Swagga Like Us: Why Texans LOVE Texas!

I’m in a Lone Star state of mind today, and I’ve been thinkin’ about all the things that make Texas so great!  Texans have a special kind of pride in our state that’s hard to explain to those who don’t live here… nobody has swagga like us!  As Robert Earl Keen likes to say, “The Road Goes on Forever and the Party Never Ends!” My list of things I love about Texas is a lot like the road… it could go on forever…

The Dallas Cowboys, The Texas Rangers, The Dallas Mavericks, The Dallas Stars, The Houston Texans, and The Houston Astros are all proud to call Texas home!

The bluebonnet is our state flower.  They’re kind of a big deal…

Friday Night Lights! No other state takes high school football as seriously as we do.  Heck, most of our high school football teams could give the Houston Texans a run for their money! ;-)

We’re home to the Live Music Capitol of the World! ATX knows how to rock, roll, and honky tonk! For that, we are so very thankful!

Willie Nelson… enough said.

We used to be our own Republic.  If we get tired of playing nice with the other states, we have the right to secede.  Awesome.

Everything is bigger in Texas… including our economy.  It’s the 14^th largest economy in the world!  That’s bigger than the economy of most countries.  True story.

We don’t have a personal income tax, and you can buy a house twice the size of what you can buy in California or New York for about half the price.  Who doesn’t love a bargain?!

Texas is home to some of the finest establishments of higher education in the country. Hook ‘em! Guns up! Whoop! Sic ‘em!

We’ve got mountains, canyons, beaches, rivers, woods, and everything in between. 

We’re friendly.  We wave.  We say yes ma’am and no sir.  Basically, we have manners and that’s not universal. 

We love guns, and we know how to use ‘em!

The ladies of Texas can skin a deer in the morning and look like the quintessential southern bell by the time the sun sets.  Speaking of sunsets…

We’ve got the most gorgeous sunsets in the world.  Almost all of the sunsets used in television and film are shot right here in Texas... that means even our sunsets are famous!

Our food will make your taste buds high five each other!  Some like it hot, we like it extra spicy with a delicious burst of flavor for good measure!  The best part… it’s served in Texas sized portions!

Simply put, we’ve got history… an entire text book full.  Texas History is part of the core curriculum for Texas students.  We’re as proud of our past as we are of our state!

There are so many things to love about Texas that it would be nearly impossible to list them all!  Bottom line, Texas is AWESOME!  If you don’t agree, you’re clearly from the portion of the map simply noted as NOT TEXAS.

Confessions of a Dirty Girl

My apartment is a reflection of my life.  Some days it’s so clean and organized that people wonder if anyone actually lives here… today is not that day.  Today is the day that it’s so messy and dirty that I can’t figure out how I ever let it get so out of control.  As I sit here writing this blog, I’m surrounded by chaos.  Laundry is piled up everywhere… some of it clean and some of it dirty.  Dishes are in the sink, on the counter, on the table… everywhere but in the dishwasher.  In fact, I’m pretty sure there is more than one half empty Sonic cup sitting on my bathroom cabinet… don’t ask.  I can’t even figure out how they got there.  There are not one, not two, but three suitcases sitting in the dining room that are half unpacked… or half packed depending on how you look at it.  There are shoes in the living room, in my office, in the bathroom, in my bedroom, on the treadmill… and there’s a pair of boots sitting downstairs by the front door that someone borrowed about three months ago.  I’ve been in and out that door a hundred times since then, and still they sit there waiting patiently to be returned to their rightful home… the closet.  Trash is picked up at the curb right outside my apartment every Tuesday and Friday, but all of the trashcans are full.  My apartment is so messy that I called the cleaning lady and postponed my last cleaning because I didn’t want her to see it like this.  That’s bad when you feel like you need to clean before the cleaning lady can come clean.  It’s like a nasty downward spiral.  It starts getting messy because I’m so busy traveling that I don’t have time to do anything but unpack, repack, and leave again.  Then, when I do have time to do something about it, I just don’t care anymore.  Now it’s at a critical stage.  It’s at the “so dirty it’s making me unhappy” stage.  It rarely reaches this point, and I’ve discovered that this stage often times coincides with my mood about things other than the cleanliness of my humble abode.  Life has gotten kind of messy and confusing, and the more messy and confusing it gets the messier my apartment gets.  I found my stapler in the refrigerator yesterday.  That’s bad.  Really bad.  90% of the time, my apartment is adorable, CLEAN, and organized as efficiently as only someone as OCD as myself could achieve.  The other 10% of the time it looks like a war zone.  When my life gets messy I shut down.  I don’t do laundry.  I don’t do dishes.  I don’t cook.  I obviously don’t clean.  I just sit around in the midst of the chaos and feel bad about the fact my messy life and my messy apartment aren’t living up to my expectations.  This is usually the point where my sister stages an intervention.  She comes to town, we clean, I cry, and then we move on like it never happened.  I’m trying a new approach this time.  I’m going to clean on my own today… sans intervention! At the very least, it will be one less thing to sit around worrying and feeling bad about.  Wish me luck!

LEMON / lem·on / noun: A yellow, oval citrus fruit with thick skin and fragrant, acidic juice.

How do you know what to do when you don’t know what to do? How do you fix something you didn’t realize was broken? How do you become something you didn’t know you needed to be? How do you adjust your vision of the future to be the opposite of what you imagined? How do you find a new path when you never wanted to leave the old path? How do you acknowledge the truth when you’re not even willing to share it with anyone else? How do you forgive someone when it never occurred to you they weren‘t worthy of your trust in the first place? How do you accept something when you don’t understand it? How do you undo things that have already been done?

Sometimes life hands you lemons, and sometimes it hurls them at you when you least expect it. One day you’re strolling along wondering what you did to deserve such good fortune, and the next you’re curled up in a ball crying and trying to figure out how you got from point A to point B. You’re wishing you had never started out at point A so you didn’t have to understand how truly painful point B is capable of being. You feel a complicated mixture of sadness, anger, confusion, and desperation. All of which you would give nearly anything to make disappear. You wonder what comes next, and you know that no matter what it is, it isn’t going to be easy. You’re full of questions with no answers, and no matter how hard you search for those answers, many times you will never find them. You pray and you ask for guidance, faith, and patience none of which actually make the situation any less painful in the moment. You then realize you don’t even know what exactly it is you need to be praying for so you simply pray for God to figure it out and help you to accept it. You spend an unfortunate amount of time staring off into space thinking blank thoughts in effort to avoid any real thoughts. You realize a whole day has passed and you never got out of your pajamas, and you hope that somehow you can get away with doing a whole bunch of nothing again the next day. You’re paralyzed by the thought of having to accept what has happened, make a plan, and move on with life. Things don’t just seem overwhelming, they truly are overwhelming. You cry, and then you cry, and then you cry some more.

Eventually a day comes when all those tears, and all that prayer have brought you to a place of acceptance. It doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve forgiven. It just means you want to. Until that day comes, you just have to believe that there is some lesson to be learned… the lemonade that comes from all those lemons. In the moment, that’s hard to see and even harder to believe, but it’s true. God has a plan. We don’t have to like it, and we don’t have to understand it. We just have to be willing to accept that the path He calls us to take will always be worth the change, worth the risk, worth the effort, simply because He has chosen it for us. When He finally gets us where He wants us, we’ll wonder why we wasted so much time and energy being upset and trying to figure out why we didn’t get what we thought we wanted. We will be sitting around sipping on the most delicious lemonade imaginable, and we won’t be able to imagine anything better… it’ll be hard to remember what it was we thought was so great about where we were before.

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him and He will make your paths straight.” Proverbs 3:5-6

Excuse me sir, could you help me with my baggage?

I took a trip to Florida a couple weeks ago… I also took along a 66 lb. suitcase. 66 seems pretty precise right? It is. They weighed it at the airport and charged me an extra $50 because it was grotesquely overweight. If it had been flying on the plane instead of under the plane, they would have referred to it as a customer of size. I really thought I was doing everyone (and by everyone, I mean my male traveling companions) a favor by cramming all of my necessities into one bag versus several. Obviously I had no intention of being the one to cart that beast all over Florida! Aside from the overweight baggage charge, my “Excuse me sir, could you help me with my baggage?” plan worked out splendidly… until I got home…



As it turns out, it hadn’t really occurred to me that while I had strapping manly men to help me with my baggage as I gallivanted across the country, I was on my own when I got back home. As I sat at the top of the stairs cursing my 66 lb. suitcase, I began to think about a different kind of baggage… the emotional kind. It’s no fun either. I’ll admit it, I’ve got some baggage… and don’t even think about pretending you don’t have a nice set of baggage too! Emotional baggage is messy, painful, and tricky to handle. Really, the best we can do is hope that those who love us will learn to accept our baggage… and in return, we should accept theirs. When you think about it, that nice set of baggage is part of what makes you who you are and vice versa. Most of our baggage is filled up with things like heartbreak, regret, anger, distrust, jealously, secrets, and pretty much every other ugly thing you can think of to cram inside those bags and hide. Here’s where it gets tricky… you can’t let all of those ugly things from your past ruin your future. You can’t refuse to love again because you’ve had your heart broken. You can’t refuse to trust others because you’ve been betrayed. You can’t be jealous when you haven’t been given a reason. What you can do… what you MUST do… is try to accept your baggage, learn your lesson, and move on into the future fearlessly. The things inside that baggage hurt you once. Don’t let them continue to hurt you over and over again by damaging new relationships and filling you with fear and doubt. Life is scary. Life is also an incredible adventure so don’t let your baggage get in the way of allowing you to share that incredible adventure with people you love. When you trust in God’s plan it all starts to come together. Then, it is as simple as asking for help… God will take care of the baggage for you. He’s awesome like that… and He won’t charge you an overweight baggage fee which is pretty generous of Him considering how much baggage we manage to accumulate!

Psychic Readings By Ashley

Fear is… scary. Duh! It’s also kind of paralyzing, confusing, and miserable. Fear is natural. As humans we all deal with it daily in all kinds of ways. We have teeny tiny fears, gianormous fears, and everything in between. Over the years I’ve discovered I’m not so great at dealing with my fears… especially the biggies. I can’t predict the future, and that makes my fears even more horrifying. I was lost a while back and came across this place:

I remember thinking at the time that if I were psychic, I wouldn’t be lost. To me, fear is kind of like being lost. You don’t have the answers, you don’t know how to get where you’re going, and it’s really frustrating. Thankfully, we don’t need a psychic from the wrong side of the tracks to guide our path, that’s God’s job. Remembering that God has it all under control is the hard part… especially when we’re dealing with fear. I’ve got a whole list of defense mechanisms that I use when I’m scared. I recognize them, but I’m not always good at putting a stop to them, stepping back from the situation, and letting God do His thing. I’m not alone in being fearful of the unknown, I’m generally just a bit more self aware than most people. I got scared today. I panicked just a smidge, I cried a lil bit, and I prayed a whole lot! None of the afore mentioned coping mechanisms did all that much to make me feel better, and deep down I know that it doesn’t matter how scared I am or how hard I try to fight back that fear by employing every defense mechanism in my vast arsenal. The reality is that God’s got a plan, and my silly little insignificant fears aren’t going to get in His way. Sometimes the answer is as simple as a deep breath and a few baby steps, and sometimes the answer isn’t simple at all. The trick is to channel your fear into some good old fashioned faith. Today‘s fear grew from something good… which sounds like an oxymoron for sure. Strangely enough, the majority of my fears are that way… mostly because I spend so much time worrying that my fear is going to create a situation where I screw up something really amazing by using all my not so clever fear fighting tactics. It’s a vicious cycle! In dwelling on today’s fears, I had an epiphany. Stop being scared of what lies ahead and simply enjoy right now. Not knowing how the story ends is terrifying for me (which seems odd given my tendency towards being a bit of a free spirit), but pushing aside those fears in favor of a little faith helps me remember that it doesn’t matter how they story ends as long as God is the one writing it...

Birds of a feather…

This posting could alternately be titled, “Ashley needs a gun for self protection because she‘s to dumb to use a map!”

When I first moved to San Antonio I needed to find a doctor. Seems simple enough right? So, I just asked around and scheduled an appointment based on a recommendation. Bad idea… really bad idea. I didn’t Google the address, I didn’t ask questions, I just hopped in the car, put the address in my GPS, and took off for the doctor’s office on the day of my appointment. I live in North San Antonio. When I passed downtown and took a left it should have been a red flag. Southeast San Antonio is about as sketchy as you can possibly get. Long story short, I cried all the way back to my side of town and vowed never to set foot on the Southeast side of town again… unless it was for pizza at Big Lou’s. Anyway, after that fateful day, one would have thought I’d learned my lesson. Always ask where something is located… Google and Yelp are your best friends, use them! Unfortunately, I’m a slow learner. I spent some time on the southeast side of town again today and here’s how it happened… I have a small Groupon addiction… and by small I actually mean completely out of control. A few weeks ago I bought a Groupon to have my hair feathered. I’ve been paying a fortune to have this done in my neighborhood for months now. Generally, I check out the business on Yelp before I purchase a Groupon to make sure I’m getting a good deal. This time however, I skipped Yelp and just clicked purchase. It was such a bargain! I figured it would be located close by or in Alamo Heights… mostly because I assumed that such services would only be offered in posh salons. You know what they say about assuming. For those of you that may not know, hair feathering is this new thing where girls like me who have an irrational fear of permanent hair dye embrace our inner wild child, channel Steven Tyler, and have feather extensions added to our hair. They’re fabulous and super sassy! Plus, you don’t have to wait on it to grow out like you do with hair color… which is a real bonus for impatient people like me. So, this afternoon I set out on my little adventure. I drove, and I drove, and I drove some more. As I approached downtown, I started to get a little twitchy. What had I done?! Sure enough, Fine Feather was located on the dreaded Southeast side of town. Yikes! I considered turning around and requesting a refund from Groupon, but the lure of a head full of colorful feathers simply could not be resisted. I thought perhaps I was lost and had entered the address incorrectly in my GPS when I pulled up here:

Then, I saw the sign cleverly marking this warehouse as the location of Fine Feather. Eek! I text my location to a friend with the instructions to call 911 if she didn’t hear from me in 20 minutes. One would think that if I felt the need to take this precaution, I would have had enough sense to get the heck out of dodge. Wrong. I ventured on into the warehouse area and encountered this:

Eventually I located Fine Feather (a small room with a record player, loads of feathers, and a woman named Rocio who was quite possibly stoned). All things considered, I will give her credit for having a nice selection of feathers:

I set down on the lone stool in the tiny room and let her get to work. In just a few short minutes she was finished and I was sporting a colorful array of feathers in my long locks!

As I sped back to my side of town, I reflected on the important lessons I learned from this little adventure:

#1 - GOOGLE! YELP! MAPQUEST! (It’s a shame I didn’t learn this lesson the first time.)
#2 - Don’t judge a book by it’s cover! I got a sweet deal on some fine feathers, and while Rocio may have been stoned, she was very friendly and quite adept at the whole feathering process. So much so, that I’ll probably go back when it’s time for more feathers!

It’s okay to talk to strangers... as long as they knit!

YELP! I love to share my opinions, and I have finally found people who actually want to hear them… or in this case read them! Do you Yelp? If not, what are you waiting for?! All the cool kids are doing it! So here’s the story of how I discovered Yelp, made a fabulous new friend, and joined the ranks of the Yelp Elite Squad…

Last summer, I made a spontaneous little trip to Laguna Beach, CA with a guy I was talking to… he’s really irrelevant to the story (If only had known that then! lol), but you need context… trust me. We had a layover in Phoenix and he was driving me nuts… like full on what have I gotten myself into completely bonkers kind of nuts. Simply put, he was a whiney traveler. So in a desperate attempt to change the subject I decided to throw out a random fact about myself and see where the conversation went from there. I KNIT. Yes, I did just admit that I knit. No, I’m not 80 years old. Knitting is very chic these days and all the trendy crafty girls are doing it! He, of course, was totally appalled. As we’re sitting there arguing about my claim that it’s totally cool to knit, he smarts off and I’ve finally had enough. So, I enthusiastically announce that he’s a <insert inappropriate adjective>. I go on to tell him I’m going to knit him a scarf with previously mentioned inappropriate adjective stitched on it. All the sudden I hear a little chuckle come from the seat directly behind us. Low and behold, it’s a fellow knitter! A sassy, smart, surprisingly awesome fellow knitter! Sassy fellow knitter’s name is Krys. She proceeds to join the conversation and explains that my knitting habit is legit and perhaps he’s the one who needs to brush up on the latest trend. As it turns out, Krys is also from San Antonio and has been eavesdropping on our conversation for a while now wondering how a cool girl like me got stuck traveling with “whiney guy.” As we continue the conversation, it becomes instantly apparent that Krys and I have bonded and become fast friends. She goes on to explain that she’s headed to San Francisco for a work related meeting at her company’s corporate headquarters. As it turns out, she is the Community Manager for a company called Yelp. Yelp is a social networking site where real people can share real reviews about the places they love (or hate)… restaurants, bars, spas, etc. Krys and I exchange contact info and I promise to check out Yelp. By the end of our initial meeting I’m wishing we could send Mr. Inappropriate Adjective to San Francisco and she could come to Laguna Beach with me! We hop on the plane (which we almost missed b/c we were so busy chatting it up) and eventually part ways in Orange County. When I got back to San Antonio, I set up a Yelp account and began sharing my opinions with the world… which I’ve always done, but these people actually cared about what I had to say. Nifty right?! Krys eventually came back to San Antonio and the rest is history. I yelped and yelped and yelped some more! Before long I became a member of the Yelp Elite Squad, and a permanent resident in Krys’ circle of friends. We strike up conversations with strangers just about everywhere we go, and we love to tell the story of how we were once strangers from the same town destine to meet in the Phoenix airport. So, here’s the moral of this story… well there’s actually two…

#1: It’s okay to talk to strangers!!! Always be friendly! You never know who you’ll meet or how they’ll impact your life! Krys is like a little ray of sunshine!

#2: YELP! Do it now… like right this second now! It’s a great way to find new places to eat, drink, and be merry! Plus, they have all kinds of fun social events… and when I say fun I actually mean legendary, epic, and extravagant!

If you want to check out my profile to see what it’s all about it, click the link below:
Ashley's YELP Profile!