90 days

Happy Labor Day! This is one of my favorite holiday weekends....usually it signals that Fall is just around the bend, which is my favorite season of the year. And it's nice to have a 3 day weekend off with J. We've both been off together this weekend and that hasn't be the case for a while.

As of this weekend, we have been here for three months. I can hardly believe it. In many ways it seems longer and yet, it also seems like we just got here. Yesterday, we sang for the Mulitfaith Celebration at the newly opened BOK Center. It was a historic first for this city. And we were happy to have been a part of it. There was a community choir made up of over 300 singers (including J & I):

The arena was blessed by eleven co-celebrants:

The Rev. Mouzon Biggs Jr., Boston Avenue United Methodist Church
The Rev. Billy Joe Daugherty, Victory Christian Center Bishop
Edward J. Slattery, Catholic Diocese of Tulsa
James F. Johnson, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
Venerable Abbot Thich Duc Tri, Tam Bao Buddhist Temple
The Rev. William Christ, Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church
Rabbi Marc Fitzerman, Jewish Congregation B'nai Emunah
Raghavan Rajagopal, Hindu Temple of Greater Tulsa
Imam Mohamed Alghobashy, Masjid Al-Salam Islamic mosque
The Rev. Marlin Lavanhar, All Souls Unitarian Church
The Rev. Michelle K.T. Moulden, Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church

Here's an article on News6's webpage about it. It also features some video clips (which, for some reason, I am unable to embed or link directly here). The one of the choir is the song we started with, if you look closely, you can see J in the middle of the screen around 1'15" and I am at the top, in the back row, closer to the aisle of the right section (when the camera pans out).

After the concert, we decided to celebrate with dinner at The Chalkboard, a restaurant J has had on his list since we arrived in Tulsa. It's located at the historic Ambassador Hotel. We were the first patrons to be seated for dinner and basically had the place to ourselves. We started with a Taxi Cab Martini for me (pineapple and lime juice with a vanilla flavored cognac) and a regular three-olive Bombay gin martini for J. For starters we had the blue crab cakes...yummy! Then salads...Caesar for him (with fried capers and roasted garlic) and the House Pecan for me (with goat cheese, dried cherries and pecans).

Main courses were a two bone pork chop with blue cheese gnocchi in an apple reduction for me and the restaurant's famous Beef Wellington (Filet Mignon with Foie Gras Pate and Mushrooms wrapped in a Puff Pastry & baked till golden brown, finished with Marchands de Vin) for J, which came with haricot verts and smashed potatoes.


We each had a glass of Louis Latour 'Valmoissine', an awesome french burgundy wine, with our main courses and for dessert, we shared a slice of their amazing white chocolate drenched bread pudding. Yum, yum and yum! We were stuffed and both agreed that we can only eat like that once or twice a year. But it was good. And a good way to celebrate 90 days in our new town.