I’m on my way back home. Typical commute. Flight delays, short connection, scrambling for carry-on baggage space, hoping for an upgrade to that last seat in 1st class. Bleh. Thank goodness for the Admiral’s club. 🙂
I’ve been using the in-flight wireless on most of my business travel legs. It helps me keep from getting behind on email and todos.
On this flight, I decided to knock off early. Well, i *is* 6PM on a friday night!
I was taking photos out the window after we had leveled off at 35 thousand feet. I had a nice view of the moon above the clouds, and some pretty blue sky, and then I had the brainchild … hey, i should just post it now while I’m online. 🙂
Rachel is back home. Julie is studying. Monte is at the lake. And I’m getting ready for a Sunday afternoon full of work-work.
We went to brunch at Güero’s this morning, then I dropped Julie back at her apartment, before taking Rachel to the airport. This is a shot of some of Julie’s many glassybaby pieces. These blue ones are pretty. I also like the taupe/beige/cream colored ones. But I guess I’m feeling blue today.
We had a nice weekend. But we all have a busy week ahead.
Tomorrow is Rachel’s first day as a surgical resident (u go girl!). Julie has a test. And I have a full slate of meetings and presentations.
Here’s to the next girls’ weekend.
And, Happy Father’s Day to all you dads out there! My dad is gone – for several years now. But he would be very proud of his progeny, especially the two very talented, determined and self-reliant granddaughters that I got to spent the weekend with.
Today is National Marina Day. Coincidentally, we were headed to the lake anyway because our good friends Teri and Jim were in town for the weekend. What a great day. We had lunch at Shades, then went for a sail on Cupholder. Then floated for the rest of the afternoon with friends off of B-Dock. Dinner at Flore’s. Then home before we turned into pumpkins.
It was great to see Teri & Jim. We miss them and Island Time. But….once a b-docker, always a b-docker! We’re looking forward to seeing them again, whether by land or by sea.
We headed to the lake today to raft-up with Marty & Sue on Caribbean Hug, Lori, Dave & Jake on Camelot, and Mike and Kathy on Soul Healer. Julie joined us for the night, and Laura dropped by for a couple hours, too.
I paddled the kayak to shore to tie a stern line and saw these pretty little weeds growing in the rocks on the shore.
One view of Arky @ night
Mike had a pair of military grade night vision goggles, which everyone passed around for a while. This is a shot I took through the goggles. Just thought it looked cool.
And, finally, this is a shot off the stern, of the last moments of dusk.
..and another shot of Arky at night.
A good time was had by all.
My niece is moving to Austin to attend grad school at UT. She and her brother drove down from Seattle, and arrived on Friday. We’ve enjoyed visiting with them for the last few days. Tonight we drove down to South Congress to meet them for dinner, and afterwards watched the bats fly out from under the Congress Avenue Bridge.
We headed to the lake yesterday to raft-up overnight in Arkansas Bend cove with Marty & Sue, and Joe. It was really pleasant out. Overcast yesterday, but nice breezes. This is a shot from yesterday of the windsocks on Joe’s backstay on Prelude. It got into the 60’s last night. Refreshingly chilly. It will be hot again soon enough.
We made quite the fleet. 2 sloops, 1 catboat, 2 kayaks, a rubber dinghy and a stand-up paddle board.
Today, we kayaked and sup-ed around the cove, and then headed back early in the afternoon to prepare for Monday. Today was much sunnier, blue skies with big clouds, and a nice breeze for the sail home.
When I got my Mac, I realized that it could only open the windows filesystem on my old USB backup drive in read-only mode. Not great for doing backups. I’ll need to reformat it to use it. But I’ve been procrastinating, because i’m going to have to sort through what’s on there to see what to keep and what to get rid of. So this week I took the first step – I copied most of what was on the backup drive to my mac to prepare to reformat the USB drive.
Consequently, the next time I opened Picasa, it found ALL the photos that I had just copied and loaded them into its library, which took a while. But, once it finished, it makes for very easy viewing of many years of pictures. So, I’ve been spending a lot of time this morning browsing through photos I’ve taken that I haven’t looked at for years.
When I got to this one I thought I’d share it with you. This is a photo that I took when my sister, Colleen, and her son, Jacob, were visiting about 4 years ago. We drove down to Port Aransas for the weekend, and stayed a place right on the Gulf-side of the beach. This is a picture of Colleen and Jacob jumping together in the surf. I used some piece of software, can’t remember what, to create a water-color effect — oh, and I edited out the oil rig on the horizon :(. I later printed this and framed it for her.
I guess it’s kind of appropriate, too, because this is Mother’s Day weekend, and she’s a great mom.
I had a nice time last night. First, dinner at the Grove Wine Bar. Can you believe that appetizer plate?! I had wine flight #1, bubblies from Italy & France. Monte had flight #8, Italian reds. The cappuccino afterwards was almost too pretty to drink, but I’m glad I did, it was one of the best I’ve had in a long time.
Then we headed to One World Theatre for the Diane Schuur concert, which was great. She played for about 2 hours… with someone on drums, sax and bass. She sang numbers from Duke Ellington, Chuck Mangione, Stevie Wonder, and Patsy Cline, to name a few, and ended with Amazing Grace, one of my favorites.
Keeto is about 8 months old. His flight feathers are in and he has mastered flying. He loves to sit on his perch in the window, which is about 2 feet away from a hummingbird feeder. When the hummingbirds fly up to the feeder, I don’t know who is more freaked out, the hummingbirds or Keeto. He also will fly between Monte and I when we are all sitting down to watch TV. He seems to be pretty house-trained. Good thing. …and he loves to give kisses.
Today is day 2 of an absolutely beautiful weekend. Monte has headed to the lake, and I am working. Ok. Well. I will be as soon as I post this.
We are looking forward to a fun evening at the One World Theatre. For Christmas, I gave monte tickets for 2 for the Diane Schuur concert this evening. I made him humongous paper tickets for the gift. The real tix are actually at will-call. But we’re bringing the home-made tickets with us to see if they’ll let us in with them anyway 🙂
We started out this evening with dinner at Z-Tejas downtown with the visiting Three. Frozen mango marg and a salad for me. Delicious!
Friday, Saturday and Sunday night… a trifecta of fun.
Walking to our car after dinner, we stopped by a statue store to take some pics. Ran into the King. Then we headed over to Lori’s to play a few rounds of a game that Denyse told us about… called Telepictionary. It goes roughly like this… each person writes a sentence at the top of a piece of paper. Then they pass it to the right and the next person draws their interpretation of the sentence. That person folds over the sentence, so the next person can only see their drawing. And the next person then must write a sentence that captures what their interpretation of the drawing is. Then this person folds over the drawing and passes the paper to the next person, who can only see the sentence that they wrote from the previous drawing. This goes on for several more passes. We had 7 people playing tonight. When the paper makes its way back to the person who wrote the original sentence at the top of the page, the round is over.
It’s funny to compare the original sentence to the last one on the page. The shot below is of one my sentences after having made it around the table.
You get the idea.
We had a fun time at Lori’s Friday night. Tonight we threw a party to celebrate Monte’s retirement. It was a blast. I wish every day was a Saturday, with a party 🙂
Monte got a lot of funny gifts: a double-barreled beer helmet, retiree t-shirt, this lovely retirement crown, wine & champers, a giant inflatable tentacle (yep), to name a few. The retirement crown was given to him by another friend named Lori, who retired last week herself. She wore this at her party. We will pass it on to the next retiree, who will pass it on to the next person that retires, and so on…until all our friends are dead… speaking of which… one gift was a funny little picture book for adults called All my friends are dead. You can read part of it online here.
Tomorrow… clean up the party and finalize my tax return…
Today is Friday the 13th. It passed without incident.
After work we headed over to Lori & Dave’s house – several friends of ours make an annual visit to Austin, and it’s always a big party when they get here. Lots of laughs…and lots of mob dancing to 80’s tunes. 🙂
The car in the center of the picture was what I was trying to get a shot of… an old timey volvo or something. Didn’t turn out, but I like it anyway.
Sheila365 