What a Weekend

So much fun, it's taken me a week to put in into words!

My wild weekend started off with these two beautiful ladies.  Kelley, Kristina and I began the night with dinner and drinks at Cyclone Anaya's and followed it up with Luke Bryan's "Huntin', Fishin', and Lovin' Every Day" Tour, along with Granger Smith and Brett Eldredge. What a fun night we had! 

I slept in on Saturday morning and only crawled out of bed when Bri called and invited me to join her and Kelli at Meagan's for the Southwest Classic Game -- Arkansas vs Texas A&M.  (The guys were golfing.)  I can't say many kind things about the game...but these two cuties made up for it.

Minnie Mouse, Babs Bunny and Ariel made an appearance.

During the game, the girls helped me put all of the finishing touches on the games for our Fellowship at Field Store Women's Progressive Dinner.  We had a great turnout (22!) and so much fun.  I laughed so much.  We are quite the competitive group...especially when it came time for the photo scavenger hunt!  There are photos that cannot be seen in public unless someone is there to explain what is happening. 

We are missing Nancy in this picture...but the rest of the gang is accounted for.

Sunday morning I drug my aching body out of bed and then to church.  We had a sweet time of worship and fellowship followed by the celebration of our 'Jo' birthdays...Jo, Joe and Joseph.  I came home to Jim's delicious brunch and enjoyed the quiet of our house.  The kids were all gathering at Meagan's for the Texans game, but I just couldn't.  I chose to stay home and enjoy my beautiful flowers instead.

Gerbera daisies that look like fall.

Instead, I curled up with a good book!  I curled up in bed, on the couch, on the loveseat...anywhere I could find a place of quiet and solitude.  And I had read the WHOLE THING by the time I went to bed Sunday night!

Young Jane Young: A Novel by Gabrielle Zevin
(Fiction)

Un-put-down-able book of the year for me!

This was my first book from The Bookshelf Thomasville's 'Shelf Subscription, an independent book store in Georgia whose podcast ('From the Front Porch') I listen to faithfully. I did a happy dance when I opened my first package to reveal not only a book I had been wanting to read, but an autographed copy!

This is the story of a political affair between an older politician and his intern, BUT from the viewpoint of the women caught in the storm.  We hear from the mother of the intern, the intern herself, her daughter and the politician's wife. The story jumps back and forth in time (thus the daughter) revealing a little more of how each person played a part in the outcome. I found it to be well written and to bring up the conversation of how the politician moves forward with just an asterisk by his name while the women never truly recover and find themselves as either the butt of the joke or the one that bears all the blame and shame.

I would love to sit down to discuss this one with someone soon.  I thought the author did a great job of neither condoning the affair or excusing either party while still asking the questions about power, fame, responsibility and naiveté.

Aviva Grossman, an ambitious congressional intern in Florida, makes the mistake of having an affair with her boss--and blogging about it. When the affair comes to light, the beloved congressman doesn’t take the fall. But Aviva does, and her life is over before it hardly begins: slut-shamed, she becomes a late-night talk show punch line, anathema to politics.

She sees no way out but to change her name and move to a remote town in Maine. This time, she tries to be smarter about her life and strives to raise her daughter, Ruby, to be strong and confident. But when, at the urging of others, Aviva decides to run for public office herself, that long-ago mistake trails her via the Internet and catches up--an inescapable scarlet A. In the digital age, the past is never, ever, truly past. And it’s only a matter of time until Ruby finds out who her mother was and is forced to reconcile that person with the one she knows.

Young Jane Young is a smart, funny, and moving novel about what it means to be a woman of any age, and captures not just the mood of our recent highly charged political season, but also the double standards alive and well in every aspect of life for women.

★★★★☆