In Which We Are In Fact A Very Grateful People

I can’t say for sure that filming the dotMOM intro video with Melanie and Christy Nockels was an adrenaline rush, but I can tell you that when I finally got home Friday afternoon around 1:30, I hung out with Alex for a little while, visited for a few seconds with some friends when they came by to pick A. up to go see Minions, then stretched out across the bed in the guest room and slept for three solid hours. I didn’t even hear David when he got home from work. However, I did wake up around 6:30 that evening wondering where I was and if I’d missed Friday completely.

Even still, I managed to go to sleep at a perfectly normal time Friday night because WIPED OUT.

And to be clear: we had a blast in Nashville. It was all kinds of fun. I think this was probably the first year when Melanie and I were both (mostly) comfortable with being absolute FOOLS in the video, and since Christy was such a great sport, we laughed a whole bunch. My friend Erin wrote the script, and oh my goodness she outdid herself. She capitalized on the fact that Mel and I have both enjoyed a certain degree of fascination with the lovely Mrs. Nockels for, I don’t know, the better part of a decade, and as a result I got to touch and also sniff Christy’s hair.

It was all for the sake of my acting craft, people. ALL FOR THE SAKE OF MY CRAFT.

My own hair was actually fairly well-behaved, and that was a little bit of a wonder considering that I got to Nashville and realized that I’d left my shampoo and conditioner in Birmingham. By that point it was too late to run back out to Walgreens or wherever, so I went with the hotel products and fared pretty well. I’ll put it this way: it could have been much worse. It didn’t hurt that I had your powerful hair-related prayers working in my favor.

It took most of the day for us to get the video done, and it never occurred to me to take a single picture except for this one when Melanie and Christy were sporting some sah-weet costumes.

That is a lot of good hair in one photograph, people. The fact that Melanie’s is pulled back with several tiny clippies doesn’t do a thing to diminish its wonder.

Our friend Paige made supper plans for us Friday night, so we left the church where we’d been filming (shooting? making? I do not know the lingo.) the video and headed toward a trendy gluten-free restaurant in East Nashville. The traffic was terrible (TERRIBLE), and my enthusiasm may have been suffering since I had mixed feelings about the gluten-free restaurant and couldn’t help but picture a lot of mashed cauliflower and also kale (nothing against cauliflower and kale, you understand – but it had been a long day, and Mexican food sounded really good). Paige is typically a good restaurant-picker, though, so I decided that stepping outside of my gluten comfort zone might be a very fine thing and WHY NOT. Eventually we made it through the worst of the traffic, and I didn’t know it at the time, but Christy snapped this picture from the back seat.

Y’all, I love it so much, mainly because I don’t have any idea how many cities Melanie and I have driven through together over the last 8 years, but it’s a lot. For some reason I am almost always the driver, she is almost always the navigator, and somehow – through the power of Google maps and no small degree of sarcasm – we manage to find our way. So this picture is totally a framer for me, not to mention that these two comments from Christy’s Instagram cracked me up:

It was such a fair question.

The food at the gluten-free restaurant turned out to be pretty tasty; however, they were definitely having some A/C issues, but I’m choosing to be merciful about that at this juncture because I’m listening to Watermark on my headphones and snarky feels all wrong. So, even though it was, um, a little on the warm side, it was great to hang out and visit with friends I don’t see nearly enough.

It was also great to get back in the car and turn up the air to full blast and sit there and just REVEL in it, amen.

Hallelujah.

Praise His name.

So, to recap: Christy was as genuine and wonderful as we knew she would be, my hair mostly behaved, gluten-free restaurants are a real thing, and air conditioning is a blessing from on high.

I believe that just about covers it.

Hope y’all had a wonderful weekend!

p.s. Download Christy’s new album here.

p.p.s. Get your dotMOM tickets here.

p.p.p.s. Go tell your air conditioner or your favorite fan that you love it a lot. You might even want to make it some chocolate chip cookies to show your appreciation.