For the last couple of weekends we have been tearing into the house – a bit like a top-to-bottom Spring Cleaning (only 6 months late). I’m topping it off this morning with a getting all the windows cleaned. Even if it only lasts for a few days, I love how clear the view is. The morning sunlight seems 10 times brighter now. I picked up these lovely lillies at the store this morning, to bask in the sunlight.
Monte’s neice, Amy Lee, is in Austin this weekend for an education session that is being held at the Capitol. She’s staying with us tonight, heading home tomorrow.
It’s nice to get to spend time with her. Hopefully next visit we’ll be able to catch up with her kiddos.
Happy Halloween! This the season… to carve the pumpkin, don my jack-o-lantern earrings, and put a bowl of candy by the door. It was five years ago today that we closed on our old house and officially moved into this house. I was looking forward to living in a new neighborhood, and visions of hoards of trick-or-treaters danced in my head.
That first year, I was bummed that there was only one knock on the door all night. Since then I’ve come to realize that the number of trick-or-treaters coming by a given house on Halloween is inversely proportional to the median age of the neighborhood, which, in our case, is about 70 (or thereabouts). For tonight I bought one small treat bag of peanut M&Ms, just in case. So, of course we got a bunch of kids — the M&Ms ran out before 8PM. It seems that over the last five years we’re getting a bit of turnover in the neighborhood, more young families with kiddos.
So, watch out, Halloween 2012 will be BIG!
P.S. this is my first blog post from my new Mac Book(!)
If you know me at all, you know that I take my time making up my mind about some things, but once I do, I’m committed (and very impatient). Well, I’ve recently decided that I needed a new device. Something that I can use for my personal computer things… internet browsing, apps, iTunes, photo editing, blogging, music editing, geneology research, data storage, etc. So I embarked on a long period of researching my options – no impulse buying here. So, I checked out the iPad. Not really what I was looking for, it’s really more of a glorified client device that needs to sync to a PC (or now the iCloud). I guess I need a traditional laptop kind of computer. So I had to decide between PC and Mac. I opted for Mac. Mac Book Pro to be specific. In researching it, and the OS underneath i was pleasantly surprised to learn about Mac OS X Lion and its features.
I decided on the 15″ Mac Book Pro. But I wanted to add some custom features (8GB Mem, faster Hard Drive, anti-glare monitor, etc) that you cannot get by walking into the Apple Store. Which meant that I had to order it online.
Soooo, i did. And i’ve been (not) patiently waiting for it to be delivered for over a week. The target delivery date was today. The nice people at Apple sent me the tracking info so that I could watch the progress of my new toy make its way from China to my front door via FedEx. That means with the click of a mouse I can go out to FedEx and see the status of my package delivery… which I’ve done about 10 times a day since last week! The package was picked up by Fed Ex and then sat at the FedEx place in Shanghai for about 3 1/2 days… excruciating!… and then when it finally got to the continent, it sat in Anchorage for over a day. Ugh! Well, as of this morning it is in Austin, on a truck, out for delivery (YAY!).
You guys all drive careful out there, around those FedEx delivery trucks today, allright?!
More later. (oh and here’s a youtube link to a song that comes to mind as I pen this post.)
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.
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.
We have another full-moon raftup this weekend, the Full-Hunter’s Moon. It’s been several months since we rafted up on the lake, the last few have been marina-based “slip-ups.”
I have been wanting to make Jello Shots for some reason. Kind of a fun treat for the lake, if I can just figure out how to get them there in tact. I have been looking around for little 2 ounce plastic cups with lids, and couldn’t find them in grocery stores. A few weeks ago we stopped by a restaurant supply company and found them – in bulk 🙂
So, this morning I googled conventional web-wisdom on jello shots and came up with the following:
Jello Shots
1 3-oz package of Jello 8 oz boiling water 2 oz cold water 6 oz rum or vodka or whatever
Pour the Jello powder in the boiling water, stir for a minute or two. Then pour in the cold water & booze and stir. Fill cups and refrigerate til set. 1 package ended up making about 12 of these 2 oz sized cups for me. Note that if you put in more or higher octane alcohol, then you run the risk of them not setting properly. With the mixture I used, the cups set fine in about 4 hours in the fridge.
I popped on the lids, and put in the ice chest for the lake, and they made it just fine.
I have this thing about certain words… some of them I can’t seem to remember time and time again. But I remember what letter they begin with. Weird. Makes me think that the brain, or at least my brain, indexes information alphabetically.
Anyway. The name of this flower is one that always escapes me. But I know it begins with a “G.” Google is a nice companion tool for my funky memory, i just searched on “flowers that begin with G.” And there it was in the list with all the other G-flowers… Geranium.
This is one that has weathered the summer, and is putting out some more buds – they’ll be fire-red when they bloom. These are likely the last of the season.
Its amazing to see how quickly Mother Nature responds to a little rain in the midst of this terrible drought. We got an inch or two of rain on Sunday, and today the creeping lantana out back is popping with blooms. I’ve been watering this guy by hand all summer, but it wasn’t as satisfying as a drenching rain, I suppose.
The crepe myrtles are popping into bloom as well. It’s nice to see a little color out there!
FINALLY the rain gods have smiled on us. We got a few minutes of showers yesterday afternoon, but this morning a front came through and dumped about 2 inches at our house, and hopefully a lot more in the Hill Country, bound for Lake Travis.
The shot above captured a splash from a raindrop in the birdbath out back.
The shot below captured a rain drop in free-fall 🙂
Nearly 11 years ago a little blue parakeet adopted us. Petey lived with us 9 long years. We have waited some time before getting another bird but have started looking over the summer.
Over the weekend we found a gentle little boy (we hope) who has some of Petey’s coloring, but is different enough to be his own little bird.
We brought Keeto home tonight. Here’s to the newest member of our flock!
We’re back home. We had a nice time in the Pacific NW, but it’s nice to be home again. We flew in over Lake Travis and got these pics. The lake is at 629.07′ today, according to LCRA. We are lower now than we were in 2009, and only about 15′ more to go to hit the all time low. The shot above is of Hurst Cove and our marina. You can see the docks all stacked up. The marina sent a notice saying they’ll be moving some of the docks out to the middle of the cove. Not much water left in there.
This is a shot of Arkansas Bend. Arky North and South are slowly disappearing.
Arkansas Bend.
Below is a shot of Cow Creek. It’s hard to believe we were up in there for the March birthday raftup.
As you may have figured out, we extended our stay in Seattle a few more days. We are working from here during the day and playing at night. Today is our anniversary, as well. It just so happens that we got engaged while on a trip to Seattle to attend Patrick and Nga’s wedding. Monte popped the question and gave me a ring in a waterfront restaurant here – Elliott’s Oyster House on Pier 56. Nice memories. So…. since we were in town, we just had to go there for dinner tonight to celebrate.
After work we popped over to Seattle on the ferry. The mountain was out, though a bit hazy.
Whenever riding the ferry, I buy a bag of cheetos to feed to the seagulls. Monte had them eating out of his hand.
In Seattle, we walked down the waterfront for a while. At Elliott’s, we had a great table by the window overlooking the Sound and watched the sailboats and ferries go by as the sun set. We sampled as much of the seafood as possible – oysters, crab cakes, scallops, salmon…..the food and wine was delicious.
Afterwards we walked up and down the waterfront on the way back to the ferry. The weather was great. The first shot in this post is of one of the horses on an antique carousel inside of Miner’s Landing on Pier 57.
Picked a bunch of blackberries today. The plants grow like weeds here. They are big and sweet and ready to eat.
When I was a kid my brother and I would often be sent down the street to pick gallons of blackberries at a time – to make pies, jelly and jam. We would come home with full buckets, covered in scratches, with red stained fingers that you couldn’t get clean even with bleach. And that is where I learned to dislike spiders. The bushes are full of incredibly large spiders that love to hide behind the big green leaves, and who also have a tendency of spinning their virtually invisible webs at eye-level across walking paths among the brambles.
This time I wore gloves, and I managed to avoid any close encounters with those gnarly spiders. 🙂
Sheila365 