of his clothes are mix and match.  That is not by accident.  Occasionally some rogue piece of clothing will throw off our system and he chose one of those pieces today.  It was a pair knee length black satiny shorts with silver on the sides.  I'm not sure where they came from, but I can usually tolerate them when he wears them around the house.  Today he paired his UFC gangsta homeboy shorts with a nice, maroon colored golf shirt with big cream colored Hawaiian flowers on it.  It was a painful ensemble.  I wanted to take a picture but didn't want to hurt his feelings so I'm blogging about it instead.

We got in the car and when we pulled out of the driveway the Garmin started telling us how to get out of our subdivision.  Jayson immediately went off on her yelling about how she doesn't even know where we're going yet!  I grabbed it before he could throw it out the window and programmed our first stop in Texarkana.

We did the whole straddle the state line line thing, grabbed some lunch then headed for Hope, Arkansas, the birthplace of Bill Clinton and the home of the largest watermelon ever grown.  I really didn't care about the Clinton thing, but I sure had hoped we could see the replica of that watermelon.  Apparently Hope is closed on Sundays so we couldn't see the watermelon.  But the good news is that we will be driving back through on our way home next Saturday which also happens to be the 34th annual Watermelon Festival in Hope!  How lucky are we?!  We're penciling that into our vacation agenda.

We strolled around in the yard of Clinton's first home for a while, sitting in his porch swing, and admiring the tricycle that I can picture him riding wearing a 3 piece suit and a propeller beanie.  There were some other interesting photo ops around Hope, you'll have to check my Facebook Photos to see them all.

Jayson and Taylor have gone in search of food and I'm so tired I might be asleep by the time they get back. I'm looking forward to tooling around Hot Springs tomorrow.  It's a very clean and beautiful resort type city but the Green Family is here to keep it real, know what I'm sayin'?  I wouldn't say that we're white trash or anything like that.  In fact, we're so classy that we rotate the tires on our house at least every 2 years.

Leadership Summit Day 1

Today and tomorrow Jayson and I (and maybe 40 other people from Trinity) are attending Willow Creek's Global Leadership Summit at the East Bayou satellite site.  Even though Willow Creek puts on the summit it's not just for church leaders.  In fact, they always have a good mix of some of the best spiritual and business leaders from across the globe.  This is Jayson's first time to attend, my second, and several times today he mentioned that he wished everyone that he worked with could come to this.

Bill Hybels, the senior pastor at Willow Creek, gave the first talk of the morning.  I'm not a huge Hybels fan but I can't put my finger on exactly why.  His talks are always good, his books are good, his church seems to love him, I'm not sure what it is about him that makes me cautious.  It's probably his cheekbones, apparently I have issues.  Anyway, he talked about how one of the roles of a leader is to move people from 'here' to 'there'.  Hybels tends to speak in a way that makes every single sentence sound like it is extremely profound.  Or maybe it is, I dunno.  Remember when you were taking notes in school and how you knew what you should write down by the way the teacher said it?  There's something about Bill Hybels' diction and his voice inflection that makes me think I'm supposed to write down everything he says.  So I do.  And then when I go back and reread it, I realize that I wrote down a bunch of common sense stuff that I already knew but I didn't realize it at the time because he made it sound like a brand new important concept.  I feel kind of deceived and stupid but that's not really his fault.  Then like all authors, and I can't really fault them for it, he pitched his new book "The Power of a Whisper: Hearing God, Having the Guts to Respond".  I think there's a DVD study that goes with it.

During the break, I went to get some coffee in the hopes of remaining conscious for at least most of the summit, and was extremely entertained by the coffee urns at East Bayou.  Most of them were labeled with whatever kind of coffee was inside but there were a couple labeled "preschool".  I know this is probably because these urns belong in the preschool area of the building but I couldn't help but think that maybe this coffee was for the preschoolers to drink, or even better maybe it was made from freshly roasted preschoolers.  When I went to fill my cup I said, out loud but to myself, that I was going to try the preschool roast.  The lady standing next to me absolutely busted out laughing like I'd just said the funniest thing she ever heard.  It was humorous and made me chuckle but she was carrying on to the point of tears.  Then she wanted to continue to talk about the preschool roast long after it ceased to be funny.  Poor little thing.  I couldn't imagine how stale and boring her life must be if she got that much joy out of a ridiculous coffee joke.  She must have been a Junior Leaguer.

Being a church employee, it's a little strange when I visit another church.  Good strange, not bad strange.  Churches are different and I think they all have their place and serve a purpose but it's just natural to compare them to your own.  Not that I'm trying to figure out who is better, I just love to get a different perspective how things can be done...then I go back to my own church and make sure we do them better.  Just sayin'.

There are a few things that East Bayou does that I would love to see happen at Trinity.  One of those things is these clever cooler stands they had stashed around the snack area.  Some people might think, "big deal, so what"?  Those people are not my friends.  This is one of those small, seemingly insignificant details that are easily overlooked but when given the attention they deserve they can have an enormous amount invisible impact.  What good is invisible impact, you ask?  Well.  Let me tell you.  It can make or break an event, in my humble but usually right opinion.

I just deleted 2 paragraphs of me going on and on about invisible impact and how seemingly insignificant little details can be a catalyst for a major wow moment.  You can thank me later.  Those kinds of things make me positively giddy and it's one of the things I love about my job.  Suffice it to say, as an event attender (not a church employee) matching coolers on stands makes me think that whoever planned this event cared about my comfort, my convenience as well as the aesthetics of my environment.  The bottom line being...I felt valued and yes, silly little cooler stands are just part of what created that feeling.  Well done East Bayou!

Another thing I love about East Bayou is their totally black auditorium.  The walls, ceilings, everything is black.  Some people might think this would create a heavy or depressing environment but it really doesn't if you use it well, and I think they do.  Black is a good neutral background and you can do a lot of really cool lighting techniques with it.  It also makes an effective camouflage for things like music stands, mic stands, amp cords, pedals and all those other technical gizmos that are a necessary part of the stage on a typical Sunday morning.  What I love best about a black background is how it can make other visual elements pop.  What do popping visual elements have to do with church, you ask?  More than you might think.  No one is going to come to Jesus just because I put some kind of cool looking decoration on a black stage, but it might bring them back to church next week where they'll meet the person who brings them to Jesus.  That's another one of those little things with huge invisible impact.  I would love to see us have an all black stage area if not the entire auditorium at Trinity.  I might get strangled in the parking lot for saying that out loud but dang it, black is not bad like people make it out to be!  Decorators used to tell people to stay away from dark colored walls, they'll make a room feel small and closed in.  That was before they knew how to work with dark colors and use their potential.  Black gets a bad rap but black is our friend.  Black is the new black.  That's profound, write that down.

The second session of the day was from a man named Jim Collins who is a business guru and author of "Good to Great" and "Built to Last", both of which are on my long list of books I must read some day.  His talk, which was very good, came from his latest book "How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In".  He talked about organizations in decline, how they got there and how they can work their way out of it.  He gave examples of several well known companies and their leaders.  These leaders were very diverse but all shared some common practices and ideals that keep their companies successful.  Really good business leadership stuff.

After Jim was this little dynamo named Christine Caine who is a pastor from Hillsong Church in Australia and founder of the A21 Campaign whose goal it is to abolish human trafficking.  They do everything from rescuing and providing after-care for the victims to helping them prosecute the perpetrators.  How cool is that?!  This woman overcame incredible obstacles, abuses and injustices in her own life and has an energy and passion that are so genuine they are infectious whether you want them to be or not!  She had me wanting to jump out out of my seat, run up on stage and give her a chest bump...which would have been weird since we were watching her via satellite.  I'm definitely going to pick up her book "The Core Issue: Authentic Living That Impacts the World".

Marti picked up Cane's for lunch so all the Trinity folks went over to her house to eat.  I love a house where 40 people can comfortably have lunch.  I sat on the couch which is in the living room that's off of that other living room and let me tell you that couch is made for napping.  It's probably 8' long and the seats are deep and the cushions are extra cushy and I would never leave my house if I had that couch. 

Even though Mark and Marti have a large beautifully decorated house, it is very comfortable and homey and not at all a stuffy show place like some big houses can be.  Sometimes my allergies act up and will cause one or both of my eyes to water and that started happening during lunch.  I asked Jayson if he could find me a kleenex since I was much too busy eating and talking to be bothered with it.  Jayson came back and handed me a wad of toilet paper.  He said he asked Mark where he might find a kleenex and Mark looked a little perplexed and suggested he check the bathroom.  Jayson didn't find kleenex in the bathroom but he knew that I would find toilet paper to be an acceptable substitute.  If you come to my house and you ask for a kleenex, there is a 99% chance that you will be handed a wad of toilet paper.  Since Mark didn't instantly produce a kleenex when Jayson asked, I figured that meant that he also found potty paper to be an acceptable substitute which made me feel slightly less white trashy.  Or maybe it just made me consider him to be slightly more white trashy.  Either way it was a good thing.

We were one of the first to leave Marti's house after lunch and head back to East Bayou since Jayson has this annoying habit of always wanting to be on time.  I just don't get that.  Anyway, it was lightly raining outside so I stayed in the garage and asked him if he would pull the car up into the driveway for me since we all know that my kind melts in water.  He obliged but not without an eye roll and a comment about how it was barely raining at all.  When I got into the car, everyone was starting to file out of the house and head for their cars as well.  Jayson said, "you're such a prima donna...look at those ladies, they're all walking to their cars and are not afraid of a little rain".  To which I replied, "they have UMBRELLAS!!!" 

I'm too tired to describe the rest of the afternoon sessions but they were all good.  Craig Groeschel did an interview with Tony Dungy who talked about mentoring.  Adam Hamilton, the senior pastor of The United Methodist Church of The Resurrection in Leawood, KS tackled an unpleasant topic.  Two of his staff pastors were caught having an extramarital affair and he talked about how their church handled that and offered advice on how to resist temptation in general.  Good stuff but difficult stuff.  After another break we heard from Dr. Peter Zhao Xiao who is a Christian Chinese communist economist.  Through a translator he talked about how China is warming up to the idea of Christianity since they have done studies that show how the prosperity of American business is linked to Christian values.  This struck me as incredible.  China has always been very resistant to allowing Christianity into their country as a religious choice for their people but they've warmed up to the idea after seeing how it could help their country to prosper.

Okay, maybe I'm not as tired as I thought.  I love the Chinese people, they are so precious and so misunderstood.  China used to have the largest economy in the world and they have a goal to gain that status again.  They are very business oriented and they want to be a great country again, to lead others and to influence other countries.  They're doing well in economics, politics and sports but they fail on the platform of faith.  This adorable Dr. Zhao is teaching Chinese leaders the importance of morals and values in their efforts to become a great nation.  Think about it.  This is an important man in China.  He is advising the leaders of his country.  He is telling them that their success is linked to Christian churches.  And he's here, in America, speaking at a Christian conference that will be broadcast all over the world...with the blessing of his government.  They know what he's doing, they had to give him a visa to get here and they're okay with that.  This is a very good thing :)  Right now China might think this whole Christian thing is just good business but once it gets into their hearts, stuff is gonna happen.  Good stuff.  It's very exciting for their people!

Andy Stanley was the final speaker of the day and of course he was good.  He talked about how all organizations are going to have problems and tension that they simply cannot resolve and he suggests they shouldn't resolve it.  He talked about how to determine if your tension is one of these unresolvable kinds, then he described how to leverage that tension to benefit the organization.  One of those tensions that doesn't go away is the balance between work and family.  If you work too much you can lose your family, if you stay home too much you can lose your job.  How do you solve that?  You don't.  You manage it.

At some point during Andy's spiel I noticed some of the stage decorations behind him.  They were the same exact little stage thingies that East Bayou had on their stage.  What a cool coincidence!  Or maybe they had seen the Willow stage and ripped off their idea.  Kudos either way.  It's hard to see in the picture but the lighted thing on the right is on the East Bayou stage and on the left is the screen showing the stage at Willow Creek with same stage prop thingie.  I pointed this out to Jayson and he looked at me like I had just sprouted a third eye.  Apparently he noticed it as soon as the satellite feed began and I didn't see it until 8 hours later. 

It is a misconception that all artsy types (that includes me most of the time) have an eye for detail.  Some have an eye for detail and some have an eye for some detail some of the time.  Then there are those who are strictly all about the big picture and simply can't get bogged down in details.  I'm one of those some detail some of the time types.  My closest friend could lose 75 pounds and I would not notice.  Is this because I pay so little attention to her that I have no idea what size she is?  No.  Well...probably not anyway.  She's one of those no detail things where I just see the big picture of who she is.  I might not notice if she shaved her head because the state of her hair, or lack thereof, is not one of those details that grabs me.  I am a terrible proofreader because I don't notice words that are misspelled.  I can read a word 10 times, slowly, out loud and never realize that it is misspelled.  But if there is a mistake in the size or consistency of what I'm reading it grabs my attention like a stick in the eye.  If there's an extra space between sentences in a paragraph, I'll see it.  If the font size of a word is one point more or less than the font size of the word next to it, I'll see it.  It's very bizarre.  So you see, the fact that Jayson noticed the matching stage thingies 8 hours before I did is because of a difference in perception, not because I am oblivious to my surroundings.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Avoiding the unavoidable

Don't panic, I haven't turned into a super blogger who writes long, important and correctly spelled posts every other day. I am simply avoiding doing something that needs to be done by doing absolutely everything else but that task. I do this all the time and I'm fully aware of what I'm doing and I don't like that I do it but I do it anyway. Is anyone trackin' with me or am I all alone out here?

The sad thing is that I'm not avoiding a root canal or anything like that. I simply need to pick up my beads and junk that I have spread out all over my art room/guest room and put clean sheets on the bed in there for Taylor's house guest who will be here tomorrow. It will probably take me less than 30 minutes to get it done...if I can ever get started.

I am fortunate to have an extra room where I can store all my art supplies and crafty doodads but when I get into a creative frenzy like I'm in right now, I tend to completely trash the whole room which is a slight problem on that rare occasion when that room needs to serve as a guest room.

When we were getting ready to move here from North Texas, the company Jayson works for sent a moving van to our house to pack up all our stuff and haul it here. That was a very cool thing since it saved us a lot of time and work and expense. There were some things we didn't want the movers handling so we packed that stuff up ourselves but for the most part we let them handle it.

The movers were 3 Hispanic guys from some moving company in Houston, which was odd since we weren't moving to or from Houston but we weren't paying for it either so they could have been from Mars for all we cared. Only one of the guys spoke English which ended up making things pretty darn entertaining. These were experienced movers, they knew what they were doing so they really didn't require much from us. One thing the supervisor guy (the one who spoke English) asked was how I wanted the boxes labeled from my art/guest room there. I told him to just label them 'art room' and that would work since they'd be going into another art room after the move.

We got all moved (and not one single thing got broken or lost) and when we began the process of unpacking all the boxes, I saw that the boxes in the art room had been labeled "Arte Room". For a while we referred to the art room as our son, Arte's room. Taylor had some peacock feathers in her room that the movers had carefully rolled up in some heavy padded paper and they labeled it "Girl's Room--Chicken Hair". We got a lot of mileage out of Taylor's chicken hair.

It might not be so bad if all I had to do was straighten up the art room but really "art room" is a misnomer. It's more of an art storage room since I don't actually do any art in that room.  I just store my art stuff in the 2 big closets in there.  The lighting, flooring and available space are just not conducive to a studio environment so I get what I need from the art room and drag it all over the house to work on it. Picking up the stuff I have strewn out all over the rest of the house is the task I will be avoiding after I get through avoiding this one.  I really don't need to put everything away, I just need to confine it to one area so we can at least appear to live like normal human beings, which I'm sure our guest will appreciate.

BEFORE

AFTER

Since I still need to be able to get to all my little jewelry making supplies but I can't keep them spread out all over the guest bed and dining table, I decided to clean up a couple of printers tray/shadow box thingies that someone gave me a while back. I think I got these from Lacey Herbstler but I wouldn't swear to it. They've been tucked away for probably a year just waiting for me to decided what to do with them. They were pitiful little trays but they had potential so I held on to them. Since I'm in avoidance mode and didn't have unlimited free time to work on these, I decided to give them a quick sprucing up with some Old English scratch remover stuff.  It worked great. The dry wood soaked it right up making it look like I had stained them but I didn't.  I love the way they turned out.  I wanted them to still look sort of rough, not all sanded, finished and polished.  There's a drip on one of them that looks just like bird pooh but it's not. I checked. I think it's a paint drip. Apparently at some point someone was painting something in a lovely shade of bird pooh.

WITH GOODIES

Have you ever noticed how when you say you will never, ever in a million years do something, that's the one thing you are guaranteed to end up doing? Most mothers probably think that most boys are not good enough for their daughters and most of the time they're probably right. That was the case with my mother but she took it to another level by doing everything she could to dehumanize the poor, unfortunate young men who had the bad luck to catch her daughters' eye. Any time my sister or I would start talking about a boy, our mom would never refer to him by his name. She acted like he was so insignificant that it wasn't even worth her time to learn his name. They were all called Whatshisface or THAT boy and make no mistake about it...she called them that to their face. Boys were never afraid of our 6'4" dad, but our mother was legendary scary. I swore I would never be that kind of mother and I really don't think I am but lately I've caught myself slipping a little. Take for instance Taylor's house guest. He has a name, I know his name, but I keep calling him House Guest. Since this seems to be the result of some kind of deep psychological scarring, I'm concerned about my ability to not call him House Guest once he gets here. What will happen if he gets here and I say, "hi House Guest, it's nice to meet you"? What if he goes to church with us on Sunday and I introduce him as Taylor's House Guest and never even mention his real name? What if he's reading this and starts making frantic calls to the airline to get his ticket refunded before it's too late?  Taylor would shoot me.  My name would be mud. Or THAT mother.

Serial killers, rusty metal, and a text from the White House

Has it really been 10 days since my last post?? I wish I had a good excuse but all I can say is I forgot to blog. Well, that and the fact that nothing has happened to make me think oh my gosh I can't wait to write about this, so technically it's not my fault. It's yours. I can't help it that all the people in my life are boring and not doing anything blog worthy right now. Although I have a feeling that will be changing shortly since Taylor will be having a house guest over the weekend. This is a young man she met on the internet who is flying in to meet her in person and will be staying with us. I can't even begin to describe the weirdness of it all. This could be a very bad thing or it could be a very good thing and I am equally concerned about both outcomes. I honestly don't believe this guy has misrepresented himself and will turn out to be a 40 year old serial killer or anything like that. But just to be on the safe side Jayson has stocked up on ammo and pre-dug a shallow grave in the backyard. We're just good parents that way.

For the past week or so I've been busy making pendant necklaces out of hardware, rusty metal, junk I've collected over the years, and these sparkly vintage glass rhinestones that I found on eBay. I love how they're turning out and I'm having fun making them. I usually don't sell the stuff that I make because then it feels like a job and sucks the fun out of it. But I've made an exception for these and put them on Etsy because, really, how many necklaces do I need?

Hopefully someone will come along and take these off my hands so I can move on to the next project. But not until I use up some of the cool plumbing and electrical parts I picked up at Lowe's today. Lowe's is just one huge art supply store for me.

When I finished at Lowes, I had a couple of other errands to run and found myself driving up Cameron on my way home. Cameron is a street that has a lot of industrial businesses, used car lots, salvage yards and other unattractive businesses that might be out of place on prettier streets. It also has more than its fair share of abandoned warehouses and other buildings which can serve as a really good source of free art supplies. It was an overcast afternoon and I had some free time so I pulled in next to a row of abandoned buildings with gravel parking lots and spent a good hour or more scavenging for treasures.

I didn't find a lot of stuff I could use for jewelry since most of it was too big. But I could probably use it to make some fun assemblages or something like that.  I found a couple of bottle caps and washers, several bolts and lots of chunks of unidentifiable broken rusty metal.

I'm not sure what it is about rusty metal that I love so much. It might be the colors. I'm fascinated by all the different colors and textures in a piece of rusted metal and how nature created them all by itself. I like how some metal corrodes and starts to break down when it rusts and other metal builds up layers and layers of rusty gunk until you can't tell what the original shape was. It's just beautiful. And playing with it forces me to keep my tetanus shots up to date so that's practically a health benefit.

Any time I'm scavenging or dumpster diving I tend to lose track of time and before I know it a couple of hours have passed. I tell myself that I'm allowed to stay and keep digging until I come across something that grosses me out. When that happens, I take it as a cosmic sign that my time is up and I need to go home. I almost always run into an animal of some sort but I'm usually okay with that unless the two of us are confined together inside a dumpster. When that happens, I leave and give the critter their house back.

Today I didn't see any animals but I did hear a good bit of scurrying when I got close to the bushes. Then my imagination took off without me and I started weighing the odds of me finding a dead body on one of my adventures. How gross would that be? I wondered if I would freak out or if I would be calm and I wondered what I would say when I called 911 and if they would play that recording when the incident appeared on Forensic Files and would I have to appear in court when the murderer was found and goes to trial and if so what would I wear? Then I was horrified to think that maybe the police wouldn't let me keep my rusty metal treasures since they were found at a crime scene and they might even get confiscated for evidence and how cool would it be if I just happened to pick up a piece of metal that contained the forensic evidence that solved the whole case?! Then I would be famous and everyone would know me as that woman who solved that murder case while looking for art supplies then all the best art galleries in the country would be calling me and begging me to let them do a show for me at their gallery. And then the White House would text me to try to commission an original sculpture for the White House lawn but of course I would refuse and when they said I could name whatever price I wanted and they would pay it, I would tell them that they must lift the drilling moratorium and compensate everyone who lost their job because of it and Obama would have to hold the biggest press conference ever where he would admit to being a total jackwagon and he would have to use the word jackwagon and look genuinely remorseful while doing so.

Right in the middle of Obama's press conference I got jolted back to reality when I ran across my cosmic sign that it was time to call it a day. My sign was not overtly gross (like the occasional condom or syringe that I run across) but it just looked like it could represent something potentially gross. It looked like one of those tyvek wristbands like you'd get at a bar to show that you're of legal drinking age. So I've heard. But this one had "XXX" on it which made me wonder if it was from some kind of sleazy adult theater or something and why would they need wristbands and did I really want to explore this line of thought with the mood my imagination is in today? Not so much. I tossed my goodies onto a towel I keep in the floorboard of the backseat for just such occasions and pulled out into traffic. I was satisfied with all the fun stuff I found but didn't give it much thought since my mind had already locked onto the next errand for the day. I simply had to find something decent to wear to court.

How to get nowhere near rich as slow as humanly possible

Sunday after church we went to a new (to me) Mexican restaurant called Maya's.  Since moving to Lafayette 7 years ago I have learned that any time someone asks you where something is located, you are to give them directions based on where another business used to be.  It does not matter if that business closed a year ago or 20 years ago, you are expected to know its exact previous location.  You need not bother yourself with learning street names.  They change all the time and no one ever uses them anyway.  So, if you'd like go to Maya's it's where the old Evangeline Steakhouse used to be.

If you're looking for Tex-Mex you will be disappointed.  However, if you're in the mood for authentic Mexican, you're good to go.  The food was good and the salsa was not outstanding but it was good plus they serve it in those little individual creamer containers which just makes it fun.  Their chips are fantastic, by far the best in town.  You can watch Mama make fresh tortillas while you eat and I'm thinking they might use those for their chips.  The queso is also well worth the trip.  It's a white queso with really good flavor and just the right amount of kick. 

We rode over there with the Thibodeauxs in their new swagger wagon with a dash that resembles the cockpit of a 747.  Jamie drove and I sat up front next to her, Chad and Jayson were behind us and the kids were all the way in the back.  It was as it should be.  When Jayson got in the backseat, Jamie turned around and told him she thought we were all close enough now that she felt comfortable telling him that his junk was showing.  Well, technically it was just his undies which happened to be blue that day.  Jayson just crossed his legs and said, "yeah, I know" then started babbling about the gila monster and unleashing the beast and other completely ridiculous guyisms that made me and Jamie roll our eyes.  Apparently Jayson came to church well aware that he had a gaping hole in the crotch of his jeans and he was perfectly comfortable with that fact.  The only thing that could have made it worse for me is if he was wearing the underwear that had a matching gaping crotch hole.  Or a thong.  That's the stuff nightmares are made of.

After lunch we hadn't been in the car more than 5 minutes before Collin and Emily were overtaken by a post-Mexican food coma.  It wasn't long after we got home that Jayson and I looked pretty much the same way, except for the seatbelts.

This morning I was a little concerned about how my day was going to play out since it got off to a rocky start.  Me and mornings don't get along but unfortunately they can't be avoided.  I rolled out of bed at the crack of 8:30 and stumbled around in the bathroom during my morning routine.  I wear glasses but I take them off to put on my makeup and dry my hair so for most of my morning routine I'm flying blind.  Normally this isn't a huge problem since I know where everything is but there was one small out of place element that cause me some trouble this time.  I felt around in the drawer and found my toothbrush then remembered that I had squeezed the last possible drop of toothpaste out of the tube last night.  This wasn't a problem since I often have one or two little travel tubes in my drawer.  I grabbed one of them and squeezed it out onto my toothbrush, wet the brush then brought it up to my mouth and almost started brushing.  I guess it's true what they say about when one of your senses doesn't work properly, the others will kick into overdrive to make up for it.  Without my glasses I couldn't see what was on my toothbrush but just before it hit my lips my nose smelled it.  It was NOT toothpaste.  I put on my glasses and saw that I had loaded my toothbrush with Monistat.  It was the little separate tube of cream (that's exactly the same size as a travel tube of toothpaste) that comes with the yeast infection kit.  I still shudder to think how close I came to brushing my teeth with that.  That's the kind of yucky you never really get over.

Fortunately the rest of the day was uneventful and the evening was a lot of fun.  I was invited to a party at Painting With A Twist to celebrate Lane and Lacey's birthdays.  I'm so glad they invited me, I've been dying to try this place out.  I have to say, it was a lot of fun.  There was another group there besides us so it was a full house.  The painting we were doing was a zebra striped fleur de lis.  I liked the basic design, but the colors just would not be happy in my house.  Several of us brought our own paint colors to share so our group could have a few more options.  When we were done, we saw that everyone in our group changed either the colors or the design or both.  Everyone in the other group painted an exact replica of the sample.  I don't think their group brought enough wine.

Maizy came to the party with me so she could give my painting either a happy face or a sad face.  So far, she's giving it a happy face but it's not quite half done.  I did what I could while I was there but I really needed more time to add some more layers of paint for texture and I also desperately needed my Sharpies since the brush they gave us for outlining wasn't nearly small enough.  I'm going to continue to work on it and see what happens.  I'll either end up with something I can live with or I'll gesso the whole thing and start over.

It's looking better than it did at first, I'll say that much.  The stripes make it look sort of like a bumble bee right now but that'll change when I add more doodles.  It's definitely an improvement over where it started.  Before I added the black stripes and outline, Lisa and I both agreed that the top part of the fleur de lis looked like a vagina.  I'm just sayin'.
I sat next to Melanie, whose Indian name is Little Brush, which was a good thing since we both tend to get into the zone when we're painting so there's no socializing required.  Not that she'd get much out of me anyway but at least I had the zone excuse this time.

I gave Lacey and Lane some notecards I'd made out of some of my drawings as their birthday gifts.  I felt a little weird about it, I guess because it's the first time I've photocopied my art like that. I've given away originals before but for some reason this felt different...like I was cheating or something, I don't know.  Anyway, I hope I can get over that since I've sent off one of my doodles to be professionally printed onto notecards that I'm going to try to sell on Etsy along with a bunch of other stuff.  Jayson was very excited since he's always nagging (he calls it 'encouraging') me to sell my stuff.  I then had to explain to him the reason for the phrase "starving artist".  I've sold a few of my things in the past as part of my 25 year long get-nowhere-near-rich-as-slow-as-humanly-possible scheme.  I just really, really don't like doing that.  I'd much rather give it away but unfortunately that won't pay Taylor's tuition.

Marti also made some special cards for Lane and Lacey.  They looked suspiciously like party napkins but I think that was part of the artistry.  You know...like those fancy cakes they make to look just like a designer handbag?  Napkin cards could be the next big thing.

It's been a long day so I'm turning in.  Don't worry, I've learned my lesson so tonight I will look very closely before I brush my teeth.  With Jayson's toothbrush.