Friends, family, and the importance of reliable public transportation

Over Memorial Day weekend, Sam and I journeyed to his former homeland and our old stomping grounds in New Jersey, New York, and yes, even Astoria. Our trip was even a little longer I think than when I was there at Christmas, but the time seemed to fly by. I also found myself missing New York more than during that December visit. I guess because it was cold then and this time we were blessed with beautiful weather constantly. Also, last time many friends were traveling, so while I got longer quality visits with those folks that were in town, there were fewer people to see. Riding the subway from Astoria into the city to meet friends, even though the train was unreasonably slow (the rumors are true: the MTA service is definitely suffering), I was nostalgic for riding that same path however many hundreds of times before.

Sam was supposed to be taking a picture of the adorable Fiat that was our transportation for the weekend. It's basically a vespa masquerading as a car. 

 For some reason rather than plan one group meet up, I arranged to meet friends from different groups in rapid succession. This allowed for more quality one-on-one time, but shorter meet-ups in general. Since we met four groups of friends for drinks one after another over the course of the evening, it also led to our getting very drunk. (Which reminds me, another thing I'm nostalgic for: the not-worrying-about-driving-home-end-of-the-night-two-martini-special).

Drinking and chatting took priority over taking photos with friends, but I do have some from earlier in the day at Central Park. This was a cool art piece. All the cable spools have colored roped representing the length of different paths through the park. 

The site of some of our engagement photos years ago. The angel from the Bethesda fountain looks like it's coming out of my head, but otherwise this is totally on par with the professional pics. 

After spending the night with friend in Astoria, we headed back to New Jersey for a BBQ at Sam's parents house. Friends, kids, dogs, and good food were all in attendance. The next door neighbors were also having a big party complete with what we can only assume was the Spotify playlist "Lesser Known Songs by 1990s One Hit Wonders" which provided a nice background ambiance to our own festivities.

BBQ party people!

The whole crew! Except whoever is taking the picture, I guess. 

Actually the above picture was a lie because it didn't include the gracious host and hostess of the party. 

 We had a devil of a time getting back to Austin on Memorial Day due to the massive rainstorms and flooding. After an unplanned 7 hour diversion to Houston, we finally made it back to find our house un-flooded and our cat only mildly perturbed. The tri-state area has some wonderful things and, more importantly, some wonderful people, but it is always nice to be home. That said, I'm still bummed about missing Shakespeare in the Park with Sam Waterston. I mean, it's Sam Waterston!

One final shot. From Madison Square Park and their summer art piece. Always may favorite public art piece in the city. 

A visible representation of life lately

I've been a rather terrible blogger lately. Some deadlines are all coming at the same time at work, so my writing energy has been focused over there. And truth be told, that's still true, so this won't be much of a post either. Still, to tide you over until I'm back in blogging shape, here's a few photos from my phone over the last few weeks. A window into my life, as it were, without all the unnecessary paragraphs of text.

Got a zoodler for turning zucchini and other vegetables into noodles. Turned out awesome. with a pork Bolognese  (the secret is a quarter pound of pancetta…)

It finally stopped raining enough for us to start demo on the porch. Goodbye sweet porch, we barely knew ye!

Shakespeare in the Park at Zilker. Production wasn't quite on par with Central Park's, but it was a smidge easier to get in to and they didn't care if you took pictures of the set. I can see why Taming of the Shrew isn't performed in modern productions that often though. 

Did one of those drink-a-bunch-of-wine-and-paint lady's night classes. Our painting was of bats on the South Congress bridge…in case you couldn't tell. 

Got my hair cut and the guy did some cool styling with expensive products. Alas, left to my own devices, my hair will never look this good again. 

From a couple of weeks ago at the O Henry Museum Pun-Off. This is Sam's "listening to puns" face, I guess. 

Will return soon with more writing and more pictures and, who know, maybe hugely important life lessons. At the very least, I'll have more progress photos for that porch demolition. I think this might be the only time I've had a photo dump post without any photos of Dinah in it. Don't worry, she continues to thrive. 

Spirit of St Louis

This past weekend and a bit of last week I had the privilege of spending time in the toasted ravioli capital of the Midwest: St Louis. I wasn't going to visit the city, so much as to visit friends who live there, but having never been, it was still fun to check things out.

As it turns out St Louis has a lot of city pride. They have their own style of pizza (which is not likely to ever be heard outside of St Louis), rabid Cardinal fandom, and an insistence on calling Panera's "St Louis Bread Co." Pizza aside, there's a lot to be proud of. Turns out St Louis has a number of wonderful free museums including a pretty awesome zoo. They also have the City Museum which is not free, but totally worth the price of admission.

Here are a few photos of my trip. I realized Sam isn't in any of them, but you'll have to trust that he was there some of the time too.

Friends on the zoo train. It went through some bizarrely long and narrow tunnels, but other than that a good time was had by all. 

I didn't take many pictures of the animals, but I did get a nice one of these two adorable woodland creatures. 

 I feel like before the series of photos on the City Museum, it needs some sort of explanation. It was the one thing I had heard about St Louis before going that I knew I wanted to do. I knew it had a large series of outside tunnels you could crawl through, but what I didn't realize was that the entire museum was like that on the inside as well. Basically the entire multi-floor structure is one big jungle gym for kids of all ages with everything from slides to fish tanks. The whole place actually seems like a liability law suit waiting to happen with very few safety measures and kids running every which way (and weirdly, I mean that in a good way). If I was going to get shin bruises anywhere, this would be the place. And really the only time I almost wiped out (as I wore completely inadequate footwear for the event) was just walking down the stairs to the food court, and that could just as easily happen at a less fun place, like a courthouse or a multi-floored dentist office.

The City Museum!

This is representative of one of the tunnels I didn't really climb through. Heights I can do, but not tight spaces. 

With friends at the bottom of the 10-story slide. Turns out the downside of a 10-story slide is mostly the walk to get to the top of it. 

Outside the St Louis Museum of Art

All in all, I would recommend a trip to St Louis, but especially if you have some good friends there. Thanks for hosting us! We'll have to come back someday to do that arch.

Art, horsemanship, and other poorly photographed things

 I feel like I haven't been taking as many pictures lately, or not any good ones, but I've decided that shouldn't stop me from blogging. There's a particularly photogenic part of my last couple of weeks, that I don't think I'll ever be able to capture. I've been taking horseback riding lessons (well really just a four week class) at these stables a 15-minute drive south of us. (As a side note: one of the things I love about Austin is that I can drive 15 minutes one direction and be in the heart of downtown and 15 minutes another and be in the middle of the country). The drive down is pretty unremarkable until you turn off onto a narrow gravel road that leads down to the stables. You have to drive 10 miles an hour for most of it as horses roam freely in the area. To one side there's a random emu farm which currently has the cutest little emu chicks, or more like adolescent emus, running around. Past that there's a beautiful field of wildflowers. Perhaps I've belabored this point too much already, but the wildflowers are really killing it this year. Due to driving, I'm unable to photograph any of this. I did however manage this poorly captured image while trying to take a photo of the horse way in the background bathed in light:

So you can't actually see the horse I was trying to photograph, but he's back there. 

In other mostly un-photographed moments from the weekend, I met a friend at a gallery show on Saturday night. The theme of the show was "bees" in that all the work was made with encaustic (beeswax based paint) and also featured bees in the images. They also had some lives bees there on display. I wasn't so impressed with the works themselves, but I did feel like I learned a bit about bees. Also, it was a fun night because it turned out that gallery was part of a little nest of galleries, so we were able to do a little gallery hopping. One of the openings had a person mixing very nice, fancy cocktails, which was a nice step up from the usual wine in plastic cups at these things.

This was a bunch of flowers hanging between the galleries, that I thought looked cool. Now I'm not so sure.

In other art news, Sam and I ventured downtown to check out Austin's Contemporary Art Museum. I wasn't terribly impressed. It has quite a small exhibit space and no permanent collection. I think it goes down with PS1 in Long Island City as one of those museums where the building is much cooler than the art inside it.

Contemporary art, such as it is. 

I feel this post is a bit meandering. I also still feel like if I'd taken better photos that that might have saved things. Perhaps that's something I'll work on this week, or perhaps I'll just write something more interesting.

In remembrance

Yesterday, we had a wonderful celebration for the life of my 97-year-old grandfather. It was sad, yes, but also nice to hear stories about him and his parents, some of which I knew, and some which I had never heard before. I don't really have that much to say about the service, but I wanted to post these wonderful photos, so that I'll always know where to find them. 

You were loved and will be missed by many, Gordon Teague. 

On peafowl and pressing on

This past week was not a very good one. In fact, I think it would be fair to say it was a shitty one. A series of unfortunate events---some frustrating, some angering, and some just incredibly sad--combined to make me especially happy to see Friday roll around. The one bright spot is that the weekend was lovely and the wildflowers are blowing up. We're trying to save money right now (to pay for the more frustrating/anger-inducing things), so we committed to finding some free things to do. It helped that some friends were hosting an Easter BBQ on Sunday (well not so much an Easter BBQ as a BBQ with no religious significance that happened to be on Easter, but there were marshmallow Peeps present, at least). 

It further helped, that this weekend was Bank of American's Museum's on Us weekend. I feel it's an important public service announcement to make that Bank of America offers free admission to a number of museums all over the country on the first weekend of every month. I don't think it's a perk they advertise very well, and very few of the museums I've ever gone to under this promotion have had any signage about it. (Just when they tell you how much admission is, you have to sheepishly ask "Is it Bank of America free weekend?"). So yes, if you, like me, support corporate greed by keeping your money in giant faceless Bank of American instead of a local credit union, then you should definitely enjoy going on a few art outings when the first weekend rolls around.

Museum's on Us covers four museums in Austin, but the one we decided to check out was the Laguna Gloria. It's the sculpture park off shoot of the Contemporary Museum of Austin. Instead of being downtown, it's out of the way a little along Lake Austin and surrounded by some beautiful scenery. Since the weather was perfect, that was the main reason we chose it. I thought the sculptures themselves were sort of hit or miss, but the grounds were lovely. While we there, they were setting up for a wedding. I could definitely see it as a lovely place to get married. It was full of those long twisty-armed oaks and fields of bluebonnets along a long path that winds through the grounds.

Sam mocks this poor crying bunny fountain. 

This one doesn't look that cool, but if you're up close you can see it's made of very beautiful polished wood. 

On the way back, and because it was right next door to the Laguna Gloria, we spontaneously decided to go for a quick walk in the Mayfield Nature Preserve. The area is a 21-acre park with a number of trails, but the entrance to the preserve is perhaps the most fun part. It's a park with a couple dozen peacocks (or rather a combination of peafowl: both peacocks and the less showy peahens). They're quite accustomed to people and especially to young children running amongst them. Other than one bird that was screeching most of the time we were there, they seem quite content to sun themselves in the trees of the park.

I wish I could have seen how they get up there. 

I call this one "Peafowls in Love"

So yes, it was a very good weekend, and I hope it sets the tenor for the week and month to come. I'm looking forward to seeing many family members in the next couple of days. Even though it's for a sad reason, it is still always nice to see loved ones.

Picking asparagus while the sun shines

It's been a couple of weeks, but in my defense, it's hard to follow up a post on the excitement of vacation. This past week was also rather full of unfortunate and non-blog-worthy things (mostly regarding some of the darker sides of home ownership). That said, I'm starting this week on an optimistic note because it was a glorious weekend. It was the type of weekend where the weather was so nice that I felt guilty every time I went inside. In my efforts to stay outside, I managed to get some yard work done, along with plenty of ice tea drinking on the back porch.

We have a table now, which makes porch sitting nicer.

On Saturday, we had a much-looked-forward-to picnic with friends. Franklin BBQ is a restaurant in Austin that people get up at 6 am to wait in line for. They cook up 1,800 lbs of meat per day, open at 11, and sell out by around 3 every day they're open. I'm not someone who waits in line for food if I can help it (Shakespeare, yes; food, no). I discovered it was possible to skip the whole line business if you were willing to email your order in advance. They still had very precise ordering deadlines (had to be at exactly 9 am on a certain date more than a month out), but in the end we got about 12 lbs of delicious meat to-go. Since Sam and I cannot eat 12 lbs of meat, no matter how delicious, we had organized to share it with friends while also potlucking together some sides. All and all, it was a delicious meal. I'm not sure I would ever wake up early for it, but rather waiting in line or waiting passively for a month and a half, I do think the anticipation helps it live up to the hype.

That's some good brisket right there.

On Sunday, before doing some more gardening, we checked out my new favorite place in Austin: The Natural Gardener. It's this awesome nursery that has everything you need for organic gardening, plus a bunch of things you don't. A labyrinth, fields of wild flowers, chickens, goats, and a couple of donkeys, to name a few. You can save money by shoveling and bagging your own garden soil and mulch, which has the advantage of making me feel somewhat more hardcore. They also had at least 30 different types of heirloom tomato plants. We now have an entire bed devoted just to tomatoes. I don't even like tomatoes! That's the power of the gardening store.

Not found at your average organic gardening superstore.

My garden so far. Herbs in the front right, tomatoes and peppers beyond that. Carrots and beets (seedlings) in the front left and assorted vegetables behind that. Also, my newly built compost heap!

So far the thing that's growing the best in my garden is the asparagus that some previous owner of the house must have planted. Somewhat is survived my raising of all living things from the beds and laying down fresh soil, because we're getting a few new shoots a day. Unfortunately, a few shoots of asparagus is kind of useless in terms of eating it, but it's still given me some joy to actually harvest something.

Hopefully we'll have more photos of the backyard once we can afford to buy plants and stuff again. Til' next time...