Starting Summer off Right!

Summer started with a Memorial Day visit from Geoff's family and mine.  It rained the whole weekend, but there was enough time to fit in a bit of sightseeing and lots of time for the families to get to know each other.

We also fed everyone lots of Tex-Mex before sending them home. The next weekend I headed to Lake Conroe with the girls to celebrate our 30th birthdays.

It was tight, but we got 5 women's worth of luggage into the car.  We shared a cabin on the lake and spent the nights in the hot tub and days playing Uno and catching up.

It's been almost three years since we have all been together.  On our last day, we kayaked in the morning then rented a pontoon boat to spend the afternoon floating around different parts of the lake.  It was a great, relaxing way to start the the summer and hopefully it will become an annual tradition.

Friends, Fun, and Fireworks

The last week has been bursting with friends.  Last Friday, we drove up to Ft. Worth for the wedding of our friends Dawn and Jim.  Dawn had her dress custom made and it is so perfectly her.  The reception was held at a really nice RV park (sounds crazy, actually crazy-awesome) which boosted the retro-kitsch vibe that was also very much in the bride and groom's style.

Our friend Maria befriended a local chicken and Dawn brought out her friend Abe (long story).  Geoff was the last person to go get cake, so they gave him a half-pound piece (he had about three bites, then pushed it aside and I ate it - I have a major cake weakness).  These giraffes were our place cards and now hang out on our bookshelf.

Quite a few of our Pennsylvania friends flew in for the wedding (although only a few still live in PA) and it was great opportunity to catch up in person instead of on Facebook.  We only had a few days with most of them, but our Frank came back to San Antonio with us for a four-day visit.

I had to work most of the week, but Frank and Geoff rented some bikes and toured the town.  Of course, they went to the Alamo (they failed to find the basement), but they also looped around the McNay, and tried on some fancy new hats.

On the Fourth, we had a cookout over at the Holtz' and entertained the kids with bubbles (left over from the wedding) and runs through the sprinkler while the adults relaxed and ate way too much 7-layer dip. Man that stuff is good.  It's a good thing I only have it every five years or so.

Mike's niece and nephew are visiting for a few weeks and Veronica got them matching flag shirts and made them pose for a series of increasingly ridiculous portraits.  I call this one "bored at Six Flags."

After last year's drought, we were excited to shoot off fireworks.  I think the adults were nearly as excited as the kinds and they graciously shared their sparklers.

Obviously, I had to make some things for the party, because that is just how I roll.  I had my favorite tart crust from 101 Cookbooks in the freezer so I baked that up and filled it with peach butter and berries.  Never one to stop at just one desert, I made red velvet graham crackers which were combined with Veronica's homemade marshmallows into insanely decadent s'mores.  To channel the kids' sugar highs, I helped them make pinwheels that work like gangbusters:

Visitors Brave the Heat

My parents and grandma braved the intense Texas summer to come visit us two weeks ago.  They drove down so they could stop and see family in Oklahoma and the next day we put them back in the car to drive back up to Austin.

We hit up IKEA in the morning for supplies for a fantastic trundle bed I'll show you how to make very soon.  Then we headed for the famous Salt Lick restaurant for BBQ.

The food was delicious.  We shared a combo platter with a bit of each of their types of open-pit cooked meats and the special - a brisket burger smothered in queso and roasted peppers. Messy, but oh so good.  Grandma, in her white shirt, spilled not a drop of sauce.  The rest of us were not so neat.

After lunch, we headed to the LBJ Presidential library which had quite a bit of biographical information, but also a great exhibit of the radical movements of the '60s.  It is on the University of Texas campus and free to visit so I highly recommend a stop if you are in the area.

The next stop of our jam-packed day was the Collings guitar factory outside of Austin.  They only offer tours on Friday afternoons, but if you can make it there, it is incredible.

Each guitar takes about three months to make, not including the careful drying and rehumidifying of the wood.  One very experienced man matches the front and back boards based on their sound quality before the blanks are cut. Just prior to final assembly, the pieces are returned to him for "voicing" and he shaves off minute layers from the inside of the guitar top.

In addition to making just 1200 guitars each year, the factory produces 600 mandolins.  The craftsmanship is easy to appreciate even for someone like me who knows nothing about guitars.

While we were finishing up the tour, Grandma was out in the lobby chatting with Bill Collings.  The owner was waiting to see how our tour went.

After dinner, we headed for the Congress Avenue bridge to see more than a million bats emerging to feast on the plentiful South Texas insects.  This spectacle goes on for the better part of half an hour.  If you have never seen this, I can't recommend it highly enough.  It is a bit surreal.

As I watched the ribbon of bats wind across the sky, I couldn't help but wonder what it would take to install a colony in our backyard to deal with the mosquitoes.  Saturday and Sunday, we took it a bit easier with trips to the farmer's market, cool projects around the house, and dinner with Mike and Veronica.   

On Monday, we visited the Witte Museum to check out their Amazon exhibit.  The focus was on the many dangers of the Amazon River.

Mom was so scared  of the piranhas that she headed back to land-locked Kansas the very next day!

The trip was short but lots of fun.  It was a great reminder to play tourist in our own town more often!

Bike Shorts

...that's what Scotsmen where under their kilts.  Or at least, that is what the ones competing at the San Antonio Highland Games were wearing.  We got half-priced tickets through Groupon and headed up to Helotes this afternoon in time for lunch.

Scotch eggs (hardboiled eggs wrapped in sausage and fried) and Cornish pasties were a pretty drastic change from the last week of veganism.  There were, of course the requisite bagpipers and drummers.

But the real reason we were there was to see the events referred to as "Scottish Heavy Athletics."  After watching for a while, we mostly figured out the rules, but if you are curious, you can read them here.

The first event we watched was the hammer throw.  The hammer weighs 16 pounds and has to be thrown without moving the feet.  Some of the men wear shoes with long metal bars coming out of the toe to dig into the ground so they don't rotate.  Throwing the weight requires spinning the weight around the head and then releasing it over the shoulder.  There are no bonus points for looking like a ballerina on release.

 

The next one we watched was the self-explanatory "Weight Over the Bar."  (By the way, all of these guys are wearing shirts reading "plaid to the bone.")

Seems pretty straight-forward, but the weight is 56 pounds so occasionally, people completely ate it.

You can tell from the picture this isn't going to end well.

The last event of the day was the iconic caber toss.  Evidently, there is no official weight for the caber, but the one they used was 18 feet long and 125 pounds.  Hard enough to pick up, throwing it end over end - insane.

The run.

I had always assumed that the goal was to throw the caber as far as possible.  The goal is actually to turn it end over end and have it land perfectly perpendicular from your body.

The pull.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, only about 1 in 7 guys managed to even completely flip the caber end over end.

The turn.

It looked like so much fun that I was having flashbacks to my shot put days.  Maybe next year you will see me in the women's division!

{clapclapclap} Deep in the Heart of Texas

We arrived in Texas late in the first week of the new year (now more than 2 months ago!!!) and I began work  the following Monday.  I've been sending my mom a picture of myself on my first day of school every fall since I left for college (prior to that, she took the picture herself).  So it only seemed appropriate to text her a quick photo on my way out the door on the first day of my postdoc.

I'm a dork.

Work has been great so far. I'm getting to learn different skills than I used during grad school - which is exactly what I was looking for.  The transition to a new job is challenging because I hate constantly feeling like I don't know what I'm doing!!

I'm official!

The second week of work, there was a "snowstorm" that closed my office until noon.  It looked like this:

See how the sidewalk looks white?  That's the snow.

Geoff and I are really liking living in a larger city and having a lot more options for food, shows, museums, and more.  We really miss our friends in State College, but our favorite thing in San Antonio is living a block and a half from the Holtz!!  Veronica and I haven't lived in the same state for ten years and this is closer than we have lived our whole lives - it's wonderful.  They introduced us to our favorite thing in the neighborhood - Paciugo gelato!

We like it so much that Geoff even requested a gelato pie for his birthday in February.

Happy Birthday!

We formed a Wii Rock Band, have each other over for dinner, and go to the farmer's market every weekend.  

The farmer's market in San Antonio is great because it is year round!!  The growing season starts so early that there were strawberries at the market today.  Between the farmer's market and all the "Made in Texas" food at the grocery store, it has been relatively easy to hit 50% local food.  Not to mention, everything is bigger in Texas:

That dog is a Afghan Wolfhound.