A Few Nights of Culture

This past weekend was quite busy. On Friday, I got to spend most of the day with Mandi for the first time in a while since she didn't have to go to Nashville for classes. It was a welcome break for her, as she's done for the semester. Just has a paper to write in the next couple of weeks. To celebrate, we went to Taste of Thai...possibly the best restaurant ever. At least when you're looking for Asian food. Josh, next time you're around here, we'll go to Magic Wok and then we'll go to Taste of Thai. You just can't be disappointed.

Saturday was filled with more work on the new additions in the house. Dad worked on getting wall studs put in so that we can put up electrical boxes for the room, which will allow electricity for the lighting and hot tub to get put in. I put on the second coat of paint in the room while he was drilling holes in the concrete floor. Maybe tonight we'll finish up some of the wall things in order to get the switches and such put in. It's coming along though. That evening, Mandi's dad had got tickets to a surprise something or other. I didn't know I was going, but at about 3:45 Mandi calls and says that there was a misunderstanding and I was supposed to be going with them. So I get going and show up to their place, and we leave about 5:40 with these mystery tickets. It turned out that the Knoxville Opera was doing a performance at a church in town, and since Mark's company was promoting it, he had gotten tickets for everything. So we were there from about 5:45 to 8:30 that night. Not the best example of opera as it was just piano and singing, but it was alright. Certainly nothing compared to Carmen that Mandi and I saw earlier in the year.

Sunday was a good day as well. Church in the morning, where we're doing an interesting study through the book of Acts. Yesterday's discussion centered on the story of Annanias and Sapphira. You remember the story, where they sell some land and bring the money, but falsely claim that they are bringing the whole amount that they received. They are both struck down and die immediately after they lie. The question that was discussed was mainly, why such a harsh punishment for this act? And how much blame could really be given to Sapphira who either had the choice of hanging her husband out to dry, or lying to Peter? Was she completely at fault herself? Or was it because she was married to Annanias and therefore was sort of brought along due to his sinfulness and harshly punished? It was interesting to think about.

Lunch was a spectacular Indian curry that Cathie made. I had not been a huge fan of my previous experience in Indian cuisine, so it was a pleasant surprise at how good this was. Actually, I think she said she got the curry from people from Qatar. So Qatar curry I guess is more appropriate for a description. The evening was finished off with a chocolate fest as one of the ladies in our small group was celebrating a birthday, so we brought all sorts of different chocolate desserts to the party. There was chocolate cheesecake prepared by a chef in our group, we made chocolate-peanut butter pie, there were cookies, chocolate fondue, ice cream cake...I'm pretty sure we were all on a sugar high. That might help explain some of why I'm not feeling all that well this morning...but it was worth it last night.

Something pretty cool that my mom does is the Foothills Craft Guild. Essentially it's a bunch of artists from around the area that are in this guild to show their crafts and artistic abilities. They are having a show this weekend where they are all displaying and selling their creations and such. It's really pretty neat. Mom will be displaying her Temari balls and her baskets that she makes, so she's pretty much frantically working on getting some things together since she's only been home for the past week or so. I've never actually gone to the show before, but Mandi and I plan on going this weekend at some point to look around. Should be pretty cool to see some of the things that people are making in the area. With all this culturizing (is that a word? I don't think so...) I don't quite know what I'll do with myself. I'll have to hold off for a while after this thought I'm thinking. Even so, in honor of culture (somewhat), the music in the player is from the Transformers movie score.