So for the last few days I’ve been on a little family trip, and if you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned anything about it before now, it’s because our house has been empty since Saturday and I didn’t want to give a heads-up to a local RING OF THIEVES.

Because I’m sure that it’s totally the norm for a RING OF THIEVES to read blogs and then plan their heists accordingly.

Not that robbing our house would qualify as a heist, mind you. A wee small heist-ette, maybe. And only then if I’d just gone to the grocery store and therefore had an inordinate amount of cheese in the refrigerator.

We actually planned our little family getaway several months before I found out about the trip to Ecuador, and when we realized the timing of it all – what with the family trip falling in the middle of what was sure to be Ugly Re-Entry Time – my husband was a little worried that there would be some point when I’d be bawling my eyes out while he and the little man were having the time of their lives. Honestly, I thought it was a pretty dead-on prediction, but as it turned out, the time with my people was just the thing to counter the last of my re-entry blues.

Except for the part where I forgot to check in on Southwest until about 12 hours before we left town and we were way down low in the B boarding group and the flight was completely full and I spent a good portion of Saturday morning wondering HOW, HOW COULD I HAVE FAILED MY FAMILY WITH THE LOW-B BOARDING GROUP, HOW? HOWWWWWWWW??!?

So I was very level-headed and absolutely loaded with perspective about all of the plane-related events. As you can clearly see.

[I just wrote a whole bunch about our trip and then deleted it because I decided that my details were beyond boring.]

[But we went to Universal in Orlando.]

[When I figure out how to share some info about the festivities without making you want to claw out your eyeballs with a salad fork, I will certainly try again.]

[However, you can rest assured that a fine time was had by all on hand.]

[I mean, WE SAW HOGWARTS, Y’ALL.]

It was delightful.

And to top it all off, today in the Orlando airport I had one of my most epic people-watching days EVER thanks to two female bodybuilders. Now I don’t know for sure that they were bodybuilders; I am merely making that assumption based on the fact that their arms were so cut that it looked like each woman could have picked up a whole row of chairs and flipped it through the nearest window, not to mention that when they walked past me I could hear their abs rippling. So if they weren’t bodybuilders, they were, at the very least, weight lifting aficionados.

Aficionadas?

I have no idea.

So the bodybuilder-esque women were sitting on the row across from us at our gate, and I was trying so hard not to look at them only HOW COULD I NOT LOOK AT THEM WHEN I WAS SO COMPLETELY FASCINATED? I had an endless list of questions in my head – do you train together? are you on your way to a competition? is body building big here in florida? have you ever tried the mushroom swiss burger at dairy queen? do you know that it has sort of a gravy-ish substance on it that I find strangely delicious? are you surprised that I am not personally involved in any sort of hard core weight lifting? do you know jillian michaels? – but I was too scared to strike up a conversation because, well, they seemed very intense and focused and also intense.

I tried to distract myself by texting a friend of mine who is as obsessed with people-watching as I am. And y’all, just as I started typing out that text, I realized that the bodybuilder women were eating chicken breasts from a Ziploc bag and I thought, “OH MY WORD THEY’RE PROTEIN LOADING. AT NINE THIRTY IN THE MORNING.” I continued with my texting so that I wouldn’t, you know, STARE, but I couldn’t get over the fact that they brought their own chicken to the airport. They took their chicken through security, y’all. THAT IS SOME DEDICATION.

My time in the Orlando airport also helped me to solidify some thoughts about this whole tucking-pants-into-boots trend, but that information will have to wait because quite frankly I don’t know how you could possibly handle the news about the chicken-eating bodybuilders and my opinions on the boot tuck-in all in one day. I can only ask so much of you, especially with Thanksgiving just a couple of days away.

Anyway, we’ve been home for about five hours, and I’ve already baked my sweet potatoes and am about to baptize them in some butter and brown sugar. Tomorrow I don’t have to go anywhere, so I’m going to stay in my pajamas and cook all day and then maybe change into some different pajamas and cook some more and then maybe watch some TV. So basically I’m going to have a pajama party that involves preparing large quantities of various and sundry high carb foods, capped off with a night where I watch DVR’d reality television programming. THE LORD IS FAITHFUL AND WORTHY TO BE PRAISED.

It’s good to be home.

And it’s especially good to be home WITH NO PLANS TO LEAVE.

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all.

I don’t really have a lot of exciting news to report, but since that’s never stopped me before, I figured I’d update Ye Olde Blog before I go to bed.

So. I cooked some fish for supper tonight.

Love,
Me

In all seriousness, I’ve been having a hard time getting into a post-Ecuador groove. I’ve been plenty busy with family and work and errands and whatnot, and I’ve also been doing some pretty impressive sleeping (some of my best ever, in fact), but I’m still just a little bit unsettled in a way I can’t exactly explain. It’s almost like a little piece of my heart is still a few thousand miles away (totally estimating on that mileage thing, by the way – I’m not very strong with the geography). It’s not really a sadness – it’s just that I miss it. I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to go.

So there’s that.

In other delightful developments, I seem to have caught a cold at some point during All The Traveling. I started sneezing Monday afternoon, and by Tuesday morning I was wondering if I’d ever breathe through my nose again. You may have noticed that I’m not at all melodramatic when it comes to something as run-of-the-mill as THE COMMON COLD.

Have mercy. Sometimes I WEAR MYSELF OUT.

Anyway, today was much better on the cold front (as long as you’re not counting the part where it rained all morning and I was having a terrible hair day and I wasn’t home so I didn’t have a brush and my cowlick decided to overtake the whole right side of my forehead and CLEARLY I AM BACK IN THE SWING OF DOCUMENTING MY MANY FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS), but this afternoon I realized that I needed another box of tissue. At this point, by the way, I’m guessing that there are two or maybe even four of you still reading, and if that is the case, then I would just like to say KUDOOZ TO YOU (if you get that reference, then I may have to send you some sort of prize).

Anyway, I ran to the Walgreens to grab a box of tissues, and I made a discovery that may very well change the course of my entire life or, at the very least, the course of the next 3-4 days.

They’re Kleenex Cool Touch tissues.

HAVE Y’ALL TRIED THESE?

Oh my word.

I don’t know how in the world the Kleenex people put the cool touch magic in these tissues, but they are A REFRESHING TREASURE. They actually feel cool against your face – almost like you’ve just pulled a box of tissues out of the freezer (which, you know, I’m sure lots of us do on a daily basis). I’m normally not overly picky about my tissues, but after finding myself in need of a tissue on approximately 251 different occasions today (just a rough estimation, of course), the Cool Touch Kleenex have provided some sweet relief over the last few hours.

So that’s pretty much all that’s new with me: a hard-to-define restlessness, a cold, and some really good tissues.

What’s new with you?

You know, if I were ever in any sort of situation where I had to prove that I have a strong tendency to get totally wrapped up in the most mundane, pointless details, I really do believe that I could enter yesterday’s post into evidence.

Your honor, I wrote about straws. Drinking draws. I’d like to submit this post as Exhibit 1-a.

(Is evidence submitted as “exhibits”?)

(I don’t really have any experience with legal lingo. I’m pretty much just basing my word choice on some old Matlock episodes.)

So yes. In yesterday’s post I established that I enjoy a straw. THE WORLD CAN CONTINUE WITH THE TURNING.

Other exciting things that have happened lately:

1) I bought some organic soup in a box.

2) I watched four episodes in a row of House Hunters International.

3) I couldn’t find my favorite note-taking pen in church Sunday, so I had to use a fine-tip red pen instead. You can imagine how difficult it was for me to concentrate under those circumstances.

4) I cooked some turkey bacon for breakfast.

5) I exchanged a pair of cargo pants for another pair of cargo pants.

Really, I don’t know why someone hasn’t composed an original musical number to capture all that magic in song form.

There actually was a little bit of real-live excitement today when I spent a significant chunk of the afternoon making sure that I had all my shots and prescriptions and general medical whathaveyous for Ecuador (side note: for the last couple of weeks we’ve been pronouncing Ecuador as “AY-qua-thdor” in our house – sort of like how Giada De Laurentiis always says Italian words with a thick Italian accent (“mozzaRELLLLLLA”) – and now I’m worried that I’m going to get to Ecuador (“AY-qua-thdor”) and accidentally say English words with a really bad Spanish accent and basically disgrace OUR WHOLE ENTIRE COUNTRY.)

(But I’m trying not to be overly dramatic about it.)

(You probably picked up on that.)

Anyway, this afternoon I got a shot and some prescriptions, and I’m mighty relieved to have that stuff out of the way. I’m gonna take the next couple of days off from the blog so that I can concentrate on plowing through the rest of my to-do list. Among other things, I need to wrap up some work stuff, finish an article, make one more (panicked) trip to Target, etc. But I’ll be back at the end of the week (-ish), and hopefully I’ll be organized (-ish) and sane (-ish).

In the meantime, I hope that all of you continue to enjoy your straws. And should exchanging one pair of cargo pants for another pair of cargo pants be the order of the day for you, I hope that your new cargo pants meet all of your cargo pants-related needs. And then some.

Hallelujah.

See y’all in a couple of days!

You know how you can have a vague awareness of a certain date or trip or event for a really long time, but then there’s one day in particular where the reality of that upcoming thing sort of settles in and you start to think that you’re not at all prepared and SWEET FANCY MOSES TIME’S-A-WASTIN’?

That’s pretty much what happened to me this past Saturday. One minute I was all normal and happy-go-lucky and look! the sky is especially blue today! – and the next minute I was scribbling a to-do list on the back of an envelope and trying to run six errands during the hour and a half when the eight year-old was at a birthday party.

The good news is that my small, private panic attack totally paid off, because I managed to get a whole bunch done over the course of two days: the freezer is stocked (I made everything on my list except for mac and cheese), my laundry is done, my suitcase is open on the guest room bed and waiting to be packed, and after about five nights in a row of being in the bed by 9 and asleep by 9:30 (oh, wisdom tooth extraction, you are the gift that keeps on giving), I am more rested than I’ve been since 2002.

Seriously. I woke up Sunday morning about 6:30, kicked off the covers, and thought, Well. I believe my work here is done.

And get a load of this, bloggy people: you know I mentioned (a week or two ago) that I was was cutting back on caffeine and wasn’t really drinking any caffeine after lunch time? Well, last week the dentist told me to avoid carbonated beverages for a few days because sometimes carbonation can cause a dry socket (I’m not really sure what that is, but I’m definitely sure that I don’t want one), so I was all IXNAY ON THE IETDAE OKECAY, but then I got a little confused about what “a few days” meant, so then I got paranoid about not following doctor’s orders, and the bottom line is that I haven’t had a Diet Coke in a week.

I. have not had. a Diet Coke. in a week.

And yet here I am. LIVING TO TELL THE TALE.

The dentist also told me to avoid using straws, and I actually think that’s been harder for me than steering clear of Diet Coke. Oh, I do enjoy a straw, and do you know what else? I find that a straw makes drinking ice water a much more enjoyable experience. Of course, I realize that the fact that I even have an opinion on this admittedly meaningless matter is a pretty good indicator that I’ve been overachieving in terms of thinking about issues of absolutely no consequence at all, but it’s good to know where you stand with the straw. Or if you stand for the straw.

(For the record, I am decidedly in favor of the straw, and I look forward to our tearful reunion just as soon as I know that all things socket-related are healthy and healed.)

(Amen.)

So that’s pretty much life around our house right now. Lots of list-making. Lots of cooking. Lots of sleeping, oh Lord be praised.

And lots of Ecuador-ing in, well, about a week.

Hasta luego, y’all.
________________________________________
Tomorrow (11/1/11) at 11AM central, the LifeWay folks are having a Facebook launch party to celebrate the release of Beth Moore’s new Bible study, James: Mercy Triumphs. There will be a live webcast, lots of giveaways, and, I’m willing to bet, a whole bunch of fun. Don’t miss it!

I really do start listening to Christmas music full-force on November 1st.

Why, you ask?

BECAUSE I ADORE IT, THAT’S WHY.

And since this week marked the debut of several great new Christmas albums, I thought I’d mention a few of them. I also thought I’d mention a few of my not-so-new favorites because I’m pushy like that.

Snow Globe – Matt Wertz – Valerie mentioned this one in the comments of Tuesday’s post, and I kicked myself for not remembering it. This is such a fun Christmas CD – with a version of “Tennessee Christmas” will no doubt make Amy Grant beam with pride.

Christmas – Michael Buble’ – This CD reminds me of when I was little and my parents would play Christmas records (real-live records – on a real-live record player) that featured Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Eddie Fisher, etc. It’s a throwback to a different era, which means that it’s probably destined to be a new classic.

Ring The Bells – Travis Cottrell – We call this CD “RANG YAW BELL” in our house. I have no idea why. But for our little man it’s what Amy Grant’s very first Christmas CD was for me: the hands-down Christmas-time favorite. We love it so much.

Joy – An Irish Christmas – Keith & Kristyn Getty – We sing lots of the Gettys’ music in our church, so I was tickled to see that they have a new Christmas CD. I’m a fan of the Irish flava (and I’m sure the Gettys are all about the flava), and I love that every single song is focused on the birth of Christ. Great mix of old and new.

A Neighborly Christmas – Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors – This Christmas CD has a funky, bluesy, folksy feel, and that’s precisely why I adore it. It’s soulful and simple and good. It’s also a great CD to play in the background during a Christmas party, mainly because it has such a unique sound. Good stuff.

On The Incarnation – Daniel Renstrom – I’ve been saying this for two years now: this is the best Christmas CD you’ve never heard. I love it so much and really do listen to it year-round. It’s haunting and brilliant and wonderful.

Very Merry Christmas – Dave Barnes – This CD came out last year (sort of late in the season, if memory serves), and we WORE IT OUT in our house. It’s right up there with the James Taylor Christmas CD in my book, and that, THAT IS SOME HIGH PRAISE.

So there you have it. A few of my favorites.

Have a great weekend, y’all!