Goodbye!

This is me signing off, before Mike packs the computer.  We will take about two weeks to drive home, passing through a host of National Parks on our way.  Here is about what I think the trip will look like (Mike did the planning on this trip, so I may be a little off in my timing). 

Leave Friday, June 29 at 3pm.  Eat German food and sleep in Fredericksburg.
June 30 - drive 6 hours to Carlsbad, NM
July 1 - tour the caves.  Then swim and sleep.
July 2 - drive north to Sante Fe, about 5 hours?  Swim, sleep
July 3 - drive north to Farmington but stop in Chaco Culture National Park on the way to see ruins
July 4 - drive to Mesa Verde.  Explore, stay there.
July 5 - drive West through Monument Valley, sleep in Kayenta, AZ
July 6 - drive North through Bryce Canyon. 
July 7 - explore Bryce Canyon sites
July 8 - drive into Zion.
July 9 - explore Zion sites.
July 10 - Drive to Great Basin National Park.  Stay really late to star gaze with the rangers, then at like midnight pull into our hotel an hour from the park.  Whew.
July 11 - drive to Winnemuka, Nevada.  The embodiment of the middle of nowhere.
July 12 - drive to Klamath Falls.  sleep here.
July 13 - drive to Crater Lake and explore.  Drive on to Roseburg and sleep there.
July 14 - arrive HOME!!!!!! This is a Saturday.

Wish us luck!!!!

Blues on the Green at Zilker Park

The packers come in the morning, yet tonight we found time to enjoy music in the park with good friends. It has been a week of so many goodbyes, and it was great to see these friends one last time.  BTW - it is really hot.  106 today. 

Paleontology museum at UT

The Texas Memorial Museum is UT's dinosaur and fossil collection which we finally visited this week as we've been powering through our "must do" list for Austin.  It is a good collection and it is small enough to enjoy it all before you tucker out.  We got to pet a real dinosaur femur.

Hot!

It is crayon melting hot here this weekend, literally, and we headed out to one of the spring fed public pools in central Austin.  This time we went to Deep Eddy, only a few minutes from here.  It's a public pool the size of a soccer field and 3/4 of it is shallow end (3 foot ish).  It rocks!  It is crisply cold, and it has plenty of room to play even with hot weather crowds.  Portland really needs this.

partial view of Deep Eddy

a crayon experiment on our balcony

NASA - mission control!

We stopped in at NASA on the way home from the beach and got to see both the new, exact replica of the Shuttle which arrived last week (remind me again why NYC got the real one... what did they have to do with the Shuttle program?) and Mission Control (which wasn't open to us on our last visit because they were busy using it for the last Shuttle launch/mission).

Ashes to Sea

A note from my personal journal...

We spread my mom’s ashes today.  My brother flew the two of us out over the Gulf of Mexico, just off shore from Galveston Island where I’ve rented a house for a week.  At about 250 feet above sea level, and with the terrain indicator alarm going off, I opened the window in the Cessna and with a little struggle was able to get the ashes out of the plastic bag and into the air.  Released.  And so it is, she’s come full circle.  Back into the waters from which she came, birthed all those years ago to an unlikely pair of rice farmers on the Gulf Coast. 

I feel good about this decision.  There have been so many, many decisions we’ve had to make in her stead these 13 years since she’s died, and not all of them have left me in peace.  Of the options we could come up with of where to put her ashes  –  this seems right.  When she found out she was dying she didn’t hop a plane to Paris, or book a trip to a Greek Island, she got in her car and drove to Galveston, Texas, where she checked into the San Luis for two weeks.  This is where she came, at every one of life’s junctions, to make peace.  And with this peace is made here and an era ends.  Each of the trusts have closed with my uncle Peter’s death marking the last; the work of it all is done and this makes this last letting go seem all the more timely.  The right thing.

I am so much older now than I was when this all started.  When she died I could hardly see my way to the rewrite of a life without her.  I could hardly bare the accumulation of years, stacking up to eventually be more than those I had with her.  And here I am at the halfway mark of 13 years, in a life that feels squarely like another chapter, equal in both value and depth. 

Us, headed out to sea

Galveston Island week

I rented a house on Galveston Island for six nights (Tuesday afternoon - Monday morning), and Eleanor and I headed south.  Amy took the week off to keep us company, Dad and Anna Lou visited for Thursday and Friday, Josh came over for the day on Friday, Mike arrived late Friday night for the weekend, and John + Kristanne came down on Saturday evening and spent half of Sunday with us.  This was SUCH  a relaxing time.  Really.  Eleanor and I mostly just laid around reading (newsflash: Eleanor reads to herself now.  Wahoo!) and playing in the Gulf's warm and relatively gentle waves.  Add in all of the extra time we got with family, and this seems like a stroke of genius.  I'd love to do this again. I can't believe I didn't get any good family photos at all the meals we had together!  I was so lazy, I just didn't even think to get the camera.

Playing in the Gulf on the upstream side of the sediment current is not without its challenges ( jelly fish, crabs underfoot, red tide).  But the more interesting and less threatening wildlife (rays, clams, cool birds) and the general wah of the place just wins out in the end.  And you can't beat this surf for playing around with kids, even if it is muddy.  Nothing we've found in Hawaii feels this safe, so there it is.

Day Trip - "Bluebell, the best ice cream in the count-ry"

Only, you have know the tune to make that title really work.  We stopped in and took the tour in Brenham, Texas, on our drive to Houston.  It actually was interesting.  And tastey.

One of the original delivery trucks.

 

House Hunting - Offered and Denied

We put in an offer on a house in Austin yesterday, but we were the fifth offer in a matter of hours and we weren't taken up on it.  We aren't bummed, but we are tired.  The house isn't exactly what we want (its too small, it needs a number of energy efficiency upgrades like windows and insulation, its in our personally designated second tier school list, and it just needs work). BUT it has a good feel in its flow and layout, it has room to add a studio and possibly a second story, and it is one of the only houses we've seen that I can see us falling in love with someday.  After some work.  The pictures on Zillow make it look more polished than it is, but here you go:
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2503-Wilke-Dr-Austin-TX-78704/29322807_zpid/

Rag Curls

Mama Nellie (my grandmother) and my Aunt Marie used to roll my hair up in rags to make it curly. I loved that soooo much. I remembered this trick recently and gave it a whirl with Eleanor. I don't have a box of rags here in the Austin apartment, so I cut up a bedraggled T-shirt.

What?!?! Disney World?!?!

That's right, we squeezed in a trip to Disney World just because we could! (The flights are so much cheaper from here, we couldn't resist.)  To top it off, we got to see the St. Clair Grandparents!  As you might imagine, a trip like this generates PICTURES.  So, if you're a fan of Us you'll go to the Picasa site for that fix.

Mike is taller than an Imperial Storm Trooper