Birthdays and Home

HAPPY DECEMBER AKA CHRISTMAS MONTH!!!

I have a lot to catch you guys up on! School’s been crazy busy lately so I guess I’ll just give you the semi-short version of everything…

First, Tommy and I went to the Oh Hellos concert at the Troubador in West Hollywood a couple of weeks ago and it was so fun. BUT I might have been wrong about what time the concert started and we might have gotten there an hour early and the Oh Hellos might have not gone on until 3 hours after we got there. All I have to say is Tommy’s a trooper. Bless. 

The fact that he's smiling is proof he's a keeper.

I briefly lost my drivers license at a TJ Maxx… Even though, in my opinion, if you’re going to lose your drivers license, TJ Maxx is the best place to do it because then you have to go back and shop a little more.

A cruise ship with norovirus docked in LA a couple of weeks ago and those of you who know me well/have lived with me (looking at you Kelsey Drennan), know that any slight chance I might possibly maybe get anything close to a stomach bug sends me into a spiral of panic. I was surprisingly calm about the whole thing, mainly because it was like an hour away. But still.

Okay so now the good stuff. Most of you probably don’t know that Tommy’s birthday is November 22, which is only 2 days before mine. Aka we got to celebrate birthdays for like 4 days straight.

For Tommy’s birthday (Saturday), we went to the USC/UCLA game at the Rose Bowl and it was so much fun… USC got hammered, but I had a blast. The atmosphere felt a little more like SEC football since it was a rivalry, so that was great.

Rose Bowl

Sunday night, the Knapps took all of us out for Tommy’s birthday and listen to this: every year Tommy orders/eats sushi and ribs. He eats them both. At the same meal. Who even knew there were restaurants that cooked both sushi and ribs????? Welcome to SoCal. The west coast is weird, y’all.

Okay, prepare to be amazed. Henceforth, I will recount all the things sweet Tommy did for my birthday (Monday).

1.  9:30 am: took me on a bus tour of LA, which is something I’ve been dying to do ever since I moved here. He’s lived here his entire life, so we all know going on a bus tour of LA is not something on his bucket list. But, y’all, it was so fun. We hit a bunch of the famous spots around LA including the Chinese Man Theater where all the stars are. I could go on for pages about how fun this was, but I’ll spare you.
2. Took me to lunch at LA Country Club. That was super fun. It almost felt like a piece of home walking in because country clubs are such a southern thing… and the décor was very similar to the country clubs in the south, so it was nice being in a familiar (ish) setting. And it’s cool to see so much land in the middle of LA.
3. We got to walk around a local ranch, which was really cool. The property is beautiful – it has a bunch of oaks in an open field and actually looked a lot like the South.
4. He let me choose where we went to dinner. I chose Chick-fil-a. #constantcraving
5. Went back to my house and watched movies

Matt Damon. Enough said. 

"Um no actually we live here"

Y’all. It was perfect.

Last thing. I went home (Knoxville home) for Thanksgiving and guys it was amazing. I hadn’t seen any of my Knoxville family in 4 months INCLUDING ADDISON. This was the first time I’ve seen her walk in person. Unfortunately she was a little sick the whole time, but I had a blast with her anyway, of course. It was so fun to see all my cousins and Nonnell and Dadoo. I can’t express how wonderful it was to be back in east Tennessee for a little while. Nothing like the Deep South.

Birthdayyyyyyyy

Richard hugs. 

Wearing Addison's sunglasses...

Roscoe and I are best friends

Fam Jam

I got to meet up with Alesa and Kevin (her fiancé) at Cracker Barrel for breakfast – it was so fun catching up and just being with people who have known me basically my whole life.

Love you.

OH and it snowed a little on Thanksgiving morning!!! (Rich said it was sleet, but he’s wrong. Actually he said it was a combination of snow and sleet, which he named “sneet”. Once again, he called it sneet.)

A couple of things I’d like to mention:

•  In case you haven’t caught on, I’m dating someone. His name is Tommy. A few people have brought it to my attention that he just appeared out of nowhere in my last couple of blogs and it has apparently caused distress so here it is: I have a boyfriend.
•  A few people have said things along the lines of  “Wow your life seems perfect” and “Do you ever even have bad days out there in Malibu?” Short answer: YES. You can ask Tommy or Mary Nell or any of the other girls in my cohort. I only tell y’all the fun stuff because it’s fun to talk about/hear about. School is overwhelming, being a grown-up is challenging, and being 1,400+ miles away from my family is hard. But truly, there’s nothing like being thrown into the middle of a completely different culture all alone to strengthen your reliance on God and on those around you. Bad days and good days, I’m thankful to have a God that never leaves me and always loves me the same, regardless of how much of a mess I am.  

Differences between Malibu and the South:

• Ham. They don’t have ham at restaurants out here. I had this epiphany right around the time I saw the honey baked ham in the fridge and inexplicably pounced.
• Tommy had never heard the phrase “The pot calling the kettle black”. I’m not positive that’s not just him being clueless but it’s worth mentioning.
• The Christmas lights here are leaps and bounds classier than the lights in East Tennessee. Shocking, I know

·       So much love to all of you.