Brownstone and Casey Thompson

I have been dying to go to Brownstone in Fort Worth for the last six months. Dying. This is what I asked of DH for my birthday and he willingly complied. I am in for it when his birthday rolled around - he is setting the bar high and I'm loving it. But back to the food.

Now y'all should know that I didn't feel that great the whole weekend, so I may have a different opinion the next time we go to Brownstone. I loved that even though we were dressed up - um, it was my birthday after all - we could have walked in after a day of seeing the city and been perfectly acceptable. After an eventful start where a patron crashed and burned in front of us due to an unseen spill on the floor - totally something I would have done - and another patron thought DH worked there since he was wearing blue, we had a drink and people watched from the bar. Our wait wasn't bad at all for a Saturday evening and we could have sat outside immediately if we wanted to be blown away by El Nino.

The best part of the entire meal, for me, was the appetizer which were chicken pot pies in a basket. They came out immediately and were so great. The crust was just thick enough and it wasn't salty which worked wonderfully with the filling, as it was a little salty.  Perfect balance. I could have eaten multiple baskets despite how I felt. It did take a long time for our meals to come out from the kitchen and that was the biggest critique I have. DH got a burger and said it was really great. The fries were pretty good when I snagged one from DH's plate. I got a chicken dish that could have used more than the sprinkle of housemade ricotta. I think the sauce threw me off...it was a brown sauce and I expected a BBQ flavor in every bite, despite the previous bites which were not BBQ infused at all. I also thought it could have used a little more flavor, maybe salt? Sorry Casey Thompson! Can we blame it on my stomach? Let's do that because it breaks my heart to think I didn't love it with every ounce of my being.

We passed on dessert, which sounded mouthwatering, in favor of banana pudding from Pappadeaux.

Next time around I will probably get the grilled cheese made from pimento cheese. Or maybe just baskets of chicken pot pies...

Welcome To The World Baby Girl

That's what I imagine my mom and dad said 32 years ago. Was it am or pm, Mother of Us All?  I can't remember....I was kind of tired, what with all the plucking me from the womb. Don't ask her to show you, but she has the scar to prove it. A scar of which I was and am reminded of when I do something particularly frustrating. "I had a C-section for you!" I love the story of my parents the night I was born.  I hope I remember it correctly...if I didn't, don't disillusion me now. After all, it's my birthday. Thanks in advance.

My Dad works for a railroad about 10 minutes from the house. Legend has it that when my mom went into labor, she called his work and once he was on the phone she told him "Don't rush but come home as soon as you can". Of course he rushes home and runs into the house to find my precious Mother of Us All in the tub shaving her legs. (Sorry mom). My father was dumbfounded. My mother's reasoning? She was having a GIRL and she was not having her with hairy legs. And I wonder why I go through razors so quickly...

Things I have learned since then:
1. It's kind of cool having a younger brother with a birthday only 5 days different from mine.
2. It kind of sucked having a younger brother with a birthday only 5 days different from mine when I was little. Imagine what it was like for my parents...if you need a picture, please note the enormous can of Maxwell House coffee in the picture at the beginning of this post.
3. Growing up within walking distance of one set of grandparents and a very short car ride from the other set was the best way I could have grown up.
4. Baseball bats and younger brothers with poor spatial skills will result in someone sporting a black eye.
5. Picking up what seemed like hundreds of cigarette butts from the first set of grandparents driveway and being paid a dollar is a priceless lesson in what I will do for money.
6. Disney songs are best sung at the top of your lungs while walking in the sun with a red-headed best friend.
7. Water and I were enemies, but may yet be friends.
8. Kitchen floors will catch fire if the circumstances are right.
9. Parents who pay for 9 years of private voice lessons and never expected me to be someone who I'm not, i.e., a Tony award winner that can pay them back for 9 years of private voice lessons, were and are crucial to my sense of self-worth.
10. Friends made the first day of undergrad can be the ones who will literally and figuratively save my life, even now.
11. Following my dreams has ended up being a very, very expensive endeavor...but I'm glad I did it anyway.
12. I heart ears. Heart them.
13. Moving halfway across the country with only the contents of my car was the scariest moment ever, and my family never stopped believing in me. They're good like that.
14. Living somewhere that is 80+ degrees in March is pretty freaking rad. Sorry Yankeeland-ers...it just is.
15. Convincing children to play listening games all day long is a surprisingly satisfying job. Even better, though, is having the honor of helping them hear their parents better, more clearly or maybe at all for the first time. Seeing their little eyes light up is an amazing thing.
16. Meeting a man who blows my expectations out of the water has been a very good thing. He's reinforcing a lot of things I've been told over the years about what a relationship should look like but have never seen in my own significant other until now. I thought everyone was making it up. If you've seen the Gilmore Girls episode when Lane comes back from her honeymoon, you get my overall theory. Other people seem amazingly happy but I couldn't quite get there. Maybe I just wasn't a good enough actress...ironic since my undergrad is in theater. Luckily I was totally wrong and DH has proven that. Sigh...he's just dreamy. Oh, sorry, did I just digress?

Thank you to every single blessed one of you who has influenced me, who has put up with me, who love me, who support me, who listen to me ramble about the same things over and over, who has helped direct me, who has stopped me out of love and said "what the heck are you thinking?!?!?". Thank you to my parents, my brothers, my aunts, uncles and cousins, my person, my DH, my unofficial family that started as friends, both new and old.

Overall I think I'm a pretty great woman after 31 years! Sorry, is that conceited?  Ah, you know what? It's my birthday, so I'm allowed to think great things about myself today.

Happy Birthday Lil' B

Happy Birthday to my little brother...who happens to be turning the big 3-0 today!  I didn't forget (aren't you reading this right now?) but this was the most appropriate picture I could find.

 

Because we are Crosby and Malkin....except without the heavy Russian accent, superior skating skills and multi-million dollar paychecks.

Lil' B....I am so thrilled you're my brother. I don't remember whether you gave me the black eye or I gave you the black eye. I didn't have anything to do with The Mother of Us All giving you and the entire troop poison oak. I have loved every minute of every hockey game that we spent in Civic Arena. You have inspired me to be better at my job every single day. I am insanely proud of you finishing your master's and not giving up on wanting to stay in Da' Burgh. I cannot wait to stand with you in June as you gain a wife and start the next part of your story with Library Girl.

I love you, every last part of you (even the parts that drive me crazy).

I Can't Eat WHAT?

It's approaching summer and vacation and weddings and swimming pools and less clothes in general. DH and best friend are embarking on a two month long intense work-out and healthy eating plan.  The plan is not so different from what he normally does, except it includes two-a-day workouts, lifting and cardio, and no junk food.

I'm going to try to stick to the diet portion of this plan, to some extent. As DH remarked on Saturday as we grocery shopped at Wal-Mart "eating healthy isn't cheap". There's just no way my will power currently can handle two-a-days and cutting out junk food. I think I better focus on one thing. So as of today the refined sugar consumption nose-dives. The drinking of adult beverages is going to be nil. Complex proteins will be a daily item on the menu. Fresh fruit and homemade trail mix will be snacks.  Um...I'm starting to reconsider this.

The exception to this strict regimen will be when we venture to Brownstones this weekend. I've been waiting months to try the place and it's no holds barred on Saturday night.

What do y'all like to eat that is healthy and tasty?  Oh and can you make it cheap too? Ever done a strict work-out or diet regimen?

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Is it any surprise that I made cookies for St. Paddy's Day? I guess I could have focused on Irish potatoes or Irish car bombs or Irish soda bread. But I figured I should stick with what I know best. Cookies.

Is there anything more Irish than a row of shamrocks?

Maybe a row of filled shamrocks?

May the luck o' the Irish be with you all tomorrow!

Cookie Surprises!

There are some cookie surprises that I can't wait to share with y'all....once I finish and mail them, that is. So stay tuned later this week.

In other news, I totally got schooled in pilates class this week with Ashley and Jess.  Even my intercostal muscles hurt.  Do you know what kind of torture is involved in making a person's intercostal's hurt?  You don't want to know, actually....

26 Things You May or May Not Know

 So I have to thank OliePants for this post.  Check her's out!

 

ABC’s of ME!

Age: 31...for a mere three more weeks
Bed size: Queen and I loove it
Chore you hate: cleaning the toilet! And I don't even live with a man yet.
Dogs: Love them, but also love cats. Havaneses are really cute and smart.
Favorite color:  Cobalt blue

Gold or silver: Silver please
Height: Short, otherwise known as 5'4"
Instruments I play: Piano and I sing
Job title: Audiologist
Kids: Want them but currently are without them. Work with them every day!
Live: In the Deep South, otherwise known as the DFW metroplex
Mom’s name: I'll abstain so as to not bring too many details into this. Here she's known as The Mother Of Us All
Nicknames: Awn, Dre
Overnight hospital stays:  One in the early 2000s. It sucked because it was from the day after Christmas through Jan 1. And my parents caught the worst flu ever after I was admitted, so they couldn't even come visit.

Pet peeve: Overfull garbage cans
Quote from a movie:" I love ya more than my luggage" "Yes, I shall go down in history as the man who opened a door" "You know, for kids!"
Right or left-handed: Right...my left hand cannot be trusted to produce anything legible.
Siblings:  2 - Most Illustrious Brother (MIB) and Little Bro.
Time you wake up: If I plan on the gym, 4am. If no gym, 5:30am.
Underwear:  Yes.

Vegetable you dislike: Beets...they taste purple. 
X-rays you have had done: Ankles, back, neck, head, chest, shoulders...I'm a wee bit accident prone.
Yummy food you make:  Sugar cookies
Zoo animal: Polar bears

Thanks OliePants for posting this survey originally!

I Was A Smart Kid

To be exact, I was "gifted and talented". It's true, you can ask my mom. She'll tell you. Actually don't ask her...at one point in my tender development she mistook my stubbornness for me being "slow". I was part of the GATE class - Gifted And Talented Eduction. It should serve as a hint that I attended a school system that capitalized the word "And" in order to have a clever acronym. I am convinced to this day that I made it into this illustrious program because I was smart enough to deduce that a muffler "muffles things". We did various Mensa like activities that included picture searches that were most likely lifted straight from the pages of Highlights, word searches, and one memorable dissection of a frog when we passed around the eyeball all while lounging in the old locker room on pieces of ramshackle carpeting. Perhaps we should have focused a little bit more on vocabulary considering I pronounced "specific" as "pacific" and "dilapidated" as "diplidated" for years.

In middle school we progressed to reading classics, depicting the mammals of the world in size order on long sheets of freezer paper whilst debating the need of all mammals to have human like rhino-logic anatomy, laughing like idiots when someone would inevitably sit on a protractor, hatching various deformed chicks due to the eggs being left out in a freeze prior to our incubating them, and in general sidetracking our GATE (which was then TARGET...Talented And R-something Gifted Education T-Something) teacher into talking about skiing. Heavens that woman loved to ski. I will forever remember how much she loved to ski.

The other fabulous project we participated in while in our tween years was the Invention Convention.  I was reading a post over at i am baker and she had made some colored pancakes. If you happen to either be my mother or my best friend growing up, you know exactly where I'm going with this. The Invention Convention was held in the Big City and we all had to come up with a product or service (I think) and have a prototype as well as a poster board that explained our product. Now the first Invention Convention that I participated in I knew I had a winner of an idea. It involved books, Kool-Aid and fake glasses.  How could I not win?!?!  The idea was you attached this bookmark thing (it's still in the R&D phase) into a book and it connected to the glasses by tubes filled with powdered Kool-Aid. The sheer power of the Kool-Aid would transform the words in the book into energy and transport the book into your brain while you did something else. I even drew a kick-butt picture of the book floating above a person's head to symbolize the book having osmosified into the brain. Sadly the judges chose to ignore my brilliance and didn't even mention me in the awards ceremony.

I was determined to change that all the following year. There are few things I love in life more than breakfast. Specifically pancakes for breakfast. I didn't get Pop-Tarts or cereal or toast but pancakes, I thought, were the niche market that needed to be tapped. I envisioned frozen pancakes long before Eggo cornered the market. So I whipped up a batch and stared at them while trying to figure out how to make them stand out. I mean, they were PANCAKES. They didn't need glitz, glamor and glitter to stand out. Through much trial and error I landed on colored pancakes! Now what about syrup? Let's color that too! Who cares about red dye 40? I even theorized about selling them frozen and then popping them in the toaster in the morning. You could even include syrup packets, much like the Kellogg toaster strudel icing packs. I even went to the lengths of gluing pancakes to the poster board. Keep in mind I was a walker. I think every blessed pancake fell off that board between my house and the middle school. FYI, it is darn near impossible to reglue a pancake onto poster board. Suffice to say, while my pancakes did make it on the local news, it was not the Michelin 5 stars I was looking for. Casey, Fabio, Jenn and Dale, I feel your pain. If I'd had knives, I would've had to pack them.

Thank you, i am baker, for vindicating me these 20 long years later as I do not foresee an Invention Convention All Stars anytime soon.

Skies

Every now and then we're lucky enough to catch the edge of an Okie sky down here. You don't find these in Yankeeland. Sorry, yinz know it's true, bless your hearts!

These were taken a couple weeks ago. I was headed back from the gym and caught a glimpse of this sky in the window of a car passing me in the parking lot. I hadn't even glanced west when I walked out of the gym and would have totally missed this. I ran (literally) home and grabbed my camera. I walked through the parking lot snapping pictures wishing I understood all the ways to use my camera to manipulate the shots. My favorite shot is the bottom one with the tree.

Skies like these make me glad to call this patch of prairie home.

Dark Horse

Dark horse is a term used to describe a little-known person or thing that emerges to prominence, especially in a competition of some sort. (Thanks Wikipedia). I do not view dating as a competition, for the record.

Those of you that know me know that I've been trying the dating scene for the last couple years. For those of you who don't know me, I've been trying the dating scene for the last couple years. For those of you who were lucky enough to meet your other half before the end of college years, count your lucky stars. It is increasingly difficult to meet people once you are no longer thrown together in Cartography 101 or Music Theory 475 or Equine Studies 220. Some people do meet the opposite sex at the drop of the hat. It appears they are never without someone on their arm. There are many places you could meet someone - the gym, church, a bar, the library, Wal-Mart. I did date seriously in this last year and a half and I think there are many reasons that I met the men I did in the ways I did (which, by the way, was none of the aforementioned). Those are a whole other post though.

If you've been reading my blog since it's inception you may have read this little gem of a post Lessons Learned...And Possibly Bridges Burned. I've been lucky enough to have continued on that journey and was pretty darn happy with where I was....single, learning about who I was and where God was taking me. Sure I was still on an internet dating site, and was meeting some great guys. Great guys who weren't meant for me. There are some lucky women out there though when these guys settle down! But enough about them, let's talk about my Dark Horse, or DH.

My DH was someone I had talked to for awhile before meeting. We had some good communication and agreed to meet up around the first of the year. I went into that date thinking I'd have dinner with this guy, and he seemed so nice, but I wasn't sure if there was that spark. Thinking that started to change the second we met and had been blown out of the water by the end of the evening. It was one of those rare first dates where you don't want it to end because the idea of him not calling for a second date had to be put off as long as possible. On a side note, it's a good thing he turned out to be a great guy because my "emergency friend" was asleep when I called her after to let her know I hadn't been kidnapped. Geez...what's the use of an emergency code word if the other party is too tired to get the text? Anyway, I digress...

There are many things that I have learned about DH, many things I absolutely love about him, and some of these things I will share. Others, I will not.  Sorry, but I'm not a completely open book! One thing that I adore is that he listens. To every word I say. Every word. One of the things that apparently had been lacking in my dating life was flowers and I mentioned this. Flowers for occasions. Flowers for no reason. Flowers to cheer me up. Blooms. Petals. Leaves. Buds.

To cheer me up....

For Valentine's Day, an early morning surprise of my favorite flowers...

Because I didn't feel good...by the way, these are some of my favorite pictures I've taken to date!

I've been blessed to meet someone who understands me, who is completely undeserved, who is inspiring in his sweetness and kindness toward not only me, but everyone he comes in contact with.

Brain Wave Flat Line

Ever wish you could just turn your brain off? Stop everything chasing each other around in there? Thought after thought after thought. Throw in a dash of worry and fear, happiness and joy, anticipation and anxiety.

I'm taking a class right now that is a faith based class on finances. I have to say, even though I'm doing a lot of good work and moving in the right direction, it's a fifty-fifty chance that I'll leave class feeling beat down. I think it's partly that I have so far to go regarding student loans (audiology, like drugs, doesn't pay). The other part?  It's that little devil man sitting on my shoulder poking and prodding my worry and fanning the flames of my money anxiety.

Tonight I stopped at boyfriend's after class to grab a snack and some time with him. I was just mopey and it started coming out in all these other ways that had absolutely nothing to do with what was bugging me. Gosh, don't you hate the girl who does that? One thing is bothering her and suddenly it morphs into all these other things that aren't actually bothering her and have nothing to do with anything. Sadly, I was that girl tonight. Luckily boyfriend is pretty woman savvy and he knows, already, how to diffuse me when I start to get wound up. I don't know if he even knows he's doing it, actually.

After I got home I was just really relaxed and not at all anxious. As I sat here thinking about it, I realized today was one more way that God showed me just how powerful He is. See, on Sunday during Life Group, we were instructed to pray for the person to our left this week. My fabulous prayer warrior of a friend, B, was to my right, i.e., she was to pray for me. B knows that my debt, whether it would be big or small in anyone else's eyes, weighs on me. Just this morning she sent me an email to let me know she was praying for my finances and included a couple verses. Satan hates when we pray for each other. Hates it! And he sticks his bony little toes and fingers all around until he finds that little niche that allows him to grab hold. The result? I was anxious and down and didn't feel like I was moving in the right direction money-wise. Which is all really poppycock, since I AM moving in the right direction. The erasing of my anxiety? My beautiful prayer warrior and my beautiful Lord. When we entreat Him, He answers in perfect timing. The more I trust the more He blesses me. In this case that blessing was the removal of my case of the blahs.

It's such a good feeling to turn off my brain and just trust.