We Went To Nashville, Y’all

June 23, 2015July 1, 2025 / Ally Bean / 25 Comments

Like just about every post that I write about our travels…

Zen-Den was in [fill in the blank] for work and I decided to join him.

In this case he was in Nashville, TN, aka Music City USA. So I flew down there for a goof-off weekend in a city that is cheerful and easy to navigate.

Nashville is fun, y’all. Here are the highlights of our Weekend.

:: We went to the Parthenon.

Built for Tennessee’s 1897 Centennial Exposition, this building has INCREDIBLE detail, a small art museum in the basement featuring regional American landscape art, and is located in a large, somewhat uncared for, city park.

I learned how little I know about Greek mythology while here, y’all.

:: We went to a fancy part of town called Green Hills.

There we wandered around a mall, and adjacent lifestyle center, that had many of the same stores that we have here, BUT they were twice as large with FRIENDLY sales help. As much as I don’t usually enjoy shopping, this I liked.

I bought a Coach purse, y’all.

:: We went to the Country Music Hall of Fame.

This museum was amazing. FASCINATING. Curated to tell, entertain and engage everyone with music, videos, instruments, album covers, photographs, costumes, interactive displays and tasteful decor, we enjoyed this museum more than we thought that we would.

I saw Elvis’s gold Cadillac, y’all.

:: We ate at Ted’s Montana Grill.

This is a chain restaurant, owned by Ted Turner, that features beef and buffalo, along with salads and fish and milkshakes. The restaurant was beautifully decorated in a 1970s steak-house style with lots of dark wood and shiny brass. The food was DELICIOUS and the service was attentive.

I ate a bison burger– and I washed my hands with Boraxo powdered soap, y’all.

:: And finally, the answer to the question that everyone asks when you go to Nashville: Yes, we went to the Grand Ole Opry.

It was GREAT. We saw lots of older performers who we’d never heard of [Connie Smith?], but eventually, as the evening progressed, we saw performers who we knew, like Vince Gill and Pure Prairie League. Then, in true Opry fashion, two superstars stopped by the Opry on a whim– and the crowd went crazy.

I saw Tricia Yearwood AND her husband, Garth Brooks, perform together, y’all.

My Weekend At Home With A Snotty Hacker

June 16, 2015June 16, 2015 / Ally Bean / 24 Comments

Last week Zen-Den got a cold. This is unusual.

He was traveling for work and somewhere along the way, on a plane or at a hotel perhaps, he picked up a nasty head cold that over the weekend morphed into wheezing and chest congestion.

This condition, as you can imagine, lead to lots of nose blowing and loud coughing. I dubbed him a snotty hacker, which I thought was clever.

He didn’t seem to appreciate my sly sense of humor, clearly showing you that he didn’t feel good.

Snotty hacker. That’s funny. Healthy people would laugh.

Whatever.

So this past weekend, when I wasn’t fetching hot tea or a blanket or a box of Kleenex, I goofed off in my own low-key, dear-lord-it’s-hot-and-humid-outside, kind of way.

The following are my three big takeaways from my time spent, more or less, alone.

I finished watching Grace and Frankie which is a wonderful new, not violent or crude, TV show available on Netflix.

The show, which stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as two straight women whose husbands have left the women for each other, is smart + authentic + funny.

Just a little bittersweet.

And has the most amazing house porn, the sort of which that is usually reserved for movies.

Go watch it now. I give it 5 stars.

Ever since I heard the whole “Call Me Caitlyn” thing, it has bugged me. Not the idea that a human being has the right to do whatever he or she wants to do within and/or to his or her body.

No, that I get.

What has bothered me, I finally figured out, is that a woman born in 1949 would not be named Caitlyn, a name that showed up in the the 1970s. She’d be called Linda, the 1st most popular girl name that year. Or Mary, the 2nd most popular.

And if by chance her name was “Caitlyn” it wouldn’t be spelled all modern-like. It would be spelled Kate Lynn. Shortened for the 9th most popular girl name, Kathleen + basic middle name, Lynn.

Kathleen Lynn. A perfectly acceptable 1940s name.

Right?

I finished reading A Little Salty to Cut the Sweet: Southern Stories of Faith, Family, and Fifteen Pounds of Bacon by Sophie Hudson.

Sophie is a blogger who took her personal stories to the next level by writing this funny, charming memoir. The book, published in 2013, has been on my list of books to read for years, so I’m not exactly talking about it on a timely basis.

No surprise there. My reading is rarely current.

However, be that as it may, I thought that I’d tell you, my gentle readers, that if I could pick a family to join, I want to be part of Sophie’s family. I know that I could fit right in immediately.

I like bacon. And I adore kindness.

Both of which are in abundance in this delightful memoir. Highly recommended.

We Went To Washington, D.C.

April 24, 2015July 1, 2025 / Ally Bean / 28 Comments

ZEN-DEN NEEDED TO be in D.C. for his work, so we wrapped a couple of days around his business travel– and went to Washington, D.C. for a fast little vacay.

We figure that it must have been 15+ years since we’d been there together, which surprised us. At one point, Z-D’s job in the midwest took him to D.C. about half of the year, so I’d meet him there on the weekends.

D.C. was our favorite vacation playground.

# # #

Cherry blossoms were past their prime, but tulips were everywhere. I snapped these photos at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.

# # #

FROM A TOURIST’S point of view much has changed for the better in D.C.

What amazed us was how much cleaner, easier, prettier, friendlier the city has become. No snarly people [I’m looking at you, Boston] or people with superior attitudes [I’m looking at you, NYC].

Instead, hotel employees, nice. Cabbies, pleasant. Museum employees, helpful. Restaurant wait staff, attentive. TSA, patient.

Who would have thought that while the jackweasels in the U.S. Congress can’t agree on which way is up, the rest of Washington is buzzing along like cooperative little bees making honey while the flowers grow?

# # #

I took all of these tulip photos with Zen-Den’s iPhone, which is something that I’ve never done before.

# # #

WHILE MOST OF our time in D.C. was taken up with business events, we did manage to do a few things.

We had a delicious lunch at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, which is a gorgeous old-fashioned hotel in Adams Morgan that you may remember from scenes in The Pelican Brief.
We rode the metro which made me feel like a young twenty-something fresh out of college, assuming I’d end up in a big east coast city. [That didn’t happen, now did it?]
We went to the National Gallery of Art, toured it, then ate lunch in the cafeteria in the basement by the waterfall because… well, that’s what we do when we’re in D.C. together.
We wandered around the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden which was pretty even if we were a week late for the cherry blossoms.
We saw the Navy Yard, the Watergate Complex and Rock Creek Park from a taxi.
And while waiting at Reagan National Airport for our flight home, we saw an Honor Flight of WWII & Korea veterans arriving in D.C. At their gate a live jazz quartet playing pop standards from the 1940s & 1950s met the group, while a crowd gathered round and applauded.

# # #

While the flowers were glorious, these iPhone photos don’t do them justice. Next time I’ll bring my real camera with me. 🙂

# # #

IT’S BEEN A long time since I’ve been anywhere that I felt as comfortable as I did on this Washington D.C. trip. We’re both ready to return soon.

Next time I’d like to focus on seeing more of the presidential and war monuments; take in a few more museums; perhaps go to a concert; and breakfast each morning on fresh east coast bagels with a schmear & a coffee regular.

How have I lived without them?

A Quiet Sunday Afternoon At Home With A Patient On The Mend

March 29, 2015April 1, 2015 / Ally Bean / 20 Comments

“Ms. Bean, what the heck are you doing this weekend? I see you messing around with frozen peas. Now if it was peanuts I’d understand, but peas? Please explain, I’m all ears.”

• Looking out the window today I see, beyond an inquisitive squirrel staring in at me, a spring day filled with pale blue sky above leafless gray trees. A couple of daffodils have made their appearance in the yard, but the forsythia bushes are showing no sign of joining the daffs.

Outside the temperature is in the upper 30s/lower 40s, which is more wintry than springy. However, I’m not going anywhere today so the weather can do that which it wants to do without me whining about it.

As if I have any control over it to begin with.

• I’m at home today looking after Zen-Den who had surgery [to correct ptosis] on his eyes on Friday. His recuperation is going well. He’s walking around the inside of the house without any trouble, able to see well enough to play Farm Heroes on his iPhone.

And beginning to get bored with the 20 minutes on/20 minutes off post-surgery eye icing schedule. No longer do the little plastic bags of frozen peas, used to ice his eyes, charm him with their whimsical healing properties.

No, he’s leaning toward grumpy now– and I fear that he’d rather eat the peas than wear them. But I persevere and follow him around with the little green ice packs, forcing him to use them for at least 10 minutes on/30 minutes off.

This schedule will have to do.

• And with that I’m off to bake some banana bread. The surgeon’s office did not specifically mention it as necessary for a proper recuperation, but I figure it can’t hurt. Zen-Den loves it– and it might just be the thing to coerce him into cooperating with me and those damned little plastic bags of frozen peas.

“If you sit still with your pea packs on for 20 minutes, then you can have a big slice of banana bread afterwards. Now wouldn’t that be nice?”

Later, kids. Much to do.