eric whitacre concert at duke

during my choir geek days in high school, i fell in love with eric whitacre's music. not to mention the man himself. we sang his song "sleep" on our choir tour to new york and it was one of the most spiritual experiences i had in high school, to be honest. i remember we all walked off the stage after singing that song and crying and hugging and doing all those other things that choir nerds do after performing. here, let me show you how great the song is.

turns out tommy sang some eric whitacre songs when he was in high school too, and that was one of the first things we bonded over when we started dating. in fact, the first time he ever said the "girlfriend" word was connected with an eric whitacre song--i sent him one of my favorite e.w. songs, and he was playing it in his office. someone asked where he had gotten it and he said it was from his GIRLFRIEND. and then he told me about it later. oh, swoon.

you can see why eric whitacre is so important to us. he was so totally fundamental in our relationship.

all joking aside, when we heard that he was coming to do a concert at duke, we jumped at the chance. and the concert was awesome! a few lovely things about e.w.:

check out these songs:

seal lullaby

a boy and a girl

and his virtual choir--people from all around the world sent in their videos and sang and he put them all together to make a choir. so cool!

and it was even better when it turned out that it was the same night that my dad was in town to visit us--he had some business meetings in atlanta and so he took the hour-long flight up to spend the evening with us. so we went and ate pupusas at our local salvadorean restaurant, went to the concert, and got cook-out shakes.

daddy-o, always wearing appropriate university wear. he wore his duke shirt to duke campus that night, and his nc state shirt to class with me the next morning. classy. he was a good sport in the concert--even though he hasn't loved eric whitacre for years and he was really tired from a busy few days, he only fell asleep once or twice.

but anyways, thanks for coming, dad! it was awesome!

my two favorite grandpas!

this photo was taken at camille's wedding. isn't it just cute?

i love my two grandpas. i'm glad we got this picture. it's not often we get to see the two of them together!

freudian slip?

something i just remembered from high school: when mr. feruzzo, our principal, got up for a beginning-of-the-year pep rally and, while trying to talk about the "amazing success" of our student body, actually talked about the "amazing sex" of our student body. whoops.

one of my favorite moments of college: when my good friend, who shall go unnamed but shall be called s. e. f., was giving a spiritual thought at ward prayer and, while trying to talk about how "blessed" we all are, actually said the word "breast" and, after an awkward pause, the entire ward burst into tears of laughter.

those moments still make me laugh out loud when i think of them. who knows what freud would say about them?

prioritizing

"i can do anything i want, just not everything i want."

this quote is a pretty good reflection of what i've been thinking about lately. you have to spend your time doing the things that are going to be most meaningful for you, because you won't get around to doing everything in the world that sounds appealing to you. this applies to your day-to-day activities but also your major life goals. prioritizing is essential for our sanity and for our happiness. you just really need to know what it is you want in order for it to work. (which, for me, is the hardest part.)

recently, i've been spending ALL of my time on schoolwork. no joke--my google calendar's been filled, every hour, for the last two weeks (and the next three as well) with meetings, readings, and research. this is why there has been no blogging going on here any time recently. there also hasn't been much exercising or enough scripture reading. but lots of stress. doesn't sound like a recipe for success to me, right? but there's not much i can do when i'm faced with deadlines and 20 students who are waiting for my exciting lesson on introductions. (speaking of which, i thought we had a really interesting discussion about plagiarism today. THEY WERE ACTUALLY LISTENING! AND CONTRIBUTING! it was amazing! it's the small victories that matter in teaching, i'm starting to learn.)

oh well. at least i KNOW things are out of balance, right? it's a lifelong (eternal?) goal. i did make the time on wednesday to make some pumpkin oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. the baking was beautifully therapeutic and the cookies have been delicious. so i'll try again on the whole prioritizing thing next week.

and i think i'm going to go read some more wives and daughters and take the next few hours off.

nashville

of all things in the world that i need to do tonight, blogging is definitely not even in the top 59. but i wanted to share about our recent trip to visit our favorite new tennesseeans, the busbys! (or should it be spelled busbies?) this weekend was our fall break and we took full advantage of it by taking the eight-hour drive to nashville. and it was totally worth it. we got to visit a new state (always a priority for us), see some fun nashville sites, memorize all the songs from tangled (kylie's favorite thing was making tommy or devin sing the "flynn ryder" part of the song while she sang rapunzel), play endlessly with kylie and emmy, get our fill of bonding time with devin and cathy, and most importantly, eat GIANT EMBARRASSING but AMAZING amounts of bluebell ice cream. no, really. embarrassing amounts. oh, so good.

there aren't enough emmy pictures in this blog post, but that's mostly because she's such a gem that she didn't make enough of a fuss for us to carry her while we were out and about. kylie's turned into such a goofball charmer, and it was awesome for us to spend time with her. devin and cathy were reasonably fun as well.

so here are some random pictures from our trip:

this mad face was done on request. she wasn't actually mad. but isn't she stylish?

did YOU know that nashville has the only life-sized replica of the parthenon in the world? or maybe i should ask, have YOU seen the percy jackson movie? because that's how we knew this existed. (we saw it on the plane. don't judge us. but it was actually pretty good.)


this picture's too far away to see anyone, but it looks cool, right?

dessert #4 of the trip, i believe. maybe #5. absolutely AWESOME popsicle things.

in downtown nashville, by all the honky-tonks!

oh, baby, baby. (wait, is that a justin bieber quote or elvis? ... or, no one?)

HERE'S an emmy picture. see? isn't she cute?

and the grand ole opry house!

oh, gross. what are you teaching your child, devin and cathy? she's getting some crazy ideas...


visiting andrew jackson's home and grave. this is the third presidential home we've visited this year... we're practically experts by now.

we seriously hope we can be as amazing as devin and cathy someday. it was an AWESOME break from our normal life and we were sad to have to come back to boring old school-town. but we've developed a secret plan for our next trip--we just have to see if our finals schedules are going to cooperate. a hint: it may or may not involve a theme park that has EVERYTHING TO DO with harry potter. we're going to keep our fingers crossed.

victory!

i don't know if this is terribly obvious already, but usually i'm the one who gets mad at customer service people. i've spent days of my life on the phone, yelling at delta and wells fargo and getting more and more frustrated with their automatic robot answering machines, eventually throwing my phone across the room. tommy usually plays the part of listening to me vent and then making me some popcorn to calm me down. he's always so dang patient and polite on the phone, even when talking to the incompetents who work for united. or american express. or chase. or anyone.

but this week, tommy got an email with our monthly utilities bill from duke energy and it had a nasty surprise: it was twice as high as any bill we've ever gotten. the reason for this oversight was because duke energy claimed that our meter had broken during the previous billing cycle so our bill for that earlier cycle was too low. so, naturally, they just decided to add a random amount that they thought appropriate to our bill for this month to make up for that mistake. so we were being charged over $100 for that month's energy--and it was the month that we were gone in europe and for camille's wedding. we were quite literally home for four days out of that whole billing cycle, and the only thing that had been running that whole time was our fridge.

tommy went into fighting mode. i think this song was playing in the background:

first he called the company and complained so much they had him talk to the manager, who tried to slink around with the whole "it's a policy" excuse, but tommy wasn't going to back down. after getting off the phone, he compiled a giant fax with our flight information, several of our previous energy bills, and an intimidating cover letter that used the words "outraged" and "unreasonable" and "contact my lawyer and/or seek mediation in the small claims court." he sent it off--twice, just in case the first one didn't go through--and we settled down to wait the prerequisite three business days to hear what their decision was.

and on friday, he got a new bill in his email with all the additional charges dropped. no explanations or apologies, but no extra charges. those few hours of work were well worth the satisfaction of having TAKEN THE MAN DOWN.

would you ever believe that? beneath his mild-mannered ways, there really is an problem-causing fighter for justice. i have never been so proud.