Have I told you how Briscoe hates skateboarders? It might be one of the funnier things I’ve seen in a while. I think it is the noise that scares her. The dog needs a haircut like whoa. She’s going to get her hair did tomorrow, and I expect to have a little lamb by tomorrow night instead of the bear that is currently sleeping in my kitchen.  For some reason she has developed this ridiculous habit of spilling her food all over the floor.  It is like she picks up her bowl with her teeth and dumps it out, although I’m not sure that is actually possible.  But once the food it on the ground, she won’t eat it.  For a while, when I would come home to her spilled food, I would pick all the pieces up and put them back in the bowl.  Then I realized, wait, she’s a dog, if she wants to spill her food on the floor, she should eat the food off the flood.  So, I stopped cleaning it up, other than to turn the bowl back upright.  Sure enough, after leaving the food on the ground until late into the night, the dog finally decided she would eat it off the floor.  So, she’s started cleaning up the mess herself, but she’s still spilling the food. 

Something about summertime makes me want to lose myself in a story, preferably a long drawn out saga. Happily, HBO has provided that for me with The Game of Thrones, and even more happily, I am able to read the novels instead of waiting to see what happens in HBO time (which is painfully slow in my opinion). I enjoy the story, the show (and the novels for that matter) are quite gruesome and violent. I find reading about violent and gruesome things is easier than watching them play out on my unnecessarily large television. But I’m totally engrossed in the novels, each chapter is told from a different character’s point of view, and the author has mastered the ability to speak in each character’s voice in a way that is seemless but also adds a depth to the writing and storyline that is not immediately apparent. I would not recommend the books or the television series to everyone, there is a base element to it that not all will find endearing, crass talk of sexual encounters and horrible things happen to almost all of the characters. But even the villainous characters have redeeming qualities (well, some of them do) and the heros have flaws, and there is nothing I love more than a good story with round characters.

I spent the last two weeks of May in Washington, D.C., training for work. Let me tell you, two weeks is a LONG TIME to be in a hotel. I learned a lot, got to spend time with some old friends (sadly, the Bizzy was out of town the entire time I was there), and enjoyed some fabulous food and beautiful sights, but I was very happy to come home to my apartment and my dog. I did meet some super cool new friends though. My mom and my aunt Jan came to visit me in Charleston this past weekend, and boy did we have a good time. I wish I could tell you we did lots of productive things, but really more than anything, we simply enjoyed Charleston and each other. We wandered, we enjoyed drinks on the rooftop under the shade with a breeze, we ate phenomenal food, (as a side note, a merinague will always add to a dessert), we peered through hedges, gates and walls into the fabulous gardens and side yards of people we didn’t know but wish we did, we sweated, we watched little children play in fountains, and Kate and Jan rearranged the furniture in my apartment. We did not shop at all, other than a short trip to the grocery, and we spent most of our time outside. It was great.

Oh! So I want y’all to check out my cousin Heather’s blog - she has MS, and has an amazingly honest and refreshing perspective, including my favorite – Wheelchair Etiquette.

I know I’ve talked about the Monday after Masters being miserable, but today was equally as depressing.  Y’all, Libby’s wedding was last weekend, and I had so much fun, but now I’m depressed.  I’m sure that part of it is that the wedding is something Libby and I have been discussing for, oh, the last fifteen to twenty years, and there is something deflating to have it actually be over, but even besides that, it was insanely fun.  I like to believe that all my bridesmaid experience was utilized to the fullest extent, but regardless, I had the maximum amount of fun.  I’m looking at photos of the weekend and wishing I could have been at three places at one time the entire weekend because there is video evidence that I missed almost as much fun as I experienced!  Haha.   I’m also sad because an impressive amount of my favorite people in the world were all in the same place and now I freshly miss them.  Sigh.  If only we could take all our favorite people and make them all live in the same place.

Then I wouldn’t have anyone to visit in Colorado or New York or a few other choice locales, but maybe we could all travel to those places together on a regular basis?  This dream is becoming increasing unrealistic.  Maybe I’ll just stick to praying for cheap airfare, connecting flights that don’t get cancelled in the black holes that are also known as the ATL and CLT, and for staying up until 5 am on a Saturday night to not ruin my entire week.  A girl can dream, right?

On top of everything, my best friend will be virtually  unreachable for the next two weeks.  JUST when we had so much to talk about, she runs off to the other side of the world.  Even Briscoe is exhausted.  Yesterday, my parents house was littered with hungover people and animals.  Bella got in the trash Saturday night after the festivities and let’s just say on Sunday, the term, “sick as a dog,” sprang to mind.  But I’m pretty sure she would do it all over again.

I’d like to tell you more, but I’m so tired my hair hurts, and they say a picture is worth a thousand words, right?

It's a marvelous night for a moondance...

Mr. and Mrs. McAleer

As I was pulling out of the rental car lot at 12:30 am in the torrential downpour, my mom called.  “Hey, where are you?”  “Flight canceled, had to rent a car, driving to Charleston.”  “By yourself?!”   Pause.  “No. With Friends!”  Pause.  “Friends.  Like friends you just met at the airport, or friends you’ve known for a long time.”  Seriously, why would she assume I’d just met them, even if I did?  “Friends I just met but we know all the same people and I checked them out and I’m going to be okay let me call you later!”  Eventually I gave her their names and our connections and it was fine.  In the end, we split the $200 cost of the rental car four ways, and made it to Charleston around 3 am.  One of my new friends did not have a checkbook or cash, and he promised to mail me a check as soon as he got back to New York.  He worked in publishing, and also promised to send me books.  The promise of books alone was extremely exciting, and he was nice enough to ask me all about what sort of books I enjoyed and who my favorite authors were. 

As Monday was a holiday, the first business day after our Friday night trek was the following Tuesday.  On Wednesday afternoon, I returned home from work to find a large box on my doorstep.  True to his word, my New York friend had overnighted me a check for $50, and an impressive array of books.  Y’all, seriously, this was probably one of the most exciting presents I have received in recent memory.  I ripped into the box, and spent a long time sorting through my newly acquired treasures, which included coffee table books, cook books, hardback short stories, paper backs, including books that were already in print and not yet published.  I was struck by the obvious thoughtfulness that went into the book selection.  I told him I enjoyed classics, loved Fitzgerald, and above all, enjoyed a good story, specifically novels and short stories.  I’ve been meaning to tell you all about the books he sent me, and which ones I would recommend, but it has taken me months to read them all.  I have included the covers that I found particularly engaging, but you can’t always judge a book by its cover, I just didn’t want y’all to miss the pretty cover artwork.   

My favorite of all the covers and the books in general was the short story collection – Stories.  This collection was put together by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantoni, and includes stories by all sorts of amazing writers, some you will recognize, some you might not.  In the introduction, Neil relates a discussion concerning short story anthologies in which he and Al came to the conclusion that the only thing they really cared about, when it came down to it, were the stories.  That good writing was important, but the stories were where the real magic happened.  The reason he reads comes down to four words.  “…and then what happened?”  This entire short story collection was built on those four words.  The dedication says it all – For all the storytellers and tale spinners who entertained the public and kept themselves alive, for Alexandre Dumas and Charles Dickens, for Mark Twain and Baroness Orczy and the rest, and most of all, for Scheherazade, who was the storyteller and the story told.  I could talk about this book forever, and I was going to tell you which stories were my favorites, but I realized I’d basically need to copy the table of contents for that to happen. 

I’m realizing it could take me days to get through all my thoughts about these books, so I’m going to have to come back to this discussion.  In other news, it has been raining pretty consistently for about the past week, I’m still eating lots of oysters, Briscoe looks like a muppet dog because she hasn’t had a hair cut in so long (someone called her Benji the other day), and we had a fire drill at work this morning.

Oh, Mean Bean.  I miss you. 

Last week I mentioned to Justin that I needed to borrow his lawnmower to cut my grass.  Brice let me borrow his lawnmower last time, but the Wright family was out of town and my lawn was really starting to thrive.  When I came home from work on Thursday, sweet Justin was at my house and had just finished mowing the lawn and edging and was about to roundup the walkway.  It was super, super nice of him. 

The rest of this story is pretty funny, so try to stay with me.  Libby was in town, so we went to the Thirsty Thursday baseball game and ended up coming back and sitting on the front porch for a little while before going to sleep.  Libby slept in the guest room downstairs, and was driving her dad’s car.  Libby would have normally stayed at her parents house, but she wanted to wake up and do P90X with Sara and Kirby on Friday morning at the crack of dawn (because they are XTREME) and Bryan’s flight got into the airport at like 8. 

Natalie was out on a narcotics raid in Harrisburg (I know that sounds hilarious, but she’s an ADA, and anyway, apparently it’s really fun to go on narcotic raids), so she didn’t get home until after we went to sleep.  I guess I had neglected to tell her that Libby might spend the night.  So I wake up in the morning and I have a text from natalie from 1 am that says, THERE IS SOMEONE IN OUR HOUSE.  And then by the time Natalie woke up on friday, Libby was already gone.  I felt really bad that I might have scared Natalie, but she swears she wasn’t freaked out, and once she saw libby’s toothbrush in the bathroom she figured it was okay. 

Ultimately the weirdest thing that has happened this week is that it has been cool outside.  Last night we went to dinner after tennis, and we left dinner, we were all cold.  Granted, we all had on our ridiculous looking tennis outfits, but still.  In Augusta, in July, you should be able to be in a bathing suit at any hour of the night and day and not be cold.  A wet bathing suit at that.  Normally it’s 90 degrees at midnight.  Recently, it hasn’t reached 90 degrees at 3 pm. 

Speaking of tennis, I’ve decided one of my favorite things about tennis is the fact that you get to wear ridiculous outfits that would be inappropriate anywhere else but are totally appropriate on the tennis court.  It is amazing how much I enjoy wearing tennis skirts.  My tennis shoes are a little clunky, but what can you do. 

The biggest problem of my life right now is that I can’t get up in the morning.  I would happily go to sleep at 9:30 at night if it meant I could wake up refreshed at 6:30.  But I can’t go to sleep at 9:30.  My body won’t let me.  And forget getting up at 6:30, I can barely drag myself out of bed at 7:30.  I  don’t lack will power in any other part of my life, I have a good bit of self control, and I work hard at life.  But I CAN NOT GET OUT OF BED.  It is a real problem.  My body wants to sleep from 2 am to 10 am, and not from 11 to 7.  Sigh.  Oh well.  I think I’ve been working out too late at night. 

Briscoe got her hair all shaved off last week, and she looks like a little lamb.  She also looks kind of fat.  It’s impossible to tell when she has long hair, but when she gets her hair all cut off, she seems to become a little self conscious of her figure.  Natalie made up a new song for Briscoe’s hair cut.  It goes something like this -

Bobby had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb, Bobby had a little lamb who’s puffy, fluffy and white!

But I want to tell y’all that Peter and JBlanchard are the best friends ever.  Saturday, on the 4th of July, Emily and I were grabbing lunch at the sub place that I can’t remember the name of right this second on Mount Pleasant, and when we got back in the car to drive to the beach, Emily’s car wouldn’t start. 

Everyone we knew was already on the beach.  Some of the people we called were on islands you can only get to by boat, which was not helpful.  This was not awesome.  Parking lots are hot.  Everyone is doing something on the Fourth of July.  Something other than driving around Mount Pleasant with jumper cables. 

Jennifer had called when we were in the sub place and I called her back.  She and Peter were on their way out to Folly, sitting in traffic that was horrendous.  When I told her what happened, she and peter went back to Peter’s house and got jumper cables, and drove all the way to the end of Mount Pleasant to save us.  It was a true act of love and friendship.  On the Fourth of July.  Don’t make me start singing Lee Greenwood, cause I will. 

I think Tracy Lawrence, Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw would approve.

The weather threatened to rain on our parade, and although we could see the rain off in the distance at many times over the weekend, we only got rained on once.  And we were prepared for it. 

I got to see so many awesome people, and it was wonderful to have a weekend where the only requirement was that all activities must take place outside, weather permitting (except when we had to do a little shopping for outdoor gear like bathing suits!). 

What with the sun bossing around all those rain clouds and making them act right, and the fact that we saved the bocce balls from certain death in the tidal pools (cold beer can make you irresponsible), and all the dolphins that wanted to hang out at our boat, it was close to being a perfect Memorial Day Weekend.  The beer was cold, the music was loud, and Jennifer cooks a mean hot dog.  And only the bottom half of my back is sunburned.  The air temperature was in the upper 70s, the water temperature was in the lower 70s (both of which are a little colder than I prefer, especially for this late in the year, but it was tolerable). 

My only regret is that I didn’t get to sing any patriotic songs.  Sad.  I guess I’ll just have to practice up for the 4th of July. 

OHHH!  And BETSY and BRAD had a BABY!  So happy!  James Brooks Bagwell.  They are going to call him Brooks.  Bety, Brad and Brooks Bagwell.  Poor little Amos.  He missed out on the alliteration.  Maybe Briscoe and Amos can get married and Briscoe will be Briscoe Bagwell.  Ha.  I don’t know why I think that is so funny.  Oh, and for the record, Betsy’s due date is actually tomorrow – but we all made guesses on when the baby would be born, and I guessed the right day.  I was off by like three hours, but still.  I was REAL CLOSE.  Betsy and I just have such a magical connection – the date came to me in a dream.  I can’t wait to meet him!

I’m really looking forward to seeing everyone, so many special friends from the law school years, and I’m so excited for Betsy and Andrew.  I tell Betsy all the time that I want to be just like her when I grow up.  She’s such an amazing friend and I’m always impressed with how she and Andrew are able to have common goals and dreams and actively pursues these goals and dreams together in a successful and exciting way.  I love them.  And I love Kaya too. 

Pray that it doesn’t rain, and I hope that your Friday the 13th is as fun as mine promises to be!

Kisses!

My law school friends referred to Betsy as the WGF, which stands for World’s Greatest Flirt.  And I learned a great deal about flirting from the Betsy, who is truly, a master.  She is such a phenomenal flirt, she once convinced a gay man to rent his house to her, instead of selling it.  The house was on the market, had a for sale sign in the yard, and was listed for something close to a million dollars.  Betsy called the man and flirted her way into a rental for herself and three other girls.  To this day, the house is still being rented to four girls, the original girls have slowly gotten married or moved away and have been replaced.  But I still have a key to this magical house, lovingly referred to as the Terrace. 

When the grass would get too long on the front lawn of the Terrace, Betsy would simply find some unsuspecting yard man during her afternoon run and convince him to stop by her house on his way home and mow the lawn real quick for $20.  Luckily, she is a bilingual flirt, and her Spanish has come in handy at such times.   

Did I mention the fact that Betsy is an aerobics instructor?  I’ve heard her step and her sculpt class are legendary.  I’ve heard, mostly because I’m too uncoordinated to do aerobics, and she has this horrible habit of teaching class at 6 am. 

Betsy taught me how to take the five extra minutes and ask about the sale price that rang up more than what was on the shelf, how to convince a mechanic to plug the hole in your tire for a $10 tip, and the best way to handle a server at a restaurant who is less than thrilled to be taking your order.  Betsy’s ability to handle people always amazes and inspires me. 

I wish we were eating lunch at five star, or the cafe at pharr, or the resort.  Sigh.  Another day.

Betsy and I share the love of many things, often things that other people dislike.  We share the bizarre appreciation of getting into a hot car that has been baking in the sun on a summer day, we both have an extreme dislike of authority, and any time I get lost in the ATL I know that all I have to do is call Betsy and she will know exactly where I am and where I am going and how I need to get there. 

We use the same kind of toothbrush, make up, and have been known to steal each other’s hair brush.  She taught me how to not wash my hair every day and the usefulness of a nalgene bottle.  She introduced me to Amos Lee and Patty Griffin, who both changed my life.  Together we learned accounting, forgiveness, trust, finance, how to get over a break up, how to survive a terrible football game date, how to put the pieces back together when our carefully laid plans didn’t work out (margarita machines come in handy at such times and can be rented by the night), and how just laying in the grass in the front yard can solve a lot of problems. 

I know Betsy and I will continue to copy each other, although she is a little ahead of me in life right now.  I was really looking forward to meeting Baby Charlsie Bagwell, but since Betsy is set to have a BOY in a few months, the world is going to have to wait on Baby Charlsie (Betsy, I’m  serious, I think Charlsie Bagwell has a nice ring to it, we can call her CB and ask her what her 20 is all the time, and say things like, 10-4, over). It makes me so happy that Briscoe and Amos are the same kind of dog, because Betsy and I are the same kind of people.  We are Kindred Spirits.  Our dogs have our personalities, which is just the way it should be.  I want to be like Briscoe, and Amos and Betsy – light, fluffy, happy, and adventurous. 

There are a lot of other things I need to tell you all, the last few weeks have been eventful, and the next few weeks are going to be crazy.  My whole body is tired.  But I will leave you with this one update.    

And a few links to my favorite Betsy posts – Trampolines and Daydreams, Betsy in the Pond, Wow!  Well, you look great!,  and finally, the windsor post.  Sweet dreams friends.