"It must be evening"

We got home from buying things to make dinner and the sky was a beautiful, very blue and pink. I told Katie to look at the sky and she said, "it must be evening." For a child who calls yesterday "last night" regardless of what time she was referring to, I loved the fact that she knew evening.

You can see one of our crape myrtles. They are a really artistic tree with beautiful flowers in the summer and smooth curved branches highlighted in the winter. I love looking out our kitchen window at this tree.

I recently met someone who moved here from NYC to marry his wife. He said that he was reserving judgment on Dallas for 2 years - he wouldn't even tell his sister what he thought. I admire this. Given my tendency to be, perhaps, a little too open, I can only hope that I can show some restraint. If people ask me how I like Dallas, I usually just say "I'm adjusting." Yes, there is subtext - there are only so many euphamistic expressions one can use. But of course the truth is that I miss my friends most of all. My family I still speak to all the time, every day, so that hasn't changed at all. For my friends, well I think of them all the time, I miss them all the time, but I don't talk to them all the time so it might be hard for them to know how much I do miss them.

Katie is pretty funny. She has made lots of friends in school. But because her friends in NYC were the children of my friends, she seems to assume that I must be friends with her school friends' moms. This, unfortunately, hasn't happened, but there's always hope for the future. You have to have a certain level of comfort or familiarity with people to invite their child over to your house and that's a hard part for me. Who likes rejection? In so many ways I feel like I'm the new kid again like I was in 5th grade. I'm just thankful that Katie doesn't feel that way.

To highlight an amusing "you know you're not in NY" anecdote of the week. I went to an event for "married Jewish women under 42" a few days ago. Besides the fact that I felt completely out of place in terms of conversation, I met a few women that Peter grew up with. One specifically asked me why I didn't take Peter's last name. Did we change decades in Dallas? Why should anyone care if I have my husband's name or not?