Inspired by my friend Rebecca Tredway, who asked her blog readers to comment if they had voted, I ask my readers, all four of you, to tell me about your voting experience. Was the line long? Did you write something or push buttons on a computer screen? Did you feel powerful when you left the voting booth or was it a let down? Did you get a sticker that said 'I voted today' ? I did not get a sticker, and I was kind of annoyed. It was like when you were little and you went to the bank drive through and you just knew they were going to give you a sucker. But they didn't. In any event, I took advantage of my constitutional rights this weekend, and sticker or no sticker, I have to say I am a little more aware today of how great it is to live in a country where I get to say 'This is what I want.'
So. How did your exersize of constitutional rights go?

In keeping with the title of this blog, I will periodically post some of the reasons I miss Mississippi, pretty much based on whatever is making me miss home on that particular day. Today, I miss my little sisters. My sister Hannah posted on my blog for the first time (Welcome, Hannah!) and left me a link to her blog site. And it was so much like a Web site I might have made that it was scary. Hannah, I think, is a lot like me when I was 17 but much, much cooler. My youngest sister, Audrey makes me laugh because she's so direct and so funny. She's a little like me, but again, cooler, and with more confidence and better hair. Both of my sisters are much better-looking than I was at their age, and as far as I can tell they never went through an awkward phase in their early teenage years. This is totally unfair, since my awkward early teenage phase lasted for about five years and consisted of being painfully thin, having stringy hair, braces, glasses, and a serious lack of physical coordination. I still don't have any physical coordination! So although I have many reasons to resent them for stealing all the good stuff from the gene pool, I love my sisters and I wish I saw them more. Here's to going home in two weeks.

Dan, in an act that would mean I would love and honor him till death do we part even if I didn't promise to do that when we got married, bought me the first season of Arrested Development on DVD. I'm coming off of a terrible week. I've pretty much been working since last Monday, including Saturday and Sunday, and I am delusionally tired. But then, last night when we got home from teaching our kids' class at church, Dan got out this Wal-mart bag and started going "I got you a surpriiiiise! I got you a surpriiiiise!" And then he took the DVD box out of the bag, and I knew why I married this man. Only Dan would understand how profoundly happy that makes me. So now, Dan and I are going to watch 22 episodes of Arrested Development until I laugh myself to a happier place. And, apparently, my husband wants me to be happy. Isn't he great?

I will be the first to acknowledge that I have at various times in my life mocked my mother for her adamant faith in herbal and homeopathic remedies. Usually, the mocking entails me referring to her collection of herbs as "grass pills" or suggesting that I might as well take a spoon full of sugar and then try to fly out the window like Mary Poppins for all the good her remedies will do me. But this weekend, I started feeling the first signs of my annual case of "a cold that turns into a secondary infection that turns into bronchitis that turns into borderline pneumonia." So, in a panic, I called (who else?) my mom. On her advice, I have spent this weekend alternately chugging massive quantities of water, vitamin C pills, echinnacea and zinc lozenges. And I have to say, it seems to be working. I'm not feeling fabulous, but I expected to be feeling much worse. I am not willing to come down off my high horse and become a full fledged herbal convert. But I may have to admit that there might be a little piece of truth in my mother's all natural philosphy. (I love you, mom! Sorry I said you were crazy!)
So readers, today's question is: What is the one thing your mother is more right about than you care to admit?

On election day, I had to go into work late so I could work until midnigt, but I still had to work from home and file a couple of stories. It just so happened that Dan had to work from home that morning because there was some work being done on his cubicle at work. So, we sat at our dining room table clicking away on our laptops, drinking our coffee, and
at one point I looked up from behind my laptop and saw this:

And I thought: We are such nerds.

The Get Up Kids, Red Letter Day EP

This album makes me miss, in no particular order, my friend Cara, who first introduced me to the Get Up Kids, my friend Chuck, who put this EP on one of his awesome mix tapes for me in college, and, for that matter, it makes me miss college. I don't miss college very often, because I'm still close enough to the whole experience to remember how sick and tired I was of it by the time I graduated. But I do miss certain aspects of college, like the ready availability of close friends and time to spend with them and a schedule that allowed you to stay up until 2 a.m. if you saw fit. Once upon a time, when I was much, much cooler, I used to stay up until 2 a.m. all the time, to help put out the campus newspaper, or go to a concert. And it was fun. Funny how 24 feels so much older than 20 did.

Before I moved to New Mexico, I envisioned it as this eternal desert with sand and cactuses (cacti?) and no rain. That's sort of true in the southern part of the state and in the summer. But it's not truly reflective of the winters out here. As of Friday, it's like we're living in a deep freezer. And worse, the wind is blowing. The wind in New Mexico is a phenomena unlike the wind in other parts of the country. It blows your car around on the road and howls and screams around the corners of walls. But although I'm wearing my pea coat 24 hours a day and shivering, I do have to say that the snow still kind of fascinates me. I saw snow maybe twice in my whole life when I was growing up, and so getting to see it all the time out here kind of makes me a little more reconciled to the other oddities of life in the Land of Enchantment.

Greetings, gentle readers. I am writing this from Jackson, Mississippi, where Dan and I have traveled to attend the wedding of my younger brother, Aaron, and his wonderful fiancee Kelly. We are going to stay in Jackson through the weekend and then spend the week of Thanksgiving with my family in Hattiesburg. With a wedding being the kind of event that just makes for great stories and the state of Mississippi being that way too, I am sure I will have many tales to tell on the other side of the three day string of festivity we are getting ready for now. Hopefully I will post something next week. But if not, know that I am well and happy and I am eating good food to my heart's content. May you all be so fortunate.
In the meantime, here's a topic for you: What's the best and/or worst conversation you've ever had with someone who sat next to you on an airplane?

I love Thanksgiving. To me, it's the eating and the merry making without the stress of gift-buying that Christmas brings. And when you are at my parents' house, you will eat. I am currently sitting at the table in our house in my pajamas (at 11 a.m.! How great is that?) putting off eating anything until we eat at three in the afternoon. Then, the plan is for everyone to collapse in a coma on the couch and watch Arrested Development on DVD, which we have gotten my family hooked on during this trip. I do realize that this holiday is not entirely about eatinig, so here, for your enjoyment, is a list of the things I am thankful for on this, Thanksgiving Day 2004:

* Two years ago yesterday, Dan asked me to marry him. I am so thankful for him. He is my best friend and I am the luckiest woman in the whole wide world to have such a great husband.

* I am thankful for my family. We're not all together on this day, because my brother, Aaron and his new wife, Kelly Rice, are on their honeymoon in Jamaica. We will all be together in a few weeks for Christmas, and that makes me happy. This year is a little different, because after Christmas, my brother Aaron is leaving for a seven-month deployment to Iraq. So Christmas will be the last time we are all together in one place for quite some time. I'm glad to know that and be able to make the most of our time together.

* I am thankful for my new car.

* I am thankful for nasal spray, because I have caught my annual cold. I am also thankful that I did NOT catch the flu, which is what happened last year at Thanksgiving. That was awful.

* I am thankful that it has actually gotten kind of cold here in Mississippi. Now I am going to go sit on the swing on the pier overlooking the lake and look at big beautiful pine trees.

May God bless y'all and yours.

There's something extremely out-of-body about watching your baby brother get married. This is my latest personal epiphany and I thought I would share it. I have just returned from a great wedding, that of my brother, Aaron, and his new wife Kelly. It was a blast. Dan and I actually kept saying to each other how much fun it was to be at a wedding, but not be the people actually getting married. You can do so much more talking that way! We had a great time, but the whole night I kept looking across the room and seeing Aaron all decked out in his Marine dress blues with this beautiful woman in a beautiful white dress at his side and thinking "That just can NOT be my brother." I know he's an adult. But you see, in my mind, he's still five years old. Thoughts like this make me proud that I only cried during the ceremony and managed not to sob on anyone at the reception, thanks largely to a great band, an open bar, and the presence of my stalwart friends Autumn, Robin, Lindsay, and Lindsay's boyfriend Chris, who helped me eat drink and be merry with the best of them. Here are a few pictures from the wedding. May the Lord's face shine upon Aaron and Kelly Rice! We love you both.

The bride and groom:

The very tired but happy bride and groom immediately after the ceremony:

Let the party begin:

They even let old married people dance at weddings!

At the end of the night, after the bride and groom had left, my sisters and I were the last people on the dance floor. May we dance at their weddings one day ... in the very very distant future. They're 15 and 17. Autumn gets credit for taking this picture of us getting down with our bad selves. Thanks, Autumn.

We got 90 percent of our Christmas shopping done last night, from our couch. Online shopping has got to be one of the top ten greatest ideas of the last century. I would rather chew on tin foil than go to the mall any more than I have to in the next month. It also helps when you mainly traffic in music and books for presents ... keeps Amazon.com in business. Anyway, just thought I would brag. How's the shopping going for everyone else?