Chillin'

Well not exactly "chillin'" but looking like we are. The pool water that we have our feet in was about 94 degrees. The air was about the same. Check out the clock...that was 9 P.M. ! It was a scorcher all day and not much change in the temp in the evening. Gotta love Austin!

Nats!

Nats, not "rats." My friend, Lauren and I went on the metro down to the Washington Nationals play the Boston Redsox at Nats Park, or whatever it is called. The stadium I knew was RFK, and the team was the Senators, but nevermind.

It was record attendance at the Nationals game this evening. There were 5 Nationals fans and 41,512 Redsox fans. Seriously. Great ballpark though. Really fun, roomy seats, a lot of fun things to watch between innings. I am not sure of the purpose of this, but there were people dressed up as cartoon presidents - that is Teddy Roosevelt and George Washington below. They wandered all around the ballpark, but I don't know what the game was that they were playing.Excellent food including Five Guys burgers. I had to buy a Nats cap and Lauren who normally would be decked out in full Boston garb, had to buy her tenth Boston cap. That is another story for another day.

Check out this pitch: This was not the pitch that resulted in a Sox homerun, that one was about 3 pitches later. Darn. "We" (I had to become a Nats fan for the night. Well, someone had to!) held them at 3-3 until the 7th and then inthe 8th they totally broke away and scored a whole bunch of runs. We left. Got lucky and got on the first metro train that came by and we were back at the hotel within 45 minutes.

11:36 p.m.....zzzzzz

Happy Fathers Day!

It rained again on Sunday. So we cleaned out cabinets in the kitchen and lined them with pretty paper. That was my job. Mike's job was to sort through stuff and decide what to save and what to throw. He found a total of 5 blenders. Probably the most interesting find was some old hand crank egg beaters. We kept those, of course. Someone who collects things might want them.

We also helped Mike's mom with a painting project. On our way home from that the skies turned black and a big ol guess-what...rainstorm...rolled in.

Around 7:30 we were due at Mike's parents bay house for dinner. Check out this evening sky

you can see ths rain showers - isn't that cool?!

and finally a very interesting sunset appeared between the low clouds and earth.

We are going to the beach on Monday no matter what!

Beautiful sunset and then...

Last night we walked over to Mike's parents house a few blocks away. There was a beautiful sunset

a big fat seagull sitting on top of a pole

This morning it was gray and the weather forecast said it would start to rain between 10 and 11....yup, the internet weather guy was right on. This is what it has looked like most of the day.

It is expensive (for us) when it rains at the beach! We spent all kinds of money on little things for the beach house. Life shelf paper so I could line the drawers

and shower caddies

and some more food!

We purchased extension cords, a trash can, a new shower head for the outdoor shower, some shelves for the bedroom, a corkscrew (so we can drink the wine we bought!), two new lamps, two new feather pillows, paper plates, jelly, bagels, OJ, a basic toolkit, Chips Ahoy!, glade plug-ins with fresh linen aroma, but we could not find a clothespin bag. Now we have a reason to go shopping again tomorrow if it rains (which it will).

stocking up for the weekend

We stopped at the supermarket on the way to the beach to stock up on necessities....
Beverages:

Food:That's it.

Think that's enough for 3 days?

What?!

Do you think we think we are back in college???

promises!

I have been neglectful in my blogging lately. Seems to coincide with increased usage of facebook, but it is not the same. I promise to try to get back to a regular update here. Maybe 3 times a week at least? There should be some things to report this weekend since we will be at the Jersey shore house. The expected rain may keep us off the beach but we not people who just sit around. Mike is about to pick me up at BWI and we will head east! Bye for now!

vroom! vroom!

There's a biker rally in Austin this weekend. Robbie Knievel is in town tonight to kick off the rally by jumping something like 30 tour buses on the grounds of the capital. I had to drop Duncan off at the airport just after lunchtime and I returned to the office via 6th street. Here is the view from my car window. (I was sitting at a redlight, not driving!)It was pretty much the same on either side of 6th street from I35 all the way past Congress.

I wish I could upload sounds for you to hear. From my new office that is on the Lamar Street side of the building, all I can hear right now is vroom, vroom, vroom as the bikers drive by!

Where were you when the lights went out?!

Last night we had a BIG storm. The kind where the sky turns completely black, streaks of lightning illuminate the clouds, the wind kicks up and the rain comes down hard. With this one, some funnel clouds were reported but no tornadoes actually touched ground, at least not near us. Before the storm, Mike and I had been sitting by the pool looking toward the southwest, which was pretty light and clear. I could see a grey cloud lurking around to the right, but didn't think much of it. The sky had been a bit gray before, but we decided that we wouldn't be lucky enough for it to actually rain. I thought I saw some flashes of light, but figured it was just the way I was blinking. Mike stepped into the pool house for a minute and came out and said with urgency - "get the dogs inside - quickly!" I looked around to the north and the entire sky was pitch black and moving toward us fast. I herded the sixteen paws into the kitchen and started to get things out to make dinner. "Make dinner" is a generous term, it was more like "reheat leftovers" and cut a few tomatoes for a salad. I am glad I got our plates warmed up when I did because we lost power within seconds of the last microwave beep, and it didn't come on again for many hours.


This is how we handled the outage

We could see lights on in other neighborhoods and Kerry Lynn reported that we had electricity at my house, just 4 miles away. Mike checked the Austin Energy website and there was a big area of outage including his neighborhood with an estimated fix time of 11:56 Friday night! Fortunately it came back on sometime in the night and everything was fine this morning.

The dogs were clearly upset by the storm. See how agitated they were...

Settling in

Life with 4 dogs in one house.....is going amazingly well. Who knew?! Topher and Petey share the pen and Boo and Choco share the backyard. Leah will soon join the big dogs in the backyard. We thought it would be good for the labs to get used to the yard and establish some routine before Leah arrives with Stephen this weekend. So far so good. The motion-detector water thingy seems to be working and provides the girls with fresh water from the spigot when they get close to it. I'll have to take some photos of this really neat device for my next blog.

Feeding time is still an adventure, but my 3 dogs are used to eating from the same bowl, so I've been taking them out to the pool to eat. Petey gobbles his food and then joins the other 3 and sneaks kibbles from the big-dog bowl whenever he can. Boo is clearly right at home by the pool!

The nights have gone much better than I expected. Boo and Choco and Topher all sleep in their separate beds in our room. We tell them to "get in their beds" and they do and they stay in them all night long. No click-click of toenails on the hardwood floor all night long, just the heavy breathing of 3 tired pups. :)

We had a practice party on Sunday night. Missy and Steffi joined us and enjoyed the first margaritas of the summer. Stef spent the night so she didn't need to drive to the other home.

Topaz and the Mudphonic at Tim's Porch

On Saturday night we were torn between going to see Rotel and the Hot Tomatoes at the Nutty Brown and doing something different. We chose something different. Who knows if we would have had more fun at the Nutty, but we sure enjoyed our "aomething different" evening. The new Waterloo at 71 and Bee Caves road just opened that night and it was packed. Great venue, especially for families. Has lots of those garage doors that can be opened on nice days/nights (like last night) or closed so folks can dine inside. We enjoyed our salads and a beer. Feeling lucky that the live-music venue we loved so much sort of re-opened as Tim's porch at the Backyard, we wanted to give it a try even though neither of us had ever heard of the band scheduled to play. Maybe it is the cover charge they just started up in June, a lack of advertising or some other factor, the place was empty. I think there were eventually 11 spectators. Here are 7 of us:Topaz and the Mudphonic were great and we would definitely seek them out again. In spite of the very low turnout, they played from 8 until 11 p.m. Really great music. The lead singer plays guitar, sax, and harmonica.We thought they had a bit of a Traffic sound. One of the other "fans" said they heard Doors and other 60's sounds. We bought their CD for $10 and they gave us a sticker (I'm thinking "Meg's car!"). Check'em out at the Continental Club on the 25th of June. Definitely worth the $7 cover we paid.

A two dog move

Saturday was a big moving day at the ranch. Before you get excited about me selling the house and moving, it wasn't that. But it was moving day for Choco and Boo, the resident "guards" at the ranch. They join Topher, Petey and me at Mike's house. It's been about 18 hours and so far so good. The girls have the large part of the yard and the patio off the living room. They have not yet explored the whole backyard, and that's an okay thing - cuz it is a really big yard and there is a lot of brush. The picture above I tried to take without disturbing them during their morning snooze. That big white thing is part of the plantation blinds. Of course, eagle ear Choco heard me and had to come look in the window.

We bought all the dogs new tags yesterday. Including Leah who isn't here yet. She will be dog#5. Think that's enough? Here is Boo's new tag- notice she is now a longhorn fan!

More later - I will blog about the great music we saw last night and our golf this afternoon. Bye now!

Finally, we are back to playing golf on Sundays!

What happened this spring that we didn't get out on the golf course until May 31st? It always seemed like it either was raining or there was something else that got in the way of getting out on the links. But here we are on the last day of May and I hope this is the beginning of a habit that we can keep up until next fall. It would be great to get out for 9 holes one evening each week too. Yesterday we made 18 in about 2 1/2 hours - excellent time! I shot a 90 but with a number of mulligans and gimmes. There were a few honest pars in there and my short game was pretty good for the first time out. I am sure it will deteriorate. On the downside, my new rescue club and my 7 wood were disappointing. Time to hit the driving range for a tune up. This was a good way to start the day. I chipped my ball up on #2 and then sunk it for my first par of the day. Here's Mike from his second shot, chipped on and then two-putted for a bogie.
This is a par 4 with an elevated tee-box for the men. It's a dog-leg left and you need to hit a perfect drive to be positioned to hit the ball over a wide pond and straight up a hill to the green. Mike always plays this hole well and he sure looks good in that green Tiger-style collared shirt! At this point, I lost interest in the golf and just wanted to watch this beautiful crane.