The last days

I have so enjoyed being 33...3 is my favorite number and this has been a good year. We spent the weekend celebrating , and tomorrow I will officially turn 34. Incidentally, I have been battling what I can only guess is a pinched nerve in the left side of my neck all weekend, which has been horrifically uncomfortable, especially today, and must be a sign of aging. No...I'm happy to have lived another year and thankful to have done so with such sweet friends and family.

Ryan took me to the tearoom at Spring Creek on Saturday, where I had my favorite salad and sandwich (and yummy cheeseburger soup, which I dug into before remembering to take a picture) and where I found this ironstone sugarbowl and then next door to Avant Garden, where I picked up this telephone nail with my lucky 33.

For dinner, we met our friends the Rhoads and the Turners at Metropolitan Grill. Steph gave me a pretty candleholder from Pier 1 and Yvonne gave me a mani/pedi gift certificate for Rainbow Nail, knowing how much I enjoy visiting there and how many interesting and funny stories I walk away with.

I'm hoping I wake up with the birthday surprise of my neck not hurting anymore. I have been such a baby about it and Ryan has tended to me like an invalid today. We had a nice weekend and I know there are more celebrations to come in the next few days. Plus a great year of being 34...

"I throw my hands up in the air sometimes, saying ay-oh, we gotta let go...I want to celebrate and live my life, saying ay-oh, baby let's go..." (from my favorite song this week, "Dynamite" by Taio Cruz).

Back in the business...

...of getting up early, getting dressed, and eating a quick breakfast, all with the help of Dad (high school starts much earlier, so Mom is up and gone before her boys get out of bed)...

...lacing up the new shoes (which may or may not be a perfect fit--it's so hard to select shoes for a kid, especially one with impatient and fickle feedback)...

...strapping on the new backpack (which so far has come home mostly empty each day) and latching on the lunchbox (packed with a Lunchables and a carrots-and-ranch-to-go-pack)...

...and meeting friends (old and new) in the hallways of Wanda Gray...3 days down and 177 to go...

Best concert ever

The girls and I had a great trip to see Jack in Kansas City this week. He put on such a great show and the place was packed. This car was in the parking lot of our hotel. We honked every time we drove by it.

Jack sang several songs with Paula Fuga. Such an amazing voice...

The opening acts were ALO (Animal Liberation Orchestra) and G-Love, who Gina mistakenly identified as Glove, a joke that ran through the night. She bought one of his CDs.

We got there early and landed excellent seats, but I still couldn't get any good pictures with my little camera. Our view was perfect though. Jack played for hours, it seemed, just one song right into the next, then did a four-song encore with just his acoustic guitar and a finale song with Paula, ALO and G-love.

We just sat in the parking lot after the show and waited for the cars to clear out. That took quite a while. Then we gorged on a late breakfast at Waffle House near our hotel, the only restaurant around. You can imagine how swamped they were. Our poor waitress was struggling. We all bought the same concert T and wore them to bed that night. Silly girls. We sure did also all wear them home the next day, too...

We made a sampling/shopping stop at Osceloa Cheese on the way home. In all these years of living nearby, I'd never been. The concert was just so good and the trip was a lot of fun...the words to describe it all aren't coming to me now, but I'm so glad I went. I'll be back at work this afternoon, preparing to start a new school year, but I still have thoughts swirling about what I heard and saw at the show...

And all of these moments

just might find their way into my dreams tonight

but I know that they'll be gone

with the morning light sings

and brings new things.

But tomorrow night you see

that they'll be gone too,

too many things I have to do.

But if all of these dreams might find their way

into my day to day scene

I'll be under the impression

I was somewhere in between,

with only two,

just me and you,

not so many things we got to do

or places we got to be...

Old kitty

So today our loyal old Russian Blue (who's gray) turns 14. Ryan and I adopted her from a litter of kittens born on my parents' farm the very first summer we were together and, for better or worse, Miss Alice "Allie" Cooper, has been in our lives ever since. We had taken Ryan on our family vacation to Minnesota that year, along with my Nanny and Papaw, and Ryan wrangled the newborn kittens out from under the deck the night we returned home from the trip. She is the longest-living pet I've ever had, has lived in 2 apartments and 5 houses with us and and seems braced for many a year to come. Sadly our blonde kitty Avrie, a shelter find just a year or two after Allie was born, has no recorded birthdate, so we let her celebrate along with her sister and BFF. We'll say she's 13. And while we're at it, my black kitty Maya Angelou was my birthday present one August 2 years ago (or is it 3?), so I guess Alice will have to share her special day with the outdoor cat who could give or take the rest of us. I know a lot of people just do not care for cats, and the hair on the furniture and hairballs spat out in the most inconvenient of places (and a few even more unpleasant surprises left on my bathroom rug here lately) do certainly get tiresome. But it's hard to imagine our life without these old girls in it. They've just always been with us.

"A dog, I have always said, is prose. A cat is a poem."~Jean Burden

Lots of great snippets of wisdom for cat lovers at www.quotegarden.com/cats.html.

To the sea {see}

Enjoying the gray night sky, touched with traces of navy, feeling the first relief of a breeze since I don't know when, thinking about packing for my trip to see Jack Johnson's To the Sea tour tomorrow with friends at Sandstone in Kansas City...


The light was leaving

in the west it was blue

The children's laughter sang

and skipping like the stones they threw

the voices echoed across the way...

it's getting late...

It was just another night

with the sunset

and the moonrise not so far behind

to give us just enough light

to lay down underneath the stars

listen to Papa's translations

of the stories across the sky...

we drew our own constellations.

~Jack Johnson

{Hot}house

I'm not sure how anything around here is managing to survive, even flourish, through the ridiculously hot days we've been having, but despite my sporadic watering, we've got flowers and plants to greet us if we do brave the front porches.

Time flies...

We {not} busy

We enjoyed another lazy summer day yesterday, the highlight of which was lunch with Aunt Lindsay at Little Tokyo. The 3 of us got quite a kick out of the disclaimer along the bottom of the menu and made it our catchphrase for the rest of the afternoon...

Catch and release

I guess we're kind of an odd family. One night this week when Macauley and I took Booker for a walk on the trail behind our house, we noticed a spot where the creek is usually a good 7 feet deep that had dried out to only puddles. In one of those puddles, we saw a large fish thrashing about, with little water to survive in and no place to swim to. We made a mental note to tell Dad when he got home from work. Ryan worked really late and just when he sat down on the couch to relax, we remembered to tell him about the distressed fish. He immediately got up, filled the cooler with water from the hose, and we all 3 (plus Book) trekked down to the creek. Ryan and Macauley scaled down the bank and Ryan caught the big fish with his hands and dumped it into the cooler. It only fought a little at first. Ryan said it reminded him of our cat Avrie, who we have moved to 6 different houses over the years, and who will fight with all her might not to be caught and shoved into the pet taxi but eventually just flops over dramatically in submission like, Take me. Do what you will. I surrender. We've had that cat for 13 years and only in the last 6 months has she begun to come to our laps on the furniture and not exist in constant fear of us. Like she's finally figured out that if we moved her with us 6 times we might actually want her and have no plans to harm her. But I digress.

Ryan found 4 other small fish in the puddle, which had evaporated even more since we'd last been there, along with a frantic minnow that he also grabbed. We ran through a scenario involving the big daddy fish telling the kids all that time they'd been trapped in the puddle to hang in there, that he'd get them out of this mess somehow, get them to fresh open water if they'd just follow him.

We put the cooler in the back of my 4Runner and drove over to Rivercut, where we dumped the cooler into the James River. The big fish lingered a little while and let Ryan pet it before he swam away.

So our good deed was done. Still haven't reconciled these events with the fact that Macauley had just had fishsticks for dinner that evening...

Yum

I hadn't been to Spring Creek all summer, so Lindsay and I went down to Ozark today and had lunch at the tearoom and did a little looking around. I got my usual scrumptious salad with poppyseed dressing and the roast beef sandwich. Lindsay had the chicken salad and we split a piece of peanut butter cup pie for dessert. She picked up the tab. Very sweet.

Spring Creek has been one of my favorite places to shop for a long, long time. I picked up a couple of small things today but saw lots of other treasures I might like to bring home.

Loving this piece of trim from Debra's Common Ground booth, styled beautifully as always...

Also loved this concrete turkey, but loving my husband more, I didn't bring it home. I have a huge concrete turkey over twice the size of this one that Ryan is not so fond of moving.

The NFS hutch I have loved for many years...

This wire shelf might work in my guest bathroom...and I love the old metal chair, more black than it appears in the picture.

The ironstone chamber pot came home with me and has already found a spot on my dining room table. I liked the detail and the price. Lindsay wanted to stop by an upscale resale shop on the square called Weezie's, where she found a great pair of jeans and I got some supercute pointy shoes.

We had time to sweep through Leola's on the way home. I didn't buy anything but saw a huge ironstone platter I'd like to have and a weathered wood stool I also liked. I thought my Aunt Karen might like these restaurantware platters? She mentioned she liked gray when we shopped together last month. I would love to have the iron fencing and have always wanted a garden gate...

We just about roasted getting in and out of the car. The weatherman promised a "cold front" moving in this weekend, bringing our temps down around 88 degrees next week and maybe some storms. I'm not sure I believe him.