pho and tea bubbles

while lauren is here i have to work. it sucks because i'd love to hang out with her 24/7, but we think we've come up with a way to hang out and still allow for my work schedule too.

i love being lauren's social planner. people call or text or facebook me and are like "hey is lauren doing anything?" and i subdue my desire to tell them "yes... i am hanging with her all day!" and call in sick to work (which i would never do), and i be an adult and pencil them into her social calendar.

we thought it was gonna be tough to hang out since i work all week, but it is actually working pretty well. we have a default lunch date everyday unless someone else wants to steal her, and we SO look forward to it.

today (monday) she dropped me off at work, and then covertly filled my gas tank (grrr) before relaxing for a couple hours and then meeting me for lunch. we went to pho 777, a vietnamese noodle house, for lunch and it was fun to sit and chat for a bit in the middle of my busy work day.

then i relinquished her to andrew for the afternoon, and they spent four hours at starbucks and then went to visit mellum at his work. from what i hear, he about died of excitement when she slyly walked in and checked out the ice cream counter without him knowing she was there. mustve been a great moment! :)

i met up with them after work and we had a not-so-healthy dinner at wendys before everyone headed off to young life.

lauren had heard stories of how much i adore bubble tea, so at her request we headed over to partake of the brilliant bubble... it was really funny watching her reactions to the tapioca bubbles in the bottom of her tea.



after bubble tea we decided to invite ruth lipparelli to go on our pending grocery shopping excursion with us since we were near her house. she was finishing dinner her man had made when we arrived, and we sat down on the patio with luke and ruth and danel to wait for her to finish... and then we didn't move for four hours.

we laughed and talked and joked around for an hour or so before larry and mike bishop returned from a coffee date... and then shortly after they got back, andrew got home from young life, too. what a group we had! all fiesty and animated, telling stories about life and each of our respective africa adventures, too. we all can relate on that topic, for sure.

inbetween our stories and laughs, larry pegged the neighbor's barking dog with frozen paintballs when throwing it food to keep quiet didn't work anymore. one of larry's pet peaves is not being able to hear conversations in his backyard because of the barking dog. i could barely concentrate on the conversations around me when larry went to war with the mangy mutt.

then... after four hours in the lipparelli's backyard... lauren and i headed off to go grocery shopping. that was an interesting experience, since the last time we went grocery shopping included a man telling me his wife no longer satisfied him, upon seeing me at the kenyan marketplace. ha! being around each other is so weird when we think of everything in retrospective to the last time we hung out together. soooo different.