Can you smell the hamburgers grilling? Feel the excitement in the air? Hear the cowbells ringing loud and proud? That’s right! It’s gameday baby!
Today at 5:45 p.m. Central Time the LA Tech Bulldogs host the the Mississippi State Bulldogs….and thus our house is divided. Dooley’s Dawgs come out of last season 5 and 7 and the MSU Bulldogs 6 and 3.
Will Sylvester Croom and the MSU Bulldogs wipe the floor with Dooley’s Dawgs? Or will LA Tech show up the Mighty Maroon and White? We can only wait to find out.

Today Paul and I are celebrating our two year anniversary. I can’t believe how time flies. It’s seems like only yesterday we were dancing in the hay field at my parent’s house under a canopy of lights.
The past two years have been eventful. In the just the past year we’ve decided where we want to spend several years of our lived overseas, moved four times and said goodbye to friends and family.
We have been blessed with parents who have stayed together through good times and bad. My parents have been married for about 35 years and Paul’s parents have been married for almost 30 years. Not to mention grandparents who have been married for 50 + years.
We just want to say thank you to our parents and grandparents for showing us that even though marriage is not always fun and easy it is doable. You may not like the person you live with some days but that is not an excuse to quit.

Beware: This is going to be a sentimental and sappy post.
We, like the rest of the world have been clued to the TV watching the Olympics. Here they were shown live, which meant we would have had to get up at 1 a.m. in order to watch anything good. What was showing during the hours when normal people are awake? Fencing, rowing, kayaking, ribbon dancing, and skeet shooting are just some examples of the exciting bouts of strength that we got to see.
But all this watching of the Olympics had me thinking about the last time I watched the summer games in Fort Worth. For two weeks I spent every night in an apartment with three other young women enthralled by the exhibitions we saw. We were amazed as Phelps swam to victory six times.
Those three women (plus one more who I met later on in my seminary days) are not only my sisters in Christ but are some of my closest friends. We have held each other accountable, laughed and cried together, lifted each other up, and had times where we had to forgive one another. We’ve been in weddings, shared boy trouble, buried parents, rode rides at Six Flags until we got sick, and been glued to the TV on Thursday nights.
These are some of the greatest women I know. And over the past two weeks I have thought of them a lot and honestly part of me wished I could be with them.

Sunday some friends invited us over to eat lunch, and since they are excellent cooks we quickly agreed. We started the morning by going to a monastery that overlooks Napoli. WOW!! It’s so beautiful there. A completely different view of the city.
The picture to the left has Mt. Vesuvius in the background. That’s the volcano that wiped out Pompeii in 70 A.D.
The picture on the right has the island of Ischia in the background (for those of you who read the blog Big Waves, that’s where that “incident” occurred).

From the heights of the monastery we headed back down to start on lunch. Gnocchi, potato pasta, is a huge dish here on Sundays. Our friend Pepe wanted me to learn how to make it so into the kitchen I went. I am going to briefly explain the process so you can better appreciate the two hours it took to make the gnocchi. Well, I guess if you want to get technical about it, it takes longer than that because you have to begin by making a red sauce. When I make it, I let it cook for two hours or so…Pepe let his cook for six hours!! But back to the gnocchi itself. You first boil the potatoes with the skin and then peel the potatoes. They had cooked 2 kilos of potatoes. Then you press them and you will have a mound of potatoe strings like in the picture. Then, you put salt on them and start needing in flour. Two kilos of potatoes equals 2 kilos of flour. Talk about a tiring process.
Then you roll out the flour and start cutting off little tiny pieces. You boil it for about 5 minutes, drain, and stir in some mozzarella and sauce and the result is nothing but goodness all the way down.
I am including a picture of me eating octopus just so my family will believe that I tried it. I will not be trying it again.

Wednesday and Thursday were spent soakin’ up the sun. Wednesday we went to a beach about an hour south of Napoli with our friends Alessandra and Enzo. Please note the stark contrast in skin color between me and Alessandra. Below are pictures of the beautiful beach. There is one picture of a guy jumping off a really high cliff…don’t worry it was some random guy.
Thursday we went to a pool with some other friends. It was wonderful to swim in water and afterwards not feel like a block of salt. Needless to say after two days of sun, I was a little red and will be avoiding the sun for a few days.
MacKenzie