The Great Race!

Yesterday was a momentous day. To start, I got some screaming deals at the Gap Outlet (we're talking a shirt and 2 sweaters for under $20!). That wasn't the big event of the day, though.
In little Vicksburg, the Great Race came through! What is the Great Race, you may ask?

The Great Race is an antique, vintage, and collector car competitive controlled-speed endurance road rally on public highways. It is not a test of top speed. It is a test of a driver/navigator team’s ability to follow precise course instructions and the car’s (and team’s) ability to endure on a cross-country trip. The course instructions require the competing teams to drive at or below the posted speed limits at all times.
(above info taken from here)

After helping Josh at work for a few hours, we rushed home to make sure we wouldn't miss it. It's not every day something is going on here. While I would by no means call myself a classic car fanatic, I'm all for experiencing new and different things. It was surprisingly fun and now we have a goal to own a classic car.

First, the cars came through like a parade.

Then all the cars parked at the end of the block for the public's admiration. The VW Beetle and the Fiat were my favorites!

It felt like a truly Southern experience with the bugs in the air, the blues music playing, the river in the background, and the cars lined up. Now if only we were sipping iced tea :) 

"That's a real beautiful dog you got there, miss!"

People in Mississippi LOVE Franklin. I mean, really, people everywhere love Franklin, but it's different down here. Goldendoodles are all but common here (read: most people have never heard of them, thinks he's a poodle cut wrong, look at me funny when I say goldendoodle, and/or reply with "golden-what?"), and so when you combine that with his unique coloring, Franklin becomes quite the attention-hog.

Some examples: 

• Josh, Franklin and I walked past two tables of people sitting outside of a cafe. The first table stopped Josh to talk about Frank, the second table stopped me to ask about Frank. 
• Frank and I will be walking on the sidewalk, and people driving by will shout out their car windows to us. "That's a beautiful dog!!!" one lady yelled with her head strained back looking at us while she drove by. "What kind of dog is that? He's real a beautiful dog!" another man yelled as he rolled through a stop sign. 
• There's a lady down the street who is often outside when we go on our afternoon walk. "How's Franklin doin' today?" Not me, my dog. 

I'm not complaining about this, as it has proven that having Franklin seems to make it a lot easier to talk to people and get to know them. He basically serves as an icebreaker that people are incredibly interested in and obsessed with and don't mind asking you about. 

Franklin, however, is not quite sure how he feels about it down here. 

 Take the kitchen stools, for example. Every day when we eat, he insists on sitting just like this, with his body against the wall and his head and front paws under the stool. When we finish eating, he does not know how to get out. He whines, tries to move but the stool shakes and he gets scared, he whines some more, until finally (after 5-10 minutes of this), he gets the courage up to just go for it and you hear the stool wobble around and almost topple over. And yet, after 7 days of this, he still has to lay in the exact same position. Grace has never been his strong suit.

Other happenings around town:

Everyday I walk past the Coca-Cola museum (where Coca-Cola was bottled for the first time!) and every day I read the sign that says "Ice-cold Coca-Cola!" and everyday I want a Coke. Yesterday, that dream became a reality. We got our 8oz. old time bottles of Coke and it was nothing other than a dream come true.

On an unrelated note, the Mississippi River is quite high this year.

Downtown Living

Shortly after Josh and I got married, I made a list of things I wanted to do in my life. This list includes the achievement of "live in a city." While I don't quite know if this summer will qualify enough as city livin to check it off the list, it is definitely different than anywhere we have ever lived before.

The inside is a dream, with exposed brick, granite counters, hardwood floors, high ceilings, and 2 huge windows in the living room. The outside is old and bricky!

Downtown Vicksburg is an array of random shops. While there are several storefronts that have gone out of business, it seems like the city is really trying to make it a nice downtown area. There's even music piped in to speakers on the street! And as would be expected, it's always jazz. 

So Franklin and I decided to take a field trip today to get better acquainted with our new surroundings. And while I may have felt (and most likely, looked) like an out-of-place tourist walking around with my dog and camera, it was nice to get out and actually have some nice places to walk around.  

As you can see, Franklin loves modeling for me. He also loves summers in Mississippi, that's why his tongue is so long. 

 For those of you who remember our last summer in Mississippi, it wouldn't take much to make this summer better. We're hopeful that location, location, location really is everything!

School Must Be Out...

You know it's been too long since you blogged when you don't even remember the last thing you wrote about! Now that the semester is out, I can live the life of a more balanced person and have some time to do fun things again. One of these is trying to stay more up to date with my blog!

Lots of big things have been happening lately.
#1 School
I finished my last semester of classes...EVER! Unless I decide in the future to get a Ph.D., which is highly unlikely, knowing myself like I do. Next year I have a full-year internship, most likely working in an elementary school 3 days/week and a middle or high school 2 days/week. I also have one more class to take next year, but it is not really an academic class, more just a check-in to make sure everything is on track with the internship. I'm super excited about my internship for several reasons:

1. I love school psychology and kids, and I will get to do that full-time now. 
2. I am hoping to be able to help coach a sport (girl's basketball?? or Girls on the Run!)
3. I am one step closer to graduating for real and becoming a real adult! 

Number 3 is equal parts exciting and terrifying because that also means I am one step closer to having to look for a job and not having a supervisor to guide me through difficult situations. Alas, life is full of pluses and minuses.

I also had my last official day working at the ACCESS Project, which has been my assistantship for the past two years. It was a great experience where I learned a lot and met some great people!

ACCESS Project Staff

#2 Birthday

Josh had a birthday and is 29 now! The morning started off with presents. One of the presents I made for Josh this year was to take some of his bike pictures that he loves to take and transferred them onto wood so he can decorate his bike room with rustic bike pictures! I found the instructions on Pinterest from this website, and it was super easy and awesome! The best part was wiping the paper off and finding a beautiful picture underneath! I would highly recommend it for a unique, personal gift.

Another present I put together was a notebook full of notes from friends and family with favorite memories or special notes for Josh.

Then we went to breakfast at a local diner that he has been wanting to go to for the past 2 years.

 

 It was everything you would want in a diner-old people, lots of food, lots of grease, and cheap prices.

We also went to see IronMan 3 (we liked it) and then had some friends over for Bocci Ball, charades, and Costco's chocolate cake that night.

#3 Memorial Day 
Originally, the plan for Josh's birthday was to go kayaking with a LivingSocial deal that I bought, but the weather didn't cooperate on Josh's actual birthday, so we had to extend the birthday celebration (shucks!) and go kayaking two days later, which just happened to be Memorial Day. We went to French Creek State Park in PA. The lake was a little small for 2 hours of kayaking and there were a lot of other people who had the same idea as we did, but it was still fun to do something different.

                     

 We also had a campout in our backyard with our favorites, Emily, Erik, and Alyssa. We bought a firepit for this event and it was awesome. Everyone should have a firepit in their backyard!

#4 Summer Plans

We are going back to good Ol' Miss this week. Mixed emotions on this one-looking forward to relaxing and reading, not looking forward to the imminent isolation that is bound to occur while
there (as in, isolation from friends and fun). We have no cross country road trip to start us off with a bang this year, either. My summer plans include the following:

• take the School Psychology Praxis Exam
• read
• make greeting cards
• watch The West Wing and other movies in my Netflix Instant Queue. 

#5 Running

I'm back at it again. After a nice lazy couple of months, I found motivation to run again. For the first time ever, I am trying to get faster. In the past, I have just run for the fun of it and focused on finishing, but now that I have successfully completed 4 half marathons and 1 full marathon, I know I can finish and I need something else to work towards.

I'm starting off nice and easy though and doing a flat half marathon in Ft. Worth in June (http://jalapenohalf.com/) and one in PA in September (http://www.bihhalf.com/). Yes, this means I'll be training in MS in the summer months. As the ever wise Kelly Clarkson once said, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."I am using the free Hal Higdon Intermediate Half Marathon Training Schedule. I used the novice 1 for the previous half marathons I've done and the novice 1 for the marathon and was very happy with them.

This is what running in 90% humidity looks like! 

Look forward to more frequent updates!