tonight's dinner

Mac and I found ourselves at the local Sonic drive-in for a little pre-baseball practice dinner tonight. He wanted to eat outside the car on their patio and as it was a perfect spring evening, I agreed. We were having a great time enjoying our heart attack meals (I ordered the footlong chili dog!), discussing baseball and school and life in general and listening to that cool Sonic drive-in radio station music they pipe into the patio area when this car drove up and parked next to ours.
I know this picture doesn't do it justice, but it was the most beautiful classic car - all pink and perfect and immaculate and huge. I fully expected Frenchy and Rizzo to hop out of the car.

No Frenchy or Rizzo or Danny Zuko. Not even a Fonzie leather jacket in sight. But the driver did have a cool, 3-dimensional tire cover on the back of the car!

stress behind the move to Bogota

As you probably know, we are moving to Bogota, Colombia in August for two years for Jimmy's next assignment. This should be a remarkably happy time as we will all be together again as a family after this very long year apart. I am so stressed about it, though, and it's all because of school.

A couple months ago, I thought I should investigate schools a little bit. This was just a cursory review, just trying to really check out the mission, curriculum, and facilities, but I really wanted to see the calendar so I'd know when we needed to be in Bogota. I studied up on the American and British Schools, which seem to be most popular among the embassy set. I sent an email to the British School asking some questions and received a nice email back with answers to my questions but also a note that I should go ahead and apply for Mac's admission because currently there are no vacancies in the rising 2nd grade and he needs to get on the list.

What?

Now I will admit that we haven't been in the school-aged crowd for very long in the foreign service, but I just kind of assumed that we'd pick the school we wanted Mac to go to and the embassy would make it happen.

I contacted the correct office at the embassy (a couple times) and finally got a response that basically said we are responsible for applying at whatever school we want our child to attend, that the embassy has too many American families with schoolchildren to take on that job for the parents, and that we should apply to at least two schools because admission is very competitive and there's no guarantee of gaining admission.

This left a bad taste in my mouth for the embassy and the support that we can expect to receive as family members. But that is neither here nor there right now.

I did as instructed and applied for admission at both the American and British Schools. Our packages were completed the first week of March.

Now I will admit that I am not the most patient person for some things. One of them is hearing about school acceptance because this is my kid's future we're talking about. The earliest that I hoped to know anything at all was June from the British School - that's when they supposedly know which families are leaving the school and they'll at least know if there will be any openings in the 2nd grade.

Well, enter the need for Jimmy to complete the bureaucratic paperwork for his travel orders and we sort of need to know a date by which we have to be in Bogota. And the only push for our getting to Bogota is the start of school for Mac.

So I sent emails to both admissions officers just to ask when we would have to be there if Mac is so lucky as to gain admittance to these highly esteemed and highly sought after schools (and no, I wasn't a smart aleck in the email).

American School came back with August 5. WHAT? Jimmy doesn't get home until the last week in July. That date is a meet and greet so when I told the admissions counselor there was absolutely no way we could get there that early, she said no problem but that we really should try to make it by the testing day on August 10. Mac has to be tested and they can postpone the testing if we can't be there by then, but "there will be many families applying that day and although as an embassy family you will be given priority, if there are more embassy families than we can admit you will improve your chances if you are there."

The British School's first day of school is August 24. Mac will have to be tested for math and English and Jimmy and I have to meet with the school psychologist (?) before then, but I don't think it has to be as early as August 10. Based on calendar alone, I love the British School. But the admissions officer said yesterday that "unfortunately we still do not have places available, and we are waiting until families confirm their departure in June".

What are we supposed to do? Show up in Bogota and hope our incredibly bright child wows these people? Hope that some really rich Colombian suddenly decides to endow the school with so much money that they instantly build another 2nd grade classroom? What happens if there aren't any spaces available? Do we then choose a mediocre school where he'll languish for 2 years?

This is going to make me crazy.

top 50 restaurants in the world

Today Jimmy forwarded me this link for CNN's new list of the top 50 restaurants in the world. He had reviewed the list and told me that we'd eaten at two of the top 50. There is obviously so much good eating still to be done. Clearly my work on this Earth is not yet complete.

P.S. We've eaten at #18 and #31. #31 will go down as one of the most memorable meals of my life - excellent food, beautiful table settings, fabulous location in the Cape wine country.

somewhere over the rainbow

Today Mac's baseball game got called after about 5 innings because of bad weather. On the way home we say two separate rainbows at the same time. They were magnificent. Then we turned into White Gables and saw this:

Our rental house is the one on the left of where the rainbow is coming down.

I was positive my Italy vacation was going to be paid for, but Mac and I looked for the pot of gold in the backyard and couldn't find it anywhere. Not even a leprechaun on the premises....

a little thing I like to call "summer vacation"

This year our summer vacation is a bit different in that we're meeting Jimmy in Italy and then taking an "Adriatic, Greece and Turkey Cruise" (according to the Norwegian Cruise Line description). This is a "bit different" because a) we don't normally have to "meet" Jimmy for our family vacations and b) we don't normally vacation "on the continent" (that sounds better if you say it in that accent used by the rich guy on Gilligan's Island, Lovey).

Our non-standard vacation plans tend to evolve over time even when we live together, but the vacation plans while Jimmy's been in Afghanistan have done whatever verb means "evolve on steroids".

For instance, our Christmas vacation in England started out as a warm weather beach trip to the Maldives. Until we realized we weren't movie stars, who are apparently the only people who can afford to vacation over Christmas week in the Maldives. They don't do "budget travel" so much in the Maldives.

Then we looked at Greece, but it's too cold in Greece at Christmas to do any of the fun stuff like island hop. We would have been stuck drinking olive oil and eating feta cheese for the whole time.

Then we moved onto a villa in Tuscany but Jimmy had very limited time off and that was going to be too much of a planes, trains and automobiles kind of trip where too much could go wrong.

And that's when we decided on England. A perfect Dickensian (but happier) Christmas in jolly old England. We thought the Lake District, but our friend Monique said too cold and wet but what about the Cotswolds? And that's how we came to stay in London with Monique and Co. before moving on to a lovely old cottage in a quintessential Cotswoldian village where we had the perfect, most restful Christmas holiday.

For our June vacation with Jimmy, we knew we'd have to meet him somewhere "over there" because he has about 20 minutes for this vacation so he can get home by late July (it's all about having so much time "on the ground" to count as one year).

Jimmy really wanted to do a Turkish Blue Cruise where you cruise the Aegean Coast of Turkey on a yacht with anywhere from a couple other people up to a couple dozen people. The yacht is equipped with a chef and waiter who do nothing but cater to your every whim along with a captain who pulls into pristine, private beaches to let you jump off and swim.

Sounds heavenly, right?

We have a Turkish friend whose family does this type of cruise every year and she contacted her guy who gave us a good quote.

Imagine, however, that you're on, say, your honeymoon or what should be an otherwise relaxing vacation. You step onto the yacht, meet the nice man who's going to serve you drinks for the next week, only to see out of the corner of your eye a rambunctious 7 year-old. You'd be begging for a raincheck.

I told Jimmy that would be a great vacation if we were going with a yacht full of friends with children, but it was just too much pressure on me, knowing that I'd worry for the whole trip that Mac was acting too much like a 7 year-old.

So then we agreed on a Mediterranean cruise. I did the appropriate (read here: mind-numbing, exhaustive, leave-no-stone-unturned) amount of research to determine what ships we should go on out of the ones we could afford and then it was just a matter of narrowing down the choices. The itinerary we really wanted to do left on May 29. Mac's school ends on May 28 and there just seemed to be too little wiggle room there in terms of getting to Italy to catch the cruise with luggage making it, etc. Jimmy didn't like the next weekend departure's itinerary, so we settled on a June 12th departure out of Venice with a couple stops in Greece, a stop in Dubrovnik, a stop in Turkey and 2 days at sea (which allowed Jimmy sufficient rest time).

I love, love, love the thrill of the hunt for a good travel deal. Namely because we love to travel and if we can save money on one trip, that frees up money for another trip. I will spend hours on the internet searching and re-searching for the best way to make something that we want to do more affordable. For this cruise, I did cruisecompete.com (which is a great website for finding super cruise deals and which we've used once before with enormous success), Norwegian's site, and other random cruise websites. But I ended up booking through our USAA credit card rewards company. We had a ton of points that had accrued over the years, so between those reward points and "loyalty" points (I have no idea how we got those, except that we do ever-so-loyally use that credit card!), we got the cruise for about 45% less than what we would have paid anywhere else.

I was thrilled with the cruise price but add to that the fact that Uncle Sam is paying for Mac's airfare there, and it's a relative steal of a vacation deal. (As the spouse, I apparently don't rate high enough to get one airfare during the year of separation paid for; only dependent children get one airfare paid for and we've been saving Mac's for this trip. But I did use the rest of those reward points so I got a little bit of a discount on my ticket.)

I've never been to Italy and it seemed a shame to waste the airfare over there without seeing anything but a little of Venice. And as I mentioned, I love saving money on a trip so you can funnel it into another trip. So with some of the money I "saved" us on the cruise price, Mac and I are going to spend 4 days in Rome before we meet Jimmy in Venice. I have rented a cute little studio apartment in Rome, near the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain, from an Italian man named Niccolo. Doesn't that sound wonderful? It even has a little terrace where we can apparently hang our wet clothes after we take them out of the washing machine. How Italian does that sound? If I can smell bolognese sauce while I sit on the terrace, I give you fair warning that you may never hear from me again!

After four days in Rome, we'll catch the super-fast train to Venice where we'll meet Jimmy, who will fly in from Afghanistan via Frankfurt. We'll have a day and a half there before getting on the ship for 7 nights. When we come back, we'll spend one more night in Venice so we can have a Father's Day cappucino with Jimmy before we all head back to our respective "homes".

The great news is that when we leave Jimmy on June 20th, we'll have just about one month left before he's done for good with this assignment. And that will be worth never going to Italy ever again in my life!

oh what a night

Last night I attended a College of Charleston Alumni Association event with BFF Caroline and her husband Willie. I haven't exactly been the most actively involved alumna in the association; in fact I have never been to one of their events, not even this big to-do last night on the year I graduated which is their big attempt to woo you into active participation into the association. Which might explain why I haven't been actively involved.

The big draw for our attendance last night was that Willie's son's band was playing. Normally they play at venues that don't crank up until about 11pm and as I'm long asleep by then, I have never heard them live before. If you don't know The Plainfield Project, you should look them up. They're as great, if not better, live as they are on their CD. (And I heard they may have a new CD coming out later this summer so stay tuned for more good stuff.) The music is easy to listen to and they're very energetic and fun to watch. (There was also great food and a lot of energy from some 2000 people in attendance so it was a good event.)

Despite the great time, I felt really, really old. I would venture a guess that most of the people there last night are either graduating this year (they got a good discount on the tickets) or they graduated sometime in the last five years. Young. Practically babies. Barely old enough to vote.

And they were all in very short dresses. I'm talking short enough where you'd know all of Victoria's Secrets if they bent over just a teensy little bit. I bought myself a new dress for the event at Kohl's (under $13 with tax and using this coupon I got in the mail - what a steal!!!) and was worried that it was too young and short because it stopped about 2 inches above the knee. Clearly I was measuring from the wrong end!

Since our focus was to see Carter's band, we hung around close to the stage, which was really the best place to see not only the band up close, but also the spectacle of young women throwing themselves at the band. These girls would just get on the stage (before Carter asked them to get off which invariably happened), even though there wasn't a whole lot of extra room and never mind that if you're playing a guitar, you might just need a little elbow room. I felt embarrassed for these girls but maybe they didn't remember it this morning.

Which leads me to my next thought.

As I watched all these 22 year-olds having what they think is the time of their lives, I wanted to tell them that you have no idea what life has got in store for you. You think this is the most fun, most exciting, most important, biggest and best time of your life.

Oh, if you only had the perspective of a little time and space.

Fast forward 15 or 20 years, and I hope and pray you'll be able to come back to one of these events and realize that your life is bigger than you could have ever imagined. That those 4 years of college were important, but they weren't nearly as important as you felt they were when you were in the middle of them. That at 22 if you'd dreamed the biggest dreams for yourself and your life, you wouldn't have thought it possible that you'd have covered the ground you've covered by 40. Those are the things I wanted to tell those girls last night who were throwing themselves at a band. But I had to go to the bathroom instead, which is what happens to 39 year-old women who know they better go before they have to drive 45 minutes back home. So Caroline got us into the good bathrooms with no wait because she told the guy guarding the door that she was the band's mom. Clearly there are perks to being old and experienced!

possible end of the world as I know it

Two things happened today that may signal the end of the world as I know it.

1. I can't tell you about the first one because it's not my business to share, but suffice it to say that if you look out the window and see purple pigs flying by, don't even bother to call me because I will not be surprised.

2. Jimmy and his sister inherited a house at Folly Beach when their uncle passed away two years ago. When I'm not at the baseball field, I am at this house. We've got a contractor working on the inside, but Mom and I have been doing the outside work. Today we were working and a guy who has some tenuous connection with the next door neighbor stopped by on his bicycle. Once he found out my connection to Uncle Charles, he told us that he was one of the last people to talk to Uncle Charles. They had their first-ever conversation in the yard and then Uncle Charles died unexpectedly that night. Then he went on to tell me that he'd had other conversations with other people who live right around this corner at Folly and they'd one way or another, but rather unexpectedly and tragically, died. I told the man to stop talking to us because I'm really not ready to be part of the cursed corner. So if something happens to me tonight, find the Folly Beach witch first. He winters in Costa Rica, so he says, so you may have to look there first if he makes a fast getaway.

I hate to be Chicken Little, but the sky may just be falling....

my peeps and me over Spring Break

Mac and his buddy Logan at the Flowertown Festival (post-snow cone with blue lips!)


Start of an overnight camping trip with dear friends Dennis and Madeline


Why I refuse to do overnight camping trips, especially when there are no "facilities"


Mac and me on our trip to Fort Sumter


Jimmy and Mac on the Palmetto Trail


Jimmy and Mac at the season opener of the Charleston Riverdogs baseball game


Jimmy and Mac are big on the Pig at the Riverdogs game


Jimmy and Mac at the Family Circle Cup

The photos don't do justice to our time with Jimmy; it was magical and perfect and everything we all needed and wanted. We're counting down days until we see him again in mid-June.

I have been scolded

Today I packed an extra-special lunch for Mac: he got a huge slice of chocolate cake in his lunchbox, which never happens namely because we never have chocolate cake at our house. Or any cake for that matter.

I also made the social faux pas of including a plastic fork with which to eat the cake.

As soon as I picked him up, I got an EARFUL about how embarrassing it was to open up his lunchbox to find that "baby fork" in there. Everybody made fun of him for having that baby fork and didn't I know that they have forks in the cafeteria that he can use?

He wouldn't allow me to set the record straight, so I would like to use this forum to set the record straight.

1. Yes, the fork was purchased from IKEA when he was a baby but they are technically children's utensils (and not "baby" because they're too big for a baby's mouth).

2. I tried to get rid of them in Sao Paulo, but Mac told me they were his favorites and he didn't want to part with them.

3. When he selects his own silverware for whatever reason, he chooses this plastic stuff 9 times out of 10. He always eats ice cream with the spoons from this set.

4. It looks very mod, very IKEA-ish, and not at all like babyware.

I feel better now. Thank you for listening and for understanding.

Rest assured I will never send silverware, plasticware or any other utensil in the lunchbox.

For that matter, I might not even send cake.

Blue Angels in Charleston

Mac and I planned to spend Sunday afternoon with BFF Caroline and family in their yard, watching the Blue Angels perform over the Charleston harbor. As we were pulling into their neighborhood, Caroline called to say they had to take their daughter, Mac's future wife in 20-25 years or so, to the emergency room. (She's fine now.)
We enjoyed their dock and the Blue Angels while they enjoyed the MUSC Children's ER.

follow-up to the school project!

school projects and such

Over the Easter break, Mac had an assignment to create a poster, book, or diorama to tell about his chosen animal's habitat. There were specific questions to be answered, like food, predators, temperature regulation, etc. The poster had to be in the child's handwriting and had to be in complete sentences.

He chose the stingray. Not the most exciting animal in the world, but better than his first choice of a snake.

Now you may recall the trauma I suffered from the kindergarten letter poster project in Sao Paulo. Allow me to refresh your memory by going here. Or just cut to the chase and see the poster below.

For your basic Grade A perfectionist, aka moi, this was less than a stellar result because I knew my boy could do better. And then when I saw some of the other posters... well, let's just say that I couldn't allow that to happen again. (Just so you know the level of competition I'm talking about, one poster of a child whose mother is Japanese had all of its letter objects in origami form. No, I'm not kidding. It was stiff competition in kindergarten.)

So Mac picked his animal and said he wanted to do a poster. Whew. No diorama business with styrofoam and spray paint for us.

The three of us went to Target as a family unit on a supply-buying mission. (Can you tell I was just hanging out with Jimmy, who's been hanging out with only military people over the last 8 months?). We found this awesome blue (for the ocean) foamcore poster board, construction paper and markers for the occasion.

Then I had what I thought was a moment of brilliance and said we could make templates of other sea animals on the construction paper and Mac could write all the required information on a bunch of these animals that we'd display around the stingray that he was going to draw and cut out. Great idea, right?

I have to tell you that we were all so proud of this poster upon completion. We wasted a few animal templates because of misspellings and general frustration, but the finished product was fabulous. Mac loved it and I loved it. Jimmy said he thought we both deserved an A. Behold Mac's work of art:

We proudly delivered the poster to his classroom on Monday (along with his stuffed animal stingray from the aquarium which was to be used as a prop next to the poster). His teacher oohed and aahed over it, and I left feeling fairly smug.

Until I turned the corner and saw one of his classmates and her mother wrestling a tri-fold poster (like we used in the science fair in high school) and the most enormous diorama you've ever seen. It must have been the top off of a refrigerator box or something. HU.MON.GOUS.

Panic set in. Did I misread the directions? Were we supposed to do the poster, diorama, and book? I went off to my cardio tennis class on campus and ran into a school mom-friend and she asked if we'd turned in our posters. I said yes and we immediately and simultaneously asked if we'd seen any of the other children's work. She, too, had seen the same mother-daughter team come in. We laughed it off as "overachieving moms", of which I thought I was part of that group, but clearly do not meet the qualifications.

The next day, I picked Mac up from school and we walked through the hallway where all the projects are displayed. I should have taken a photo as proof that I'm not exaggerating, but we definitely should have spent spring break fishing for stingrays so we could bring in a live sample or at least a dead sample or maybe the barbs from a tail or something. There were deer head skeletons, dioramas with styrofoam cut out to look like mountain ranges with streams built in and bears off lurking in the distance, pictures of what looked like a pet chipmunk, etc. You get the drift, right?

I will say that Mac's poster was the most colorful. I'm still enormously proud of our effort - it really could win "most creative" - but I'm obviously operating at sub-par level compared to these other moms. Second grade poster project: look out because we are owning it next year!

random musings from the Family Circle Cup

I'm a tennis player wannabe. And I'm sure I could have amounted to something under different circumstances.

I took lessons one summer with my sister and cousin at the town courts in Moncks Corner when we were all in elementary school. The lessons must have been an hour or two everyday for a week or something like that. That part of the memory is a little hazy. Unfortunately we didn't have tennis courts at our house out in the country and practicing on a gravel driveway really isn't the same as practicing on a real court. Or a smooth surface. Tennis balls don't bounce right on rocks. You get the idea. I was a victim of my circumstances and didn't develop to my full potential.

I didn't take up tennis again until we moved to Mexico, some 20+ years after that first false start. We joined that fancy sports/social club in Guadalajara and since I didn't like to do gym stuff but felt compelled to do some form of exercise to justify the club expense, I added extra expense by taking tennis lessons with this adorable boy named Pedro. Pedro didn't speak great English and I didn't speak great Spanish, so there wasn't really too much communication going on. And I could never get my serve right, or even over the net really in the right square, so I decided that I'd never be a tennis player. I mean, if you can't serve and get it in, you stand no chance of winning. Ever.

Fast forward twelve years and I find myself in this cardio tennis class and you'll not believe what happened in the last two weeks.






Ready for it?




I actually started - more or less - consistently - sort of - getting most of my serves in. This is nothing short of miraculous, I tell you.

So I did what all good tennis players in the Lowcountry do right now. That's right, friends. I went to the Family Circle Cup. We went on Saturday as a family for the opening day and then I went again yesterday by myself. Because you know, we tennis freaks just can't get enough of it.

I have a few observations I'd like to share with you about professional tennis matches in Charleston.

1. There are a lot of fake blonds out there with leathery skin who have played in the sun entirely too much with entirely too little sunscreen on.

2. Random conversations that I heard/eavesdropped on (because I was sitting one row ahead of these loud people so it was impossible not to hear) included the following (you need to read these in a strong southern accent for full effect):
a) We went over to Mitzy's house last night and decided to get in the hot tub. I had to borrow Mitzy's bathing suit and you know she's about as big as a twig (to which the other lady responded "and you aren't") and we drank too much and between the alcohol and the hot water, I am so dehydrated today. Could someone get me another beer?

b) I believe that girl down there is drinking a bloody mary. Where do you suppose she got that from? Do you think she brought that from home? (To which I wanted to say "why no, Buffy, I don't think she did unless she has a stockpile of plastic Solo cups at her home that happen to have the Family Circle Cup logo on them", but back to the real conversation). I think it's most civilized to drink a bloody mary in the morning on a post-safari drive. Do you remember those post-safari-drive bloody marys, Muffy? I believe I'm going to ask her if she's been on a safari to get that drink. (To which Buffy went down and asked the girl exactly that.)

3. Unless you're a professional tennis player, who is actually playing in the Family Circle Cup, you really should not wear a tennis skirt to the matches. I mean, really, do you think one of the real player's coaches is going to spot you in the distance in your tennis skirt with your platinum fake blond hair and run after you, saying "I have been looking for a 55 year-old woman to coach professionally and you.are.it". Puh-lease.

4. I have nothing against Lily Pulitzer. I don't wear her, but a lot, and I mean, a whole lot of Charleston ladies wear her "to the tennis". With matching fancy flip-flops.

5. Yesterday I watched a match between this German girl

and this American girl (who's worthy of two photos so you can see how her tennis skirt is hitched up on one side).


Sort of "Pretty in Pink", Vision of Springtime (complete with matching pink fingernails), Miss Easter of the WTA

vs

Hoochie Mama.

Who knew that Under Armour sponsored women's tennis apparel? (You can't see the logo in these photos, but she's in Under Armour from head to toe). The American girl had to wipe sweat profusely off her body during the match. I wonder if there's any correlation between the volume of sweat and her black knee socks?

For this match, I sat in the "end zone" and Hoochie returned a serve poorly and the ball went into the stands right where I was sitting. Fortunately, I had seen a guy on Saturday try to steal a ball in the same manner and I learned that was unacceptable etiquette based on the line judge's response to him. Obviously, this is not like going to a Yankees game. So the ball came over, the line judge turned around towards me, so I got out of my seat, got the ball and was going to hand it to the line judge when I noticed Pretty in Pink was walking towards me with her hand outstretched. (She obviously thought it was a lucky ball since Hoochie couldn't return it properly). So I handed her the ball through the fence and she said "thank you" in lovely, soft English. Pretty is as pretty does.

Hoochie, on the other hand, had minimal contact with anyone. When she needed her towel to wipe off the sweat, she pointed her finger at the towel so the ball boy could hop to and get it for her. I don't know if she competes at Wimbledon, but what do you suppose she wears there?

(P.S. As in life, being a nice girl doesn't mean you always come in first. Hoochie beat Pretty in Pink in 3 sets, but I put in my vote for Pretty in Pink to also be named Miss Congeniality of the Family Circle Cup.)

6. Watching professional athletes really is inspiring and it makes you want to be as good as you possibly can be. Tomorrow morning when I go to cardio tennis, I think I might try to wow the girls in my class by serving like this:
or lunging like this on a return:
Surely my tennis instructor is trained in rapid response first aid so when I inevitably injure myself, she will be right there to help me.

7. I am a sucker for free stuff. You'd think I had a deprived childhood or something, but I am drawn to free giveaways like a moth to a flame. SunTrust was giving away these little tennis ball things yesterday so when the lady asked if I wanted one, I said sure. (It's one of those storage things on a lanyard that you pull apart and put stuff in to keep it waterproof at the beach. I knew Mac would love it and it could be my feeble attempt to bring him a souvenir from my fun day while he was slogging it out in the first grade. Sort of like bringing him the stationery from the hotel when he doesn't get to go on the trip.) Anyway, the bank lady asked me if I wanted to enter this contest for a little video camera thing. How do you say no to that? Of course, SunTrust is going to bombard me with literature from now until the day I die, but it took about a minute of my time to do it and maybe I'll win the camcorder. So I finished up and the lady asked me what size t-shirt I wanted. Are you kidding me? What else do you have back there, woman? I really did ask if they had kids' sizes, but no dice. So I am now the proud owner of a SunTrust t-shirt which you better believe I'll use. (I also got a sample of vitamins that the WTA tennis players use. I'm kind of nervous to take them because I was given a very, very strict warning to take them after eating. I only got two doses (of like 7 vitamins per dose), but I wonder if I'll play like a professional after taking them???)

8. Like Oprah, there are things that I know for sure. What I know for sure about watching tennis at the Family Circle Cup, Althea Gibson Court, is that it must be awfully nice to be watching from here
instead of on the hard bleachers with no back out in the blazing sunshine where the no-see-ums eat you up.

quick birthday update

So today is my birthday and I'm only updating for one quick second. I have much to share about the two nights Jimmy and I spent in downtown Charleston, but that'll have to wait.

What I really wanted to share was that - BIG SURPRISE - Mac got sick today and we had to go to the doc-in-a-box late this afternoon. We're hopeful it's just allergies, but the fever is not normal for allergies. We're monitoring for the night and will fill the antibiotic Rx tomorrow if necessary.

I'm now adding "fortune teller" to my resume. Did I not foresee this coming with the anniversary vomititis?

Mother's Day is just around the corner, folks....