• Sitting here on this Monday night, we are watching Diner, Drive-Ins & Dives and planning what dessert I will make next. While we are contemplating this decision, we were thinking back over the weekend and the different experiences that we had. Saturday found us driving around doing our normal errands. Around lunch time we began to think about what would taste good. Several friends have told us about Dinah’s Fried Chicken over in Glendale so we headed that direction. The bright yellow sign with black giant letters lets you know you have arrived at this 10 table restaurant. We walk in and immediately are met with, “hi honey, just sit wherever there is a place and we will be with you in a minute.” We are sitting there with people who you know are on their lunch hour from driving trucks which were in the parking lot so we knew the food had to be good. to just neighborhood folks who have been coming in there for years. Our waitress welcomed us with a glass of tea and a menu that looked like it had been around since disposable diapers were invented. We ordered our chicken, all the while taking in the conversation around us, when we hear a loud motorcycle pull up right outside the door. Randy tells me to turn around and look at the couple getting off the bike. They had to be in their late 70’s or early 80’s. He with long gray hair and she with spiked gray hair, shorts and boots up to her knees. As they came in the door, they were seated at their apparently regular table in back. Corn on the cob, cole slaw and baskets of chicken kept passing us by, until finally our plate of fried chicken was placed right in front of us. We just looked at each other and our mouths began to drool. The chicken was amazing. We thought we had been picked up in the Spirit and placed right in the middle of Kentucky. We were shocked that Dinah’s was actually some of the best fried chicken we had ever had. Col Sanders, eat your heart out. Because some friends were taking us out that same night to a restaurant in Beverly Hills, we knew we needed to have tummy room. We head home and google Providence, the restaurant where we will be going tonight. By looking at their web site, we knew that fried chicken would not be on the menu. It had food items I couldn’t begin to pronounce.
  The pictures of some of the food were prettier than pictures at the Norton Simon Museum. Oh my gosh, I didn’t know we were going to someplace that I needed to apparently wear Spanx and heals. Quickly I began to access my clothes closet and discovered that no matter what I would wear, I was never going to look like all the cute little trophy wives that would be ordering quail egg soup with tartare.
  After putting in our destination into the GPS, we head out to Beverly Hills to meet our friends. When the GPS tells us that we have arrived, we look around and cannot seem to find it and continue down a couple of blocks. Randy says that he bets that our GPS is wrong, as it is not used to going to such foo foo places. But seeing the addresses on the building, we know that we have passed the restaurant. We do a Uie (U-turn) and there in letters that are no bigger than the letters on our medicine bottles, is the word Providence. Guess we didn’t recognize it because there were only Masarati’s and Mercedes parked out front, no motorbikes like we saw at Dinah’s. Apparently, the smaller the letters and sign, the classier the restaurant. Randy said that he didn’t realize that we should have gone to get money out of savings to be able to valet our car. When the valet price is more than we usually pay for lunch, we tend to know right away that this will be a place where we will both be holding our breaths to be able to walk in without our tummies walking through the door before the rest of our bodies. Since I am still trying to breathe (it is just so hard to do that with spanx on) I quickly find a chair in the lounge so I can let my breath out. Our friends arrive and I was so thankful that I had had a few minutes to look around without them noticing that I was trying to take this all in. When the words, “gawally, this is just the fanciest place we have been in” came out of my mouth, Randy quickly stuffed a cheese wafer in to keep me quiet. We had to admit, the food was truly an experience. Even the food that I couldn’t pronounce was just scrumptious. The evening had been so delightful (yes, when you are leaving a place like Providence, you use the word delightful. When you leaving a place like Dinah’s, you describe the food as , “darn good”.
  As soon as we got in the car, off came the Spanx and the heals. Since our drive home took 30 minutes, that gave me time to send pictures of our dinner to our kids who think that we sit at home every Saturday night watching 48 Hour reruns.
  We have learned something this weekend. No matter if you are eating in a diner with motorbikes parked outside the door or a 5 star restaurant, where our car was the only one that was parked out back, each experience can be a great memory. It just depends on which collar you are wearing, blue or starched.

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Came home last night from Big Bear, where we consumed huge amounts of food.  Isn’t it amazing that as soon as you pull out of the driveway, you begin to look for something to munch. It’s just what makes taking a little car trip, “a car trip”. We had not gone a block when Randy held out his hand and ask what we had to munch on? Seriously? We aren’t even out of our neighborhood and he is wanting me to climb over the seat to grab the cookie bag out of our “snack bag” Thinking back to last month when I was climbing over the seat on the trip from Dallas to Phoenix, to hold a pee jar for the 3 yr old grandson, at least this time I was looking for cookies. By the time we had arrived, two hours later, my rear end had been up in the air more times than it was actually sitting. You would think that having a picture of what that must look like would encourage me to eat only lettuce and water, but that wasn’t the case. We arrived in Big Bear with an empty chocolate chip cookie bag, less two Dr Peppers, half of the almonds gone and my chocolate covered blueberries, well, let’s just say that my teeth were blue by the end of the trip up the mountain.The weekend was a time of great bonding with friends who we have been around quite a lot and a new couple that we are now, bonded not only because of Christ, but by our Saturday night Egyptian feast and playing cards till midnight. You get to know people when you sit around the table, hearing stories about how they met, married and the stories of different customs because of how all of us were raised.
One of us, I won’t mention her name, thought she would try to learn how to belly dance to make our Egyptian feast “authentic”. Trying to video her had me laughing so hard that the video is moving so much that you can’t really see her, plus my laughter covered up the background music. Reminding her that I now had something to blackmail her with, I was released from kitchen duty the last day. Randy and I agreed that we won’t even go near the scales until we have a chance to loose the pounds that we came home with. We began the trip down the mountain yesterday, after going to fill up on snack food for the long 2 hour trip. You never know when you might just get caught out in the wild and need all the junk we loaded up on last night. But, as soon as we got to the bottom of the mountain and fast food places began to appear, we looked at each other and planned where we would stop. Tomorrow…we will begin tomorrow. We just need this one last night to talk about the fireworks we saw, the laughter we enjoyed and the food and card games. Of course, it is always so much better to talk about these new memories over food. Tomorrow is today. We are going cold turkey. There are no cookies to be had in our house. no lamb kabobs or apple pie. We have great new memories of a very blessed July 4th, but both of us know that if my rear end is going to be in any kind of shape to be crawling over the seat by the next car trip to San Diego, I had better find a zumba class fast.
As we are so proud of ourselves for eating so healthy today, we will reward ourselves tomorrow with a frozen German chocolate pie, which I will post the recipe. Since this is my birthday week, I have already convinced myself that I should be able to treat myself. Will maybe begin the diet next week, no, that week, our kids are coming and I will need to cook all their favorites….well maybe August, oh shoot, I just remembered, we have company coming in from Texas and will need to take them to all of our favorite places to eat. OK, maybe I just need to blacken our car windows so no one will see me climbing over the seat for our car trip treats. That is much easier than trying to diet

This morning Jodi and I were talking on the phone about July 4th and the memories we have of taking Jaden and Sevy to a club that was by our house when we lived in Dallas. Each July 4th we would take the boys and ride on our golf cart to the hill overlooking a small lake. Around 9 p.m. the celebration would begin. It was such a grand time of watching the wonder in their eyes, as the sky lite up with red, white, blue, green and pink sparkles. Sevy would get a little scared and would lay down on Randy and cover his ears. Jaden would then come sit by me and we would sit and ooh and aah at each firework that lit up the sky. Truly this was one of my most favorite times of the year. It just gave such a sense of family and how blessed we are to sit together and watch such beautiful displays of color and sound. Those are the things that I miss so much, living so far away from them. As I was replaying the scenes this morning of our July 4th memories to Randy, he reminded me that as the boys got older, we would now be making new memories that, down the road, would mean as much to us then, as the memories of times past, mean to us now. He is very wise.
As I wiped the tears from my eyes, I began to smile as I remembered a July 4th, before grandkids, when we went to the hill country in Texas. Randy had to go for a meeting and knowing that all the wives would be there, I was exited to hear that we, would have a few extra days after his meeting when we would be able to stay at the resort and just relax. We were still newly married and I had not met many of his work colleagues. It was so important to me that I make a good impression with the wives, so they would all say, “didn’t Randy marry just the sweetest lady.”
When Randy was in one of the meetings, the wives were given a breakfast there at the hotel that the company had set up, so all the foo foo women were there. Because this was my first time to meet most of them, we talked about our husbands, their work, what we did when we weren’t playing “company wife”. The talk turned to the different generations and one of the women said that you could tell how old a woman was by the type of operation that she says that she has had. I just sat there, listening and one of the younger ladies said that she talked about having babies which told everyone she was in her 30’s. Another lady shared her experience of having her gall bladder out and that would tell us that she was probably in her 40’s. I continued to sit there, because the only time I had been in the hospital was having children. Another lady, I think she was the Chairmen of the Board’s wife, told us that she had just had a hysterectomy and began to share how painful it was. She was telling us that the pain pills that the Dr had prescribed for her didn’t do any good and she was still having some pain. It was at this point that I knew it was time for me to show my wisdom. I quickly interjected, in the sweetest little southern drawl, “why don’t you just ask the Dr to give you some Valium?” Every eye turned and looked at me, as if I had showed up not wearing my pearls and earrings. The COB’s wife calmly looked at me and said, “why honey, those things are so addictive, they just don’t prescribe them much anymore”. Wanting to show her that I knew what I was talking about, I stated, with such confidence, “oh they’re not addictive, I’ve been taking them for years.” There were quite a few coffee cups that fell onto the table at this point. Oh my gosh, what I had I just said? When I tried to go back and tell them what I meant, I just kept making it worse. What I was trying to tell them is that I took 2 every month during “that time” to keep me from really getting sick. But it was no use. The damage was done. At the dinner that night, I felt the eyes of the women watching me to see if my eyes were dilated or if I was slipping a pill into my tea.
By the next day, after I had confessed to Randy what I had done, he just laughed and said that it was good that I had given them something to talk about other than their operations. At the next company meeting, I made sure that anytime the topic of surgeries or pain medications came up, I would just walk away. After all, if I got to know them too well, they might want me to share the last Valium I have saved for the last 10 years. As the years go by, everyone tells me that my hip or knee replacements are probably just right around the corner. My 10 year old Valium might just come in handy.
So however you choose to spend the 4th, watching fireworks with grandkids, family and friends, or just relaxing and discussing all your medical issues, have a great and safe July 4th…..call me if you are in pain, I know just the thing that will help.