Granbury Adventures

Last weekend, my new friend Laura and I went on a 1-day roadtrip to the cute little town of Granbury, Texas. It was only 50 miles from my house (southwest of Fort Worth), so it didn't take more than on hour to get there.

We started out at Babe's Chicken for lunch (I had heard of it, but never had tried it...). The restaurant was very "Texas" inside - and had a southern charm atmosphere.

I loved the stone interior and 'false' windows.....

It had a very neat feel in there - kind of like a German beer hall. Warm, inviting, friendly. And there was a lit-up gazebo in there too. I don't know if you have to be special to eat at the table in the gazebo, but I must say - I was jealous!

These were the chairs that were outside the restaurant - for people waiting or just to have a drink outside. So cute with those horseshoes!

And now for the main reason we went to Granbury on that particular day......to see the show "The Night The Music Died" at the Granbury Opera House! Laura's birthday was earlier this month, and she is a big Buddy Holly fan, so I bought tickets to this show to celebrate her 30th birthday.

And here's the interior of the Opera House (which is supposedly very haunted) and Laura! She's making her debut on my blog!

The show was fantastic - The Big Bopper, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens did a great job....Laura even teared up at the end when the stage went dark, representing them dying in the plane crash after their 1959 show in Clear Lake, Iowa. But then they came back and played a few more, so it didn't end on a sad note.

A hitching post in their cute little town square!!!

We had a great time shopping at cute little stores like this one. The old buildings were so neat!

And we had dinner at Hank's On The Square......and "Hank" is the owner's wiener dog!

I couldn't resist taking this picture - I should really go back and get the shirt. I love it!

Holidays

OK, another holiday is upon us (Memorial Day) so I thought I would post about my feelings on holidays. Most people look forward to holidays, make plans to celebrate them, enjoy the days off of work, etc., right?

What I have found out over the course of my 32 years on this planet: I am not most people.

There are a lot of 'common' molds that I fit into nicely, but the whole holiday thing is NOT one of them. I find that I do not enjoy holidays very much anymore. They bring some element of sadness and anxiety to me, rendering them not very enjoyable....and some of them downright painful.

I don't even think it's all a conscious thing either. About a week or so before a holiday, I usually find that I am pretty down and kind of depressed. I look at my situation, surroundings, etc. and try to figure out why I am feeling that way, and more often than not, a holiday is approaching. I don't even realize it until I look at the calendar - how crazy!

Why is it that I freak out a holidays?? I'm sure that it has a lot to do with the fact that my family has largely disintegrated into thin air over the last 10 years or so. My parents moved away from my childhood home, Kristi moved to Arizona, my Dad died, Grandma died, I divorced, and now Mom is remarried.

Those things are family details, and holidays don't necessarily have to be about family, but that is generally the direction they go - you spend holidays with family. Well, that's not really the case for me anymore.....and I don't have a family of my own. Maybe one day I will have a husband and possibly kids, and maybe I won't. I just know that I get sad around holidays when people focus on family activities and I am like the kid who didn't get picked for dodge ball.

I think I need to make up some weird new traditions for myself that I do on specific holidays so that I can look forward to them and not dread them. It's important for me to associate good memories with holidays instead of feeling left out or sad. Maybe it's that I go to a certain place on a certain holiday or maybe I make my favorite foods on a certain holiday. Whatever.

I don't want to be sad when holidays come around - that's no fun and it's no way to live. If I live until my 'average life span' age, there are a LOT of holidays between now and then and that's a LOT of sadness that doesn't need to be there.

Any ideas or thoughts on this topic??

Thankful Thursday

1. When someone says something nice about you when they don't even know you are there.

Doesn't it just feel fantastic when you overhear someone saying something nice about you when they don't even know you are listening?? It's way better even than a regular compliment that someone tells you to your face! It's kind of like the concept of character - who are you when no one is looking?

2. Day trips to a new city

Last weekend, Laura and I took a day trip out to Granbury, TX and it was such a fun day! Neither of us had been there before and so we explored, shopped, ate at cute little restaurants in their historic downtown square and took a ghost tour. There's just something therapeutic about just getting out of town and changing your scenery!

3. Eating ice cream with a friend on a bench in a cute little town

When Laura and I were in Granbury, we got ice cream at the end of the evening when the historic downtown square was all lit up with white lights. Since the little diner/store was closing right when we got our ice cream, we took it outside and ate it on the bench along the street of cute shops, facing the big courthouse. It was like we were back 50 years in time - priceless!

4. Knowing that God gives us grace when we disappoint Him.

We all screw up from time to time - say the wrong thing, get envious of someone when we should be happy for them, hold a grudge - whatever. It so comforting to know that God forgives these things and allows us to wipe our slate clean and start over and try it again. That grace is given to each of us and it's such a huge gift, because we ALL need it!

5. A clean pup after her bath.

OK, this is not Maggie, but it looks just like her when she is getting her bath. It's so freaking cute! She does NOT like being wet and is not a fan of bath time (she even runs and hides when she sees the bottle of her dog shampoo and the blue towel). However, over the years, she has gotten used to the fact that it's GOING to happen and if she just plays along, it will be over in just a few minutes.

I just love her soft fur when she is all clean and dry after her bath. She forgives me for giving her a bath in a matter of minutes after she's dried off, so we cuddle and she smells just like a puppy!

The Melting Pot

Last week, I went to The Melting Pot with April and a few of her friends (5 of us in all). It was great company and they had all been there before. I was the only "fondue virgin" so they showed me the ropes.

I didn't realize that you actually COOK the meat, as well as dipping it. For those that don't know me well, I have an aversion to raw meat - it's just a really gross texture and I just feel like there's salmonella and e coli everywhere. Don't get me wrong, though, I love eating it, but I just am not a fan of handling raw meat (insert dirty joke 'here').

Anyway, we went on "Ladies Night" so basically the entire restaurant was packed with women (we went to the one in Addison - on Belt Line and the Tollway). It was a set menu since they were doing Ladies Night, so we had the cheese fondue first. He cooked up the concoction and it was really good! Next was salads - in regular individual bowls. It was a great salad and super yummy.

Then came the big plates of raw meat - eeek! I did pretty well with it. April taught me what to do and how long to keep it in the pot so that it was totally cooked. I managed to cook everything right and it tasted pretty dang good!

The last course was the dessert. They brought out 2 pots of chocolate - dark chocolate and Heath bar chocolate. Both were fantastic! The items that we got to dip in the chocolate were cheesecake, marshmallows, strawberries, rice krispie bars and banana chunks. WOW - amazing.

The whole meal was $29 plus tax and tip. I think my bill ended up being like $44 or something like that since I got a glass of wine too. Oh, and they gave us a bottle of their garlic and wine seasoning to take home - yum!

It was a fun experience and the food was good, but it's probably not something I need to do all the time. But it's always fun to go out with a group of girls and get some laughs in, so it was a success in my book!

DC10!

It's May, so that means that it's 'conference time' at work. We held our user and developer conference a couple weeks ago - it's called the Dynamic Church Conference (or as we call it around the office, DC10). This year I was on the committee to plan the conference, so I had many responsibilities and it got kind of crazy leading up to "D-Day".

Here's a picture of "IT Central" - those IT guys had to set up countless laptops with presentations, projectors, screens, etc. A lot of work went on in this little room! In this picture, they were unpacking all of the equipment - a BIG job...

Here's Tiffany (the main conference planner) laying on the floor next to my desk - after she found out that the conference T-shirts were lost somewhere in Dallas! LOL

This is where the conference was held this year - Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, TX. It is a HUGE church (27,000 people attend each weekend).

And like previous years, my boss (our CFO) was the MC for all of the general sessions:

And when you agree to be the MC, apparently you also agree to wear a sombrero, stand on a chair and welcome people to the meet-n-greet (which had a Tex-Mex theme)!

How many guys does it take to carry the VP of Development around??? Just one.

The church was HUGE inside, but the layout actually worked out great for us - it's a fabulous facility. We had over 500 attendees and then about 85 employees running the conference. A busy place!

Here I am on the second day (it's a 3-day conference, with one set up day before). For some reason, my allergies went crazy up there in Plano and my eyes got all red and painful, so I had to rock the glasses for the second and third day. Grrrrr......

Here's Kingsley (our VP of Development - the same guy that was being carried in the pic above) giving a keynote about the future of our software.....

A packed house in the student worship center!

My co-workers handing out ice cream treats after the Networking Lunch....

The entrance to the Meet-n-Greet. I loved the sign that Tiffany designed for it - it was very "Texas" and said "Howdy" to welcome our guests from all over the country. I even got to sit with some Minnesota folks at the Networking Lunch - from Eagle Brook Church. Fun!

Here are a bunch of the development guys, serving as the 'welcoming committee' to one of the keynote sessions.....

And here's that IT room, all set up as their Command Central! Techies galore!

And here's our main keynote speaker - Ron Hall. He is the author of "Same Kind of Different As Me" - a NY Times Bestselling book about a wealthy art dealer befriending a homeless man and the amazing friendship that ensued.

But the true highlight of the conference for me was our very own FT band! We have some musically talented employees and some of them formed a band to play at the conference to kick off the second day.

They were fantastic and everyone had a good time singing along. They did a set of 4 songs to kick off Day 2 and it really got everyone in a great mood to start the day.

Here's Mayce on vocals, Joey on guitar and vocals and Chad on guitar.

Mayce was great - I had only heard her sing karoake, so this was the first 'real' performance I had seen her at and she did a fabulous job!

It was fun to see the band play - and realize that you interact with them on a regular basis in the office, but that they have this amazing talent outside of work.

The conference was a big success and a lot of work went into it. Hurray!

Flakin' Out

OK, time to vent again. It's been a while, so here goes......

I think everyone has a friend or two like this: they make plans with you and then break them over and over, but say it's important to them to hang out with you, but something is always coming up. You know that the things that come up are legitimate, but it just keeps happening. I have a couple friends that have done that too much lately and while they may genuinely want to get together with you, and circumstances may genuinely come up to require 'rescheduling', it just makes you feel like you are their 100th priority.

NOT a good feeling.


It's a meeting that they forgot about, or they are sick, or a kid's activity, or someone needs them to do something for them, or WHATEVER. In a way, I try to understand and be accomodating and agree to reschedule because I value the time we spend together, but in another way I just want to tell them that it's RUDE to keep doing that and disrespectful of other people's time and feelings. If they are really that busy, then they should know not to commit to things until their life settles down (or not at all if they can't make it a priority to keep the commitments).

Thoughts on this topic???

33 Things

OK, so I think I mentioned this concept a while back, but I'm really going to do it this year on my birthday. My friend, Millicent, just turned 33 recently and she did it, so I am too! For her 33rd birthday, she made a list of 33 unique things that she was going to do in her 33rd year.

They can be little things, things she has been meaning to do, big life-changing things - whatever you want to accomplish or experience in that year. I'm not sure if there is some big significance to the "33rd" year of your life, but it sounds like as good of a time as any to do this!

I know that I won't be able to come up with 33 good items for my list if I wait until my exact birthday to start it, so my plan is to start thinking of ideas now, and then really work through the list in July so that by my birthday on August 2nd, I've got my list to tackle! I don't want to look at the list as just tasks to complete...I want the list to be made up of things that will stretch me, enrich me, improve me and thrill me.

Here's to the 33rd year of life!