Category: Fun

Beer me, Marge.

Rover's neon.

I love that it’s getting dark later these days.  I can get more things done after work.  But it does tend to make the days longer.

Tonight it was 8:30 by the time we both sat down and and starting thinking about what to do for dinner.  So, we decided to pop out for a quick, late, bite.  We ended up at our local pub, BB Rover’s.

BB Rover’s is a great bar.   Good food.  Nice patio outside.  Tons of beer.  They have over 300 beers from all over the world to choose from every night.   They have a tradition at BBs – once a patron has tried 100 different beers, their name goes up on the 100 Beer Club wall of fame.  Don’t worry, you don’t have to drink all 100 of them in one night.  🙂  To help keep track, they have a form that you can use to check off different beers as you drink them.

We’ve been going to BBs for a long time…over 16 years.  We have friends that have made it to the wall of fame.  But, I can never seem to make progress towards the 100 milestone.   Oh, I’ve tried.   I just dug up my old scorecard.  I have 23 different beers checked off, so far.  But, try as I might, I usually just end up ordering a Stella on draft.  I guess I know what I like.   Maybe I’ll give it another go.   It could happen.

In our travels to the Caribbean, I’ve found some local lagers that I like:  Carib (Trinidad & Tobago), Kalik (Bahamas), Hairoun (St. Vincent & the Grenadines).  But they are hard to find in the US, so they haven’t made it to BB’s checklist.   I guess we’ll just have to keep going down to the islands for a cold one of them.

I’ll leave you with this (source unknown):

The Beer Prayer 

Our lager,
Which art in barrels,
Hallowed be thy drink.
Thy will be drunk, (I will be drunk),
At home as it is in the tavern.
Give us this day our foamy head,
And forgive us our spillage,
As we forgive those who spill against 
us.
And lead us not to incarceration,
But deliver us from hangovers.
For thine is the beer, the bitter, and 
the lager.

Barmen

Happy Easter!

Golden "eggs."

Happy Easter to you!   They’re not Easter eggs.  But they’ll serve.  Monte, these are hidden around the house for you to find…go get ’em!

Eastside eats.

Dinner at Justine's.

Tonight I went out to dinner with some friends to celebrate a couple of birthdays.  We picked a place in East Austin for tonight – Justine’s on E 5th – a casual french bistro.  It was my first time here.  The food and wine was delicious.  I recommend the scallops, though the sauce was a tad bit spicy.

The place was crowded and hopping after about 8 o’clock.  And it got very noisy by the time we left about 9:30.  Apparently this is a hot spot hangout for lots of the beautiful people in town. 🙂

It’s starting to get warm these days, but it was still cool enough to sit outside.  In their courtyard they had a huge neon sign of a burlesque dancer that I wish turned out better, but here ’tis.

Ooo-la-la.

Happy Birthday to Irene & Lori!

Big day for us… but could it be even bigger?!

Luck, be a lady tonight!

As of today, Monte is retired!  Big day for us.

Today is also the drawing for the Mega Millions lottery drawing, and the jackpot is up to over $640M!  We usually do not buy lotto tickets, but hey, who can resist?  We can all use a little help.  (or a lot!)

I’ve blurred out the winning numbers above, so that we can continue to live in anonymity as mega-millionaires, after the drawing 🙂  Heh, heh.

Good luck to you and your tix, too!

First raft-up of the year.

Raft-up!

It’s that time of the year.  This weekend was the first raft-up of 2012.  And it was a doozie!  We had 14 boats, 31 people and 2 dogs.  I don’t have a picture of all the boats, but I took this one of 12 of them as we were coming in to tie up, and Joe arrived later.

It took quite a while to walk from one end to the other.   Some of the boats’ lifelines couldn’t open, so it was a gymnastic feat crossing from boat to boat …with one hand free 🙂

Let me see if I can do roll call….left to right, we had Mark & Sarah on Serenade, Gray & Debbie on the blue hulled First, Bartlett’s parents’ Catalina, John & Claudia & 2 others on the brand new Solace, Tasha & Robert and Tony & Michelle (visiting for the weekend!) on Voodoo, Danny & Casey on the Beneteau 31, Rory & Greg on Sapphire, Camden & Terry on MoonRock, Kurt, Wally & Kevin on Dancer, John & Deanna on Caribbean Run, Mike on Allegro, Lori & Dave on Camelot, Monte & me on Cupholder, and last but not least, Joe on Prelude.  Whew!

As much fun as these are, we did have a rare, bad experience on our way to the cove.  Some <expletive> motorhead nearly crashed into us as we were under sail.  Coming within about 5 feet of us, and going about 30 miles an hour.  As they passed, they turned their boat, pushing up a wall of water that dumped into our cockpit, drenching both of us, and pouring water into the cabin, v-berth and lockers below.

Monte immediately got on the cell phone and called LCRA dispatch, gave them a description of the boat and their heading and … they pulled them over.   Goobers.   It could have been very bad.  I guess it’s good that we only got wet.

Anyway, we didn’t let that spoil our evening.

In true B-dock fashion, the party went on into the wee hours.  A good time was had by all.

It’s truly wonderful to have this bunch of people to play with.  Everyone really enjoys being out on the lake together.  We are very lucky.

Bye-bye Winter (and a few other items of miscellany).

pea-knuckle.

We met Doray & Tom at BB Rover’s tonight for dinner and to play a few rounds of pinochle.  The ladies won a tightly contested best-of-three match.

Today is the last day of winter.   Spring will officially be upon us at 12:14 AM local time tomorrow morning.

I have a couple of unrelated other shots I wanted to post…  one is of a deer that has taken to laying outside the guest bedroom window.  He’s got an injured foreleg, and has been back here a couple of times.   This shot is from the bedroom window.  He’s only inches away.  Forgive the crummy shot through the solar screen on the window.  You get the idea.

Oh deer!

And this is a shot of a bunch of Texas Mountain Laurel seeds that I harvested from a bush growing in the greenbelt when we were there on Saturday afternoon.  I looked online to learn how to prepare the seeds for germination.  These seeds are from last season, they are hard and red and have shrunk a bit.  Conventional wisdom says to knick them and then soak them till they swell a bit, and then plant them about an inch deep.  The little dimples on the seeds in the picture below are where I cut through the shell of the seed.  The seeds soaked for about 8 hours, so they are plumped up a bit from when I knicked them.   I’ve got these guys in pots in the back room now so that I can tend them.  I hope they take!  We want to plant a bunch of mountain laurels along the back fence line.  I’ll let you know how they turn out…  FYI these are supposed to be poisonous, so if you try this at home… don’t eat them  🙂

Texas Mountain Laurel seeds.

There is rain in the forecast…it’s been slow getting here.  But as I type this post, there’s a big red line just moving into our area.   I’ll have to sign off now to watch the weather channel (my favorite).

Good night!

SizzlyGIF.

Hot water.

I made crepes for breakfast.  Always delicious!  As I was getting the pan ready, I flicked water into it to see if it was at the right temperature.  As the water danced and sizzled, I thought I would try to capture some of that later in a picture.

So after breakfast I set up my camera on a tripod next to the stovetop and gave it a try.  The water was moving too fast for my little camera to get a good shot.  I tried several different things.   I have an ISO 3200 setting, so I tried that and was able to capture a few clearer images.  I had quite a bit of water in the pan by this time, but it still looked cool.

A single image didn’t show much, so I looked on the web for a tool to create animated GIFs quickly and found Picasion.com.  It is a web-based tool that will upload up to 10 images, convert them to a GIF, and then give you the URL to the resulting file.   The animation above is the result.

So.  There ya go.  A creative way to waste a half hour or so.  🙂

Well, it wasn’t completely wasted.  Now I know how to display animated gifs on my wordpress.com-hosted blog.  The trick was to upload and insert it into my post without scaling it down, not display it at less than full size.   So, before I created the gif, I reduced the size of the images to make each one smaller.  Then I made the gif.  Then uploaded and attached it.  Voila.

Releasing my inner artiste.

A Sheila original (sort of).

Tonight Sue & I went to an art studio called Painting with a Twist.  They hold a painting class every night where everyone in the studio paints the same picture.   Oh, and you can bring your own wine and snacks to help get the creative juices flowing (that’s the twist part).  You can choose which session you want to attend by checking out their calendar and signing up ahead of time.  They have studios in many cities, check out their main website if you’re interested.  Tonight’s piece is called Moonlit Cherry Blossoms.

I know friends that have tried it, but this was my first time.  It was FUN!  The pic above is one I took of my painting after I got it home.  I look forward to trying this again.

Look out people, ARTIST COMIN’ THROUGH!!  😀

2011 is in the books.

Here's to 2012.
May we live in peace without weeping.
May our joy outline the lives we touch without ceasing.
And may our love fill the world, angel wings tenderly beating.
— Irish Blessing

Mo’ Willy.

Number 6.

Today we walked 9 holes at Morris-Williams Golf Course.  I’ve been looking forward to golfing with my sweetie since vacation started.  The rain put a damper on that for a bit, but today was beautiful with temps in the 60’s.

This is a shot of the Number 6 hole, taken from the Number 5 green.   The rain we’ve had the last few weeks have greened things up a bit.  You can just barely see the UT Tower – the one building visible on the horizon.

I really enjoy Morris-Williams.  I am still quite the novice golfer, but this is the course that I know best – by far.   The tee-to-green distance of the first 9 holes is about a mile and a half.  So I figure we walked 2 or so miles.  Though the way I hit today, it might have been more like 3-4 miles.   🙂   And, on this course, every hole seems to be uphill.   But no matter, it was really nice to be out there.

I did not lose any balls in the out of bounds or in the water hazards.  I did, however, hit several trees that popped out of nowhere.   Oh well.   Maybe one of my New Year’s resolutions will be to play at least once a quarter in 2012.  We’ll see….

 

A Perfect 10.

My other beer goes to 11.

We had a crowd-sourced Thanksgiving meal today.  Monte and Tom provided 2 delicious grill roasted turkeys.  Kate and Glenn brought green bean casserole and Kate whipped up the best mashed potatoes (and peas!) that I’ve ever tasted.  Doray and Sandy made their sweet potato baked cup thingies.  Sue & Marty brought delicious, home-made cranberry sauce, squash, and irresistible bourbon balls.  I baked up some dinner roles,  made gravy from the drippings of the birds and whipped up a pink-jello-whip-cream-cottage-cheese-pineapple dish in honor of all our favorite aunts.  Everything was DELICIOUS!  Laura joined us after dinner, too.

The picture above is of one of the brews that Glenn opened.  He got it part way down before someone noticed the foam on the inside of the bottle formed a perfect number 10!   Pretty funny.   The poor guy wasn’t able to finish this beer for a while, for all the excitement it caused.   But it was a good omen for the day… it was perfect.

I wish all of you a very happy and blessed Thanksgiving Day.

Stopping to create posts on this blog every day (or so) has caused me to pause long enough to reflect on things in my day and life.   I have so much to be thankful for.

A day well spent.

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted something.  Things have been very busy lately.  So, i’ll take the liberty of a longer post today.

From the base of the Summit Trail.

We took today off, starting a much awaited and long overdue week or so of vacation.  The day was overcast and a tad chilly.  We set out into the Hill Country – destination Enchanted Rock.  This gigantic outcropping of granite rock was formed about a billion years ago.   It’s a stark contrast to the tree-covered, rough limestone hills that surround it.  The summit trail leads up the 425′ vertical climb to the top, which is 1825′ above sea level.  If you look at the picture above you can see a person approaching the top, and a few people along the way – which give a sense of the scale of the Rock.

Autumn in the Hill Country.

It was quite windy at the top.  But what great views!  We don’t get a lot of autumn color, so I really enjoyed seeing this patchwork of rust, gold and green from above.

The close up views were worth seeing as well.  The shot above is of the rust colored lichens that can be found covering the pink granite rocks.

Craggy.

On the way down I couldn’t resist taking this shot of a wind-beaten, twisted, dead oak tree against the sky.

Oh, deer.

After we made it back down we came across several deer, right on the edge of the parking lot.  This guy turned to say bye.

Barrel o fun!

On the way to the park we drove through Fredericksburg and stopped to walk through some of the shops.  We ate lunch at Der LindenBaum – home of awesome traditional German cooking.  On the way home, we couldn’t drive by Becker Vineyards without stopping in for a flight of wine tasting.

What a great day!

Welcome to the Dam tour. I am your Dam guide.

Longhorn sailors.

Joe suggested a cruise down the lake to see the Dam.  It’s rare to see the basin when the lake is so low – at 627.85′ today.   It’s really not a basin anymore.  Sometimes Islands are all the way out of the water, and connected to land, so, islands no more.   The original river channel winds all the way around them.  Windy Point looks more like Windy Acres.  And many of the marinas have scooted out to what would normally be the middle of the lake, but is now the edge of the shore.

Monte and I joined Ken and Joe on Prelude for a sail.   It was a beautiful day.   We had nice breezes on the way down.    The closest mile marker to our marina is mile marker 14, and the Mansfield Dam is at, well, mile marker 0.  So, round trip was close to about 30 miles.

As we passed the Austin Yacht Club we got to see several of their regattas underway.  The shot above is of some of the University of Texas Sailing Team’s Flying Juniors fleet.   The 2012 Nationals will be in Austin.  So they’re working hard to get ready.  Good luck Longhorns!

Here’s a sight we don’t see very often…

MM 1.

And, finally, we snugged up as close as we could to Mansfield Dam.  They have a string of bouys in front to keep people from getting too close – which foiled my plan to get a shot of myself touching the dam.

Upstream side of Mansfield Dam.

Construction of the Mansfield Dam (originally called Marshall Ford Dam) began in 1937 and was completed in 1941.   Mansfield Dam and Lake Travis are the only structures in the Highland Lakes chain specifically designed to contain floodwaters in the lower Colorado River basin. The lake can store as much as 260 billion gallons of water.   Some other factoids from the Lower Colorado River Authority website:

Elevation when full: 681 feet above mean sea level (msl)
Volume when full: 1,135,000 acre-feet
Historic high: 710.4 feet above msl on Dec. 25, 1991
Historic low: 614.2 feet above msl on Aug. 14, 1951
Normal operating range: at or below 681 feet above msl
Spillway elevation: 714 feet above msl
Top of dam: 750 feet above msl

The floodgates are at the bottom of the dam and are used to generate electricity and for flood control.  The spillway openings are on the right end of the dam in the picture above.   Water will start to spill over them at 714′, but it’s never happened… yet.  The highest I have seen the lake was 701.5′, which was over the July 4th weekend of 2007.  Hard to believe there was ever that much water in the lake.

We had a really lovely sail.  A nice Sunday adventure.

I shake my tiny fist at this drought!

Riff-Rafft-up.

Watching the sunrise.

We spent the night in Arky South cove.  We enjoyed more laughs, music and good company last night.  Mike and Kathy joined us on Soul Healer yesterday for a few hours, and Lori, Dave and Jake joined us this afternoon on Camelot.

Shortly after we woke up this morning, we were treated to a beautiful sunrise, coming up right behind the Commander’s Point lighthouse (well, water tower really).  A lovely sight.

Then, later in the morning a funky fog bank sunk over the lake for a while, but shortly lifted for a beautiful, sunny day.

Where did that lovely sun go?

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention… we have christened this and any future such auspicious gathering a Riff-Rafft-up.  For obvious reasons 🙂  In attendance this weekend were Wally & Kurt on Dancer, Joe on Prelude, Monte & Sheila on Cupholder, and Marty & Sue (and Koko) on Caribbean Hug.

Lazy Sunday.

Have a great week!