Hoo boy did we eat tonight! It was International Dinner Group Night and we hosted. Since Ed is from South Carolina, we decided to do Southern US food. Let me give you the run-down. We started with boiled peanuts and hushpuppies and honey butter. From there we moved on to she-crab soup, a "low-country" specialty. The low country is the piedmont area of South Carolina--the coastal area from Myrtle Beach to Charleston or so. Then for the main dinner, we had fried catfish, spinach with white vinegar and tabasco (yum!), cole slaw, red rice (another low-country specialty), and my now-famous slow-cooked barbecued ribs and homemade barbecue sauce. (I used my mother's BBQ sauce recipe.) We tasted Blenheim ginger ale, too, but it was too hot to actually drink. For dessert, we had a delicious sweet potato pie with toasted pecans and brown sugar on top. A big thanks to Angelbutt for her cooking tips on the catfish. I had planned to make fried green tomatoes because a few fell off my plants when I was pruning but I left them in the sun and they shriveled up so I decided not to do it. The food was fabulous and we had a great time! Next up: West Africa. MMMmmmmm.

Hallelujah! We have new neighbors and they are very a very nice family. Doug works at Nike--he just finished graduate school. Diana has been a preschool administrator and will now be a stay-at-home mom. (yay!) Ashley is a seven-year-old girl who will be in second grade next year. (triple yay! I happen to have a seven year old girl who will be in second grade next year, too. Now she'll have someone to walk to and from the bus with. What a relief!) Ryan is a five year old boy (very cute!) who will be starting kindergarten soon.

Ashlee is an answer to a prayer, I tell you. Since we've been back from vacation (where Joey had lots of people to play with), she's been very lonely and wanting to have a playmate over every day but except for Baylee(who lives 20 mins away), we haven't been able to connect with anyone in the neighborhood because of vacation or camp or something so she's been bored bored bored. Which means I've been irritated irritated irritated. It will be so lovely when she can just go next door to play with Ashley or invite her over to play. I'm beside myself with joy.

I forgot to mention that I did the Find Your Spot thing to find out where I should live based on my answer to a quiz and 6 of my locations were in Oregon--Eugene, Corvallis, Salem, Portland, Medford and Bend (how appropriate) including where I live now and where I want to live next (Bend, Oregon). And then were was Seattle, Tacoma, Kent, Bellingham and Bremerton, Washington. On the other side of the country, there were several places in North Carolina (Ashville, Raleigh, Chapel Hill), Maryland (Gaithersburg, Frederick, Baltimore, Annapolis) and Virgina (Norfolk, Hampton, Chesapeake, Roanoke, Lynchburg). I love living in Oregon and pretty much plan to stay here but if I had to live somewhere else, it would be Northern Virginia or Sun Valley, Idaho. I could actually see us living in Virginia very easily but it would take a lot for me to move so far away from my sisters and my best friend. An awful darn lot.

I had a dream last night about one of my very best guy friends. He and I are very close friends but it has always been very much on the up-and-up. We're both happily and contentedly married with children and lives we love. I've never thought of him in a sexual way at all. So last night I have this dream that isn't exactly sexual but it is somewhat intimate, I guess. I just dreamt that we cuddled. We were chatting as we are wont to do but instead of just sitting down to do it, we went into my bedroom and laid down on the bed and cuddled like spoons to chat. No groping, nothing like that. We just cuddled. It was comfortable and intimate and familiar and I liked it. I'm glad it wasn't sexual, though. That would be so weird--I hate it when I dream a sexual dream about someone I'm friends with because then I feel weird around him or her for a week or two until the dream fades from my consciousness.

The thing about dreams like this is that they stay with me for awhile so tonight when we were playing games after eating dinner and I was sitting next to him, I realized that my leg was up against his and I comfortably rested the back my arm against his until I realized that I don't usually do that. It was kind of funny, actually. I was acting almost like what had transpired in my dream had actually happened. I'm glad I didn't go sit in his lap or anything.

--L