Happiness in the new year

A Happy New Year to all! Those for whom 2011 has already started, and those who are still waiting to celebrate :)

I've been looking for an excuse to post this video - both the song and the visuals just make me happy. I hope they make you happy too.

May all of us, in this coming year, end up with our own spiritual equivalent of a cool platform (with a piano and sofas), and good friends, dancing, music and laughter, in the middle of a lake!!

BYOP

We were invited to a Pumpkin Carving Party shortly before Halloween - the first time I've ever carved a pumpkin! So for those who have likewise been sadly denied, here's a step-by-step guide...

1. Choose your pumpkin. Make sure it is not bigger than you.



2. Cut out the top (or the base, if you're tricksy, preciousss)



3. Remove the gunky plug of pumpkin...



4. ...and place in a tub (along with all the other innards) so that the seeds can later be roasted and eaten.



5. Mark your design in crayon



6. - or by using a template -



7. and carve away!



8. You might choose a traditional design...



9. ...or something slightly more avant-garde.



10. But with the candles in, they'll all look suitably spooky. (Prizes* for those who can guess which is mine and which is Dave's).

* Some prizes - like esteem, and kudos - are less tangible than others. ;)

Take me out to the ball game

Last night I went to my first baseball game! The Houston Astros vs the St Louis (don't forget to pronounce the 's') Cardinals, at Minutemaid Park downtown. We got the tickets through work - non-profits sometimes get given tickets to sporting events or plays, as a thank you for the work they do. Dave, Anna and I snaffled three of them and were ready, with hot dogs and beer (or Coke, for some of us) at the 7.05pm first pitch.




As far as baseball goes, we hear we had a quick game - all done in just over two hours! Certainly there was nothing of the leisureliness of cricket about it, but it was fun to be there for all the traditions - the national anthem, the seventh inning stretch, the organ music... and the Minutemaid train (those are supposed to be oranges in the back; Minutemaid is famous for juice) which whistles and drives up and down when home runs are scored.


And the Astros won - which apparently they have not been doing, as a general rule - so maybe we brought them some indirect beginners' luck!

The house that Kat built

A couple of weeks ago, I was most excited to receive an invitation to my friend Kristina's annual Graham Cracker House building day. Having never built a graham cracker house before, I wasn't QUITE sure what to expect, but nevertheless looked forward to it... so Sunday saw us gather around the most bountiful table imaginable:


There were the sorts of things you might expect, to build a confectionery house - the graham crackers, obviously, and a bag of icing mixture for everyone to glue everything together; jelly beans and M&Ms and other sweets for decorating; marshmallows and candy corn and pretzels... but Kristina, being the creative type, had also supplied things like plastic army men, bugs and dinosaurs; feathers, scraps of fabric (see what else you can spot!).


What was fascinating was how different everyone's structures ended up:






As for me - I started conservatively enough:

- but quickly put Hansel and Gretel's witch to shame...




So much fun! (And no, I haven't been able to bring myself to eat the house yet; it's still wrapped in plastic on the kitchen table).

Cirque Mechanics: Birdhouse Factory

Part way through Thursday, Matt and Rebecca emailed us to see if we wanted to go to the Miller Outdoor Theatre to see a performance by the Cirque Mechanics, an amazing troupe of acrobats, aerialists, contortionists and others from, among other places, Cirque de Soleil and the Moscow Circus.


All performances at the Miller Outdoor Theatre are free to the public, so we knew there'd be a crowd and wanted to be there early enough to get seats in the covered area (there's also a hill at the back where you can spread picnic rugs). Matt and Rebe kindly brought us jumpers as the evenings are quite cool now!


The performance was just magical; really amazing and accomplished, fun and quirky. Every segment seemed perfectly designed to make you think you'd seen the height of their abilities, and then to go that one step further...

If the Mechanics are ever performing near you, I encourage you to check them out!

Art and the City

Last weekend I spent a lovely part of Saturday at the Bayou City Art Festival - it's a yearly event here, billed as 'one of the top three art festivals in America' (which, as Dave says, you know means 'the third best') and something I would have been interested in anyway, but as I got free tickets through work I was doubly interested!

My lovely friend Anna picked me up, and we went in to the festival together - it was the first actually-cool weekend so far this year; somewhat overcast for picture-taking but extremely pleasant for walking around downtown.


The festival was held in the closed-off streets of a couple of city blocks, as well as some park space - there were loads of stalls; it was all much larger than I'd envisioned. There was so much to see! Lots of great art and photography, as you'd expect, but also textiles, jewellery, strange sculptures, wooden items... it was very interesting and lots of fun.


Dave and I bought a print - even though the exhibitors came from all over the country, our single purchase coincidentally came from someone relatively local - Jay Long, from Austin, TX.



Afterward, Dave and I went for a coffee in a hipster-cafe, Agora (I am not remotely hipster and Dave not a lot more so than me, but it's still fun to visit such places from time to time)


before going home to hang out with Matt and Rebecca. Cool weather, art, coffee, and lots of lovely friends - not far off the perfect sort of day!

Boys and bikes

As many of you know, Dave was planning to ride in the MS 150 last weekend, but due to an absolutely massive downpour on Friday evening and Saturday morning, the first stage of the ride was called off.

(Just for reference, here's that creek near home again - it was featured in an earlier blog post - so you can see what I mean by 'absolutely massive'.)


Anyway, we sensibly spent Saturday morning in the local iHop with our friends Matt and Rebecca, but on Sunday the guys decided they were going to ride somewhere; the official ride was continuing on the Day 2 route, but as that would have meant an early morning drive out to La Grange (in multiple cars to get both bodies and bicycles out there), and then contending with traffic and headaches in Austin in the evening before driving three hours home again, they decided to do their own thing... which ended up being an 85 mile round-trip out to Bellville, a small town out to the west of Houston.



Rebecca and I decided to surprise them by meeting them out there for lunch, but that was the only support they received - they covered the 85 miles in about 6 and a half hours of riding, which I think was pretty good going! I only wish I had a photo of them drinking beer and eating pie on the patio after they got home again...

My apologies for the long gap between posts - Dave's image-hosting website is still broken, which means I can't display photos as well as I'd like, which is a lot of the reason I blog in the first place! So I haven't been feeling all that inspired. Not to mention, extreme busyness at work, and having guests here, and lots on, has meant very little time - if you're one of the MANY waiting on an email from me, please accept my grovelling apologies!
In any case, I will be trying to get back into the habit of blogging more regularly again - not to mention catching up on my emails - and in the meantime you can click on any of the images above to see a larger version, even though I can't display the larger version within the post itself, as I would like.
Love to all my readers! (All three of you ;) )
xxx