Obedience Class

We've had Chuy almost two weeks, and we have been learning how to be good dog owners as she is learning to be a good dog. She has already learned how to sit on command and is mostly house trained (although every time we say that it seems she has an accident).

Neither one of us have ever trained a dog how to walk on a leash. I kinda just thought you put the leash on, she would start walking and then realize when she hit the end of the line that she needed to stay closer to me. Not the case. She runs ahead, runs behind, runs to the side. Chuy strains on her leash so hard I would get really worried that she was going to hurt her neck. Apparently this is not as easy as we thought it would be!

So I started reading. Everyone agrees a dog in training should be on a harness so the neck is safe, so I got one of those. But then everything was geared toward a dog that pulled forward- you should stop until she stops pulling. Chuy pulls occasionally, but most of the time she is behind us, sniffing, stopping, and recently, sitting (usually in the middle of the street). So I didn't know what to do. I tried waiting out the stops while keeping pressure on the leash- but the stops just kept getting longer. I tried keeping her on a super short leash so she couldn't get too far away, but that just seemed to really anger her. We got to the point where she wouldn't come in the door anymore.

What to do? We went to the library and checked out three dog training books. We signed up for obedience class. We can't make the first one, so the trainer said we could come in that day and have a make up class.

We walked in and went to the training area, where Chuy promptly pooped. Luckily, that was not indicative of how the session went. Turns out it was a private lesson, which was great. We asked his all our questions and he really helped with everything from jumping up to eating and even walking.

As we should have guessed, it turns out the problem was us. Apparently have been using our clicker all wrong. We had phased out the treats way too early and now she didn't trust us. We are now way more consistent that clicker means treat every time, and even in the 15 hours since we went to the class things have improved dramatically! She wasn't walking because we clicked it every time she walked forward, but never gave her a treat.

Now we have homework, and her next class will be on the 17th- we hope for even more improvement!

Chuy

This week we went to pick up our new addition to the family- a little 7 month old welsh terrier. So far she's everything we hoped for- she likes to play and is full of energy, but she still likes to cuddle with us on the couch. Even in the past few days, she's had a lot of new experiences- meeting dogs and little kids, walking on a leash, and riding in a car!

Andrew's Birthday

It was Andrew's birthday this Friday! He has finals this week, so we couldn't do too much that was exciting since he studied most of the weekend. We made a curry together out of one of our favorite cookbooks, and then we ate cake and opened presents. Last year my mom got me cake decorating tools, but I haven't had much success- the frosting has to be very stiff, and I always make it too runny, but this time I finally got it right. I decided to stick to straight lines to make it more likely that I would have success- here's the outcome!

Ice

I thought when I got married my life would get a lot easier on Mondays. No more having to spell my name my name slowly at the airport, car rental, hotel, etc. I was pretty used to it and had a whole spiel: "B, as in 'boy,' A (pause to make sure they write it down), L, A, Z like 'zebra,' E." Once I got married I thought it would be easy- who doesn't know how to spell "Ice?" Common word, one syllable, no ambiguity...or so I thought.

As soon as I got my ID changed I learned that "Ice" is not much easier for people. They don't want to believe it is actually a last name, and they really don't like to start words with the letter "I." They would much rather it start with a consonant and their finger will hesitate over the "I" key as they start to type. They want it to be almost anything but Ice- Rice, Tice, Bice. I usually have to spell it, repeat it, and nod yes when they ask, "Really, Ice?" Oh well. At least they don't mispronounce it once they get it!

The plus side of this is that the name is very memorable. Most of the time once someone gets it, they remember it from then on, so most of the LAX Avis counter and the South Bay Marriott knows me on sight!

Fall Hike

Karen came to visit this past weekend. After I was gone nearly all day Saturday, the three of us went on a hike Sunday morning. As evidenced by hats, fall has finally arrived here in Austin!

this weekend...

Happy Halloween!

Didn't Andrew do a good job carving?

Spokane Wedding Annoucement

Our wedding announcement from Spokane- as my mom says, I think this means the wedding is officially over!

So You Think You Can Dance

My mom, sister, and I are all big fans of So You Think You Can Dance. Every year the the top ten go on tour, and this year the Dallas date fell on a weekend my sister was already coming home for a wedding. I took advantage of Andrew studying for his midterms and headed up to Dallas as well.

Here we are before we headed out to girls night (my dad declined the opportunity to see the show with us..can't imagine why!). We had a great time watching the show- it was a lot of fun.

Austin House Updates

Last weekend my parents came up with the table my dad has been building for us- it is beautiful! My dad brought the painting that was a wedding present from Andrew's grandma a few weeks ago, so we are almost all set now. The painting looks great in our front room- our house is filling up!

Wedding Annoucement!

Our wedding announcement was in the local paper in Dallas late last week!

Vegas Traps

So last weekend Andrew made the Vegas Roach Traps. At first we were a little disappointed because we didn't seem to be catching any. They also seemed to tip over remarkably often. Then yesterday Andrew found three of them caught in one trap! He saved them for me to see his successes but i got home late last night and by this morning the trap was tipped over. So now we think we have been catching more then we thought, but must have an animal that comes by at night at eats the roaches out of the traps- probably thinking we are the best thing ever for catching his dinner for him! Either way, they haven't been spotted in the house in a long time, which is good news to me!

Creepy Crawlies

Over the past month we have learned that if you move into a house where two guys have lived for two years with two dogs, it’s going to be a while before you can comfortably call it “clean.” Despite several broom and swifter sweeps, we kept finding dog hair for the first two weeks or so. When we moved in we also dealt with a brief ant invasion. They were tiny little things, and easily thwarted. Every time we put an ant trap somewhere they would move to the next stop- from our kitchen sink to our bathroom cabinet and on. We just kept making life uncomfortable for them and they gave up in about a week.

About the time we finally got the last of the dog hair our latest problem reared its ugly head. Roaches. We found the first one the Sunday evening we had our friend E.Ray over for dinner to thank him for helping us move. It was the first roach I’ve seen since I left Manhattan and it was a doozy- at least an inch and a half long. At the time, we told ourselves that it must have come in on a plant we had just brought in from the outdoors. Andrew heroically killed it and thankfully E.Ray did not seem concerned about my food being cooked in the same house as a roach. I was a little upset, however- all our food is sealed and we maintain good kitchen hygiene, so we shouldn’t have this problem! Gross!

The next morning I woke up at 5 am to catch my flight to LA. I turned on the bathroom light to take a shower and there was another one! I went to wake up Andrew (one of the benefits of living with a guy!) and he killed it for me and then stumbled back to bed. I left for LA, and over the week Andrew found one monster roach about every two days. Through Wikipedia we learned that roaches like damp areas and only need a few crumbs a week to survive. We are highly suspicious that the air conditioning system is to blame- it runs under the house and sends air in through floor vents. Water condenses on it and so it seems it would make the perfect little roach highway. Andrew spent several hours plugging holes in the house so that if they do make it in, they are no nooks and crannies to hide in. I bought roach traps and we thought we had fixed the problem- there had been no roach sightings in several days. Alas, this weekend we started noticing baby roaches. Andrew is continuing to kill them valiantly and this weekend I am going to make some “vegas roach traps.”

Soon, and the sooner the better, we will be 100% roach free.

First Football Game

Here are some pictures from the first football game!
We had pretty good seats...
Before the game, they retired Vince Young's number. He's still their favorite player...
If we look hot and sweaty, it's because we are.
These aren't the best pictures in the world, but the guy in the orange shirt is Matthew Mcconaughey

Side Yard Pics

Our side yard was a bit of a mess when we moved in, and I spent several hours the last two weekends working on it.

Before, the stones beyond that weird gate on the right were covered in about 4 inches of dirt.

I uncovered all of this:





















There was a pile of rocks in our backyard, so I used them to make a pathway around the corner- helpful in the heavy rains we've been having!




















The driveway hadn't been cleaned in many years, so I spent a lot of time raking the dirt and cutting the vines that were growing in the left 4 feet of this picture.

An Austin weekend...

I didn't get home until Friday night this week, so it was a little shorter weekend than normal. We still managed to fit in a lot...

Friday night we went to a Brazilian Tex-Mex restaurant for dinner. I wasn't sure what to expect because the only Brazilian food I've had is the steakhouses, but it was really good. Andrew got a shrimp dish described as: Bobo de Camarao (Best of Austin Chronicle Winner) Shrimp and yucca tossed with onions and bell peppers in a tomato cream sauce, served with steamed rice. He loved it!

I got Galinhada (Brazilian paella) Jasmine rice and chicken seasoned with saffron, onion, cilantro, tomatoes and mushrooms. It was also really really good.

The next morning we got up and went to the Austin Farmer's Market where we picked up some Texas Pepper Jam- it is hot and sweet and I can't wait to use it cooking. Then we headed out to get a grill, which was Andrew's parents' wedding present to us. The box just barely fit in the car, but we got it in. Andrew spent the next hour or so putting it together- here's the final product!

We went out to get some pork to grill on it and happened upon Central Market's Hatch Chili Festival. So for dinner we had a Carribean pork that Andrew did a great job of grilling with a mango and hatch chili salsa. It was pretty good!

That night I set the breadmaker to have fresh bread ready and waiting for us Sunday am. The first time I made bread (last weekend). It didn't rise at all really so it tasted good, but it was awfully dense. This time I got some fresh flour and gave it another shot. It rose too much! We ended up with a really good loaf, but it was up against the top of the breadmaker and created quite a "muffin top."

Sunday we rode our bikes down the the Austin Hot Sauce festival and set our mouths on fire trying all kinds of red and green salsas, and "specialty" sauces. We also got a little bit of a sunburn. We don't know yet if the ones we voted for won, but there were some good ones (and some not so good).

Sunday evening we drove over to the Congress Avenue bridge to watch the largest urban colony of bats leave for a night of hunting. We got there as the sun was setting, so we got some nice shots of the Austin downtown. The bats, being nocturnal, don't leave until the sun goes down, which makes them really hard to get pictures of. It was kinda creepy- there are 1.5M of them, and they fly really fast and are swarming but never seem to run into each other. Apparently they swarm all around until they get a big group together and then go off in clouds for hunting. It was strange to be on top of the bridge because they don't ever go as high as you are and they area almost silent in flight- they are just everywhere when you look down.

Here are some pre-bat pictures:
The lake:

People down below,
it got a lot more crowded than this:

Austin House!

Our house in Austin.

We almost have the house all set up in Austin (we are the yellowish brick on the far right- we're the far right door). I spent all last weekend working on the side yard, although I don't have pictures of that yet...when I get home Friday I will take some! We had a pretty good stone patio already, and after about 6 hours of raking and sweeping I found about 8 more feet of stone patio!

Here's a basic tour of our house...

Walking in the front door here's what you see:














Turning to the right:

Living Room:
If you walk through the living room and the hall, to the front is our bedroom,


and to your left is the office (that also holds Andrew's guitars!).

Completing the circle is the kitchen, next to the living room in front of the office.

Here's our back porch (behind the office)

And our side yard

our neighbor to the right is Waller Creek...

And our other "neighbor" about two blocks away!

The truck

My mom sent me a picture of the truck she took- here's how we got across the country!

Touring Every Penske Location in Austin

We finally got to Dallas Friday night which meant we could take a break Saturday. It was really nice (especially for Andrew) to have a day with no driving. We relaxed with my parents- Andrew and my dad went to a bike store, my mom and I headed to the fabric store. We had another birthday celebration for me that night where I got some great stuff and then geared up for the next day- driving the last 200 miles, unloading, etc.

It’s Sunday AM- want to catch a headboard?

Early Sunday morning we headed out with my parents following about an hour behind us. By that point we were pros at unloading the car from the carrier, so that took only a few minutes. We unhooked the carrier itself and moved the truck into position. My friend E.Ray came over to help unload and we opened up the truck’s back door, halfway at first to get a handle on the headboard. It was loaded absolutely last, so was conveniently positioned to fall out as you opened the door.

Now that I know how everything turned out, I can talk about the truck loading process without getting upset. We hired people to load the truck, thinking they would do a better job more efficiently then we could.

Wrong on both counts.

4 ½ hours later, we had a full truck with most everything in it and all the furniture in the last 3 feet of space. They put all the boxes in first. We kept thinking they were about to load the bed, couch, and all our stuff and we didn’t want to hover over them. We totally should have. Because they waited so long on the furniture, a narrow but tall bookcase that would have been easy to load and use to store boxes didn’t make it and they had to put a really large picture flat on the top of all the boxes, exactly what they say not to do. They couldn’t get Andrew’s bike in, so one of our friend s Brad had to come over that night and pick it up. By the time we got the car loaded on to the carrier and left DC, it was just in time for rush hour. Great.

So back to Sunday AM. Amazingly, nothing seems to have broken in transit, including the picture on top of everything. E.Ray was a huge help and we got all the furniture unloaded even before my parents got there. My dad got to work putting the bed together and my mom to cleaning our fabric headboard from the dirt left by the movers.

After we got all the boxes unloaded and ate some lunch, it was time to take the truck back- finally we could get rid of this thing! We headed to the drop off point and got there just before it closed at 2 pm…only to hear they stopped accepting Penske trucks a week or two ago. The woman at the front desk gave us a map to the closest Penske location. We drove over there, only to find the Penske logo scraped off the front door and a sign that they had moved a few miles down the road. Getting smarter, we called that location before we drove over there- closed for the day. After Andrew spent several minutes discussing our situation with the Penske help desk (who referred us to the first place we had gone, then to the closed location where we were already standing) we found a drop off location that we could confirm was at the address listed, open, and accepting trucks. It was however, all the way across town. So we got back in the truck, up to the north end of town, and finally rid of our garish yellow 16 foot truck of fun. No more getting stuck on mountainsides, accelerating from 0-60 in 2.5 minutes, or calling ahead to hotels to make sure we can park and leave again without ever putting the car in reverse.

By the time we got home, it was almost 5 and my parents had gotten the bed and the desk together and were ready to head back out to Dallas. All we had left was a houseful of boxes to unpack!

143 miles to Memphis...

We're currently in a hotel 143 miles from Memphis, a room which we were lucky to get- Loretta Lynn's ranch is only a few miles away and she's hosting the national amateur motocross finals. Apparently people come from all over for it. Needless to stay, we stick out a little.

Getting to this point has been an adventure. We had a rough time getting the 16 foot truck loaded and getting the car on the trailer took a few tries. We left DC at 4 pm on Wednesday afternoon- about 3 hours later than we were originally hoping. We quickly determined the limits of our truck's engine on a particularly steep hill just outside DC- Andrew floored the engine the whole way up, climbing at a solid 15 mph. We laughed about it at the time, but little did we know the hill the night still held in store for us.

Our goal, given when we left, was to drive 4-5 hours, which would put us near Roanoke, VA. We had a pretty smooth ride and decided to find a motel just west of Roanoke. I called a few places and found a room at what was listed as a Ramada Inn. As the sun went down, we pulled off the highway. Less than a mile off the 81 we saw a Howard Johnson and I remember thinking, "Oh, the Ramada must be around the corner."

All of the sudden, the road started going uphill. Pretty steeply and narrowly. With all these great little gravel driveways that led to awesome little houses overlooking the Blue Ridge mountains. We pass a sign that had a nice little truck stencil with an X over it. No trucks. Here's a map of where we were- driving up Skyview Drive.

The most important rule of driving a truck towing something when you don't really know what you are doing is never never never put the truck in reverse. Never.

We need to turn around, but we don't have the 100 x 100 feet level parking lot that requires. Then we hit the engine max. We can't go up, and we cannot back down the road. At this point, the sun is completely down, it's dark, we're tired and I'm on the verge of tears.

Suddenly, our luck changes. Sort of. A car comes up the road. It's a man named Greg who lives at the top of the hill, coming home from the grocery store. He gets out of his car and spends the next hour with us, talking us through our predicament.

First, Andrew tries backing, which was my idea. This is a disaster and lasts about 10 feet down the mountain. Once we realize we are likely to back ourselves off the edge of the road, we decide to go with the Gregg's suggestions.

Andrew puts the parking brake on as hard as he can and we unhook the car. Andrew backs it off the trailer and we leave it in someone's driveway. Greg's plan is to drive the truck about 200 yards farther up the hill and there is a spot he's confident we can turn around. We're hoping with the car off the trailer we will be light enough to get up the hill.

Andrew floors the gas.

Nothing happens.

30 seconds pass.

Tears are welling in my eyes.

Finally, we start inching forward. And I mean inching. Cheering erupts.

We go about 1 mph for the first minute or so, and then we hit a part of the road that isn't as steep where we can get some momentum. We get enough going that we make it to Greg's turn around spot.

Now the really tough part. Turn the truck and trailer around so we can go down the hill.

Greg talks Andrew through a 36 point turn where we purposely jackknife the trailer to get it to go down one of the side streets without the truck too far off the road. We are in a flat enough spot we aren't going to fall off the mountain or anything, but we need to make sure our tires stay in contact with the ground. I'm shaking the whole time, but Greg is about as calm and supportive as you could hope for and Andrew is holding up like a champ. Apparently this happens more often then not- Greg said he talks someone through this about 3 times a year.

It's almost 10:30 pm by the time we get the truck turned around. We thank Greg profusely with our faith in mankind restored based on his kindness we let him finish his grocery store run, pick up the car on the way down, and drive to the HoJo (which Greg told us used to be a Ramada) where we have apparently have a room.

Needless to say, we slept hard that night. Andrew especially.

Today was a lot less eventful- we got up, put the car back on the trailer, and got going. Besides a pretty torrential rainstorm that was on and off for almost 2 hours (which Andrew also handled impressively), we had a pretty uneventful day and got over 500 miles in. We quit well before the sun went down and got the truck parked safely. We ate at a BBQ shack across the street and have been relaxing since. Tomorrow it's on to Texas!