Listen.

I was all set to live-blog The Bachelor last night. I’d even figured out how I was going to start the post and couldn’t wait to take the first really cheesy line and use it as my title (for the record, it would’ve been a toss up between “My Middle Name is ROSE,” “The Verdict Is In, And You Are Guilty Of Being $exy,” or “That Was Canadian Bacon”).

But a funny thing happened on the way to live-blogging The Bachelor. I watched the Passion2012 live feed – specifically, I watched Louie Giglio’s opening message – and afterwards, I sat still as a stone for about five minutes and thought, So, missy. After hearing someone preach about how Jesus raises us from death to life, how are you gonna shift gears to live-blogging about The Bachelor?

It felt a little bit like spiritual whiplash, to be honest. And please understand: I’m certainly not casting any reality television stones. I mean, I am a person who has been known to have a quiet time and then immediately settle in to catch up on a couple of DVR’d episodes of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, so I am no stranger to making a quick leap from the sacred to the secular. But something about Passion threw me off my Bachelor bloggy game. I still watched Chris and Ben and the gang (sometimes with my hands over my eyes in an attempt to hide All The Awkward), but for whatever reason, it felt weird to blog about it.

WELCOME TO MY CRAZY. I HOPE YOU FEEL RIGHT AT HOME.

ANYWAY, since I bailed on the Bachelor post, here are a few other random tidbits-o-information I’ve neglected to share over the last couple of weeks. Just so we’re all caught up, of course.

1. Did I tell y’all that Martha got a Kindle for Christmas? Well, Martha got a Kindle for Christmas. And somehow I have been designated as Martha’s Kindle tech support person. I do not have a Kindle, mind you, nor had I even held a Kindle until I set up Martha’s, but even still I am now the one-woman Kindle Geek Squad in our family. FOR MARTHA.

I would appreciate your prayers.

2. I’m fairly certain that at least one person in our house developed a strong addiction to this stuff over the holidays.

3. Remember a few weeks ago when I was totally obsessed with the Dire Grove hidden object game? Well. The week before Christmas I played TWO hidden object games: Ravenhearst (which was a little dated but fun) and Return to Ravenhearst (which I really enjoyed). THEN a bloggy friend was kind enough to share a gift certificate for 13th Skull, and I think it may be my favorite of them all. It takes place in Louisiana, and what I love is that you can adjust the “attitude” of the game to make the tone of it more Southern.

I think we all know that I’d turn the Southern all the way up to “stun” if I could.

4. Way back in November I mentioned that I had some thoughts about the current trend of tucking pants into boots. I still have those thoughts. I’ve just been a little too chicken to share them in the event that someone who feels like she’s walking in tuck-in victory reads what I have to say about this Critical Matter of International Importance and as a result unnecessarily begins to question the wisdom of her tuck-in when she’s actually more than fulfilling all the items on the Successful Tuck-In Checklist.

Not that there’s really any such list, of course (BUT MAYBE WE NEED TO MAKE ONE).

Anyway, I don’t want to be a tuck-in stumbling block when there are a great many people who are excelling at the delicate tuck-in balance. Life is hard enough without false tuck-in guilt or, heaven forbid, unnecessary tuck-in shame.

All that to say: I’m prayerfully considering the best way to move forward with my tuck-in thoughts. If I don’t feel a peace about it, you may rest assured that I will consult my accountability partner and maybe even an elder.

5. I recently started watching Once Upon A Time on ABC. I did not think that I would like it AT ALL since it involves A) fairy tales B) troll-type creatures C) a certain degree of Arthurian fantasy, a genre that typically makes me itch D) elaborate costumes that are not being used for CIA-related purposes (I miss you, Sydney Bristow) and E) a precocious child in a leading role.

NOT THAT I’M PICKY OR ANYTHING.

But oh my goodness, y’all – I adore this show. I think the acting is fantastic (especially the actress who plays the Evil Queen), and even though the premise isn’t anything I would normally expect to enjoy, I am such a fan. There’s something very compelling about knowing the story behind the story, and LOOK AT ME ADDING ANOTHER HOUR-LONG DRAMA TO THE TV MIX.

I’m shocked, quite frankly – but are any of you watching, too?

Happy Tuesday and/or Wednesday, y’all.

This past Thursday my people and I packed an inordinate amount of clothing (the weather, it was shifty and unpredictable) and made the trip up I-65 to Nashville. I know that I’ve mentioned it 14 or 27 times over the last six years, but the drive from Birmingham to Nashville is my all-time, hands-down, ain’t-even-a-contest favorite. Combine that with the fact that we were going to see the Bulldogs play in the Music City Bowl, and it’s a safe bet to say that I was ONE ENTHUSIASTIC TRAVELER. It was all I could do not to honk and wave anytime we saw a car with a Mississippi State decal / bumper sticker / car tag on the interstate, but I figured that it might put a damper on someone’s bowl game experience if they swerved into another lane as a result of the crazy lady from Alabama who startled them with All The Honking in response to seeing so much maroon and white on the road.

So I restrained myself. IT WAS A MUSIC CITY BOWL MIRACLE.

I knew before we ever arrived in Nashville that all the football festivities would be a blast, but Thursday night Sister had a little surprise up her sleeve that wound up being one of the most fun parts of our weekend. Sister’s college roommate’s sister (got that?) was hosting a songwriters’ night at the Nashville Songwriters Association International, and I decided that sounded like a fine way to spend a Thursday night even though it started at 9 o’clock in the PM and Mamaw here is usually heading into her third hour of pajama-time at that point in the evening.

As it turned out, putting on real-live clothes and staying up a little later than usual was a really good call on my part. The night was such a treat. The crowd was made up of mostly Mississippi folks (my most favorite kind of folks), and we listened to Jim McBride, Lauren Lucas and Rivers Rutherford perform some of their songs. They also told the stories behind the songs, and I could’ve listened to those stories all night long. Maybe it’s because I spent most of last week with a quote from Peace Like A River running through my head – “Is there a single person on whom I can press belief? No sir. All I can do is say, Here’s how it went. Here’s what I saw…. Make of it what you will.” – but hearing the songwriters share their stories inspired me like crazy. I’ll never forget it.

(Pretend that there are some really good pictures here.)

(I snapped a few, but they are dark and also blurry – A WINNING PHOTOGRAPHIC COMBINATION.)

The next morning I met my friend Annie for breakfast, which means that we both basically got out of our cars, exchanged hugs, then launched into a series of “SO. [INSERT TOPIC HERE.]” We ran the conversational gamut for 90 straight minutes, covering everything from blogs to church to relationships to writing to reading to random funny tidbits. After Annie and I said our good-byes, I had plenty of time to get back to Sister’s house, dig through my suitcase and conduct an elaborate bowl game wardrobe evaluation (it was cloudy, damp, and windy, so there were a lot of unknowns in terms of optimizing my layering options).

Even though the game didn’t start until 5:30-ish, we ended up leaving Sister’s house around noon. Apparently we were a smidge excited. Plus, Sister and I agreed that attending State’s pre-game pep rally was a must, so after a quick (and very fancy) lunch at Sonic, we headed downtown, where there were about 40,000 very enthusiastic Bulldog fans waiting to cheer on their team.

Bulldog fans with COWBELLS, I might add.

It was a little loud.

And yes, I know that the sound of cowbells absolutely drives some people crazy. I, however, adore the sound. In fact, if a sound machine came with an option for clanging cowbells, I’d be all about it. I’d choose it over the sound of a gentle rainfall or a babbling brook every single time. Because the cowbells, they soothe me.

THEY SOOTHE ME.

After the pep rally, the Dawg Walk and a pat-down (seriously. A PAT-DOWN. TO ENTER THE STADIUM.), we found our seats and settled in for the game. Sister was able to get some reallllly good tickets through one of her work connections, and we were just as tickled as we could be with the whole set-up (a certain eight year-old was BESIDE HIMSELF with his good seating fortune). There were some Wake Forest fans right beside us, and since they were none too enamored with the cowbells (oh bless their hearts), we tried to be good neighbors and keep our bells on a low simmer throughout most of the first half. However, the WF people sat with some friends during most of the second half, so we were able to ring with increased freedom during the third and fourth quarters. You can imagine our delight. In fact, at one particularly tense point in the fourth quarter, A. looked at the field, then looked at me, grinned, and said, “Mama, I have a bell – and I’m not afraid to ring it.”

RING AT WILL, MY CHILD. RING AT WILL.

The game wasn’t pretty, but it was a win – and a win sure beats the alternative. So we cheered and we clapped and we rang those bells a little bit more. It was a great way to wrap up the 2011 football season.

Here! Some blurry pictures from my phone! LET ME SHARE THE MAGIC!

So now we’re home and gearing up for 2012. I’m finally feel free to give Bulldog basketball my full sports-related attention, which means that this house is going to get vacuumed A LOT over the next couple of months. Hopefully Ye Olde Blawg will get a little bit more attention, too. I feel like I’ve been a good bit more scattered than usual lately – lots of stuff fighting for attention in this easily distracted brain-o-mine – but hopefully some of that will settle down once we get back into our normal routine. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

Thanks for bearing with me during these last few weeks of consistently inconsistent blogging. Everything should be back to normal this week. FINGERS CROSSED.

I’m so thankful for each one of you – much love to you and your families in 2012.

Happy New Year, y’all.

Happy 2012, y’all.

Well, my word. I had no intention of being gone for so long. But even though it wasn’t planned, it’s been good. We’ve had three (THREE!) unexpected visits from friends who popped into town for one reason or another, plus a few days with my parents, sister and brother-in-law, and I have had the best time hanging out and catching up and drinking way too many Peppermint Mochas.

Do you know what the Peppermint Mocha is, by the way?

IT IS A BLESSING.

I don’t know that there’s any merit at this point to a recap of the past week (we’ve done a lot of talking! we’ve done some unwrapping! there has also been a great deal of cooking!), but there are a few specific highlights that I would like to share with you at this juncture. Keep in mind that these things are very trivial and unimportant in the grand scheme of life, but that’s sort of been my ongoing bloggy theme for the last six years.

Why stop now?

1. I watched two movies.

There was a time in my life (see: late teens to mid-20s) when I could rattle off a list of what movies were playing in theatres without even consulting the Internet.

Wait. Rewind.

From my late teens to mid-20s the Internet pretty much consisted of an AOL home page and the occasional message board. So there actually wouldn’t have been a whole lot of “consulting the Internet” during that phase of my life. However, there would have been a great deal of consulting the newspaper as well as Entertainment Weekly.

So there. I feel better now that we’ve cleared up our movie consultation terms.

ANYWAY, I used to be pretty obsessed with movies / aware of everything in theatres / likely to see just about anything that caught my fancy. But then I turned 30 and became increasingly annoyed by people who talked throughout movies. And I also realized that there were fewer and fewer movies that I actually enjoyed. Combine those things with the fact that there was a whole lot of cleaning / furniture rearranging / decorating that I could accomplish over the course of 2 1/2 hours on a Saturday afternoon, and, well, the movies and I sort of had a parting of the ways.

That was such an endless overexplanation, by the way.

I do apologize.

The bottom line is that these days I rarely know what’s showing at the movies. I don’t know what gets good reviews or bad reviews, mainly because I don’t, you know, read reviews. And that is precisely why I had no idea what I was getting into when I recorded You Again and How Do You Know when they were on the Starz free preview a couple of days ago.

(I mean, that Kristen Bell was just adorable in Veronica Mars.)

(And who doesn’t love a Reese Witherspoon movie? She is DARLIN’ PLUS.)

So I recorded both movies and I watched both movies and I was underwhelmed by both movies and HERE’S THE TAKEAWAY: it would serve me well to READ SOME REVIEWS every once in awhile.

I feel that I’ve learned a valuable lesson.

2. I changed my skin care regimen.

It was back in the early fall, I think, when I looked in the mirror one morning and wondered why there was a middle-aged woman with dull skin staring back at me. And also: why did the skin under her eyes look so puckered? And why was there a place on her forehead that wasn’t so much a wrinkle as it was an indentation?

I gave myself a short motivational speech about drastic times, drastic measures, etc. and so on and so forth, and I promptly started to investigate some new skin care options. I narrowed down my list to a few products I wanted to try, and then lo and behold a friend of mine who is walking through a similar skin care season surprised me with several of those products. I practically hitch-kicked in our foyer on the day the unexpected package-o-potions arrived, and I thanked the Lord for sweet friends who spur us on to exfoliation and wrinkle prevention when it comes our skin care goals.

I also thanked him for Retinol.

The new products have been resting comfortably on my bathroom counter for a month now (I was totally intimidated by the multi-step process), but a couple of nights ago I finally started using them. I would love it if this could be like an infomercial and I could now tell you how my skin has never looked better! I’ve stopped wearing foundation! My pores are practically invisible! – but right now my skin is in that adjusting-to-new-products phase. At this very moment, in fact, I’m soldiering through a bit of a break out, but I’m hopeful it will be short-lived.

Stay tuned for more riveting skin care updates as the situation progresses.

3. We had homemade banana pudding for Christmas dinner dessert.

I forget about homemade banana pudding. It often gets lost in the shuffle of All Things Chocolate.

But oh, it is an underrated wonder, isn’t it?

Okay. Enough of my nonsense. HOW ARE Y’ALL? How was your Christmas? Have you recovered? What was your favorite gift that you gave someone?

I have so many questions.

So I’ll let y’all talk now.

Well.

Saturday morning our crew of three woke up and headed to Mississippi so that we could celebrate Christmas with D’s side of the family. I was sort of annoyingly excited about it because over the last couple of years I have discovered that I am a person who enjoys having Plans At Christmas. I used to think I was a person who just wanted to roll with it and be all devil-may-care-ish at Christmas, but then there was The Unfortunate Holiday Season of 2009 where we didn’t get to see any of our family on Thanksgiving, Christmas Day or New Year’s.

Needless to say, The Unfortunate Holiday Season of 2009 TAUGHT ME SOME LESSONS. And now? I make a point to map out a Christmas plan. We don’t need a calendar filled with mindless activity, mind you, but I have discovered that it’s good (for me, at least) to have a reason to fix my hair and put on a little make-up and interact with other humans. Cold, gray weather tends to put me in a funk, and I do a better job of fighting the funk when I’m surrounded by happy people and good times and the occasional cream cheese-laden appetizer.

Apparently my emotional needs tend to err on the side of simple.

Our first Mississippi stop was Martha’s house. You will not be at all surprised to learn that she greeted us wearing one of her favorite jackets, only this time it was a cute gray one (but not as cute as the one she found at Hudson’s Treasure Hunt! because it’s just the cutest! and it looks like ostrich! and it’s just so cute can you even believe how cute JUST LOOK HOW CUTE IT IS!). Martha hosted three dessert parties last week – each for a different group of friends – and so she regaled us with tales of the dessert parties and who was there and what they wore and how much fun they all had.

Listen. I don’t know what the 70- and 80-something set is up to in your hometown, but in my hometown, they are DECKIN’ SOME HALLS.

After we visited for a little bit we went out to lunch with Martha and David’s brother’s family. We had a great time, then went back to Martha’s to exchange presents. We knew that Scott and Rose were giving Martha a Kindle, so one of her presents from us was a gift card from Amazon. Her other present from us was a little something I picked up in Steinmart because I thought it might be a fun alternative to Martha’s beloved jackets.

Yes indeed. We got Martha a poncho. And considering that she put it on as soon as she took it out of the box and continued wearing it for the duration of our visit, I think she was a fan.

She was also a fan of her Kindle, but I think it’s going to take a little practice before she’s completely comfortable with it. I say that because when we left her house late Saturday afternoon, Martha was tapping the screen to turn the pages with such vigor that I feared for the Kindle’s well-being. It reminded me of when D and I were first married and the cashier at the Walgreens near our house poked the keys on the cash register so hard that I worried she was going to knock the keyboard off of its pedestal. She’d look over her reading glasses, dart her eyes this way and that as she tried to find a 7 or a 3 or a 9, and when she finally found it, she’d practically punch whatever number she was looking for. It was almost like she thought she was playing Whack-a-Mole and needed to smack the number before it got away from her.

So that? Is pretty much Martha with a Kindle.

It really was such a fun visit, and on the way home we decided to stop for supper in Livingston, Alabama. Scott told us that we needed to try a restaurant there, and he raved so much about it that our curiosity wouldn’t let us pass by the exit without giving it a try.

Y’all.

I’m gonna tell you what.

If you are ever on I-20 and wondering if there is anywhere to get a good steak near Livingston, Alabama, I am here to tell you that the answer is YES, A MILLION TIMES YES. I should’ve known that any place called Diamond Jim’s & Mrs. Donna’s was bound to be good, but I was not prepared for how out-of-this-world delicious their steaks would be. However, I suspected that I was in for a treat when I first sat down at our table.

I haven’t done any sort of scientific poll, but restaurants that leave crackers on the table almost always have the best food. It’s as sure as the sun.

And as an added bonus, Diamond Jim’s also served some mighty fine fried dill pickles.

The fried pickle spear is a little bit of a step-out in this part of the country; we usually favor fried pickle chips. But OH. The fried pickle spears at Diamond Jim’s were delicious, and I’m pretty sure that at least part of the batter was bread crumbs. Delightful, they were.

After supper we rolled back to the car and finished the last leg of our trip. I figured that we had probably exhausted most of our weekend fun, but Sunday after church some old friends who were in town came over for lunch. It did our hearts good to get to spend the day with them, and it was so pretty outside that the kids ran and played in the backyard for, no kidding, about four hours straight. It was a ’bout-near-perfect afternoon.

So that’s what’s going on in our neck of the woods. I’m about to make a big batch of these super-addictive crackers, and then I may play a little bit of a new hidden object game that I downloaded last night. So far it hasn’t sent me into a spiral of obsession quite like my beloved Dire Grove did, but I’m optimistic that it’s going to be a good ‘un.

I’ll be sure to keep you posted. Between my new game, Martha’s new poncho, and my new favorite Alabama steakhouse, I have to say that the week is shaping up nicely.

Merry Christmas, y’all.