Let's Play Dress Up!

Today is my niece Macy's birthday party. She is turning 4. Her actual birthday was last week but her party is today. It is a dress up party. So cute!!! All the kids are supposed to be coming in their dress up clothes. Macy will be Cinderella today. During the party they are going to play pin the purse on the girl (an actual game my sister found at the store) and the girls are going to decorate crowns while the boys make sports themed door hangers.
I asked Macy what she wanted for her birthday but she said she didn't know. I started suggesting toys and she kept saying no. Then I asked her if she wanted clothes and she said YES!! A girl after my own heart. So being the sacrificial aunt that I am I made myself go clothes shopping. I found the cutest little outfits with shoes to match! She also just got her ears pierced so I had to get her some fun earings too. Thanks to Wal-Mart for such low prices that an aunt can go crazy and still only spend about 30 bucks!!

Blogging In Downtown Tulsa

I am parked in downtown Tulsa, listening to Rush on the radio and enjoying free wireless internet access on my laptop. Earlier I drove over to Coney Island to get the perpetual special of three coneys with everything and a drink (any size). As I was manuevering through the many one way streets, I found it even more challenging because several streets are closed temporarily. The streets are closed because of an annual festival in downtown Tulsa, called MayFest. It is a festival of the arts, with live music and food vendors filling the closed off streets. I also saw that the Lion King musical is coming to the Tulsa Performing Arts Center on May 25. I think I would like to go to it. As we wind down our time once more here in the states and more specifically, Tulsa, I start entering a mood of bittersweetness. We have a good life in Italy. We have good friends, a warm home, job responsibilities that we enjoy and a routine that is very comfortable. However, to experience those things, it means we must once more say adieu to the life we once knew here in Tulsa. The life that we get a good glimpse of every couple of years. Our families are both from Tulsa along with many lifelong friends. To me it is natural to miss home, whether it is Tulsa or Ancona. There are aspects of each that mean so much to us. When we are in Tulsa, we miss Ancona. When we are in Ancona, we miss Tulsa. And when we are in either we long for Heaven. We go to Italy not because we necessarily want to, but because God has led us to go there. So that means it matters not whether we always like every apsect of it, but that we must be content in every situation God leads us in.


As a side note here is a great article on downtown Tulsa:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/31/AR2006033100598.html

The Drive-In

Last night, Angie and I went out on a date. Married guys should definitely take their wives out, it helps in marital harmony and Angie and I just like doing stuff together. We went and got some Taco Bueno (great fast food tex mex restaurant) and went to the Admiral Twin Drive-In. It was alot of fun. Before the movie started, (you have to wait until it's dark), they had an eighties pop radio station playing and in the distance you could see an American flag waving proudly. I got a little wistful thinking that we would be leaving to go back to Italy in less than two months. It's not that I don't like Italy....it's that I am very patriotic and I know who and what we will be missing when we go back.

Nowadays you turn your FM radio to a station to listen to the movie, instead the old boxes you hung on your window. As we finished our dinner some old (maybe from 50 years ago) cartoons came on about the movie getting ready to start and to head on over to their concession stand. Right before the previews, they started playing the National Anthem with a video of the flag waving. It was really nice. The two movies we watched were both good...Mission Impossible III and Failure to Launch. During the second movie I sauntered over to the snack bar and got an ice cream cone. It turned out to be a really great evening.

Mind Shifting

We are less than two months from returning to Italy and so my mind is starting to shift back into that way of thinking. While we are in the states, Angie and I minister in one way. Then when we get back we minister in another way. It takes a bit to shift gears in our heads and is inevitable that we must start making this transition before we actually make back onto the continent of Europe.