Phew

Big day today! We had about thirteen visitors! They were looking these Born Frees over from stem to stern. All three of us were busy answering questions and chatting with our guests.

Pop was fully engaged the entire time, so I took it upon myself to be grill master! As Pop says, this might be a little bit "bragadocious," but I did pretty well. Several people complimented the burgers and one guy came back for seconds! Pop has decided to do all the seasoning today, however, as he claims I only seasoned the burgers about half as much as he likes. Remind anyone of our family steak cook-offs?

I forgot to mention yesterday that the inevitable finally happened! Well, in my optimism, I hoped it wasn't inevitable, but Dad assured me that it was. One of our caravan (their name has been omitted to protect the guilty party) backed into a pole in a Walmart parking lot!

After all our visitors left, we went into Leander and got some fried chicken from Golden Chick. I'm growing a little bit concerned that this trip is going to take about 5 years off my life. It seems that almost every meal we've had south of the Mason-Dixon Line has been deep fried, soaked in butter, covered in gravy, or all of the above. I've actually taken to ordering salads with some regularity - just to get away from the fried food! Shocking coming from me, right?

After dinner, we went to a movie! We saw Secretariat. We all liked it. It was very family friendly - pretty corny at times, but what do you expect from a PG Disney movie? Some of the montages seemed hastily and poorly constructed, but overall, it was good. Interesting too, as I knew very little about Secretariat other than that he was a triple crown winner.

I've read some reviews accusing the film of essentially being right wing Christian propaganda, but it really didn't seem like that. There were two African American gospel songs that seemed appropriate to the setting and time period, and the movie opened with a quote from the book of Job about horses. The verses are very poetic and it surprises me that people would see this as an attempt at proselytization. Even Roger Ebert has been surprised by the attacks on this movie.

For the first half of the movie, Pop loudly declared that it was too emotional and that there was too much drama ... several times. Once the racing began, however, the film picked up speed and he ended up really liking it.

We're still in Leander tomorrow if you want to stop by!