The last couple of months

Well, I would like to say that I have a good reason I haven't been updating my blog lately, but I don't.  So let's just get a move on.

Since we last spoke...

The Pinewood Derby happened.  Fellan's X304 ended up sort of mid-pack for his age group and I managed to snap a picture of it coming in 2nd in one of his heats!  (it's in the closest lane to the camera)

The first heat, the X304 takes 2nd!

The X304 - "Most Lunar"

Marxo had to put together a science project.  She chose to see how much water beans absorb and if it makes a difference if they are small-, medium-, or large-sized beans.  (the medium-sized beans actually absorbed the most water)

We went to Mardi Gras and got to hang out with the extended family.

The girl-cousins are bead magnets, man!

We went skiing and dog sledding in Colorado over Spring Break.  This year, the husband's brother and family joined us, so the cousins got to spend even more time together!

Teaching them the correct way to pose with their skis for the TV cameras

Isn't it fun to have cousins?!  :)

Feeding the dogs after their run

And the Bluebonnets have run their course in Texas. (If I remember correctly, this was the weekend after we got back from Colorado. Amazing what ten degrees latitude does for the weather.)

Obligatory Texas "Kids with Bluebonnets" picture

 Now, I think that catches us up!  Until next time...  :)

Yin and Yang

Azaleas

No winter this year - the azaleas are blooming early.

Leonardo

The big 3rd grade project is due today - it's a "Living Wax Museum", which means that each child was supposed to choose a famous person from history, read a book about him/her, write a book report about him/her, and then give a presentation about him/her in the first person.

There are all kinds of grading criteria for the presentation, too.  It has to be between 1 and 2 minutes (you get points deducted for going over the time limit), you have to include 3 interesting facts about your person, if you dress up as the person, you get extra points, etc.

It turned out to be an extremely time-consuming and in-depth project and the husband and Fellan spent a lot of time together over the last week to get it all put together.  But, I think the result was great.  And Fellan learned a lot in the process.

So, the kids are giving their presentations this morning at school and the husband sent me a picture of Fellan as his historic person.

Meet Leonardo da Vinci:

My father was a notary and my mother was a peasant

I can't wait to hear how it goes!

Fun Friday, or Adventures with Bike Trails in Houston

I am "lucky" to have a job at a company that works four 10-hour days per week.  I put lucky in quotations because while it might sound great to have every Friday off, those 10-hour days are really long.  I'm supposed to be to work between 6am and 7am and then if I get here at 6am, I can leave at 4:45pm (45 minute lunch), but if I get here at 7am (which is when I normally get here because I am NOT a morning person), I have to stay until 5:45pm.  It makes for a late evening.

So I try to look on the bright side and think about all the bicycling I can get done every Friday!  But that bicycling is usually non-existent...

However, last Friday, the husband and I finally got to take advantage of my day off from work to go for a bike ride together.  We had been checking out Google maps and found a bike path that runs from The Heights (called Heights Bike Trail, oddly enough) all the way to U of H downtown, so we thought it would be fun to go exploring and see if we could find a way to get to it from the Buffalo Bayou Trail, which also ends at U of H downtown.

I know what you're thinking - it sounds like that's a complete no-brainer.  They both end at the same location, so it should be easy to figure out how they connect.  Well, you obviously haven't done any bicycling around Houston.

First of all, we had to ride on the Buffalo Bayou Trail to U of H Downtown.  We've ridden this trail frequently enough to know that it dead-ends right before getting to U of H Downtown.  But we haven't ridden it lately and once you get past all the homeless people living under the bridges, you come upon this:

The hazards of building a bike path along a bayou that regularly floods...

It had rained some in the last couple of weeks and after riding/walking through a considerable amount of mud, you reach this debris field.

But we didn't let it stop us, we grabbed some sticks out of the debris, scraped off our shoes and tires, and trudged through the worst of it.

And we finally got to the end of the path.  That's when the fun started: trying to figure out how to get across the train tracks and the U of H Campus to get to the Heights Bike Trail.  The people who "plan" the bike trails in Houston like to provide challenges to the bicyclists in town.  It's kind of like taking part in one of those extreme adventure races - you never know what they're going to throw at you!

Luckily, the husband and I love a challenge.  We hiked up the embankment towards the railroad tracks and got to a point where we could see what looks like a bike path on the other side of the fenced-off tracks and down another embankment.

The only way to get over there was to head back towards the trail, find the sidewalk that runs next to Travis street, follow that to the other side of U of H, and then ride through the loading dock area of the campus to eventually get to another street (1st Street?), which we could follow to the parking lot and then ride over to the start/end of the Heights Bike Trail.  Piece of cake!  :)

We did have a nice time, though, despite the adventures of our ride.  We ended up riding through The Heights, which is a really pretty and very distinctive neighborhood, and then took Heights Boulevard (which has an actual bike path!) down south to get back to the Buffalo Bayou area and then rode back home.  It turned out to be about an 18-mile ride.

It was a beautiful day and I got my first bike short tan-line sunburn of the year.  :)

Does anyone have an Ark?

By all estimates, yesterday was supposed to be the end of the world in Houston... but it just turned out to be a normal day.  So boring.  ;)

On Tuesday, there was apparently a storm brewing out in west/southwest Texas that the weather people were predicting would hit Houston in the next 24 hours.

I don't know why weather people get so overly-excited and melodramatic when they know that a big storm is coming.  I guess it must be because there's so much uncertainty in what they usually know that they're ecstatic when they find something they can actually predict.

Anyway, they were predicting floods of biblical proportions.  We got an e-mail here at work on Tuesday afternoon warning us that if our office site is prone to flooding that we were to "please pay particular attention to the road conditions in the areas you intend to travel and avoid streets that are flooded."

So yesterday morning when I woke up and it wasn't even raining, I was a little disappointed.

After checking the Weather Channel, though, I saw that the storm had just passed through San Antonio and that it would make it to Houston later in the morning.  That was good news - I would have time to get to work before having to deal with idiot Houston drivers.

All morning, I kept looking outside, waiting for the carnage to begin.

At around 10:30 or so, the dark clouds made their way to our area.  And it began to rain.  But it was just normal rain - not the torrential downpour it was supposed to be.  I must admit that I was disappointed.

It continued to rain for a couple of hours and by about 1:00, it was done in the area around my office.  But at about that time, we got an e-mail and a voice message from the school system saying that they were cancelling all after-school activities for the day.

Puh-lease!  Since when did the people of Houston get so scared of a little thunderstorm?  Oh, right.  I guess there IS a history of this happening...

But seriously, it was nothing like the sudden rain that took the city by surprise a couple of weeks ago.  This is what our street looked like on January 9.

Row, row, row your boat...

Gently down the street...

The husband was at home during the storm and he kept sending me picture updates of the street.  It was a good thing he didn't have to go anywhere!

Luckily, the rain only lasted a couple of hours and the flooding in the street was gone about 30 minutes later.  He was able to make it to his afternoon meeting without any problems, but when he opened the garage door, he was met by a pile of leaves that the waves had washed up to our garage door!

Leaf dam

Now THAT'S what I call flooding.

X304

As you all know, our household is led by two nerdy engineers.  And we're doing our best to make our children nerdy, too.

We have thus far brainwashed the kids into thinking that Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, Stargate SG-1, and MacGuyver are some of the best television shows ever produced.  But we've been trying to really step it up a notch over the last year or so.

To that end, we have successfully convinced the kids to name our new cats after characters from these shows.  Spot is named after Data's cat from Star Trek: TNG, and Schrödinger is named after Samantha Carter's cat from Stargate SG-1.

We also try to quote these shows regularly to keep the geeky index elevated around our house.  We regularly say "Make it so" like Captain Jean-Luc Picard and "Indeed" like Teal'c and when something needs to be fixed with a fantastically elaborate Rube Goldberg machine involving chemical reactions and duct tape, we make sure to refer to it as being "MacGuyvered".

Now, after such painstaking work, I can finally report that it seems our meticulous plan has worked on Fellan!

Every year each Boy Scout pack hosts a Pinewood Derby for their members and tonight is the deadline for Fellan's pack to submit their cars to be included in the upcoming race.

Fellan and my husband spent Sunday morning dreaming up the design of Fellan's car, which has turned out to be awesome, if I do say so myself!

The X304: sort of a cross between The Enterprise and the X303

It doesn't have the wheels on it yet, and I'm not sure it's the most aerodynamic car out there, but I can't wait to see it in action!!!  It makes my nerdy heart swell with pride.  :)

Awww... or Ewww?

The cats have really made some progress in their relationship over the last week! I'm not sure I'm comfortable with this much PDA! :)
(Public Display of Affection)

Schrödinger

As I mentioned in my last post, Santa brought a new cat to our house for Christmas.  You may remember that we had to have Midas put to sleep at the end of November, so one of the things on Marxo's list to Santa was "a cat that looks like Midas".

Well, Santa delivered!

"A cat that looks like Midas"

Santa spent quite a bit of time searching on the internet for a suitable cat to satisfy this wish and he thought he was choosing a kitten, according to the picture.  The kitten turned out to be more of a cat, but Santa couldn't resist - this cat was very affectionate.

So, on Christmas morning, the new cat made his entrance to the house and the kids immediately named him Schrödinger, based on Dr. Carter's cat in Stargate SG-1.  (we had talked about using this name for our next cat...)

We were worried about how Spot was going to react to having another cat in the house.  She never did like Midas and she actually gave him one last hiss as I was carrying him out to the vet that last time.

I had heard somewhere that when you introduce a new cat to the household, you should keep the two separate for a couple of days.  The first day, you allow the new cat to "scent" whatever room you put him in and then the next day, you switch the two cats, so they can walk around and smell the other cat without seeing him.  Hopefully then when you allow them to meet, they won't be such strangers to each other.

Well, we tried that.  We kept Spot up in our room with the door closed for Christmas day and then the following day, we switched the two.

On the third day, we opened the bedroom door and let the cats find each other.  Wow!  Spot was PISSED!!!  She couldn't believe that there was suddenly another cat around the house to contend with!  She growled and hissed and screamed and yelled.

Meanwhile, Schrödinger just sort of looked at her.  He had come from a house that had 32 other cats living in it, so he was completely used to being around other cats.  But he took it in stride.  He let her yell at him and after a couple of weeks, he eventually won her over.

After about a week of being together, they started getting closer without attacking each other.  (but it was playful attacking - neither of them hurt the other)

Why are you here and what are you doing eating my food?!

And they got a little more relaxed around each other.

I may look relaxed, but I've still got my eye on you...

And now finally, they seem to be quite comfortable with each other.  They both like to sleep on our bed with us every night and I end up waking up most mornings completely sandwiched between the two of them.

Don't mind us, we're just playing here.

We're very relieved that they're getting along so well now.  They really seem to love playing together and they're about the same age, so they have the same energy level.  We're hoping for many happy years of friendship between these two.

Something

Must... post... something...  I'm fighting against some serious momentum here.  Apathetic momentum, apparently, if there is such a thing!  I just haven't been able to get motivated to get anything posted here.  But I have lots to talk about.

The first thing is that weigh-ins have started again in my weight-loss contest.  There were six people who made it to their goal weight by December 19th (including me), so those six people had to begin reporting weight again to me this past Monday. The rules are that you can not have gained back more than 1% over the holiday break.  Each one of us gained weight, but we were all still below our 9% weight loss numbers.  Whew!

I'm finding it extremely difficult to work exercise back into my life now that I've moved to a different office, however.  My only option is to go running at lunchtime and then not shower afterwards since there's no shower facility here.  I've now done that three times in the six days since I've been here.  Hey, when I say it that way, it sound pretty good!  I've been kicking myself thinking that I've been such a slacker by not working out on Monday and Tuesday this week.

The first day I went running, I tried running about a 3 mile loop around the neighborhood here.  That was dumb.  This area is not really very nice and I felt like at any moment, I might get abducted by people in a Suburban or something.  At one point, I was running through weeds that were 2 feet tall since there was no sidewalk next to the street.  I haven't run that route since.

Today I think I've finally figured out what my exercise routine will be: run up and down the stairs inside the building for 10 minutes and then go out and run up and down the street in front of the building a couple of times.  That gives me about 1.5 miles of running outside.  And the street has a sidewalk.  And it's a fairly high-traffic street, so that if I get accosted, at least someone will see it happen.  You gotta take what you can get, right?

In other news, Santa brought us another cat, and this past Monday, there was a big storm and flooding around town.  I have pictures of both.  But that will have to wait for another post...