17 years later

It's June 11, which means I met my husband 17 years ago today! We met at a Jason's Deli restaurant in Arlington, Texas (with mutual friends), so every June 11, we celebrate by going to Jason's Deli. There isn't one where we live now, so we drove an hour to Tampa to find one. Yum! They have excellent broccoli cheese soup--even our kids love it. Also huge stuffed potatoes, though I just went with the salad bar today. Anyway, that was a nice celebration, and we stopped at a mall on the way home where the kids and I rode on a two-story carousel.

Another big event this week was my 5-year-old son's dance recital for his arts preschool. This dance school has so many classes they have 10 nights of recitals--last night's alone had 33 acts. And tickets were $14 apiece, even for us! Eek. But his dance was REALLY cute, really good, and a real showstopper. Of course, part of the appeal was the adorable little boys in tuxedos (3 in this case, dancing with maybe 7 girls), especially when there were only 5 boys performing the whole evening! But my son did really well, knew his part wonderfully, & had a big smile to boot. He's quite the performer. Here's a pic I took of him before his first performance of this dance at his preschool graduation a few weeks ago:

Oh, June 11 is also Owen Nolan's birthday in my short story "Owen Nolan's Square-Wheeled Bike," coming out this summer in the Summer Shorts anthology from Blooming Tree Press! The date worked really well for my story, since I needed a date near the beginning of summer, but I picked that particular date because of meeting my husband that day. So, Happy Birthday to Owen, and I hope you got a good present this year. ;-)