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!