Jan 30, 2010

Cold and a show! No, we're not getting snow like Mom & Dad, but it's really cold for Austin. After a few days in the mid 70's, we dove straight back into Winter with highs only in the 40's and wind. Cheryl and I took in Avatar at the South Lamar Alamo. Movies with a menu to order from - decadent. Overall, a good movie. Definitely worth it for the special effects, but long! The show could have easily lost 40 min and still been great. Cheryl and I fueled up at Austin Java afterwards to ward off the chill.

Jan 29, 2010

Arts and crafts day at the office. This whole set up is kinda a long story. But the moral is that 3d paper dolls of networking equipment are a pain in the ass to put together. If only I drank beer, this is how many I would have had....

Jan 28, 2010

It's Girl Scout Cookie Time! Hello Girl Scout Cookies, goodbye skinny jeans! I bought four boxes of cookies - two boxes of Tagalongs (which, in Texas, are mysteriously called peanut butter patties - ew I don't like that name!) and two boxes of Lemonades.

One of my co-workers asked if I was going to eat all of them. Um. Duh. Yeah, I am and I'm NOT sharing. It's going to take me a little while, but I can work through 4 boxes of cookies!!!

Jan 27, 2010

Drinks with the girls! It was so good to see everyone and catch up! We all decided it's been too long. Can't wait to see everyone at the crack that bottle party in February.

Jan 26, 2010

Thank goodness for travel journals. I think this is a very important habit Mom instilled in me in our first big trip abroad. And thank goodness she did because I'm forever behind in my scrapbook and I need the reminders! Although it is a bit funny that I have no idea what I did last week but I can tell you exactly what happened on September 22, 2007: We drove from Vernazza to Lucca parking at the train station. We climbed the Torre Guinigi with a bunch of German school kids and then rented bikes to ride around town. We had pizza for lunch and caught the train for Pisa. We purchased tickets to climb the tower and had to wait an hour and a half for the pleasure. We killed time by taking funny pictures of us holding up the tower, touring the cathedral, and grabbing a drink. Then at the alloted time, we raced up the stairs on the tower (yes, you can really feel the difference in stair climbing when you are going against the tilt). Took a few pictures and decided that the railing wasn't high enough for our liking and jetted back to the train station so we could drive to Gambasi Terme and our Agritourismo for the night. Dinner at a local place of gnocchi and spaghetti con mista di mare while watching the Miss Italia pageant - Julia won, but that wasn't until the next night.

Jan 25, 2010

Since the broadcast was on most of the channels on Friday night, I ended up catching almost all of the show. There were some pretty amazing performances so I snapped up the album this morning on iTunes. Somber but very relaxing. I think it's an uplifting message overall and I figure why not donate more to the Haiti cause? I hope with the global effort that Haiti is able to rebuild out of the rubble to create a better place just like San Francisco 100 years ago.

Jan 2, 2010

Happy Founder's Day! A pretty good turn out at the house today for Founder's Day. Here is a snap of Billie Washington and Cis Myers our 75 and 50 year Thetas!

Jan 23, 2010

My cuddle bug. I feel like we've had a disproportionate amount of Ginger in this blog. Ginger is the softest and she takes her hugs and kisses just like the rest. But Zoe is the cuddle bug. She's a hugger and she will bark at you until she gets her hugs. There is no such thing as "too close" for the Zoester. She'll take a nap right on top of me. In fact, that is her preferred napping mode, right on laying on top of the nearest human.

Jan 22, 2010

These are a few of my favorite things: My DDPa and DDMa earrings. They were my first blue box birthday present. Little gold x's that have stood the test of time and fashion, they've been in my jewelry box for almost 20 years and I can't think of a reason to take the out of rotation any time soon.

Jan 21, 2010

Dinner with my girls - the Thetas! Jean was kind enough to host and we had a great turn out! We even had a brilliant idea out of the evening. Allyson and I thought why don't we do a Theta movie night. So Flicks with Chicks was born! We're going to take in Valentine's Day at the Alamo Drafthouse Lamar - get your tickets online now!!

Jan 20, 2010

Is it only Wednesday. It's hard to be excited by work when it's a lot of boring numbers!! At least the weather outside is lovely. Oh wait, I'm inside not enjoying it. Hmm I hope it holds until the weekend!

Jan 19, 2010

Look at my little peanut. She's so cute. Today she got her teeth cleaned. She talked in the car all the way to the vet's office. She even continued to talk after they gave her drugs to calm down! Good thing all went well. Teeth are clean with no broken bits.

Jan 18, 2010

My regular Monday lunch buddy and reluctant photo subject, Jane. Snapped at our favorite Monday lunch spot - Panera, can't you tell?

Jan 17, 2010

Caroline was a bit sleepy at the dinner table tonight. I captured this little snippet along with a cute photo of passed out baby and Mommy.

Jan 16, 2010

Finally some sunshine after several days of gray and rain! A quick inspection of the yard revealed plenty of weeds managed to survive the cold snap. Unfortunate. Happily my blue bonnets also managed to survive.

Snapped with the new kid on the block - the Canon Elph SD 780 IS. It's so dang tiny I think I'm going to lose it. But it will be waaaay better to carry on a daily basis than the hefty camera!

Jan 15, 2010

Slow start. Miss Ginger is pretty sore from her shots at the vet yesterday. She's favoring her left leg and doesn't want to walk around. Usually this kind of "carry me everywhere I need to go" diva behavior is reserved for Zoe so when Ginger does it, I know she's hurting. Waiting for the vet to open so we can call to ask if we can give her a little of Zoe's leftover Tramadol.

UPDATE: I narc'd up that girl with some Tramadol and she's out for the day. Should be feeling better by the time I get home.

Jan 14, 2010

Is this the way out?! Zoe and Ginger didn't take to their visit to the vet's too well. Ginger "talked" the entire time we were in the waiting room - it's like they knew they were getting shots!

Zoe weighed in at a cool 13.4 pounds and Ginger was only 13! Skin and bones! She goes back for a teeth cleaning next week.

Jan 13, 2010

My new obsession is The Food Network Magazine. I always find great recipes inside to try. I had to breakdown and get a subscription after buying the last three months off the newsstand. Well, the Costco. (Do we even have newsstands anymore? I guess in bigger cities, but we don't got 'em here in Austin.)

We had a doctored up version of a white bean chili this Sunday and it was delicious! Just enough eat to get your attention and it *feels* healthy because there's spinach! Yum-O! In my version I forgot the wine (doh!), substituted cannelloni beans, and didn't add the smoked paprika (you know I don't like things that are smoked) or the cream (why? I guess it cuts back on the heat, but really this dish doesn't need the extra fat). Oh and I took the lazy man's way out and used a rotisserie chicken.

Jan 12, 2010

Sunrise and moonset. The moon has been particularly beautiful for the past few days. Here it is from my back porch this morning. I need to invest in a tripod because to come up with a somewhat non-blurry image, I had to wedge the camera up into the railing and a brick pillar....but I like the way it turned out!

Jan 11, 2010

What a glorious sunrise this morning in Austin. Alright I confess, I took this picture on the sunset setting on my camera - I missed the really good colors by just about 10 minutes. Oh well, at least I got to see the sunrise today, 'cause you know I didn't see that sunset!

Jan 10, 2010
Ya gotta love kid-speak. Tonight when the family was over for dinner, Caroline had us reading books. We're going through the animal book on the page with all the birds. That's a lot of birds for a 2 year old to know so we were fielding lots of "What's dat one?" questions. Until we came to flamingo. It was immediately translated into "Flingo!" and later degraded into "Bingo!"

Jan 9, 2009

Welcome friend! I've missed you sunshine. This is the first rays of light warming up my oak tree. And boy did we need the warm up! You can't tell from the picture, but it was 15 degrees when I took this picture at 7:30 this morning. Thank you sunshine for coming out and warming us up to a balmy 36 - it never felt so good!

Jan 8, 2010

Baby it's cold outside! Burrr was heard all across Austin today as we barely got into the 30's - about 30 degrees colder than our normal daytime average. This is a shot of the icy water flows on the rocky hills along 360 on my way home from work. We're all getting cosy tonight when the temperatures are supposed to drop into the teens for the first time in more than 15 years. Burrrrr!! Stay bundled up!

Jan 7, 2010

Today we got a fun new piece of equipment in the office. A partner lent us a dome to fiddle with. We took it apart immediately to check it out....and to get it through the door. It turns out it was a bit bigger than we expected....probably more than we need, but fun. Our youngest employee was in the office in the afternoon so we had some fun hiding him under the dome. But then he wanted a flashlight because it was dark inside there....

Jan 6, 2010

What is that you ask? It's a jumper inside the ADU. Today I learned that if you don't have the jumper set correctly, it doesn't set DTR to high when you swap the modem and GPS cable runs and you won't be able to communicate with the modem. The modem only speaks over specific TX/RX pairs whereas GPS ain't so choosey. This is good to know if you are trying to call said modem on a vessel in the middle of the ocean....Fun times. This is what you get when you have a 14 hour work day. Work pictures.

Jan 5, 2010

I couldn't resist this picture of my beggin' dog. The dog nanny, Shannon, was over today to take the girls out for a mid day walk. She left them a special treat of a leftover holiday present. Ginger made a beeline for it and tried to get as tall as possible to see what was on the counter. I didn't have the heart to tell her that her legs are just too short! I love this pic because of the shadow her head makes on the carpet behind her - a perfect little head!

Jan 4, 2010

Back to the grindstone. Ahh the Monday back after a long break. It feels like it's been so long since I've driven there, I've almost forgotten how to get there. But somehow I magically arrive, dock my laptop and get going. Nothing like an 11 hour day to welcome you back.

Jan 3, 2010

My car-panions. It's Sunday night and that means family dinner night. Tonight it's up at Jim & Heather's house which means we have to get in the horse and sleigh to get up there. The girls occupy the footwell of the passenger side for car trips. They used to take the passenger seat, but when we got the new CRV they wouldn't fit (had a tendency to have one slide off when we took a turn....) so they have learned to love the footwell.

Ginger is very sanguine about the whole experience while Zoe spends the entire trip trying to get as close as possible to the gas pedal and panting her breath of death on me. gah!

January 2, 2010

I've recently had to say goodbye to an old friend - my scale. I'm not exactly sure how long I've had it. I tend to measure things in moves. As in, "I moved you from Knoxville to Austin" therefore you are more than 3 years old. I definitely moved my old scale to Austin and I *think* I remember moving it to Knoxville. Let's be honest people, I might have just stolen that from my parents house 15 years ago.

But you can't start off a January without the right equipment and that means a fancy new scale. Yes, I sprung for the fancy body fat measurement one....but after my first reading came up 14%, I don't have too much confidence in its accuracy. Still, it's been pretty accurate on the weight measurements - just the tool I need to get those holiday lbs off!

January 1, 2010

My sister in law has inspriationalized me with her 365 photo project http://howard365.blogspot.com/ so I'm going to see if I can pick up the habit too.

Let's start with what's important on New Year's day - no not the football, the Hokies already won on the 31st! - the food. We've got to eat our black eyed peas for good luck in 2010! I found this recipe for Recession Caviar on Tasty Kitchen and just had to try it. Warning - I cut this recipe down to about a 1/3 and still had loads of leftovers. I guess that just means I've got a big bowl of good luck for the New Year!