all together: Sara Groves, Andrew Peterson and Bebo Norman

Listen up. If you live  in Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virgnia, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Virginia, Michigan, South Carolina, North Carolina or Kentucky then you're going to want to get this one on your calendar.

Sara is going on tour this fall with Andrew Peterson and Bebo Norman. Bebo basically sang me through my four years of college, my constant soundtrack for that season of life. And ever since Sara when out with Andrew on his Christmas tour I have been a huge fan. Huuugge. A funny thing happens when I listen to Andrew's music: I see little homemade music videos with each song. He paints pictures with his lyrics and it's awesome. These three are the real deal. And they're going to be on stage all together. Which will most certainly to lead to one thoughtful, inspired, amazing concert.

Click here to see the exact location for each concert  (and to see one of the goofiest concert posters ever...)

And then mark your calendars! Rory and I will be at the Excelsior show in Minnesota. Nebraska friends, try to get to Lincoln the night they are there.

Here's one of my favorite Andrew Peterson songs to convince you to come:
And here's one of my very favorites of Sara singing a hymn I have always loved:
Hope you can get to a show! Get a sitter! Grab a friend! Make plans for dinner and a concert! And then enjoy a night of awesome, thoughtful music.

rainbow tomatoes

Did you know tomatoes ripen in rainbow order? Rory brought in this bunch of baby tomatoes to show me and I was so amazed. Sort of a different kind of color spectrum...

And then, later I walked out the garden to get a tomato for BLT's and found this one that was bigger than the bread. How awesome is that?!!

honeycomb

towanda.

I dropped my kids off at my folks today. I came home and pretended I was a house cleaner and hit my house like it was my job. Because it is. 

And then I went out to the garden, picked some green tomatoes and knocked something off my bucket list:        I ate Fried Green Tomatoes while watching Fried Green Tomatoes.

It was everything I had hoped and more. If there are any other fans of Idgie Threadgoode out there let me know and I'll invite you over next time. 

summer reflection: two favorite moments

At some point this week I decided not to jump on the "holy smokes it's already September" bandwagon. So I'm not going to say that.

What I am going to say is that my one little word for the year is Reflect, but I haven't reflected in a long, long time. So I thought I'd take a moment to look back at the three months that just flew by...

I have a favorite moment of the summer. Which is fun because I have trouble picking a favorite color. But I can pick a moment. It was at our favorite place to eat here in our new town: the golf club. Few seem to know about this gem of a eatery, but we adore it. The food is exceptional and the price is right. We went many times this summer, eating on the patio, watching the golfers tee off on hole one. (Entertainment for the kids! It's perfect.)

On this particular favorite night of them all, we ate (maybe I had the perfect cobb salad with homemade blue cheese dressing. Maybe I had their buffalo wings that could win a competition. I can't remember...but the meal was awesome as always) and then we went to the club house and asked if we could take a golf cart to check out the course. The guy was fine with it, didn't even make us pay. The sun was setting, it was Friday night and there was no one golfing. Rory drove, I held Elsie in my lap and Ivar either stood or sat between us. The night was perfect in temperature, the course was stunning, the homes surrounding the course were fun to look at and the kids were thrilled. I remember Ivar blissfully laughing and asking if this was Disneyland. (We had just flown back from California the day before). I knew in the moment that this was a favorite memory in the making.

I have a close second favorite memory: eating an orange scone in disneyland as soon as we arrived. We hadn't been on a ride, but we stopped at the building that plays Mary Poppins music and had our coffee at an outdoor table while people watching. And I remember feeling magically happy.