Gwen Stefani "winds it up" in Dallas...

We had a great time celebrating Cinco de Mayo at the Smirnoff in Dallas, listening to Akon and Gwen Stefani! I always look forward to hanging out with the OG Abilene crew; after all two out of these three people talked to me and were seen in public with me during the middle school years! They deserve brownie points for sticking it out :) As you can tell from the pictures, we had a great time singing along, acting stupid and dancing around... that's just how we roll!

I feel so lucky to still be such good friends with Allison, Becky, and Trisha after 12 years. The time has gone by so fast, and as we've aged I think we've all grown into ourselves a little more, changed in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways and have been through some of the more major life-changing experiences- death, marriage, careers, moving away from Abilene, etc. But somehow that underlying "glue" that brought us together during those awkward, unsure days has remained just as strong, if not stronger; which is amazing! I feel really blessed to have friends who laugh and love so fiercely and let me be as weird or as dumb as I feel like being... that's pretty rare. It's nice to be surrounded by people who get you :)

End of sentimental journey! And onto the concert itself...

The opening act was Lady Sovereign from the UK, who was kind of rapper/hip hop mix. She was OK. She's not really my style musically but at least she was entertaining; having an accent helped too. Akon was an awesome opening act! He has a really good voice and has a lot more hit songs than I realized. He was a lot of fun and got the party started.

Sadly, Becky and I were walking back from our funnel cake/diet coke run when Gwen started her first song, "Sweet Escape" which is one of my favorites. Luckily, we could hear it well, but had to try and find our way back to our table cloth lawn blanket in the dark! I got some pretty good pictures of Gwen, courtesy of the extreme zoom of my digital camera. I also had a lot of fun with the video feature; it's a fun way to be able to re-enjoy some clips from my favorite parts of the concert. I'm not sure I know how to post them... but I'll try! I thought Gwen did a really good job, her voice sounds just as good as on the albums she puts out, which is always impressive. She had tons of extravagant costumes and costume changes, which kept it interesting.

And she played the two songs I had come to see, "Cool" and "Sweet Escape." So all in all, it was a great show. She even wandered around in the audience during "Cool" which I thought was neat/cool (haha)... too bad she didn't make it back to the lawn seats, although she did give us a shoutout. (P.S.- If I'm ever a famous singer, I'm definitely making it back to the lawn... maybe I could fly in over the lawn seats or something. I'll have to work on that...) And she talked adoringly about Kingston, her son, which I thought was so sweet. She seems like a cool gal, even from a distance. One of her encore songs, "The Real Thing," was really touching because apparently she wrote it about her family.

All in all, it was a great night. On a melancholy note, Stephen left today for his six week stint in Odessa for his OB/Gyn rotation :-( It was a hard day for me, I hate knowing that I'll be coming home to an empty apartment each evening and won't be able to look forward to our lunch dates during the week. All this probably makes me a pathetic, needy, typical female... but I don't care! When you love someone, you want to be with them, and want them to be able to hug you when you've had a crappy day or make you laugh by making weird faces and doing impersonations... it's just not the same over the phone. But I know we will survive; we survived through six weeks of separation when I was in Corpus Christi. So if anyone reading this wants to hang out at ANY time, I'll most likely be totally free! Peace out.

PS- Sorry if my post is hard to read, for some reason, it keeps changing my formating... I'll have to experiment!