Where's the camera???

Ever have those moments when you needed your camera, but didn't have it? I've had a couple of those recently.

During the first instance I was driving, so it was probably a good thing (safety wise) that I didn't have the camera. But man I wished I had one! I would have snapped a shot of Paul on a tractor driving 20 mph on a highway where everyone else is driving at least 65 mph or more. Yep, he was "that guy" on the road that causes everyone to switch lanes and then check their rear view mirror after they pass him, thinking "what's he doing on the road"? I was the car behind him with my flashers on so that no one would hit him (instead they'd hit me, but I guess the theory was that I would have an airbag...which would probably hurt me more than help since I'm short, but that's beside the point).

The next incident involved our sailboat on Paul's birthday. One day I'm going to get a waterproof case that I trust for our camera, and I'll capture these moments. For his birthday, we took off work and went out to Clear Lake near Kemah Beach, TX (the lake feeds into the Gulf). We stayed on the lake part - didn't venture out into the Gulf part (I'm too chicken).

It started out kinda rocky for me - I just have trouble with getting the sail up and keeping the boat pointing into the wind while we get the sail up. So I started out pulling the sail up, then switched with Paul so he could pull the last 6 inches up (it always gets caught at that point and I just don't have the guns to pull it the rest of the way). So I'm now at the tiller (while he's pulling) trying to figure out which way the wind is coming from so I can stay pointed into it. It didn't work, and by the end of it I'm on my knees on the bottom of the boat with my head touching my knees to avoid the boom (holds the bottom of the sail) from coming across and hitting me (because the wind has caught the sail that's partially up - all my fault). We did survive this, and after 10 minutes I was able to speak and relax and enjoy the sailing part. Paul's comment was "I don't remember you being so nervous about this when we were in North Carolina" (refering to high school days sailing at his grandmother's cabin)...to which I replied, "I was young and stupid back then - I know better now" (because now if the boat capsizes I have to figure out how to un-capsize it and pay for any damages that occur).

But that's not the part that needed a picture. The really great part was as we were coming back. We had survived--and had fun--going all the way down to the end of the lake, and had survived coming back (a little trickier to tack with the wind behind you we found out, but we did make it work). But on the last tack, Paul said, "Coming about", I switched sides, and then a crazy gust of wind or a big wave came along and tipped the boat up so that I was literally looking DOWN at Paul. I started to lean way back to try to counteract the boat's movement, Paul was scrambling to try to climb UP to get to my side of the boat, but in the meantime water was pouring over the side of the boat. By the end of it we were ankle deep in water inside the boat, but thankfully we were upright. Paul immediately starts laughing hysterically and can't stop, and I'm left sitting in shock wondering how in the world we're going to make it into the dock without crashing our boat (another time during sailing when I get pretty nervous).

My next research project is to find an electric motor that we can have on the boat so that we can motor out away from docks and cement walls to put the sail up and bring it back down again, and be able to motor into the dock (not paddle).

I do have a "before" picture of us with the boat. The car took the picture (timer on the camera), so that's why it's looking down at us, instead of at eye level.

Below is a pic of the concrete that we had to navigate around. It helped keep the dock area calm and broke the waves, but it still made me nervous and I paddled super hard to make sure we didn't hit it.

Okay, tell me if I'm alone in this, but doesn't this sign seem a little odd to you? I mean, usually with the "don't" or "no" signs, they have a picture of the activity with a circle and slash through it, or a No preceding the picture. But this picture doesn't look like a person swimming. It looks like a person drowning. But they're clearly trying to say no swimming. Maybe they needed to put the words "Swimming", then an equals sign, then the picture of the person drowning. Or just put a person that is swimming inside a circle with a slash. But this sign is just a little disturbing to me. Maybe I'm the only one though.

I'm going to combine blogs here and add Saturday to our Wednesday adventures. Paul installed a garbage disposal. And not just any garbage disposal - one that doesn't use electrity. It uses water pressure only. It's a little slower at chopping up the stuff, but it is so quiet you almost don't know it's running. So that was fun. Paul had fun installing it, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching (there's only so much room under the sink, so clearly I couldn't fit in there to help, especially since I know NOTHING about plumbing). :)

Paul said I needed a "before" picture so you can appreciate the improvements. So this is the "before".
Here's the "after" picture! What a beauty.

Okay, that's all for now. Until next time!

Fall Pictures!

On Friday, I left work a little early and headed out to the meadows to see if there was anything worth taking pictures of. Paul and I did this back in the spring, but I hadn't been out there just to explore since then (in the summer I hibernate in the AC as much as possible). I discovered that there was a lot of fun pictures! That put the "creative" bug in me. Since I had Saturday off this weekend, I decided that instead of sleeping in, I would get up and get some more pictures out in the meadows, while no one else was around to bother or interrupt. So at 6:30am, I got out my Carhart overalls and my work boots (I knew there was a reason I kept all that gear from my landfill sampling days), and I set out with our "trusty" digital camera to see what I could find. Below are a few of my favorites from Friday evening, and Saturday morning:

I loved the smell of the hay as I got up close to take the picture. I definitely love being out in the country!

Check this guy out - there were several tiny spiders making webs between blades of grass. They would make a white thick circle in the center, and then hang underneath that white circle (so you could only see the spider from underneath). The rest of the web was transparent, just waiting for an unlucky bug to find it.

I almost didn't see this tiny little hopper. His whole body is probably smaller than the nail of my pinky finger - and I have a small pinky finger nail!!
Peas anyone?

I took this picture in the early morning on Saturday - the sun was starting to come up, but my flash accidentally went off because it thought there wasn't enough light. It made a cool picture though.

This is the same picture when I turned the flash off. I tried to get the shot as the spider was in the center of his web because it was pretty cool, but I made him nervous, and he climbed to the top to try to hide from me.
Someone's leftover target practice items. Guess they missed. The pepsi can in the background is really shot up, but they didn't have much luck hitting the poker chip.

Morning dew on a blade of grass.
This was my favorite shot of the morning. This little guy stayed completely still for over 3 minutes while I tried to get a good picture of him. He's clinging to a big JCB bucket (used on the excavator for digging up stuff). The bucket doesn't appear to have been used yet - the tag is still on it, and it's still clean. Guess it made a good place to hang out and catch bugs. I'm just super excited that he didn't hop away and I was able to get the shot. I didn't have much luck with the frogs near the puddles/ponds. They all jumped in the water as soon as they heard me coming!

I felt kinda bad for this guy - I think he's a cicada??? Anyway, he looked like he was having trouble moulting - he kept kinda twitching - I think his wing got stuck in the mud after he came out of his shell.

No explanation needed. I love trees!

This is just a great Texas picture to me. Everyone uses barbed wire fencing around here, and this was a fun shot to take. It can symbolize a lot - old and new working together, different people working together...whatever you can think of.

Another great Texas shot - an old wagon/trailer left in the tall weeds. Will it ever be used again?

Well, that's all for now. I took a TON of pictures, but I won't post all of them for you here. I was out there for over 2 hours on both days.

Paul's triathlon...

Well, on Monday (Labor Day), Paul participated in the Austin Triathlon. It was an international distance triathlon, which means it was a 1 mile swim (okay technically he swam 1500 meters, but most people don't have a concept of what that means - here's a hint - a mile is 1609 meters, so he was pretty close), a 24 mile bike, and a 6 mile run. Another note on the swim - it's in a lake, and you don't have lane lines, so adding in his zig-zagging, he probably truly swam a mile. So he covered 31 miles in different loops (1 swim loop, 3 bike loops, 2 run loops).

You can find out Paul's official results at http://www.texastriseries.com/events/austintri/results.asp.

Jack and Adam's Triathlon shop hosted the race - that's where I bought my bike, and it's our favorite source for splurging on training equipment that we store in our spare bedroom instead of using. :) The guys that run it are down to earth and really helpful (we've actually met both Jack, and Adam, and Drew, who joined after they had the shop name). I think one guy had experience working at a different tri/bike shop, and then 2 others were lawyers that decided running a triathlon shop would be more fun. They do a good job with their shop, and the race was run really well - better than some of the other races we've been to, so that was really nice.

The building on the far left, is actually one of the buildings that is caricatured in Jack and Adam's logo (far right building in their logo). Because I'm not from Austin, and didn't do my homework, I don't know what building it is. But it was fun to get a picture of it in the early morning just after the sun came up. It also shows how cloudy it was that day.

We got up at 4:20am to start preparing for the race that started at 7am. We left our hotel at 5am, and Paul got his transition area all set up. It rained the night before, and had threatened rain on Monday, too, but thankfully God held back the rain and just allowed the clouds to stay, which made a perfect race day - cloud cover and cool temps (especially for Texas in Sep!!)

Yep, it was a wetsuit legal race, which Paul really enjoyed. All that neoprene helps keep you afloat and you swim much faster!

This is a bad picture of Paul's wave getting in the water (jumping off a floating dock). I couldn't tell which guy he was - I was too far away at that point. But we can pretend that I captured him in pixels here. :)

Okay, this is a side-note to Paul's race. I just want to point out that the guy who won the race, won because his swim time was almost 2 minutes faster than any of the other guys. His bike time wasn't the fastest out of the crowd, and his run time wasn't the fastest, either. But his swim time gave him such a great advantage, that he won the whole race. Above in the first picture, he rounded the last buoy, and no one was even close to him. You probably can't even see him in the first picture - just know that he didn't have any chasers nearby. The second picture shows him getting out of the water. The big crowd at the top of that picture is the chase pack. I think there were 3-4 swimmers in between him and that big chase pack that aren't in the 2nd picture. But it gives you an idea. I think he swam a mile in roughly 17 minutes (I looked at my watch - his official time may be longer because he still had to cross over the timer pad). The announcer said that this guy is a professional triathlete, so if he took longer, I guess I would have been disappointed. :) But it was still amazing to watch.

Okay, back to Paul's race. Below he's the one in the red cap - looking at me and smiling for the picture. So that was a good sign. Did I mention that he didn't really get much training in before this race? So I was glad that he was cognizant enough to recognize me. I was pleasantly surprised that he took a few seconds to look at me for the picture, too! He finished his swim in about 40 minutes.

Below is his transition area in the daylight (since the earlier ones showed them in the pre-race, pre-sun, darkness. He was number 242.

Another transition picture (between swim and bike). He's still smiling!

I was impressed that this picture came out (maybe I'm improving my photography skills...or maybe my camera is super cool and compensates for my lack of skills). He was probably passing me at about 22 miles an hour. Notice, though, he's still smiling. He said that his average bike speed was maybe 22 mph on the flats, 7 mph going up hill, and 30 mph going down hill.

Here's the first time I saw him on the run course. You may notice that...he's not smiling anymore. Not even a glimpse. But he said that he only walked at the 3 water stations, and 2 additional places, so for the most part he was jogging the whole time. And for not training before this race, I'm super impressed that he did so well.

Below are pictures of him crossing the finish line. It was kinda nice because they had 2 plastic "winner banners" that they would alternate throwing across the finish line. So everyone got to raise their arms and "break through" the winner banner. I did wonder how much sweat was transferred from each runner by the end of the race. I hope they threw those banners away - I sure wouldn't want to be the person to clean them. Yuck!

Above you can see the clock time on the left. Subtract 3 minutes from that, since his wave started 3 minutes after the official clock did. So the whole race took him roughly 3 hours and 19 minutes.

There's that smile! I guess he just needed some cold pizza to re-energize him...and to see his lovely wife that supported him all the way. :)

If you're still with me (I know, this was kind of a long blog, but still fun in my opinion), here are some aerial pics of the race courses - the red line marks the course.

Swim course:

Bike course:

Run course:

Dave & Busters...

Well, really, for this blog, the pictures do most of the talking for me. Paul and I took the "kids" out to Austin about a week and 1/2 ago, but I haven't been able to get pics up until now.

I had never been to Dave & Busters, though I had heard it was tons of fun. Turns out that it is. I liked the racing games where all of us got to race each other the best.

We got the meal/points deal so that we got dinner and $10 in points on our swipe card to play the games with. Arcades are sophisticated now - no more tokens weighing down pockets - just have to keep track of a credit card like card.

Brittany, and Chloe racing on the Nascar track.

Paul, Kim, and Kristi also racing on the Nascar track. (I raced, too, but didn't get a picture of myself).
Justin, Chloe, and Manwoo (prounounced "Mahn - u").

Paul wearing Manwoo's glasses while Manwoo played the boxing game.

(Manwoo punching his opponent with the virtual reality technology gloves.)

At the end we all combined our tickets that we won, and like good arcade patrons, used them to buy Nerds on a rope (candy), and some other kind of candy that will rot your teeth.

What a great night. We finished by going to a Korean grocery store, where Manwoo bought the makings for a great dinner that he made that week. I don't know the name of it, but it looked goourmet - it had seaweed wrapped around rice, some kind of sweet radish (that was a 8 inch long yellow vegetable), seasoned beef, and some kind of vegetable that we never were able to translate into English from the Korean. But it was great!!!

Well, that sums up our night out on the town. I definitely want to repeat it sometime.

Five girls and Paul

And if you count the dogs, it's 7 females in the house, and Paul.

The interns for this fall are staying at our house for a week until their living quarters are ready for them to move in (after Labor Day).

It doesn't affect me so much, because I'm still sharing a bathroom with only 1 other person. However the other 4 girls are sharing the other bathroom. And Paul has taken to hiding in our bedroom more often when all of us girls are home. Maybe too much estrogen in the room...maybe.

Anyway, that's what's going on with us these days. Later!

Our New Desk!

Okay, I know that "normal" people don't get this excited about desks and organizing. But I'm not normal. My favorite store is Office Max (though I don't buy anything there because it's too expensive). My favorite shopping season is Back to School because all the binders and pencils and pens and notebooks and back packs are in the aisles. But I'm getting sidetracked.

Okay, here are some pics of what we upgraded to. The bookshelf with all the books actually belongs to Dustin and Erin, who are moving to Dallas. So they are going to need their bookshelf back soon, which gave us the perfect excuse to look for a desk with bookshelf space, too.

Here's what we came up with from Ikea.I like that it all closes up so you can't see what's inside because it's pretty cluttered inside. One day that will change, but not today.
Even the bench has storage space for files, and then for whatever else fits to the left of the files.

I'll admit that all the books didn't fit in our new desk, so we had to use the college wire shelves that you stack using connectors, but that's okay. One day when I get up the nerve to throw out/donate all my books that I haven't read in over a year, I'm sure we will only need the desk to house everything.

I just can't get rid of the thought that maybe one day the environmental science textbooks might be used. I know it's ridiculous, and the truth of the matter is that anything in those books can be found on the Internet these days (which definitely uses much less of my house space than the books do). But I just can't do it. Maybe it's because it would be admitting that I won't be using my college degree again. I don't know. Like I said, one day I'll have the courage to toss it all...but not today.

Well, I'm off today since I worked the weekend, so I actually went to the mall in Austin to look around. I've decided that I'm really not missing much by not living close to a mall. I get so frustrated walking around malls - they take up so much of my time just to realize that they don't have anything that I need or want. Another reason that I'm a country girl convert. The reason I happened to be in Austin was because Paul had to catch an early morning flight, so we spent the night at a hotel which was fun.

Paul is in Virginia helping his mom get the GMI server back in order (http://globalmosaic.net/). It started a re-booting cycle that it can't get out of, so Paul was sent to the rescue with all his computer know-how. So I'm a bachelorette until Thursday. Thankfully Chloe is here to keep me company (summer staffer from the UK), and so are the dogs.


Until next time!

Summer's over, and Retreat Season is here!

Well, it did finally stop raining. And ironically we celebrated by taking our family of 12 to Schlitterbahn (water park) and spent all day playing in water. We heard them say "Schlitterbahn is now open" in the morning, and we heard them say "Schlitterbahn is now closed" in the evening. I was definitely waterlogged after that! But we had a blast and it was great to have a day away from work to hang out and have fun. All of us stayed together on every ride, which was pretty cool.

The last day of camp was August 10th, and Paul and I celebrated by staying at Round Top Retreat (http://www.roundtopretreat.org/) from Sunday night through Tuesday morning. It was nice to get away and not think about anything work related for 2 days. But then we came back to our real lives and headed straight into Retreat Season. Our first group arrived Thursday (Aug 16), and left this afternoon, and the 2nd group arrived this afternoon, and will stay through Sunday. So we definitely hit the ground running after summer ended!

I don't have pictures to post with this one, but I wanted everyone to know that we survived summer, and are headed back to a "normal" schedule - at least in camp standards it's normal.

One more note, we did go to Ikea and bought a great desk for ourselves. I'll eventually get a picture up because I'm excited about the prospect of getting more organized and getting our "stuff" more simplified. It was part of our re-organizing that we're doing, which included getting rid of 7 trash bags full of clothes that don't fit, are out of style, etc. We can almost see our closet ceiling and floor now! It was a great feeling to purge the house of all that stuff.

Okay, off to bed. As part of our "normal" schedule, I need to be in the kitchen at 6:45am tomorrow to help with breakfast for the group. Fun, fun, fun!

Rainy Days at Camp

I know that in reality it hasn't rained every single day this summer, but recently, it sure has seemed like we've received more than our fair share! Last summer we were begging for rain because it was so dry. This year we can't get rid of the rain - the ground is so saturated, that even a small shower looks like a flood because the water has no where to go, and it creates pools and streams that sometimes look like they're flowing up hill because there is so much water!!!

We have 2 bridges that you have to cross if you come to the camp the "main way" from town. Late Wednesday night, one of our staffers was coming back from Sonic and didn't realize how deep the water was over the first bridge. To make a long story short, she tried to cross it, got stuck, and the water was reportedly up to the steering wheel at one point. Luckily there were guard rails on that bridge (on the 2nd bridge, there aren't guard rails so she just would have floated over). Thankfully everyone in the car was safe (they got out, the car was towed back to camp, etc) but the car is totalled, and our staffer was pretty shaken up. (Brings to mind the lecture I got from my dad one day about the power of flowing water - even a little bit of water).

(We're definitely glad we have the roof on the back deck - this summer it has definitely paid off since we love to sit out there and listen to the rain and relax outside without getting wet.

...although we did find that we have a couple small leaks where the seams of the roof are. But we'll get those fixed soon...or we won't sit under them and just enjoy the rest of the deck. :)

Here's looking out our front door. The rain just keeps coming! Anyone know how to build an ark?

That's why we spend more time on the back deck. Better view, and we don't think about all the water running under our house, etc.

Our dogs are such chickens when it comes to thunder and lightening. It's the only time we see Flurry show fear. (Chessy always looks worried, but she's slightly neurotic).

(Chessy had to have a turn in Paul's lap, too).