for the first time. in almost 8 years. christen and i are going on a proper(ish) vacation.

without children.

yes friends, we’re escaping. we’ve somehow brainwashed my parents into believing that they’d have a good time if our children stayed with them for 3 days (yeah, it’s a relatively brief vacation, but we take what we can get…). they bit and we’ll be dropping them off and heading to kansas city for a few days. (we’re very thankful for them and our kids are super excited…and i think my parents are also.)

we had the pleasure of taking a quick trip to memphis a couple days ago to see derek webb and sandra mccracken perform at the famous levitt shell (the site of what many historians consider the first “rock n’ roll” show featuring elvis presley…for you trivia nerds…). the concert was free and the weather was great, so all the planets [...]

a couple days ago, christen and i celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary. it’s hard to talk about anniversaries without instantly sounding cliché or resorting to your standard fare summations of your love for your spouse. so, trying to avoid that as much as possible, i can truly say that i love christen much more now than i did 6 years [...]

it’s hard to believe, but we’ve been gone from paducah for almost a year now. we love everything about little rock, but we really do still miss paducah. for being the weird little small town that it is, it was a good place to live. for the first time since leaving, we were able to go back and visit. i [...]

ok, so remember when i said that i was going to try to blog every day of my trip here in springfield… yeah, not so much. oh well. alas, i find myself here in the university plaza in springfield about 7 hours away from the conclusion to our little excursion. which brings me to the most important update of the week. [...]

if i ever start a country western band, that’s going to be it’s name…honeysuckles in branson… we’ll probably go on tour with my other favorite country western band, the overall gang…. so, i have no problem admitting that i am a grade A cheapskate. i care very little about service, convenience or any other category you might find in consumer [...]

yeah, that right…this is our vacation: minden, la. no offense to minden—it’s a fine town, i’m sure—but it isn’t exactly a vacation hotspot. actually, christen and i are here to shoot a wedding of one of our good friends cara beth (congratulations cara beth and brent!) and they’ve put us up in a hotel for two nights, so this is [...]