Slow it down a little

I thought I would take a quick opportunity to write a blog note while I've got some chocolate chip banana muffins in the oven...teachers at school have begun to call me Betty Crocker ( a familiar nickname) since I frequently bake double batches for school and Mason's flight room. This fills my obsessive/passionate need to bake while dispersing the food elsewhere so Mason and I don't eat it. However, our friend Micah in Mason's flight seems to have befriended an elderly woman at church who gives him brownies to bring the flight room...we'll see how well they hold up to my muffins, and key lime cheesecake I'm sending in tomorrow.

The next two weeks are going to be extremely busy for Mason and me. Mason has afternoon/night flying so he reports in later but in turn gets home late. He's preparing for a checkride on Wednesday (keep your fingers crossed) and a phase test tomorrow. This will all be on formation. Once Mason completes his formation check ride, only 1 more major checkride before assignment night. Yikes! Last week Mason got to take his hero shot. Doesn't he look hot!

This was originally the week that Mason would be getting his assignment, but due to the crash in the spring we were pushed back to December. It's a little bittersweet, but we're excited to see what's in store this Friday for class 0808. With every assignment night, there is a spouse meeting, so that will be nice to look forward to on Thursday. It's fun to get together with just the girls sometimes. We'll also get to go on October 30th and learn more about what planes are available to our class and where these planes train and deploy to. Fun! Although, I must say I feel like my current house is really my home, and it will be strange to move somewhere else. But, I suppose with all military families you adapt to where you move. We've certainly adapted to living in Texas. (Although the beautiful weather is here.)

Next week is report card week and parent- conferneces. It's still strange to be the teacher and not the student at theses conferences. And at the end of the week, a teacher's meeting to cap it all off. Halloween will make the kids crazy, but I'm glad it's on a Friday so they can all get their energy out. It's interesting to meet so many families who are VERY opposed to Halloween, since I didn't really encounter that much when I was little. Maybe I just didn't pay attention. Sometimes I wonder if I was oblivious in school, but it seems like "these kids today" are all in each others business. Everyone knows whos on ADHD medicine, and who's parents are divorced and in jail, and everything...I don't think I ever paid attention to any of that when I was in school. Hmm...

This past weekend Mason and I went up to the Wichita Mountains in Lawton. I absolutely LOVE going up to the mountains. The wildlife and nature is so calming and peaceful. Sometimes I wish we had just brough books or something with us to sit and read or picnic at the top of the mountains. It's amazingly beautiful and peaceful. (Mason might not think so since I tend to kavetch sometimes.)

We climbed one peak and also stopped at the Holy City. This is a small "city" in the mountains that is designed to recreate the Jereuselum. I must say, while Mason and I aren't excatly religious, it was strange to us to see a group of adults hanging from nails on a cross pretending to be Jesus...I'm not sure that would make me feel closer to Him. After hiking for awhile we headed into a town called Medicine Park to check out a lake and some small shops. The shops were very tiny! Once you walked in you could see everything. The funniest thing of the day happened to be when we were in one of these shops looking at some ornaments when we heard the store owner talking to a man at her counter. She asked, "So Joe, is your daughter on birth control?" He replied, " my daughter doesn't have sex, she cooses abstinence..." well the conversation continued on for awhile and Mason and I and another biker couple we saw were just dying at the "openness" of people's public conversations.

Oh yeah- we also saw these lake houses, that were literally on the lake. They were houses to keep boats in. In all my boating years I never saw anything like it, but I thought Dad would get a kick out of it. We also saw the fanciest porta-potty ever.

Ah, Texoma at it's best.