So, my dreamy husband made a late-night run to the store tonight and this is what he purchased:

Yep.  Cauliflower.

He has found some low-carb, low-calorie alternative to mashed potatoes in which he boils cauliflower, then mashes it up with milk, butter, and salt & pepper.  He thinks it's good.  We think it smells like feet.

But, who am I to argue with results?  He IS pretty dreamy.

Hey, remember when I posted that glib post about how when I went to Blackpool in 1992, we had the most technically difficult dresses known to man?

I was wrong.

THESE guys do.  

This is the current team, the ones who were practicing in the Spanish Hall in my previous post.  It turns out that their dresses LIGHT FREAKING UP, and not only do they light up, but they have computer chips in them that make the LIGHTS CHANGE COLOR at certain points in the music.  And, they suddenly stopped working two weeks before the competition, causing the engineering students who designed them to go into their own dress-induced panic-mode.

But, they got fixed and were apparently dazzling at the competition in Blackpool, where they won and got a first-ever standing ovation.  So, 21 years from now, one of these girls can write a glib blog post about how she wore the most stressful Blackpool dress ever and the current team just doesn't know how easy they have it, even though that current team will be stressing about some fancy malfunctioning aspect of their dresses.  Although, in 21 years, I can't even imagine what fancy thing will not be working just days before the competition.

So, you know that we ordered a new table and chairs and consequently sold our old ones over a week ago.  Well, the new stuff came and when the guys set up the table, it was broken, so it had to be reordered.  

Now we have chairs, but no table.  Every time I pass this room, I feel like it is set up for a church-basement-type support group.  I kind of want to sit down and say something like "Hello, my name is Jill and I am a recovering Story Junkie." 

Except, that would be a lie.  I'm not recovering, nor do I have any intention of doing so.

I've said before that the best thing about our move here to Texas is that Brad is once again in our lives.  I love that he occasionally will come home for lunch, just because he can.

Sadly, our refrigerator doesn't always support this habit.  Today, poor Brad came home for lunch and the best meal he could scrape up was cheese sticks wrapped in lunch meat ham.  Sorry Mann.

Memorial Day. 

 

While the rest of America gathers with friends and family for sunrise flag ceremonies, visits to graves, or backyard barbeques, the Texas Bitners go to a movie and Mexican food.

 This photo was posted on Facebook today.  The current BYU Ballroom Dance Co. is in Blackpool, England preparing for their HUGE competition this week.  Blackpool is THE ballroom competition every year, but BYU only goes every three years, and they have a long-standing tradition of winning the formation team competitions in both the Standard and the Latin categories.

 I went in 1992 and practiced my Standard medley in the Spanish Hall, just like these guys are doing.  I see this picture and can just smell it--the old musty hall, sweat mixed with Powder-Fresh Secret solid, mixed with my partner's Speed Stick, mixed with the laundry detergent that I used to wash my leotard the night before in the bathroom sink.  Oh, and gum.  You have to have gum when you're dancing this close for that many hours.

As sweaty as these girls probably are, they have it easy compared to our 1992 team.  After months of practicing 10-20 hours per week, we debuted our medley at a pre-tour show at BYU in May.  We had fancy/shmancy dresses that actually were two dresses in one, so we began the routine in red, then with a rip of a bunch of snaps, we transformed into white.  But, at the pre-tour dress rehearsal just a week before the competition (the first time we'd ever danced in the costumes), we learned a few key things about these dresses: 

1) when you have two-dresses-in-one, they are heavy--12 pounds to be exact--and when you spin with that much extra weight around your body, you spin crooked.  And slow.

2) the snappy things that are supposed to rip apart in one awe-inspiring motion and change the color of your dress don't always rip apart very easily, so the man ripping the dress of his partner has to RIP THE DRESS HARD without throwing the poor girl to the floor.

3) those dreamy, gauzy scarfy things that are hooked on your shoulder and wrist will become irreparably tangled in the tiara bobby-pinned to your elaborate up-do.

So, we hit Blackpool with only a week before we competed and went into full-scale, dress-induced panic mode.  We spent nearly every waking minute rehearsing in those dresses--those hot, 12 pound dresses--in the un-air-conditioned Spanish Hall in June.

I don't have any pictures of our Spanish Hall rehearsals, but here are some shots of the rehearsal we did on the actual competition floor of the Empress Ballroom:

 See, we started off red.  

(We referred to this intro as The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.)

Then de-snapped and went to white--ta DA!!

(That's me on the far right.  You can see that the one girl's dress didn't desnap correctly.  I can guarantee that we did an immediate do-over.)

This photo was taken during the actual competition--which we won, by the way.  The dresses looked a LOT better than they felt ... and smelled.

Here are all us Standard girls just after we danced.  We were smiling because not only did we win, but we were now done with wearing those stupid dresses eight hours a day. 

So, this is me wishing the current BYU Standard Team lots of luck in Blackpool.  Because, I've been there and I know how it feels to have the pressure of years of BYU teams before you winning and hoping you aren't the one to break the streak.  

But, I'm also reminding them that they don't know how good they've got it.  Because, we had to do it wearing the heaviest dresses ever made, hoping we didn't get trapped in the wrong color.  Oh, and we also walked to rehearsal uphill both ways, barefoot in the snow.  

So, y'all better win.

Since we spent today in a cowpie-ridden field of wildflowers getting some family photos taken, I thought I'd post one of the first family photos we ever took.

The Brad-and-Jill-Bitners circa 1997.

And just in case you were wondering, there were no cowpies in this one.