Houston and Dad

This past weekend my honeypot and I went to Houston to visit some of his high school friends. They have a 14 month old boy who was really cute and mellow. We were lucky enough to be there long enough for him to be confortable around us. It was nice.

The best part of Houston, besides the super cheap house prices and the warm weather, was that where they lived there were bike paths everywhere. Where they live was clearly at one time a development - as demonstrated by the windy roads and lack of grid streets. I guess it still is a development. However, it was great there. They clearly did not clear cut the land before building because there were lost of nice trees.

The other cool thing about them is that he's a pilot and so he works for blocks of time and then is home for larger blocks of time. She's a stay at home Mom. So they get these larger blocks of time when they don't have to do anything. It's pretty cool. Yeah, I'm jealous. It sure would be nice to not be limited to my weekends - the same time I have to do all my errands that have to be completed during "regular business hours." They deserve to have such a great setup.

In other news, my Dad is coming to visit! He'll be here Thurs night through really early Monday morning. We have plans to go Kart race on Friday at the fun one. And we might go to Maverick's during the weekend. If anybody else has a good idea for something fun to do while he's here, I'm all ears.

Careful Consideration of Creative Crafts (and Aliteration)

On Saturday I met up with a friend and had a canning party. We bought some basil, onions and tomatoes at the nearby farmer's market and canned a red sauce and an Indian saucy thing. The red sauce was really more of an orange with the heirloom tomatoes we used. Too bad we were only a couple months late in buying the tomatoes. Next year I might try and can when the tomatoes are plentiful (and cheap), instead of waiting until possibly the last weekend they're available.

The other highlight was having breakfast with my long lost friend who moved to Dublin for a girl. Considering how indecisive he can be, it's a wonder he made it over there. I'm really glad he did because she's really special (and I think it was good for him to go.)

Another highlight was my friend's 31st birthday party on Sunday night. It was quite an event. Besides the homemade enchiladas (complete with homemade mole saucy, that was out of this world) it was an experience to be around so many toddlers. It was chaotic. I was whelmed. I enjoyed watching them be themselves and explore, but wow, those kids sure do have a lot of energy. The parents looked a little .. run down. Especially the ones with the 7 week old. I suppose that's to be expected.

The picture above is the canned goods and the finished hats. The green hat was made by my honeypot and includes some daring dinosaur fins that stand straight up like a Mohawk when worn. The other hat is one that I made in about a day and a half. It helped that I was stuck in an hour and a half of traffic just to get to work. I made about half of the hat then. No, I wasn't driving, I was carpooling.

Another exciting thing in my life is riding my bike to work. I have this super fun bouncy fold up commuter bike that I rode the end of last week to work. It's pretty fun. It has shocks on the seat post.

And the last thing worth mentioning is that I finally finished my wedding album. My work generously bought me this silver engraved wedding album right after I got married and it's been sitting on my desk these many months beckoning me to fill it with the best pictures of our wedding. I finally went through all my hundreds of pictures from friends and hand picked the best ones. I'm impressed with the result and I'm excited to have it (Thanks Stephanie!). There really is something to the tactile nature of physical pictures as opposed to digital ones.

That's one of the reasons I'll be watching closely the success or failure of the Kindle. Amazon's replacement for the book. I can't imagine every giving up the ability to curl the edges of my paperbacks while reading. (I'm currently reading Wicked by Gregory Maguire.)