Pool partaaaaay. The beginning of the end of 3 exciting years!

A couple of weekends ago, I went to a pool party hosted by a pair of some of my dearest friends. Two great guys I met within the first few weeks I moved to Jacksonville.
I was really looking forward to it for several reasons, and one of those being that I was going to be home alone for three days while Kyle was in New Orleans on a job interview and to celebrate his mom's 60th birthday. He left early Saturday morning, less than 12 hours after I found out that I was offered an assistantship from LSU and so I desperately wanted to celebrate with him and was feeling a little blue about his leaving. So, the pool party would be a chance for me to get out of the house and hang out with friends, but also a chance to celebrate the accomplishment with people that I knew would want to toast to the good news and celebrate the success with me.

When I first moved to Jax, away from school, all my family, friends and anything else familiar that I'd spent 23 years of my life knowing, I felt a little lonely. But in no time at all, thanks to our upstairs neighbor, and a guy that was a bestman for Kyle in our wedding last summer, I became close friends with a group of people that I will never forget. They truly are a special bunch of folks and ones who really further solidified what I knew to be true; gays have great taste, are excellent cooks and are down right some of the most welcoming, warm and hospitable people I've had the pleasure of knowing. I love them all.

Now, I won't get too political here, but it is my blog so I'll do as I please. This is more of a nod to my mother's incredible child-rearing skills and her ever so elusive way of teaching me important life lessons without going into some long diatribe and follow up Q & A to see if I absorbed and processed her point. I'm from the bible belt of the country and so in the Midwest, and especially so in smaller towns, you don't always find the most "progressive" thinkers shall I say. However, my mother has always been a very compassionate and kind woman that treats all human beings as equals. Thus, I grew up with that very same mentality.

I recall specifially the moment in which I realized my mother's beliefs had worn off. I was in 6th grade working on a homework assignment with a classmate and friend of mine when we started talking about Elton John, for whatever reason I can't recall. She made a statement about his lifestyle choice by referring to EJ as a, and my gosh I laugh to myself now at the very thought of it, "tutie frutie." It clearly reflected her parents' view on and uncomfortableness with same-sex relataionships. I don't know how I presumed that term as a reference to him being gay, but I paused and casually responded. "As long as he pays his taxes and treats people good I don't think it should matter who he loves or spends his life with." I wasn't at all shocked at the time that I said it, but as I got older and had to convince a very conservative friend of mine that having a gay roommate would be totally fine, I recalled that moment and laughed that I had even been able to articulate with the same air of matter-of-factness and compassion my mother did at the young age of 12. Either way, that perspective stayed with me and allowed me to be comfortable with a group of people different than I, but not really because we all have sooo many other things in common that connect us.

So, being the gracious and fabulous party hosts they were, I had a great time, as usual. But I didn't take a lot of pix. I'm going to try and get better at that since I'll want to share them with you.