Growing older but not up

Had a great trip to Dallas this weekend. Saw Jimmy Buffett in Frisco last night with my friend Krista. The concert was fun--if not a total sea of humanity--but I'm not looking forward to the catalog of tickets I amassed while running through toll booths on the way back and forth to Pizza Hut Park. Seriously, Texas, you should be able to finance a secession from the union with the sheer volume of tolls you collect around Dallas.

This morning we slept in, ate breakfast, then stimulated the economy at the outlet mall in Allen. Believe it or not, I actually wore out a pair of running shoes (file under: sentences you never thought I'd write), so I bought new Shox and a watch today to keep up with my runs. It measures my pace, distance, and time, and then uploads to a website via the USB port in my watch. How seriously cool is that?

It was awesome planning on my part to schedule a vacation day tomorrow. I'm crashing after a super busy week, so I hope I can sleep in tomorrow, then nap excessively. Hello, four-day work week!

Contrary to popular belief, I only had one margarita last night. I was driving, and since they were $14 each, I was one of the more sober people in the audience. The weather is here... wish you were beautiful! (Love that I'm holding some singles here... that doesn't look trashy AT ALL.)

I'm all out of love

I'm not quite sure why, but I've had Air Supply tunes running through my head all day which means that I'm either (a) a gay ice dancer; or (b) exhausted to the point of delusion.

This little three-day work week has turned out to be quite the roller coaster. What kind of admissions director decides to take two days of vacation the week before four groups start? (A stupid one.) Does she not own a calendar? (Yes, she does. But she also owns a BlackBerry AND a brand-new MacBook Pro that will go through airport security and make her oh-so-accessible on vacation.)

I've discovered that the bad thing about three-day weeks is that you don't have a mere 24 hours worth of work. You still have 40 hours worth of work or more, you just have to cram it in the three days you're technically "working." And even then some of it spills over into your vacation time.

Yesterday my alarm sounded at 5:15 so that I could pack and put on a suit and meet my boss by 7 a.m. to drive to Harrison where I made small talk with strangers. I then drove through McDonalds for a regular cheeseburger with no pickles on my way to the office to frantically work on some files and freak out everyone in my general vicinity before driving to Fort Smith for the evening. Today I awoke at 5 a.m. to attempt creative writing, left the hotel at 7:15 a.m. for a downtown breakfast (more small talk with strangers), had a meeting, drove back to the office, pushed some more files around, ate Doritos and a 3 Muskateers for lunch at my desk, sped to campus for an admissions meeting, frantically searched for a network connection in a random office before I was kicked out at 6 p.m. while working on a "thing for the President if you have time," then finally finished and submitted my writing project that had to be done today at 8:22 p.m. I'm exhausted and still need to unpack and repack.

Lest you feel too sorry for me, I do feel the need to point out that in the past 24 hours I've eaten one of the best steaks of my life with Larry and Ashley, hung out with the very precious twins E and P Diddy, languished in a 30-minute whirlpool bath in a hotel room, talked to my awesome brother on the phone, and opened an unexpected check from my mortgage company. Tomorrow I have to stop by campus for a bit, then it's a day of massages and hair appointments (while my housekeeper cleans), driving to Tulsa, and boarding a jet plane bound for DFW. Can't wait to hang out with Lonnie and Jen this weekend. Woo-hoo! Just hope I can fit in sushi and Pappadeaux.

There is that pesky little conference call on Friday morning, but them's the breaks.

Oh, and in the words of Kat Ellis in "The Wedding Date" (seen 32 times per week on TBS) about Air Supply, "Everyone knows their greatest hits, but some of their ballads are surprisingly poignant."

It's finally Friday

Man, it's been a very long day. And a stressful one. But thankfully I drowned my sorrows in some Chinese food and the 20% off sale at Express. I might have purchased yet another pair of jeans. It's a sickness, really. But it's been years since I've found jeans that actually fit and don't create a muffin top. I now enjoy looking in the three-way mirror a little bit too much.

My self-esteem was too high when I was fat. I'm really full of myself these days.

Sure, I have to go through the entire stack of jeans at Express to get to larger sizes (who's a 0 long, anyway? Giselle doesn't live in Fayetteville), but at least I can finally shop there.

Jennifer is evidently dragging me to some new intern extravaganza at the hospital next weekend, so I'll do my best to land a cute doctor (not one who excessively text messages). She has assured me that I need to wear really tight jeans. I'm not sure if that's sage advice or merely sabotage. I am sure that it will be 900 degrees in central Texas next weekend, so at least my hair will frizz and be higher than usual. 'Cause in Texas, the higher the hair, the closer to God, right?

Speaking of closer to God, my plane lands at DFW, so I'm kind of pumped about seeing the new Cowboys stadium. I think it's out of my way, but I am very curious to see what $900 million buys these days.

Tomorrow I have big plans of sleeping in, yoga, napping, church, then dinner and a movie with my friend Lori (I'm not speaking in third person; I actually have a friend named Lori who is tall, sarcastic, single, and supremely cool.. sound familiar?). This is my last free weekend for awhile, so I'm trying to bank some sleep time. Of course, I do plan to nap all day at Lonnie and Jen's on Friday while they go to work like chumps. I'll need to recover from my 47-minute flight.

Hope everyone had a fabulous week!

Back to the ol' grind

It was great to get back to some semblance of normalcy today. I had a very productive afternoon of work. Got lots of stuff done before I left at 7, with a big long list of things to do tomorrow. I also got two workouts in, so hopefully my jeans won't be tight anymore in just a few days. My caloric intake today? Yogurt for breakfast, Little Debbie chocolate chip cake for lunch, and granola and cherries for dinner. I'm trying to make up for pigging out on ribs last night (no pun intended).

The fun news? I just booked two flights, one to Boston in November (woo-hoo!) for a conference, and one to Dallas in a couple of weeks to see my Hill Country family. Yeah, I'll have to drive an hour to the airport and two hours from Dallas to Temple, but it's 1/3 of the time in the car and I got a flight for 82 bucks roundtrip. Quite a deal.

Now I need to get ready for bed. These days it's really hard to go to sleep at night and really hard to wake up in the morning. When did I turn into a teenager?

More than 24 hours later, I'm still weirded out by my LB extravaganza yesterday. The boy made me dinner. He knows his way around the kitchen. And he sings to his houseplants. Song of choice? "Easy" by the Commodores. Seriously.

Missing from his mantle? Unicorns.

Hop, skip and a wait

As of 1:15 a.m. this morning, I'm back home. Man, yesterday was a L-O-N-G day. I woke up at 4:30 a.m., got dressed and checked out of the hotel, flew from Tulsa to Dallas, Dallas to Lubbock, got a rental, and had three hours to kill until the wedding. After a frantic cardigan search (because really, my arms are unattractive) and lunch at Olive Garden, I made it to the church.

I'm so happy I went to the wedding. Not only was it a great chance to see old friends (even some who live by me), the ceremony was gorgeous and very Brooke. Fun music, great clothes, and a candy buffet to fill up bags as our wedding favors. I can't believe Brooke's married! I've known that girl since she was a freshman in college. It does seem like three lifetimes ago that we met at the gym at 5:30 a.m. every morning. I have the arms to prove it!



After the reception I had a couple of more hours to kill, so I drove around dirt-filled west Texas (really... why do 215K people live in Lubbock?... see proof below) and utilized my GPS to find a scary gas station to fill up the rental with 1.22 gallons of gas (a cool $3 worth). My flight to Dallas was smooth, but after a three-hour layover and mediocre Mexican food in the airport, we sat on the tarmack in Big D for an hour. Thankfully it was my last flight, I had change for the tolls, and no checked luggage to wait on (or to pay for... that's quite a racket, American Airlines!).



Now I'm home, trying to sleep off exhaustion and looking forward to a day off tomorrow. No more Monday work days until July! Woo-hoo!