Winter Wonderland Date Night

On Saturday Mike and I went to the Winter Wonderland Lighting of the Square event in Bentonville. It was so much fun! It was also the grand opening of the new ice skating rink-- (we decided to watch this time, not skate)  plus lots of music, vendors and Christmas lights. 

Such a great day.

 Mike being a dork as usual :)

  

 After checking out the rink, we headed to dinner at our favorite Thai place right off the Square. We still had some time to kill before the lighting so we headed over to a new frozen yogurt place-- which also happens to have two vegan sorbets! It might not sound like much, but any place to get a vegan dessert in our area is a big deal! This picture of Mike cracks me up:

I got a mixture of the mango and the valencia orange... so freaking good!

Okay, back to the Square! Can you tell we live in Arkansas?? 

 one of my favorite restaurants is shown in this pic--- Table Mesa. Fantastic Mexican food!

 The first W@l-Mart-- it's a museum and it's currently being remodeled. 

  no town square is complete without a courthouse:

 the sun finally went down and it was time for some Christmas lights!

  

Showcase of Homes

Last month my friend Amy and I attended the Shadow Valley Showcase of Homes. All the proceeds went to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Fund and I thought it would be a fun way to spend a Saturday.We toured the six different homes. Most were still for sale and one was a custom build that a family lived in. 

I'm going to start with the more "unique" choices the homeowners made. This is a bedroom and bathroom in the custom home:

The best way I can describe the custom home is it was kind of a gothic log cabin... very interesting.

And the master bathroom in the custom home:

Definitely not my favorite! The best part of the custom was the master closet. This pic shows about a tenth of the room. It was enormous and fabulous!

Since we live in the land of W@lmart, every year they sponsor one of the homes and every single item in it comes from their stores. I'm talking furniture, art, linens, dishes, everything! Surprisingly it was my favorite house on the tour! Here are some pics of the WM house:

The little girl's room was much cuter in person although the high water curtains annoyed me:

loved this part of the master bath:

S@m's Club sponsored the Christmas themed home-- every room was decked out for the holidays. I'll put that post together next--- lots of Christmas inspiration!

powerful to me

I don't expect you guys to read this, but I wanted to write a blog about it because it was very powerful to me (and to Mike). This is an excerpt of the sermon our priest did a few weeks ago based on Mark 10:46-52. It sums up so completely why Mike and I are members of All Saint's and members of the Episcopal Church. You can read the full sermon here.

Living in an environment where Christianity is characterized by ignorance, control, bigotry and exclusion, I listen to the voices cry, “Show me how I can once again be a follower of Jesus.”

Before coming to Arkansas I didn’t fully understand the nature of our mission here.  I didn’t know that in building an Episcopal Church here in the Ozarks that the true nature of our endeavor would be to let people see again.  To allow them to discover that their intellect, their belief in science, their sexual identity, their love for beauty in worship are not obstacles to an acceptance of Christ.  I didn’t know that we could enable people to see again by insisting that the Bible is too precious, too important be taken literally.  And I didn’t know that by accepting the legitimacy, the sanctity, of the path to God chosen by our Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim brothers and sisters we would enable open minded people to see again - that the true path to Jesus is one of love and acceptance.

Every week since coming to Benton County, I have people say to me. “I can no longer accept a literal interpretation of the Bible. Can I be a Christian? or “I’m gay.  I was raised in the church. I have faith, but the church has rejected me.” or “I’m Roman Catholic.  I love the church, but I can’t live in hypocrisy any longer.” And with those words they all say, “Teacher, let me see again.”