Weekend Things

Lauren1 Comment

Even though it’s Monday, I have a headache and my hamstrings are sore as hell, I think it might be impossible to be in a bad mood today.  Because: JUNE!  SUMMER!  80 DEGREES!  I’M WEARING A DRESS!  I think a lot of problems are solved simply by a change of mindset, so when Joey was lamenting that today was Monday, I told him he needs to stop thinking of things as weekend or weekday and just think of it all as summer.

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If I told you I fell asleep on the couch at 9:30 on Friday night would you still be my friend?  We seriously drove 45 minutes to a homebrew store and when we got there they had JUST closed.  Nooo!  So instead, we stopped at Whole Foods, listened to the Rockies almost almost pitch a perfect game and started Top of the Lake before my aforementioned accidental passout.  Livin the life!

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Saturday and Sunday mostly consisted of us doing yard work.  We set new fence posts for our white picket and I did all the painting, which means I still have white paint in my hair.  It won’t come out!  We also set pavers on the other half of our yard and tore out a jungle of weeds so that we can put rock over the dirt.  So yeah, I’m sore and sunburned but something about using your own two hands (and hamstrings) to make your home nice feels so dang good.  Plus, enough of that crossfit shit, digging a trench and lifting bags of sand is a real workout.

P.S. It’s important to still use the gate, even if you don’t have to.

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I loved Joey extra when he was adamant about working really hard in our yard but also about not working past 5 PM.  We cleaned ourselves up on Saturday and walked to dinner.  As in, it wasn’t raining, it was warm and the restaurant we wanted to go to was that close.  HAPPINESS ABOUND!  We walked past this “good sign” on the way there 🙂

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We’d been to Jezebel’s once before and didn’t have the best experience but the menu is full of southern favorites, it’s so close to our house and it’s part of the Denver Passport Program so we just really wanted to give it another chance.  I’m so glad we did!  The service was awesome and the food was really impressive.  I sipped a Southern Mule on the patio and felt perfectly content.  Also, my shrimp and grits were killer.  More of that Andouille and those big ol’ shrimp, please.

The whole walk home I was quoting The Wedding Singer (I have no idea why…) so we were so in the mood to watch it when we got home, but couldn’t find it anywhere!  We settled for The Big Lebowski, man.  Insert, Joey’s turn to fall asleep on the couch 🙂

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Sunday started with pancakes and ended with us actually making it to the homebrew store.  This weekend has come full circle!  We also watched a few more episodes of Top of the Lake (which, for the record, isn’t really grabbing me all that much), cooked our favorite warm weather dinner and an evening stroll to the local library.  

Viva la summer!

A Book Review: Whistling Past the Graveyard

Lauren1 Comment

Book Group was weird this week.  I’m still trying to get the hang of this “Go Somewhere By Myself And Try Not To Be Shy” thing but I feel like I have to give myself a Hannah-From-GIRLS style pep talk beforehand (come on, you know the one).  At this particular meeting, there were about 12 of us and maybe it was because I wasn’t that into the book and didn’t speak up much but I just felt uninteresting and like I wasn’t really fitting in with the group.  I don’t know where I get this need to be liked by others from but I should probably work on that.  Just keeping it real today.

Anyway, back to the book, Whistling Past the Graveyard by Susan Crandall.

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I thought it was just okay.  The plot, characters and writing-style didn’t particularly excite me.  The narrator is a 9-year-old girl (Starla), who runs away from home, befriends a black woman (Eula) who has just found a white baby abandoned on the steps of a church and decided to keep him as her own and the three of them journey to Nashville to find Starla’s mother.

I could appreciate that the author decided to use a child narrator because it allowed her to delve into race relations in the 1960’s with a certain level of innocence and naivety, but I felt like she only brushed the surface of the intensity of things that happened during the Civil Rights Movement.  It was all a little too simple, especially to have taken place in the deep south.

That being said, some of the characters were very endearing and you couldn’t help but like them.  The relationship between Starla and Eula was particularly sweet.  Some of my favorite parts of the book were centered around them baking and bonding together and really transcending any race barriers.  Go figure that I’d like the parts that included pie 🙂  Overall, it just reminded me too much of The Help and how much more I liked that book over this one.

What are you reading right now?