Merry Christmas!

The Hs have had a fun-filled week leading up to now...it's good to be finished w/ all your shopping and work so early! We've had lots of fam time (due in part to a certain child's extended grounding :-) and made an overnight trip to Waco to share gifts w/ family. Two movies: Alvin and the Chipmunks (***) and National Treasure 2 (*****). A is sitting here beside me and she'd like to dispute the 3 star rating I'm giving to Alvin. However, I'm going to stand by my 3 stars for several reasons - she's 8 (A would like me to say "almost 9" right now), finds chipmunks humorous, and did not see National Treasure.

Anyway, Merry Christmas everybody~ Hope your worship this Christmas is especially joyful!

yay for me!

woooooooooooooooooooohoooooooooooooooooooooo!


in case you were wondering, today i finished my writing assignment (the one for YOU, the African-American piece). also, c mailed out our Christmas cards. oh, and all my Christmas shopping is done. it's footloose and fancy free i am!

my life and stuff

you beg for a miley report and then you comment not. sheesh. you ppl are hard to please.

tonight i went to fbc waxahachie to get their youth workers fired up about the curriculum they're about to use. i got two 11th grade boys to go with me, bc when the youth min. told me he wanted my talk to be "high energy", I didn't know if I was up to the task. But i think it went well and the boys were just happy to get a free meal out of the deal (the youth workers were also having an appreciation banquet). ANd as I sat watching them wolf down their 2nd dinner of the evening (they had both already eaten at their homes an hour earlier), I began to realize that when B is a teenager I'm going to have to get a 3rd job (in addition to writing and tutoring) bc 16 year old boys eat a LOT. It's not even like it was a light meal...they were serving spaghetti. and they both cleaned their plates

B's bball team played a team from mansfield Monday night and got beat 78-15. ouch. but B scored 2 of those 15 on a nice little drive in the lane and ball fake. That one moment almost made it completely worthwhile for c and me to sit through that otherwise dismal game. They get to play another Mansfield team next week...woohoo!

mileyfan@blogger.com

The Hannah Montana concert did NOT disappoint. I think the only other pop concert I've ever been to in my entire life was Rick Springfield in about 1985. And though Rick was everything I'd hoped for and more :-), there's just no comparison. Concerts have come a looooooooooooooong way. And when I was explaining to C that sometimes the stage looked like the set of High School Musical or something with all the dancers and choreography, he pointed out to me that Disney backs her and they don't do anything 1/2 way. AFter the Jonas Brothers opened (btw, i think that one guy is more in love w/ himself than all the little screaming girls combined...."I'm Joe Jonas!" [pause for dramatic effect]) Hannah Montana descended on the stage (literally...she was in some kind of big cage-like box that came down from the ceiling) in dramatic fashion. Several times between songs she went into an on-stage dressing room and changed clothes as the band/others played intros to whatever song was coming next. In the middle of the concert, the J brothers sang 2 more songs while HM transformed into Miley Cyrus, and this is how she performed the remainder of the concert. It was like 2 concerts in one. Oh, and a few times she disappeared or reappeared through the stage floor. There were fireworks (of some sort), streamers exploding into the air, video, and lots of flashing lights. (I was worried that someone in the audience might seize.)There were 5 tour buses outside, just to let you know what a big operation this thing is. Anyway, fun was had by all and A was happy to receive such a cool Christmas present early. so there ya' have it. My 2nd pop concert in 38 years of living. At this rate, I'll see another one in the year 2025 at the age of 56. ROCK ON!

scary stuff

it's a little bit scary how techno savvy kids are these days. Last weekend when we had family here, A and I had gone out for a bit. When we got back, my laptop had been sabotaged...screensaver, wallpaper, homepage and more was all t.u.'d up. Later, when I realized it, A said, "I can fix it, mom." Within minutes, she had me all fixed up, even with improvements made to my previous settings - she'd put a pic of Kyle Field on as wallpaper for me. She's EIGHT.

and speaking of scary, C and B got to go to the Cowboys/Packers game Thurs. night, courtesy of friends who ended up not being able to go. C said it was INSANE...people acting like complete "morons" from start to finish. But they had a good time still, despite the drunken stupor of tens of thousands of crazed fans.

and speaking again of scary, A and I are going w/ some friends up to OK City tomorrow to see Hannah Montana in concert. I wonder how many miniature, wigged Hannah fans will be there. I'm thinking that's probably where it starts...Hannah wig at age 8, married to drunken man who paints himself blue and gray (or wears a block of cheese on his head) at age 35. We'll be going as ourselves. :-)

Justice, fairness, and all that, but please just do it quickly

I don't know a whole lot about the writers' strike, but since the public cry here on "because i can" demands some ponderings, I'll give it a shot.

My M.O. on such issues could be described as open-minded and generally unopinionated because I figure people have reasons for what they do. Sometimes they might even be good ones, or at the very least they probably have a legitimate complaint or two. So you'll not read any angry "BRING DOWN THE ESTABLISHMENT" or "JUST DO YOUR JOB AND STOP COMPLAINING" here. That said, I'm a writer, so I might be a wee bit skewed. And I'm not complaining --if you think so you're misreading-- it is a job that is largely underappreciated (unless, of course, your writing is for the edification of the church, in which case your rewards are really cool and shiny :-). I mean seriously, can you name a writer of one of your favorite shows? But that's where the real creativity and excellence is found. Sure, there are some great actors-- Hugh Laurie of House, Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton of Friday Night Lights head my list--but without the story, who would care?

That said, they better get this worked out before long. In case you were wondering, the last strike (1988 Writers Guild of America strike) lasted 22 weeks, costing the American entertainment industry an estimated 500 million dollars. I don't want to go 22 weeks without good TV. that's what the summer is for! Gas prices are high so it's not like we can go places for entertainment. Nope, we're stuck inside. Thank goodness for Netflix and all those tv shows on dvd that we haven't watched yet. Otherwise, I might have to go old school and read something at bedtime.

p.s. Chick fil A has some really good writers. Everyone should go get a kids meal. They have these little question packs that we've been using at dinnertime. They're very fun...we've fielded such questions as: If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?
If you could move in with one extended family member, who would it be, and why?
What was your favorite vacation?

The kids love 'em.

Boo

Upon review of my last several posts and your lack of response, I have gleaned that you are more interested and involved in reality tv shows than you are in my actual life.

Me, too. :-)

Game ON

B had his first ever "tryouts" last week. Thursday and Friday after school were basketball tryouts for 55 7th grade boys at his school. On Friday afternoon he came out of the school grinning from ear to ear and holding up his newly acquired practice jersey! We don't know if he's A team or B team yet, but it doesn't matter one bit. He's flying high and loving it so far. In fact, he got home today at 5:15 after his daily 2 hour practice, dropped his backpack in the garage and shot baskets til dinner. And right now, at 8:33 PM, he's upstairs shooting baskets on the little wall-hoop. AH, and it brings back fond memories...I once owed my big bro 100 packs of Hubba Bubba from our gambling on games of "Horse". good times...

Um, I don't think that hotel evaluator job is all that great. in fact, I don't think i want to do it again...EVER. It is perhaps the most tedious, brain-cramping job known to man. Just fyi, bc I don't want to leave you with a false impression that it is really cool and fun. bc it's not.

But TAKS math tutoring, on the other hand is VERY fun (after 1 day on the job). It's only 2 hours twice a week and it's MATH, which is a nice little diversion from writing. I think that's why the hotel thing wasn't so fun for me. I write all the time, and so the tediousness of that highly technical writing was just piling on my already tired writer-brain. I have 4 groups of 5 kids 30 minutes each, back to back to back to back. This week I tutored them on place value and used the salaries/contracts/net worth of Tony Romo, Dirk Nowitzki, Bill Gates, and Daniel Radcliffe to do so. More tuting tomorrow...

yee-haw and stuff

so i'm here in n'ville and it's pretty festive. i didn't know it til i got here, but it's CMA week. this means that even MORE guitars are out on the streets than usual. i've been keeping an eye out for billy ray and miley, since they're the only ppl i think i could recognize. sadly, though, they're not hanging out at lifeway. but kinda cool is that my new editor for the previously mentioned african american curriculum is mandisa's bff. really. and a girl who sings backup for mandisa and melinda doolittle sang for me tonight. actually, she was singing for all of us writers, but i do tend to be a little egocentric.

Schwank, part deux

C and I enjoyed a 2-night stay in the Highland Park area of Dallas this week. I don't know how many of these hotel evaluations i'm going to do, though, bc it's A LOT of work. I think there were 23 checklists, to be exact, and each one requires a detailed narrative, complete with quotes, time stamps, and a play-by-play account of the events. IT's a whole different experience staying at a hotel when you're evaluating, bc the instructions were to perform specific tests that required us to be (in my opinion, at least) quite high maintenance. Here are a few for instances: the first night we were to order room service right before they closed for the night. The next morning, we were to call Engineering and tell 'em we needed to leave soon, but had locked something in the safe and couldn't get it open. On the way out that same morning, i had to ask the concierge for some dinner suggestions in another nearby city (i chose Addison) with a "lively atmosphere and good menu." I was to tell her that I had to leave, but "could you have a list of suggestions for me when I return?" And my favorite was that while I was having this conversation, C had to strike up a conversation with the valet about how "green" (eco-friendly) this hotel group is. this was fun for me bc i think C was growing an ulcer thinking about how he would carry on this conversation, seeing as how that topic is such a natural one for him and all. he did great, though, and when we weren't causing the staff to earn their pay, writing about it, or taking pictures, we hung out at Northpark Mall and ate some good food.

I DID get that massage...about 25 minutes in two different chairs at Brookstone. :-) Turns out it wasn't a required part of the evaluation after all. :-( But this was nice because while I was getting a great chair massage, I learned so much. Did you know that in Asian cultures, skipping a 15 minute daily massage is as bad as leaving the house w/out brushing your teeth? Also, the cost of such a chair really isn't that bad ($5,000) if you consider the cost of a weekly one hour massage. Over a year, you come out pretty even and, with the chair, you can have 2 massages a day if you want. In that case, we'll take 2. we're gonna need them for our private island, don't you think?

Food Challenge

I'm changing my list of fave shows. Now it goes like this:
1. 24 and Friday Night Lights (I can't choose bc 24 isn't on right now, but that FNL is a GREAT show.)
2. 24 and Friday Night Lights
3. The Closer
4. House
5. Kid Nation

So last week on Survivor, they had the season's disgusting food challenge. They're in China, so they were having to eat some Chinese delicacies that were WAY over the top, in my opinion. Let's see, there were the little baby turtles, chicken hearts, eels, 1,000 year old eggs, and the worst of all...chicken fetuses, complete with feathers and all.

Watching this got me wondering, if another country was doing their own episode of Survivor, and the setting was America, what would be the food challenge that would make the foreigners gag and the show's watchers dry heave in their living rooms? At first I was hard pressed to come up with comparable food items, but then maybe not:

Spam
beets
Pork rinds
fruitcake
raw oysters
grits
chitlins
rattlesnake

and C wants me to add boiled eggs (but i like those)

maybe you'd like to help me with my list?

new stuff

I got myself a new little job this week. I'm gonna be a math tutor at A's school for 4th and 5th graders who need extra help getting ready for the TAKS. It's just 2 afternoons and only 4 hours a week, but I'm excited about it. I've been wanting to get back in the classroom, but only a little bit...not much! Mainly, I'm missing human interaction every day between 8-3. So this seems perfect for me. Plus the pay is really good, so of course, that's an added bonus.

Also, I'm going to be working on a brand new curriculum piece for LifeWay. Its for African-Americans. I know, I know...this brings up all kinds of questions. I'm not African-American, so why am I working on the piece? And why is there a need for a separate piece for African-Americans? I don't know all the details, so I can't really answer these questions adequately just yet. But I will learn them very soon, and so we shall discuss it further then.

name dropper

tonight i was sitting around doing nothing much so i decided to try out the new show, "Chuck." And in the first few minutes of the episode, I saw an old friend of ours playing the part of a chauffer. But then he got shot like 30 seconds into his scene, so that was sad, because as soon as I said, "HEY! There's DAVE!" he was dead. Still, it was pretty cool. Usually Dave isn't ON the shows he works...he is a stunt guy and directs fight scenes. When we lived in Orlando, Dave was a stuntman on the Wild West Show at Universal Studios. Anyway, I know how you've come to expect some name-dropping here on because you can, and i haven't done that for awhile, so there ya' go.

hey here's a different kind of name-dropping....C won the new ipod touch at the Texas Youth Minister's Conclave a couple of weeks ago. it's very neato, but we're selling it on ebay. cha-ching.

and i was a good little reviewer at that restaurant, so now i get to evaluate a fancy hotel. And i'm not positive yet, because i don't have the details quite yet, but i think i might HAVE to evaluate the hotel's spa services. :-) more to come on that...

Curious

Well now I just want to know what I have to do to get a "PG" or "PG-13" rating. After all, those generally do better at the box office, so it makes sense that you might come back more often if "because i can" gets a little edgy. Let's try a new approach to journaling today, shall we?

Friday night we drove over to Corsicana to watch our Panthers play football. We drove right past the Texas Youth Commission facility where juveniles are taken for doing dumb and stupid stuff like stealing cars, selling and doing drugs, and engaging in violence. Sometimes in such cases of violent behavior, there is even blood. And sometimes I think that nudity is probably involved, like when the delinquents streak around town when they are high on marijuana and crack cocaine. This kind of behavior, much like drunkenness, can only get you in trouble.

Anyway, our football team played with a lot of guts. It was an exciting game, but the stupid clock ran out before we could score another touchdown to tie it. Dad-gum. Also, it was very cold to me because I ignorantly wore shorts. C was comfy, though, in his XL panther football t-shirt. He wore this because his other panther shirt is a medium, and i thought that when he wore it last week, he was a little too sexy.

if you, also, are curious, just click on the G-rated button in the previous post and put in my blog address to find out the new rating.

Rated G...All Ages Admitted

from JustSayHi

A concerned blog-reader pointed me to this website that rates your blogs. Turns out mine gets a "G" rating, with the following explanation:

"This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

death (1x)"

WHEW~ that fish mishap almost got me in more trouble than I originally thought...not just with A, but with the blog police, too!

Columbus Day

I don't believe we've ever had a more eventful Columbus Day. There was the year we were at Disney World, but even that was like an afternoon siesta when compared to yesterday. First, B got braces. Then thought we'd taunt B at the State Fair with corny dogs and all things fried. The kids had free tickets from school and we had lots of friends who were going. But it seems that everyone in the entire Metroplex had the same plan, and so just getting to the fairgrounds and then into the park was a special challenge. We were not among the 200 who were treated for heat exhaustion, thanks to bottled water, the air-conditioned car show buildings, and the last Watermelon Chill in the Midway vendor's lil freezer chest. We avoided the 20,000 "future Mrs. Jonas" hopefuls who were packed in like sardines at the Jonas Brothers concert. A and her friend had kind of wanted to hear them, but after realizing they were too short to see anything and it was too hot to stand still, they decided it would be better to enjoy other things that Big Tex had planned for them.

All in all, it was a good time...maybe sort of. The heat and crowds were way overwhelming, and A and her friend were done with the whole experience after just a couple of hours. But we did get to hear one of our youth sing on the big stage; her girls' group opened for the Jonas brothers. The dog show was entertaining and B enjoyed the pig races because he stayed into the evening w/ a friend of his. And there's so much education to be had at the fair. Really, where else are you gonna see a 1,000 pound sow? You don't see that kind of magnificence every day, i tell ya'.

I guess our last conversation last night as our weary heads hit the pillows sums up the experience best:

Cy - I love you.
Cl - I love you, too......hey, let's don't ever do that again. OK?
Cy - OK. [drifts off to sleep and dreams of parking-lot traffic and fried lattes]

I Don't Like Your Poll

this post is simply to offer you a place to comment if you can't fully embrace the current poll. maybe you aren't as committed to your DVR as we are. Maybe you don't have a DVR (i'm sorry). Or maybe your favorite premier was Desperate Housewives or something, and so you feel that you wouldn't be true to yourself by voting. whatever. but if you'd like to choose "other", do so by commenting below. i'm all about equal opportunity.

Questions? Contact our webmistress at...

C and I spent a large part of the weekend creating the student ministry pages on our church's website. Before this weekend, I knew practically nothing about web design, but now C calls me his "webmistress", I guess because webmaster is so common. Anyway, we made a lot of pages and some of the images we created ourselves. So I thought you might like to enjoy our handiwork. Besides that, it will keep you informed about what's going on here in the hub of Texas. Keep in mind that we're planning to add several more pages, so you might want to check back in later this week. Also keep in mind that there are a couple of kinks we'd like to work out:
* we wanna change the pics on the banners. i don't know about you, but we just don't think the single mom and grandpa images are really all that youthy.
* and we're having issues with centering.
i think that's all we don't like.

For starters, look at the page and then start clicking on all the buttons you can, because we're especially proud of those little linky things. And it's purty durn fancy because when you click on one page, you might get to click somewhere else on the next page. It's like a fun little surprise. And when you're finished, you might want to comment me about your favorite student ministry page.

Just to show you that I'm worthy of the title "webmistress", I'm gonna give you one of those cute lil buttons right now. so to get to the website, click HERE

Mandatory Participation

Because I can, I decided to add the poll feature to the blog. The way I envision it, I will now have a simple tool to use on days, much like today, when I am feeling pressured to blog but have very little to say. Also, it will allow the 20 or so of you (yes, i'm watching you with another nifty little tool called "sitemeter"), who refuse to comment for various reasons, to participate without actually forming your own sentence. I've given you several from which to choose. So let's have 100% participation in the poll, people.

Schwank

In preparation for the day we all get our $ together and rent our own island, I've become a mystery shopper for high-end restaurants and hotels. :-) OK, that's not actually the reason, but I'm still pushing for the island thing.

I used to mystery shop in college, but that was only for one nice restaurant in College Station (that's nice, like I used to think of nice...not nice like the places I'm evaluating now) called Cafe Eccel and Church's Chicken. This is not at all the same experience. But I digress. Last night, C and I got to go eat at a hoity-toity (C wants me to use the term "Schwank") place in Dallas. This was fun for many reasons, the first of which is the fact that we were allowed up to $145 on the meal. that's right, $145 on a meal. So we had to dress up a bit in order to appear that we might actually be able to afford such a meal. And I guess I did ok on that, bc when B saw me he said, "Mom, you look rich."

Another fun-ity of the evening was that we were to arrive separately so that I could, alone, evaluate the bar. Now our instructions were to get there between 8-9:30 and meet up at the bar. I'm wondering, how many married couples have circumstances forcing them to arrive separately at a place like that at that time on a Saturday night? I guessed that anyone noticing might think we were having a clandestine meeting. So there I was, sitting at the bar and waiting for my secret tryst to begin. At this point, I was both rich and sinful.

My job was to inquire the bartender about an "interesting summer drink." This was, in particular, a challenge for me, because I could not know LESS about the subject of alcohol. I guess I pulled that off, too, though, because the bartender was all ready to fix me "The Perfect Summer" when I told him that on second thought, I'd just have tea instead.

After Clay finished with the valet service and perused the grounds for a bit, he came in to find me and had trouble. This was another fun part for me, because I believe he may have begun to panic, thinking that I had left with some strange man who hypnotized me with his worldly charms in my 10 minutes alone in the bar. :-) After all, I DID look rich....and alone. But we found each other and went on to enjoy items from each course, as if we had not a care that there are, in fact, starving children in Africa. The food was simply delish, as I imagine the two men who were holding hands in a quiet corner booth would describe it to you. Here's to me doing a good job on my report so that we can evaluate a schwank hotel next time, as I am certain that will provide us more bloggable fun.