Oklahoma City

Ah, last week at this time Katie and I were tramping around Oklahoma City with our dear friends Josh and Suzanna. (Sorry all I could come up with for Josh was the crash "shop" link, alas).

I have to admit. Trent was always right. Oklahoma City is a swell place. Many of the neighborhoods have these cute little German houses with squat pillars on the porches. Josh and Susanna have an artist's paradise of a place - lots of books, music, instruments, paintinings on the walls, a recording studio, every room painted a different color (lime green in the kitchen), and chic furnishings. Beautiful.

Katie and I survived the 18 hr. drive to get there from Tallahassee and spent the night in Huntsville, AL with Katie's great aunt and uncle. (They gave Katie's mum and grandmum a glowing report about me *grin, blush.*) My car's AC was working on half capacity, and I have no CD player, so we talked, talked, and talked to keep us going. We each began working on a list of our own top 100 songs. It's hard, and a bit frustrating. Oklahoma City had more culture than I expected. Josh and Susanna took us downtown, where we saw the Murrow bldg. memorial (I thought of my students, since we have a chapter about memorials in my curriculum), and an Asian Arts festival in the Myriad Gardens. I got some crazy tapioca. We saw X-Men III (and empowering popular culture moment on the big screen! I love this stuff) and went to a great pub in Bricktown. We went to a party later and met many people from Josh and Susanna's church. They meet on Sundays and have a house church system, which sounds fruitful and much-needed. Sunday was a very peaceful day. Lots of reflection. Since it was a holiday weekend, their church didn't meet. So we had a bible study in the morning, then Katie and I took a nice walk through the heat to the local park - with a long arroyo bed. We all went to an amazing bookstore and did some reading, then grabbed some great Italian. We baked chocolate chip cookies and watched a curious documentary on Radiohead (oh, so artsy). Josh wanted me to see it for my hipster class - he's writing a big essay on "the cool" right now. He traded some ideas. After a great night of sleep Katie and I made the 18 hr. drive back to Tallahassee in one day ... God blessed us with cloud cover most of the way - so the 1/2 AC was bearable. And blessed us with amazing conversations. We had a close call with gas when driving through Mississippi. I forgot that many exits still have absolutely nothing because of hurricane damage. But we lucked out and found some gas. Off one exit, every building was leveled, many of the trees bent over, lots of sign-skeletons, and debris all over. Anyhow, we got back to Tallahassee a bit after 2am. I put close to 3,000 miles on my car. But, boy, did I need the break - I had to write a paper the next day and Katie is finishing her M.S. thesis this weekend.

I have a few more weeks of the first summer session left, then teach a class and am taking a Restoration Lit. class (Darcy, Andrew will be proud of me) in Session C. Hopefully, I'll be flying "home" to San Diego for a week in August.

Who's still in VA?

Love to all.

Travis