TIME WARP II

Miss Alexis, who has always had very strong opinions about style!

Lex and Chase were 2 1/2 when the Sanfords took a job near College Station, and we got transferred to Midland.  It was a hard, hard thing to be moving so far from them, but there was one consolation.  John's parents would only be 20 minutes away from us.  Good thing...

for our little Austin arrived just a couple of months after the move, and we needed all the help we could get!  A year or two later, our friends Danny and Peggy moved there as well, along with several other Mobil couples we knew from Houston.  Such was life with a big oil company.

Pawpaw George and Theda come to hand out our candy on Halloween, so we can both take our little critters trick-or-treating.

Midland was a great place to live.  Oil towns aren't like most other small towns, where it can take them years to accept a newcomer.  Oil people know they will probably get transferred again in a few years, so they don't waste any time.  They jump in headfirst and start making friends.  Within a year you're considered an old-timer, and it's your job to welcome the newbies.

We lived in a fantastic neighborhood, with Bunco groups, babysitting co-ops and block parties, and we joined a wonderful church, with the best Mothers' Day Out program ever, and ministers who became our good friends, and who could be a lot of fun at a good murder mystery party.

Best of all, I found the greatest job ever!  Bunco friend Beverly knew a girl named Barb, who had a catering business called Chez Vous.

Barb and Beck help celebrate John's 40th on New Year's Eve

Bev and I both started helping her out with parties, and before long, most of our neighborhood and church friends were helping out as well!  When both  kids were old enough for Mothers Day Out, I started working as their office manager two days a week.  Barb's partner was a crazy French chef named Dominique, whom everyone adored -- especially our kids!  He always fed them special treats when they stopped by the office, or whipped up some French-style hot chocolate from scratch, and gave them fast rides through the kitchen on rolling chairs.

Our Austin (striped shirt) hanging out with the CV catering kids crowd.

Through Barb and Dom we met Ron the florist, who hired some of the catering moms to become his Ronettes -- the crew that helped him decorate people's homes for the holidays and such.  Fun times!

All these new friends, though, did nothing to displace our old ones.  We met up with the Sanfords in Dallas several times, when visiting my folks, and one time they came to visit us, then we drove on out to the Davis Mountains for a little vacation together. (Before moving to west Texas, I didn't even know we had mountains in Texas!)  We also met up with them and other friends from Houston, including Nellie and Dave and their two kids, down in the Hill Country, to do some rafting and tubing.

Danny Boy

After just a couple of years in Midland, Danny and Peggy got transferred to Aberdeen, Scotland.  While they were there, we used our frequent flier miles to go visit our Eric in Denmark, then met up with the Reehs in London for a few days, while my folks and John's split up watching our kids for us back in Midland.  Our first get-away!

Meanwhile, my hubby had become one of the Rotating Equipment Specialists for Mobil.  It was his job to travel around to the different gas plants in west Texas and New Mexico, to make sure all those ginormous turbines and compressors were well maintained, and to trouble-shoot any problems.  He said this position was a bit different from that of most engineers, in that he really couldn't see us having to move anywhere in the foreseeable future.  So, after 10 or 12 years of worrying about "resale value", and keeping everything in our houses strictly neutral, I finally did this to my living area:

You know what that means don't you?  It means that, before the paint was even dry, we started hearing rumblings of unrest!