When the Preacher's Away, the Wife Will Play

So...I skipped church.

This never happens in my real world.  I teach small children, I show up looking presentable, I talk to all the elderly members, and then I go home and collapse every Wednesday night.  But not tonight - I'm on Preacher's Wife Vacation.  Not something that the worthy woman from Proverbs would do, but I am a rebel (tonight.)

I went to the Blue Door in OKC and saw a bluegrass group called The Greencards.  The place has no name, no sign really, but it has a blue door and really interesting groups play there.  Even without air conditioning, the show was great.  About the Greencards:  it is amazing to me that two Aussies, one Brit, and one guy from Atlanta can sound like they were all born singing country music in Tennessee.  It is also amazing that I went to a concert that actually worked  - that hasn't happened in a while.  They were very good and they sang some great stuff, including a Patti Griffin song that made me want to pull out everything I have of hers and remind myself of why I love Patti.

I spent tonight with my brother and sister-in-law and my sister.  We were reflecting about how it was twenty years ago that my brother got married.  I showed my brother's wedding photo to Darby and she cracked up because I was dressed like a compound wife, or a Duggar daughter (whichever one you pick, I got the floral dress and hairstyle to match.)  We enjoyed looking at all the wedding pics today, laughing about the things that happened, like when my cousin Kelli and Jacob got stuck in the elevator at Scott Chapel and Kelli taught Jacob inappropriate jokes to distract him.  Ah, memories...

Roadtrip Observations

1.  I drove across the hot, dry land in a black sedan.  That kind of sounds like a line from a blues song, doesn't it?  The black vehicle does me no favors when you are going to a place that is as hot as H-E- double hockey sticks.  My oldest daughter sang , "I see a black car and I want to paint it blue...", and I love it when my child knows some classic rock songs.  We owe  it all to Guitar Hero.

2.  Mississippi was especially interesting this go around.  I started counting Bingo parlors.  It was astonishing how many I found!  I also found a venue for adult male entertainment called "The Boobie Trap."  With a name like that, you have no doubts about the atmosphere...

3.  The award for the most idiotic restaurants/stores goes to...Oklahoma!  OK won this same award last time as well.  Roxy and I stood in line for over 10 minutes at a McDonald's, listening to the gentleman in front of me ask the cashier about the quality of their barbecue sauce, and then I looked down and saw he was wearing torn up, cheapo plastic shower shoes AND he had nasty toenails, too.  Roxy was watching the weird, slightly altered young man wandering the place with a "For Sale" sign duct-taped to his back.  Darby was noticing the unwashed dining tables and how many flies were congregating on them.  And then the cashier with the black hair with the white skunk stripe straight across the top of her head told me that the ice cream machine was broken.  Shocker.

So we left and headed across the street to the Wendy's/Gas Station.  I have previously had creepy experiences there, but I figured that we had no where to go but up after the McDonald's visit.  We ordered the Coffee Toffee Twisted Frosties (so yummy) and a Frostycino (very yummy and drinkable), BUT I had to pull over for Frosty triage because the stellar employees gave them to me with drippy ice cream cascading down each cup.  Nice.

4.  You can entertain Roxy for hours - no joke- with magnetic tanagrams.  It is one of those little brain-building items where you build certain pictures out of triangles, a rectangle, and a square.  The challenge is figuring out just the right placement to make the images.  Roxy is pretty good with spacial reasoning and she loves the challenges of puzzles and stuff like that, so my girl was busy, busy, busy.

5.  Darby was introduced to Weezer.  She is a fan of a couple of songs, so she was completely shocked to find that I actually own Weezer CDs from back in the day.  She does not even grasp the strange, bizarre music collection I have.  She thinks I'm a lame mom, but I know that cool moms have saved their Weezer CDs from 15 years ago.  Ha!

So we survived the roadtrip and we did not end up broken down on the side of the road (which is important when you consider the quality of I40).  Life is good, I have my family, and we are in need of a vacation!

Let's Get Sassy for Father's Day

Nothing says "I Love You" like sarcasm - Happy Father's Day, Scottie, from your retro-50s housewife!

Random Acts of Photography: The Final Post

I feel much better now! The picture card has been cleared! You can see church picnics, a reenactment of the Stand By Me movie, and a view of Atlanta from Turner field - good times.

Random Acts of Photography - The Roxy Story

Random Acts of Photography

I finally got the camera situation under control and look at what I found...

Scott's Curse of the Troubadours

Scott and I had a date last night. Yes, we actually did - babysitter and all. This is such a rare event, you would think I would have documented it with photos, but I could not. I think the last babysitter we hired was in October when he accompanied me to the Ryan Adams concert. Which brings me to the curse...

I like music that is generally never played on mainstream radio stations - guys that write and sing their own music, often times by themselves. Ryan Adams, for example. When we went to his concert in October I was just excited I got to see the guy before he left this earth because he has harmful behavior tendencies. We went to the concert and Scott hated it, but fortunately the concert was cut short after 1 hour due to Ryan's illness of flu. He rescheduled the concert and offered free tickets, but I had to pass on those because I had no Scott. Under no terms would Scott ever see him again.

So, in a desperate act of pleasing his wife, Scott got us tickets for Steve Earle. I am a Steve Earle fan, I find him very interesting and authentic, and I really wanted to see him but did not have the nerve to ask Scott to go with me. This concert was different - all acoustic, no drums, set outside in the Atlanta Botanical Gardens at Piedmont Park. The setting was perfect and I was pretty sure that Scott would not plug his ears all evening.

Everything was promising and I was enjoying the concert until about the eighth song. That is when the monsoon storm hit. We managed to duck and get under cover pretty quickly, but about a thousand people were soaked to the bone. Picture a bunch of society types, wearing their white linen shorts and carrying their wine buckets and their beach chairs - and now they are dripping wet because a huge storm system had come upon us, stretching across Georgia all the way to Alabama. Fortunately for us, the advanced society surrounding us wore undergarments. There was nothing to hid when all those richies got plastered with raindrops. If this had happened at a Braves game, it would have looked like more tailgating party antics.

They had to cancel the concert. There will be a rescheduled concert in all likelihood, but alas, another dream date dashed. Scott's curse of the troubadours seems to kick in after about eight-10 songs, which means that I get hopeful only to have the rug pulled out from under me. In another eight months, I'm due for another date/concert. I'm thinking I'll go to the movie store and rent a concert, then wait for the electricity to go out after about 8-10 songs.