Pollen

I tried to capture some of the pollen in pictures so I could show you how intensley yellow EVERYTHING is right now. The pictures simply did not do it justice. There is no point in washing the car, in an hour it will be yellow again. It's like walking on a rug of pollen. Any hard surface looks like a child took yellow chalk and scribbled over it so completely covering anything that was blank so that everything would be the same pollen yellow. The dog lays on the back patio and when he gets up he is yellow. The windows are open and the furniture is yellow. My keyboard is yellow. And it's only just begun, this will last well into May. At that point, maybe my eyes will stop itching :-) Oh yes, and after the pollen, then the worms will come out of the trees, but that's a story for another day. In the mean time, if you live here in Austin, you know that to say everything is yellow is not an exageration. I do love my live oaks, they do more for temperature control in the summer than anything else. The pollen is a small price to pay for their beauty. So, I leave you with this lovely image of pollen...

Easter

True to form, Easter turned into a holiday that stretched over a couple of weeks instead of just one day! I guess that's part of being a mom and being active in mom's groups. Pre-Easter we did two separate easter egg hunts and passed up about 3 others. We also dyed eggs in the park one day (which turned out to be a good thing because we never got around to doing it at home). The easter bunny did come Sunday morning and the boys were thrilled. We bypassed the traditional hot cross buns, I made ebelskivers (stuffed pancakes) instead. Steph & Michael came up for lunch. Again, we bypassed the traditional foods and dined on grilled shrimp, fresh fruit, and a nice salad. We had another easter egg hunt and spent the rest of the afternoon just enjoying the beautiful weather.

For the record, you have to leave a window open the night before easter so that the easter bunny can get into the house. It's nice to leave him a carrot too.

Geocaching

A couple of weeks ago the boys and I had our first geocaching adventure. We had a blast! Geocaching is basically like a treasure hunt for grownups, or anyone actually. The gist of it is that someone hides a container with stuff in it somewhere, then s/he logs the coordinates of said container on the geocaching.com website. Then anyone can go and find the container. You don't actually take the container, just sign the log book and swap some token that you brought for something in the cache. Then you replace the container exactly as you found it so someone else can join in the game. Kind of silly I guess, but just plain fun if you like to be outside. The caches range in size from teeny tiny to large ammo boxes. You use a gps to find the cache. The GPS will get you pretty darn close, within a couple of yards or so typically, then you have to search. Some of the finds are ridiculously easy, some are much more difficult.

Anyway, on our first geocaching adventure we went to this undeveloped park. It was a really beautiful area, and spring is just gorgeous here this year. We found 3 caches, one of which was actually pretty well hidden, we almost gave up on it. The boys had a blast, the scenery was fantastic and in general it was a really fun day.

One of the very cool side benefits of geocaching is really discovering the area around you. We were walking in an area that used to be a riverbed, the evidence of prehistoric people was all around us. We found a geode, tons of rocks that had obviously been used as tools or in the tool making process. I even found 2 arrow heads. It was so much fun looking through all of the rocks, I could have spent hours doing that. The boys loved walking in the woods, listening to the birds, picking flowers, and playing with bugs. They are excellent hikers, bushwhacking with the best of 'em! They got really excited about the "treasures" that we were finding too.

We had so much fun that I decided to introduce Mike to geocaching as well. Last weekend we found another park with a bunch of hidden caches, he really had fun too.

Anyway, there are about a gazillion caches hidden in and around the area here so I should never be bored! The closest cache to the house is only .2 miles away, so somewhere in the greenbelt behind our house. One of these days I'll go check it out! It's kind of fun to think of all the ones that I have surely walked by but simply never knew about.

Meet George, Gracy, & Alfred

This is our aquarium. It is ~50 gallons and so far has been lots of fun.



There are 3 inhabitants right now: George & Gracy are convict cichlids, and Alfred is a pleco (algae eater). We actually got the fish from one of my friends. Alfred we had planned on taking, but George & Gracy turned out to be the only other fish we could catch. I think I mentioned before how ridiculous it was trying to catch them. Anyway, I thought you might like to see some pictures.




George & Gracy are a mating pair. Not too long after we got them, just a couple of weeks actually, Gracy laid a bunch of eggs. We watched them, they hatched after a couple of days and there were no babies to be seen. Just this past week Gracy laid another batch of eggs, these have hatched and from what I can see there are at least 4 or 5 of the fry that are alive at the moment - we'll see if that lasts. It's been quite ineresting watching the whole process. Cichlids, particularly the kind that we have breed at the drop of a hat. If we're not careful, we could end up with tons of fish!

It's Spring!

This is one I meant to write a couple of weeks ago. Spring actually came to Austin a few weeks ago, beautiful weather, I think we even hit 80 already. In the fall, we prepped a large garden in the back. We piled a bunch of compost on and let it sit and break down all winter long. When it came time to plant, we had a beautiful base in which to do it. The back garden will be our vegetable garden. So far, I have transferred my herbs to one section, and planted some corn, potatoes, strawberries, cauliflower, broccoli, spinach, kale, and a couple of pansies. (Alex picked the strawberries, pansies, and kale). Everything is growing beautifully, I am so excited. I also planted my sunflowers in their traditional bed. They are sprouting and it promises to be another banner year for sunflowers.

Our peach tree is in full bloom at the moment, if we can avoid a late season deep freeze and hail storms we just might get some peaches this year. We haven't done anything in the front yard yet, still waiting to see what all comes back.

I still have many more things that I want to plant, some more herbs, tomatoes, peppers, transfer my bay leaf tree form the pot to the ground, start some verbena seeds, well you get the picture. Still lots to do!

Other signs of Spring in Austin: the trees dropped all of their leaves the past couple of weeks - yes it's a little backwards from most places who get leaves falling in the fall. I saw the first blue bonnets of the season this week, can't wait to get some pictures. Finally, as is true to springtime in Austin a nasty cold front blew through on the first official day of spring, complete with thunderstorms and gusty winds. We avoided freezing temps last night, might not be so lucky tonight. I have to go cover my veggies so that I don't lose them. The spinach is looking quite beautiful, I would hate for it to die off. Fortunately, this batch of cold is not supposed to last.

I'll leave you with a picture of my peach blossoms:

Curling

I'm going to use curling for my excuse as to why I haven't spent more time updating this. While it is true that I only actually get to curl once a week, I have spent alot of time just about every day for about the past month doing curling work. The olympics were huge for our club this year. We held two open houses in honor of the games. The first was on the last day of the olympics and the second was a week later. We (the curling club board members) were thinking that a combined turnout of between 50 and 60 people would be a success. In actuality, we took 410 people onto the ice the first week and then 452 people the second week. It was insane, but everyone had a great time and somehow or other we managed to make it work. So as not to bore you with the details I'll just say that this led to an incredible amount of work for me. While it has kept me busy and from doing more fun things like updating this blog, it has been exciting knowing that so many people want to try this very cool sport.

The Texas Open Bonspiel is coming up again in just a few weeks. I'll be heading to Houston in mid-April to play again. I'm on the same team as last year, maybe we will again score a big win! There are lots of people from our club going so it should be a great weekend, although I will miss Mike and the boys immensely.

Finally, and this is the best curling news of all so I saved it for last, our season has ended. OK, that's not happy news, but it ended on a GREAT note for me. My team had the best regular season record so we earned the number one spot in the championship game. It was fabulous to win the season. Today was the championship game. To put it mildly, we totally walloped our opponents. The game was over after 4 ends, we were so far ahead it was crazy. Our opponents only scored 1 point the whole game. We scored MANY more :-) So, in my first season ever as a skip I won the regular season and the championship game. I'm floating pretty high right now. I am already looking forward to September and the start of our next season. Hopefully I have secured my place as a skip. This is, without a doubt, the coolest game ever!