I'm goin' to... Kansas City, Kansas City, here I come...

Last weekend, we took a trip back to KC to see some friends of Tim's from vet school. (Well, they pretend they live in Kansas City, but it feels like they're practically in Oklahoma, it's so far south.) We flew in Friday afternoon (after a small hiccup in travel due to "ice on the runways in Dallas"). We checked out a couple of shopping venues; there's a great new place up north called the Zona Rosa. It looked really neat, but it's an outdoor mall, and, well, we Texans just aren't used to winter anymore. We hit a couple of malls though. One that we frequented when I was growing up was terribly disappointing; it must be close to closing, which is kind of sad. After killing enough afternoon time, we met some old family friends for dinner at Cascones. If you're ever up north in Kansas City and are looking for some Italian food, it's a great place. Plus, Tim was pleased to find out that they have Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat beer there; we can't get it here in Texas, and I know he misses it. He was drinking it all weekend. It was good to catch up with the friends and find out how their whole brood is doing. After dinner, we hopped back in the car for the drive down to Louisburg to Dave and Emily's house.

We spent Saturday and Sunday with them, and had a great time. Though it was tough to convince ourselves to venture out of the house much, given how chilly it was. Here's Emily snuggled up with her dog Derby Saturday afternoon:


I did get to experience an old KC favorite, though...Saturday night, we met some additional vet school friends for dinner at Strouds, home to some real good fried chicken. Everything's served family style, and you can finish off with a cinnamon roll to die for. After dinner, we did some bowling... always an interesting affair, especially when no one's really a bowler... Here are some photos from bowling: Dave and Emily, then Andy and Beth, then the boys together:



Sunday we had to head back, but we all stopped by one more friend's house for a little pre-Super Bowl celebrating. (Tim and I, of course, missed almost the whole game, since we were on the plane...)

All in all, it was a great trip...very relaxing, with no email access for two full days!

The 3M Half Marathon

A few weeks ago, some friends from college (and teammates of Tim's in college), Susan and Jeremy, came to visit. They've been in Albequerque for some time, and we haven't seen them in a couple of years. The real purpose behind their visit was to run the 3M Half Marathon that starts up here in North Austin and finishes downtown. Tim's been thinking about getting back in running form to run either this race or the Freescale Marathon, but he's been busying himself playing basketball instead of running. So he watched from the sidelines while Susan and Jeremy braved the chilly Austin morning for 13.1 miles. They both had great races (getting personal best times). On top of that, we got to spend the entire weekend with them, taking them to see a few of the Austin sites (and restaurants). Here's a post-race picture:

Arctic Blast 2007

Austin is in the grips of a winter storm. While the storm doesn't really compete with the old Missouri storms, the ice is pretty treacherous, and we've started getting a light dusting of snow on top. The dogs seem to enjoy the weather well enough:


It's not my fault that they're a bit blurry...it was hard to capture Casey especially when she wasn't moving.

Here's some of the ice on the shrubs out front:


And proof that it really is cold!

Visitors Beware...

Here's a little warning for anyone thinking about coming to visit us...

We've been here in Austin for about 2 and a half years now. We've had several visitors. But in less than three years, we've had three different sets of visitors who appeared and decided to stay in central Texas.

First, there were our friends James and Laura. They came to visit at Christmastime the first year we were here. They'd been living in San Diego, and when they returned, they realized they simply couldn't live anywhere other than Austin. They promptly returned that spring and have been here in town ever since.

Next came Tim's mother and brother. Arthur is stationed at Fort Hood (about an hour from Austin). Audrey is working on post there and lives in Kempner. (To be fair, I think Audrey actually decided to move BEFORE she ever visited...)

And finally, my parents have been down several times. On their second or third visit, they killed some time while Tim and I were working looking at neighborhoods. They happened upon Sun City in Georgetown, Texas (about a half an hour away). Sun City is a neighborhood dedicated to people "55 and better." With their retirement looming, this November, my parents came down and bought this house:

We expect them and my sister permanently sometime in late summer or early fall.

So, as always, we're more than happy to entertain any visitors. Just beware that you're risking major life changes if you make the trek down here to Austin...

Linens 'n Things

One of our dogs (Casey, if you don't know them well enough to tell the difference...) has an extreme love of linens. Especially wet towels. If a pile of the laundry is in the floor, she will seek out the wet towels and partake of a backflop on them, only after rubbing her nose in them for a bit. What follows is a sequence of pictures of just such an event. If you scroll fast enough, you may get a real-time effect (think digital flip-book...).

Happy 17 days after Halloween!

Camping

We've been looking for a weekend to take a little camping trip with the dogs. Between August and Thanksgiving, we found a single weekend where one of us wasn't working and we were both in town. It was the weekend before Halloween. (Sure, the post is late, but better late than never...) I got home from a work trip at midnight on Friday night, and we headed out Saturday mid morning. We went to a state park about an hour and a half north of Austin called Colorado Bend State Park. It was really a lovely park, and the weather was so beautiful that weekend that it was packed. We hadn't reserved a campsite, which was almost a problem. But not a terrible loss because we wanted one of the sites that requires a pretty significant hike-in (about a mile) to try to get the dogs away from the crowds.

Saturday afternoon, we first hiked into our campsite. (Note to selves: we need a new tent; the one we have is a six-person two room tent, which is simply not made for carrying any distance at all. Plus we discovered a pretty substantial hole...luckily it didn't rain, and Tim's an expert tent surgeon.) Once we were at the site, we got everything set up. The dogs behaved surprisingly well, especially with a river just across the way and us not allowing them to jump in it. Our campsite:

Sure, we had a slight amount of concern about the very large tree we put our tent under, but we figured it hadn't fallen all the way over yet, so what were the chances it would do so that night?

After all that was set up, we took a pretty short hike with the dogs (about 3 miles, maybe). It was in the 80s and Hannah got pretty hot. We bought the dogs a little backpack (think saddlebags for dogs) so they could carry their own water and such. I think Hannah got a bit tired (she was tasked with carrying it most of the time):


After we got back from the walk (and the park had some really nice trails), we made some dinner (dehydrated something to which we just had to add boiling water). As an aside here, Tim purchased himself a little backpacking stove before we went out, and this little thing can boil something like a liter of water in three minutes. And it weighs practically nothing. Anyway, dinner was adequate (I really didn't feel very good, so nothing would have tasted good), the dogs gobbled up their dinner, and we got ourselves ready to turn in. Everyone was quite tired, including the pups, but apparently they weren't up for sleeping with nothing between them and the ground but a tarp and the tent floor. Their pillow beds here at home have spoiled them. And in a goldilocks style event, Tims's sleeping bag wasn't quite good enough for them either. So this is what I had to deal with all night:

I finally got them to move enough so I could get inside my sleeping bag, but all night anytime I tried to move, I had to shove one of them with my foot to get some slack in the sleeping bag. Two asides about the night: 1) the dogs had to get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and we were forced to get out with them, only to be greeted by the most beautiful night sky we've ever seen, and 2) I've determined that peeing outside is not for me (a mile+ is a little too far to walk to facilities at 2 in the morning, it turns out...). The dogs were pretty good, even with all the sounds of wildlife outside the tent and a few other dogs within earshot. They quieted down pretty quickly and pretty well.

We got up in the morning and cleaned up our campsite. We'd put some thought into going to look at the gorgeous waterfall they apparently have in the park, but you can only get there on a guided tour, and they don't allow dogs on the tour. Neither one of us was willing to single handedly chaperone the dogs for two hours, so we opted for some different hikes instead. We trolled around the park for another 4 hours or so and got to see some little waterfalls at least. By the time we were finished with this, we were pooped (or at least I was pooped) so we headed home. Here are a few more views of the park: