A Three Day Weekend on One Good Leg

A friend left a voicemail Friday afternoon saying he couldn't remember if we were away for the long weekend or not, which made me laugh out loud. I listened to it while my broken ankle was wrapped in an ice pack and Beverly Hills 90210  reruns played in the background, because I am still trapped in the confines of an orthopedic boot. The closest we were coming to any holiday weekend adventures was couch surfing. (In the spirit of full disclosure, it's not like I would have been out hiking or rollerblading even if my bones were whole; still, when I'm healthy, I'm quite good at lounging on a beach or by a pool).

Determined to make the best of the situation, we kicked off our three day weekend with a most all-American feast at our favorite local hot dog spot: JJ's Red Hots. For some reason, the neighborhood had a power outage right around dinnertime, and when we pulled into JJ's parking lot, the lights were back on but the sign on the door said they were closed. We were devastated but determined, and an employee reassured us that if we could wait a few minutes, they would indeed reopen their kitchen and churn out some deliciousness for us to enjoy. About twenty minutes later, we were in hot dog heaven and it was well worth the wait.

Hot dogs and cheese fries (you know, for the calcium).

Saturday, to our lazy person credit, we did laundry and a few other odds and ends around the house, started watching a new show (Killing Eve) which turned out not to be terrible, and then cleaned ourselves up and ventured out. We have a habit of staying within a five-mile radius of our house for most of our outings, but it was a holiday weekend and we were staycationing, so I decided that a trip up to Lake Norman to try the much talked about restaurant Hello Sailor was in order. I'm so glad we did!

Hello Sailor is the revamped version of the old Rusty Rudder fish camp that used to be in the same spot, right on the lake in Cornelius. It has an updated, Palm Springs kind of vibe and the food is worth all the rave reviews it has received. They even have a cute little tiki bar area outside to have a cocktail and watch the boats dock.

Hello Sailor and hello, delicious.

The tiki bar promises "smooth sailing."

We took a seat by the water and ordered up two of their signature cocktails. I had a fizzy pineapple concoction and Clint chose a watermelon libation. His was the best, by far, but we shared and sipped until the heat and my good ol' boot got the better of us. We headed inside to the air-conditioned dining room for our meal.

Lakeside with boat drinks. Not a bad place to be.

Last May, Garden & Gun magazine called Hello Sailor's hush puppies the best in the South: high praise indeed coming from one of the Bibles of the Southern lifestyle. We knew right away we had to try them, and they were fantastically light and airy. We also ordered a dozen raw oysters on the half shell, half East coast and half West coast. Hello Sailor serves these with Biggie and Tupac markers, a rapper from each coast to keep those oysters trendy. (Hard-learned lesson: when the menu reads "market price," it is always wise to ask what the current market price is...I won't go into detail, but our oysters should have come with diamond encrusted cocktail spoons. Yikes.)

East coast vs. West coast, oyster edition.

He ran out of Saltines so he just sucked that last oyster down straight.

We also split their fried shrimp and fish platter, and I'm still thinking about those shrimp. They were addictive, and part of the reason we are already recruiting friends to go back with us for another visit.

A platter of delicious fried everything.

Absolutely stuffed, we headed back to south Charlotte, got into our pajamas, and rented quite possibly one of the most mindlessly stupid movies I have ever attempted to watch: Happy Death Day 2U, the less-than-highly anticipated sequel to Happy Death Day. I shouldn't even confess that we watched it, but if you are looking for a movie to make Hot Tub Time Machine seem like an Academy Award winner, you might want to check it out. Well, at least our dinner experience was a great one.

We slept in Sunday morning and shunned the sweltering 90-degree heat in favor of watching old Duck Dynasty reruns from the couch. When Clint gets bored, he tends to futz in the kitchen, so our idle morning resulted in a batch of "Clint's Magical Ceviche" for lunch. I have offered on many occasions to go out to a nice restaurant for ceviche, but apparently this dish tastes best when you spend at least half a day chopping, dicing, mixing, and laboring. What do I know?

Clint's self-proclaimed "magical" ceviche. He's nothing if not humble.

Our lunch was followed by a dutiful and necessary trip to Walmart to pick up our online grocery order. Mercifully, we did not need to venture inside the store, so we were home in no time, restocked with all the essentials for grilling out on Memorial Day and with the remainder of the afternoon left for the broken ankle entertainment trinity: Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and Hulu. Young, wild, and free, y'all. We may or may not have also made ourselves a pitcher of palomas to get the Walmart taste out of our mouths. Continuing our theme of terrible movies, we watched The Meg, the Jason Statham shark movie about man versus megaladon. Sure it was cheesy and the special effects were terrible, but it is a summer shark movie, so we felt obligated to watch. It was free with our left-over-from-Game-of-Thrones HBO trial subscription, and I really feel like we got our money's worth.

Getting back on track after an afternoon of errands.

Our Memorial Day plans, minimal as they were, change drastically once we realized the entire state of North Carolina was one big open flame. We had planned a cookout, but as the time approached to get the grill going and the thermometer still read 92 degrees, we improvised and got out the next best thing: the George Foreman grill. Lean, mean, grilling machine and air conditioning? Hard to beat.

This still counts as grilling in my book. 

We finished up our evening with our tasty burgers and some more streaming shows. I'm headed back to the orthopedist this afternoon, with high hopes of being emancipated from the shackles of this boot. After all, this was the unofficial start of the season, and we've already done an exceptional job of putting the lazy in lazy days of summer.

The CBD Experiment

I don't know if you've noticed, but CBD is the new black. Short for cannibidiol, CBD is one of the chemicals found in marijuana and hemp. Since it doesn't contain THC, it comes without the psychoactive effect, which means CBD won't get you stoned. I have had not one, but three, friends rave to me about all the wonderful effects that CBD has to offer, and it seems like every time I turn around I hear or see something else about how miraculous this supplement can be.

Each time someone extolled the virtues of CBD to me, I would come home and amazedly tell Clint that I had found yet another user; I am an admitted rule-follower, goody two-shoes, and total avoider of any kind of recreational drug, so CBD really seemed like forbidden fruit. After all, I am a person who gets nervous taking more than the recommended dosage of my gummy vitamins. I grew up with Nancy Reagan teaching me to Just Say No, and I never want to wind up like that fried egg that is a brain on drugs. Clint began to try and convince me that maybe I should give the stuff a try--since it might not only help me sleep at night, but could allegedly help mellow me out?

I'll admit, I was intrigued but insulted. Mellow out? Me? My adoring husband tells me on a frequent basis that I am an anxious person, but in my mind, I am just the right, responsible amount of worry. He barely has a pulse he's so laid-back, so one of us needs to fret over things like appointments, the budget, the weather, our health...okay, so maybe he did have a point. Plus, I will do practically anything in the name of a good night's sleep, and I've rarely met a supplement I didn't like, so I decided maybe it was time to get on board this trendy CBD-fueled train.

A store called Charlotte CBD came highly (no pun intended) recommended by multiple sources, so on Saturday we decided to brave it. Clint suggested I wear my Willie Nelson "Feeling Willie Good" shirt for our shopping venture, but I decided it made me look too overeager. We pulled into the jam-packed parking lot seeking pure cannibidiol bliss.

There are no cell phones allowed inside, so this is the only picture I got.

We entered a small waiting room, much like a (very sketchy) doctor's office, and were immediately told by the man at the window to fill out the form on one of the provided iPads. I began entering my personal information, including driver's license number and other minutia, when a lady came up and began filling out her form at the same time. I typed furiously, determined that this woman would not finish and submit her form before I did...I'm not sure why that mattered so much at the time, but it did make me briefly pause and consider that perhaps I did need something to help me relax just a bit.

After I turned in my form and showed my ID, an bouncer employee opened the door to the retail shop (but not before Clint could adamantly refuse to fill out a form for himself, holding his hands up and exclaiming, "I'm not buying anything, I don't need this, I'm just here with her!" Turncoat.), ushered us in, and told us to ask plenty of questions. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this 12 x 18 foot windowless room packed full of every age, shape, color, and size person was not it. Music blared, which I'm not sure is exactly conducive to the question asking, and a counter along each wall separated the customers from the products. On the right side of the room, there was a "bud bar" (you can't make this stuff up) where CBD coffees and teas were for sale, along with loose leaf CBD that they roll and sell. The bud bar was literally not my cup of tea, so we ventured along the left side of the room to the oil and edibles section first.

A kid who looked exactly like an extra from the movie Dazed and Confused came over to answer our questions. I'm not sure how much trust to put in a pimply faced, hat-turned-around-backward, long-haired stoner, but he mumbled a few suggestions for CBD oil and then warned me that use would cause me to fail a drug test. Oh Lord. Ever the frugal shopper, I chose the cheapest of his recommendations (Charlotte CBD proudly offers prices from $5 to $420) and a very low dose to begin: best to ease into these crazy waters than dive right in, am I right? We shuffled our way through the crowd to the area with the most shoppers, which of course was the CBD for pets section. Through the music, I could swear our cannabis consultant said the treats we had chosen were $5. As it turns out, they were $25. We walked past the gummy candies, caramels, and lollipops with our two purchases and escaped into the sunshine and blessed fresh air. 

Nirvana, here we come.

I was instructed to take a half dropper in the morning for focus and calm, and another half dropper before bed to help me sleep. I ignored the fact that my new oil tasted like a bong smells (earthy and musty and like a wet paper bag oh my), held my breath, and dutifully downed the first dose. I spent the entire next day feeling horrible: nauseated, with terrible stomach cramps and bathroom issues. I attributed the feelings to a 24-hour stomach bug, maybe food poisoning, maybe even margaritas? No, it's never the margaritas. Once I started to feel like myself again, ever the rule follower, I took another dropper of my new CBD oil. And dang it, my symptoms started right back up again. (I even had to miss a friends's birthday brunch, and we all know I do not miss a brunch).

Everyone I questioned adamantly told me there is no way that CBD could or would cause such side effects...clearly, the general population is assured that CBD is used only for good, never for evil. I ignored all of them and went to the interwebs, where I discovered that while CBD does not typically cause gastrointestinal problems, the MCT oil used as the delivery system for the CBD compound very frequently does cause issues. The recommendation? Keep taking it until your system is desensitized. Really?!? I am an obedient student, so for the next three days, I kept filling my little dropper with ash tray juice and dosing myself. I will admit, aside from the knifing pain and nausea, I did sleep better, although I had some strange and very vivid dreams. Even still, I was far more pleased with my purchase than our dog, Cotton, who acts fearful of his CBD-laced treats. Basically, every time we attempt to give him one, he flees the scene like a junkie caught in an undercover sting. We've calculated that each of the treats cost us about $1, so if he doesn't start eating them, one of us is going to have to get them down. Waste not, want not.

My verdict after this CBD experiment? I'm glad it works wonders for so many people, but as is often the occasion, I guess I'm just not most people. I think I will toss my bottle of hemp healing and just go back to my old uptight, occasionally sleepless, impatient, Nancy Reagan reared ways. It may be called Mother Nature's Xanax, but I don't think I'm woman enough for the CBD high life.

Now this seems reasonable: for use during high stress situations.

Thank Heaven for Southern Mamas

My dental hygienist told me last week that, having been born and raised in Florida (which she freely admitted is geographically in the South but by no means Southern), she was not accustomed to hearing "sir" and "ma'am" until she moved away to more gentile parts for college. She said she is still uncomfortable hearing or being addressed this way, as it was just not part of her upbringing.

I started thinking on the way home: thank goodness sir and ma'am were woven into the fabric of my being. I am a full-fledged adult (as much as I dislike admitting it much of the time), and I still refer to older people that way, as a sign of respect. I love hearing it--so long as it is directed at other people, since I am far too young (ahem) to be the recipient at this point. It also started me thinking about the other things Southern mamas instill in their children that we sometimes take for granted.

Let me begin with the ways we behave in public, which do not include chewing gum or (heaven forbid) crying. Gum and emotion are reserved for the privacy of home, as I have been reminded many times over the years. Public places such as the grocery store or your wedding day do not qualify for tears or smacking on Hubba Bubba.

Before Sara Blakely and the good Lord blessed us with Spanx, we were taught that when in doubt, wear a slip. Oh, how I hated that old-fashioned undergarment, but dutifully wore one anyway, and now I'm thankful: think of all the Hollywood wardrobe malfunctions that could have been avoided if those women had Southern mothers to make sure they had the modesty insurance provided by a slip. Why, a slip could have changed Janet Jackson's Super Bowl halftime performance for all of eternity.

At least a slip was somewhat comfortable, not that comfort is a consideration for Southern women. Mamas just go ahead and let their daughters know as soon as they are old enough to ask about home perms and mustache waxing that beauty is pain. You know you are dressed to the nines if your feet are screaming and even your overteased hair hurts, but that's the price you pay if you want to turn heads. If you have a Southern mama, you know that hearing, "I bet those shoes are comfortable" is not a compliment.

My beautiful mom and I, primped for dinner during a trip to Paris in 2008.

Getting all dolled up was a quintessential part of the next fundamental of a good Southern upbringing: church on Sunday (or Wednesday for family night, for that matter) was a foregone conclusion. We never needed to ask if we were going, because our clothes, including hair bows, tights, and shoes, were all planned and laid out the night before in an attempt to limit any kind of Sunday morning before-church chaos. I slept in pink sponge rollers every Saturday night of my life until hot rollers became my new norm. We had a designated pew in which we always sat, and it was understood that missing church services meant you were sick--so sick that you better not ask to do anything else on Sunday if you had not made it to Sunday School and morning worship.

One of the most widespread Southern mantras we are all taught is that presentation is key: from the way we dress, decorate our homes. or present the food at a dinner party, God is in the details. The little things are what really make you stand out, and making everything look neat and pulled together makes all the difference. Putting one's best foot forward is a cornerstone of how Southerners live their lives. Now, pass the monogrammed cocktail napkins, would you?

The hostess with the mostest and her so-good-it's-deadly "punchbowl cake." 
How's that for presentation?

Growing up with Southern mamas, we know that certain occasions call for special meals. It goes without saying that there will be red velvet cake at Christmas, ham and deviled eggs for Easter, and some kind of congealed (read: Jell-O) salad served on a lettuce leaf to accompany any and all of these occasion celebrations. Well, that or half a pear with a dollop of mayonnaise and some cheddar cheese on top. The house wine, naturally, is sweet tea.

Half a canned pear, with a dollop of mayonnaise, a sprinkle of sharp cheddar, and (if you're really feeling fancy) a maraschino cherry. A Southern staple.

Southern mamas also know more than their share about sacrifice. These are the women who would gladly spend $2,000 on a pageant dress for their daughter, but wear Walmart clothes themselves and organize yard sales to pay the bills. These mamas aren't afraid to learn how to camp when their boys are in Scouts, spend their Saturdays cheering on less-than-stellar athletic efforts, and wear jewelry made from dried pasta by their preschooler without an ounce of embarrassment. Southern mamas are the women who literally bring home the bacon and fry it up in the pan, y'all.

This Mother's Day, raise a glass of sweet tea and toast to the heavens for giving you a Southern mama. Take some time to celebrate the women who taught us to put on some color, hold your shoulders back, quit acting ugly, and who don't even need words because they can stop us all in our tracks simply with A Look. I'm fairly certain our carefully coiffed Southern mamas and their teachings put the pearls in the saying "pearls of wisdom." Thank heaven.

Happy Mother's Day to all the mamas out there, Southern and otherwise!
You are, to borrow one of your own catchphrases, "as good as gold."

Best-Laid Plans

I realize we have talked about my birthday quite a bit as of late, so please indulge me one last time as I mourn and say my goodbyes. Yesterday, the last day of April, was the official end of birthday month. I'm just going to come right out and tell you that this year, birthday month died a premature death. My best-laid plans went seriously awry. I managed a mere two weeks of celebrating before things took a most unexpected turn. You've heard the saying, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." Let's take a brief look at what I had planned for my month, and what turned out to be.

What I planned to do: Celebrate footloose and fancy-free in every way imaginable for the entire month of April.
What I did instead: Tripped over a lizard and my own two feet, fell down my deck steps, and broke my ankle. This was not what I had in mind when I talked about kicking up my heels.

These are the days of my life....

What I planned to do: Take a drive down to Georgia and spend Easter weekend enjoying more birthday festivities with my family, including gifts and a special Junior's cheesecake shipped all the way from New York City just for moi.
What I did instead: Took a ride in a wheelchair. Wheeeeeeeee.

What I planned to do: Get all dolled up for each of my celebratory social events, look and feel young despite turning a year older.
What I did instead: Threw on a t-shirt with a hole in the armpit and some dirty yoga pants, headed to the orthopedist, and was repeatedly called "ma'am" by my alarmingly youthful-looking physician's assistant (I seriously felt like I was stuck in a Doogie Howser, MD reboot).

What I planned to do: Wear my new, super cute designer sandals I got for my birthday.
What I did instead: Past, present, and near future, I will be limping around in a big orthopedic boot. Do I get extra style points for the compression socks I get to wear while sleeping? As for those adorable sandals, well, I will see you in six to eight weeks.

What I planned to do: Reminisce with old friends over festive dinners and drinks, sharing old memories and making new ones.
What I did instead: Whiled away my mornings reminiscing while watching Beverly Hills 90210 reruns and revisiting my memories of Brandon, Brenda, Dylan and the gang, while sipping coffee and texting friends pictures of my poor ankle swaddled in ice packs.

What I planned to do: Get ready for summer (and swimsuit season, oy) by ramping up my exercise and getting my diet under control. The end of the month was to be a time for swapping cupcakes for carrot sticks, and trading cocktails for cardio--at least most of the time.
What I did instead: Created a pity food pyramid consisting of Chex Mix, Flamin' Hot Cheetos, any and all foods that can be delivered rather than prepared, all-you-can-eat carbohydrates, and washed it all down with ice cold Diet Coke. While I've been laid up, I actually read that it's possible to need more calories while recovering from a broken bone. Right! I'm definitely swimming in my t-shirt this summer.

I only ate this deliciousness for the calcium;
get some for yourself, you know, for your bones.

Now it's time to say goodbye, birthday month. I'll keep it short and sweet, because it's almost time for my pain meds. No one is more sorry than I am that we didn't get to do all the things we imagined, but I will do my best to ready and waiting for you next year when you come around again. In fact, I'm thinking that next year I might just tack on these missed two weeks of reveling and observe my birthday for six weeks to make up for lost time...God and ankle willing. Take good care, April, until we meet again!

The party is officially over.