The Fairest Of Them All

Last Saturday Chelsea and I went to the State Fair of Texas.  I am only slightly embarrassed to reveal to you that it was my second time to visit the fair.  That week.  I don’t really know how to defend myself, other than to say that when you love something with your whole heart, as I love the Texas State Fair, you make it a priority in your life.  Anyway, Chels and I had a great day.  We managed to check all of our “Must-Do” items off of our list.

We visited the petting zoo:

And discovered that alpacas may just be the cutest animal I ever did see:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I caught up with Big Tex:

We tried some Texan delicacies (and by ‘delicacies’ I mean anything that would stay still long enough to be deep fried):

Deep Fried Frozen Margarita

 

Fried Bacon

And, since I know the questions are inevitable, I will give you my opinion on all the fried foods I partook of.  In my personal experience fried foods are exciting and delicious.  IN THEORY.  In reality?  The first three bites are usually pretty good… but then you start to think about what exactly it is your eating and it’s all downhill from there.  But, I continue to eat them because fried food hope springs eternal.  The fried margarita could have been good, except they poured strait margarita juice (or whatever that would be called) over the fried part, which made it pretty gross.  The bacon was ok, except every time you took a bite all the fried stuff would fall off, so in the end you were just eating bacon.  And I don’t know about you, but I prefer not to pay $8 for my bacon.

After eating our way across the fair Chels and I headed to visit my friend Cortnee.  While there we watched a little MLB Smackdown:

I may be momentarily obsessed with the Rangers.  And I’m ok with that.  Especially when they’re winning.

After we left Cortnee’s Chelsea needed to run by her office (at 8:00. On a Saturday night. Nerd Alert!) so she headed over to do that and I went home.  After I’d been home for a few minutes Chels called and asked if my Dad and I could come jump her car since it was dead.  When we got there I realized that Chelsea had been holding out on me:

I had no idea she was this prepared.  She has her own traffic emergency sign.  We’ve been best friends for over 10 years and I would never have expected her to have a spare tire, much less a traffic sign.  In my defense, she did have a flashlight, but no batteries.

All said and done the Fair definitely lived up to its hype this year, and now I am counting down the days until next year.  Just 365 days left to prepare my arteries for the deep fried butter.

I Blame ‘Twilight’

Last week at school all the kids wrote out their dreams and some goals for how they could achieve their dreams.

Lots of children wrote about wanting to become a football player or a veterinarian and some wanted to work at their parents’ car shops or become rock stars.

As they were writing out their dreams I was walking around the room and one young man stopped me and asked me how to spell “ologist”.

I said, “like biologist?”

He said “yes, but just the ologist part”

I told him how to spell it and said “Do you want to be a biologist when you grow up?”

“No.” he said, “I want to be a werewolfologist.”

Behold, the youth of tomorrow.

I Have Some Thoughts About Some Things

I’ll write my thoughts in list form, so that I am not required to think too hard and so that you read this post with the lowest possible expectations.

1.  This weekend I watched Dirty Dancing for the first time in a long, long while.  I love that movie.  All summer long I wanted to bring a watermelon to a party just so I could say “I carried a watermelon”.  I never did it.  But I know it would have been cool if I did.

2.  I attended a Fall Festival on Saturday and enjoyed a funnel cake.  Funnel cake may not scream fall, but it does scream my name any time I see it.

3.  I am LIVING for the State Fair of Texas.  LIVING.  Living.  The fair has always been a big deal to my family.  We would always go and work our way from the car show, across to the craft pavilion, take in a show and spend a few hours gawking at whatever farm animal has been immortalized in butter that year.  Not to mention the food.  Oh, the food.  There is something oh so magical about fair food.

4.  I really have to hold myself back from spending my whole paycheck on buying new clothes.  Boots and sweaters are my friends.

5.  I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about this before now, but I recently became involved in a relationship.  I’m in a love affair with a little TV show called Friday Night Lights.  And it’s serious.  I am so embarrassed that it took me 4 years to jump on board (you can count on me to be on the cutting edge of the trends) but now I am all in.  I just wanna have a “Matt Chat” and be Tim Riggins’ AA sponsor and go to church with Smash Williams and hang out with Eric and Tammy Taylor (or, as I like to call her: Mrs. Coach).  You can see that I’m in love.  Mainly in love with Matt Saracen but also in love with Friday Night Lights.

Bad Blogger

Newsflash:

I am OFFICIALLY a bad blogger. 

And it’s only taken me a year and a half of writing lackluster posts to realize it!

At least I’m not slow.

 

More soon (And by soon, I mean in three weeks).

P.S. I miss you guys.

Thursday Thoughts

1. Happy 90210.  I cannot tell you how delighted I was to tune into The Today Show and watch them repeatedly report on the interesting coincidence of today’s date (9-02-10) with photos of Brendon, Donna, Brenda, Kelly, Steve, Dylan and the gang from the early 90’s.  It felt like some strange holiday that I was totally unprepared for.  Although, it did make me crave a nice long Beverly Hills 90210 marathon.

2. Today I decided to tackle cleaning out and organizing my closet.  I began this afternoon and this was the scene in my room around 10:00 tonight:

I thought maybe Hurricane Earl had swept through and someone forgot to tell me.  Then I remembered that around 4:00 I decided I should go ahead and clean out all my drawers too so I could optimize my cleaning / purging.  Obviously, this plan was well thought out and reasoned. 

I’m dreading sleeping on the couch tonight.

3.  Speaking of dread.  This weekend I will be visiting my storage unit in order to get a few of the fall clothes I have packed there.  That’s right.  I’m bringing MORE clothes into the mix.  Just to give you a peek into the reality of my life:

This was my storage unit when I last left it.  I understand it’s dark in there and I understand it may look like my audition photo for “Hoarders: Buried Alive”, but it’s bad.  Really bad.  Just to further stress my point:

4. I am currently having a love affair with Roasted Red Pepper Hummus.  If you haven’t ever tried it you should run- don’t walk- to your local grocery store and try some.

5. Since the weather has been so nice this week I’ve been taking long walks in the evening and each night I’ve ended up at my grandparents house across the pasture.  I’ve been missing them a lot.  They were really special people.

My Mammaw and Grandaddy- Paul and Faye.

 

I hope you guys are having a great day!  And for my reader(s) on the East Coast stay safe and keep outta Earl’s way. 

Because, honestly?  The last thing you wanna rumble with is a Hurricane named Earl.

The Month Before September

Well, August is finally over.  And, in celebration of this, I have made an important decision:  from this year forward August shall forever be referred to as: “the-month-that-is-dead-to-me”.

No, I’m not more dramatic in the month of September, why do you ask?

So, clearly ‘the-month-that-shall-not-be-named’ was a rough one, but some fun things happened too. 

Here’s a list:

1. Shark Week!  Shark Week was extra incredible this year.  I got a ton of it on the DVR (unfortunately the DVR has since bit the dust since my parents got HD which means they get a new DVR which means Shark Week is, once again, merely a fond memory) and particularly enjoyed the newest version of “Air Jaws”.  On July 31st I got a tweet or a text or a comment or a wall post from Katy (sometimes I think I am overly committed to all my social networking) saying she hoped Shark Week didn’t disappoint me, which I thought was really funny and sweet.  Clearly, I have worn my Shark Week heart on my sleeve and she didn’t want to see me hurt, but I am happy to report that I was not disappointed in the least.

2. I got to see plenty of my favorite people!  Including meeting the Evans girls for some coffee and some talk (ideally there would be an adorable photo of Ginger posted right here, but I forgot to dig my camera out that day, so you’ll just have to take my word for just how remarkably beautiful she is). 

I also got to hang out at a birthday party for Miranda along with Jennifer, Alison and Sarah and Justin.  The birthday party was a fun combination of games, birthday cake and porch swings.  That’s like the Pythagorean theorem for the perfect party in my mind.

3. The WEATHER!  Oh, my heavenly days, the weather.  At some point last week God smiled upon Texas and our temperatures dropped from about 112 degrees to 87 degrees daily.  It was a summer miracle.

4. My friend Cortnee came to my parents house in the country for the weekend.  I took her to see all sorts of things, including my neighbors’ farm of exotic animals, which deserves a post all of its own.  But, most importantly, my parents took both of us on a little driving tour of the country.  We even drove up to the lake.  It was beautiful and bizarre all at the same time.  I felt like I was back in junior high sitting in the back of my Mom’s car with my friend while we drove on the county back roads.

5. I accepted a couple of job offers.  Then today I accepted a new one and will be working full time for a school in the area.  The only explanation for it all is that my life is weird.  Every time I give up hope I am surprised by God’s provision again. 

I think that last bullet point explains why I am not going to continue looking back on the dark days of ‘the-month-that-is-dead-to-me’.  Not that I didn’t have some fun times, but from here on out, I’m all about September.

Life Under Construction

I don’t know if you do much driving, but this summer has been “The Summer of The Car” in my little world.  It explains a lot about why I haven’t written anything on my blog in about a month… I was too busy driving in my car.  All summer long I had been leaving my parents house on Monday morning and driving about an hour and a half to work, then I would drive about 20 minutes to a friends apartment and spend the week with her- driving back and forth to work everyday.  On Fridays I would make the trip home again and the whole process would begin anew Monday morning.  Lather, Rinse, Repeat.  Towards the middle of July the friend whose house I was staying at moved (out of the country) and I was sent into a tailspin.  I stayed with a friend one week who lived about 40 minutes from work, one week I drove from my parents home (an hour and a half BOTH WAYS.  I was seriously questioning my sanity) every day and in the midst of all that I’ve been driving to interviews all over creation.  I’m not positive about the exact number, but I think it’s safe to say I put something like 200,000 miles on my car.

All that time in the car this summer put me in the way of some serious construction zones.  Here’s the thing about construction zones: they’re annoying.  Incredibly annoying.  I think all of us can agree that (for the most part) we realize the necessity of highway construction and we appreciate that, in the end, it’s gonna be a wonderful thing for us.  But DURING the construction?  Miserable, awful and annoying. 

What I’ve noticed lately though is that my life is sitting in the middle of a construction zone.  I’ve been searching for a job all summer and I’ve been waiting to find a new place to live until after I have a job.  And all the waiting has felt like gridlock.  Annoying, headache-inducing gridlock.  It seems that God has decided to take every comfort I never knew I was clinging onto and strip them away until the only comfort is Him.  From financial security to pride God has decided to light fire to things that are not eternal and while I see that the end product will probably bring me greater joy, right now?  I’m stuck in traffic and the car is starting to overheat.

I can’t help but think that one day (in the not-so-distant future) I’m going to really regret having written this post.  I’ll look back and laugh and say to myself: “you were such a drama queen!  Of course you had to learn that lesson, but why did you have to share it on the public domain?”.  Oh, the mid-twenties.  They are a veritable smorgasbord of insecurities.  But, I don’t have a diary that I write in every day and the whole purpose of writing a blog is to record my life and share it with others.  Whether it be about life’s big questions or about my inability to spell the word rhythm.  I mean I’d love to be able to come on my blog and write another post about how much I truly loved Shark Week (because I truly did), but the truth of the matter is, life isn’t really that pretty right now and writing about my gruesome fascination with shark attacks isn’t going to change that.  So, I’ve decided instead to just be honest and tell you my life is under construction and some days I don’t know what it all means or what it’s all about, but sooner or later the traffic will ease up and I’ll be moving ahead again.  Until then, I’m living life in a construction zone.