Beauty of Houston

Ok, in an effort to make myself believe that Houston is not the Armpit of America, I decided I should take a picture of something beautiful about Houston this past weekend.  This is a view of our street in the pretty part of the neighborhood.  We live not too far from here, but don't have the full canopy of live oaks.

Canopy of Live Oaks

Why Houston?

So, a little over a year ago, we bought the empty lot across the street from us with the intention of building a house on it.  Actually, we want a pool and if a house comes with it, that would be great, too.

I didn't mention anything about it because I never felt like it would become a reality.  Turns out that I was sort of right about it not becoming a reality - the design that our architects have come up with is so super-cool and spectacular that we can't afford it.  So we're having to delay the project to come up with more money.  We're not giving up, but we've had to accept the fact that we will have to wait one more year for our pool.  *sob*

While we were in Colorado, we visited with some friends who kept telling us that what we really need to do is move to Colorado and build a new house.  It's always a tempting thought, but we just can't imagine doing it.  While we hate the Houston heat and humidity, we've gotten to the point that we love our neighborhood so much that we can't imagine living anywhere else.

I just need to stop looking at pictures from anyplace else in the world because they put Houston to shame!!  I mean, look at this.  And this.  And this picture has been my wallpaper for the past few weeks.  Every time we return from vacation and drive from the airport or the outskirts of town, I'm struck by how ugly this place is.  It's too bad, really.  If you read about the history and culture of Houston on Wikipedia, it almost makes you want to live here!

Actually, that's sort of the point we try to make to people about Houston - it's a good place to live, but there's not much reason to visit.  And as long as you don't mind complaining about the heat and humidity to anyone who will listen, you'll be able to endure.  Houston - it's worth it. (!!!???)  Oh my gosh, if you don't click on any of the other links, you must read this one. It literally made me LOL. :)

Back to work

After 17 days off from work, I had to finally come back to work this week.  We spent a nice Christmas at home and then headed off to Colorado for a freezing-cold ski trip for the New Year's week.

Unsurprisingly, I'm finding it hard to get back into the swing of work and that apathy has taken the place of any eagerness about blogging.  Too bad, too - on Monday, I was this close to posting a snippet about our vacation that I'm sure would have been engaging and cute in its brevity, but that enthusiasm seems to have gone missing sometime around 4:00 Monday afternoon.

Ah well.  I'll leave you with a picture of our Christmas Eve Aebleskiver instead.

Aebleskiver - worthy of a King, of course!

Cultural Heritage Project

Marxo had to do a cultural heritage project for school this week.  It's due today, in fact.  She had to answer a bunch of questions about our family and then do the "art component" of the project. (It's a Fine Arts Magnet School, which means that they actually get to do art in school like I did when I was growing up, unlike a lot of schools now who have cut everything extra out of their curriculum.)

For the art component, she was supposed to choose a medium (in her case, she chose playdough), make the project, and then write a two-paragraph essay about it.  The first paragraph was supposed to describe why she chose her medium and the second was to describe how it relates to our family culture.

Being of basically mixed-breed ancestry on both sides, or in other words, "American", this type of project is always difficult for our kids.  But we have a couple of traditions in our families that help to save the day.

My mom's heritage is the outlier in our case - she was born and raised in a town that was settled by Danish people and she therefore happens to be able to trace her entire heritage back to Denmark.  I bet she's in a small minority of 4th generation Americans who can claim only one country in their heritage.  Hmmm...

Anyway, as I was saying, my mom's heritage is Danish and when I was little, she decided to introduce a delicious custom to our family: eating Aebleskiver (pronounced, in my mom's hometown, as "Eb-a-skyoo") on Christmas Eve.  Back when she did this, the only place to get an Aebleskiver pan in Nebraska was her hometown hardware store.  I think they're a little more common now, but mine also came from Ace Hardware in Minden, Nebraska.

(As an aside, there's also this card game called Some R Set that I'll have to tell you about sometime - those cards could only be bought in one special store, too)

Anyway (again) Marxo loves Aebleskiver and she looks forward to Christmas Eve so she can eat her fill of blueberry Aebleskiver.  Soon, we may have to start tripling the recipe to keep up with her!

The only other "tradition" our family has is that we are sort of required to attend Mardi Gras in New Orleans every year because the entire husband's side of the family gets together for that.

So, Marxo decided to combine these two traditions into her art project.  (drum roll, please...) Presenting King Aebleskiver riding his Mardi Gras float!

King Aebleskiver on his Mardi Gras float

Thankful

Our church has a "bread ceremony" every November where everyone brings bread that they either make or buy that has some sort of personal meaning to them.  One of the ladies at our church grew up in Brazil, so she brings a type of "cheesy bread" (can't remember the name!), another lady brought cinnamon raisin bread this year because it reminds her of her mother, and every week, I bake bread for our kids to use for their sack lunch sandwiches, so I just make a half-loaf of that and take it.

The people who brought bread then bring their loaves up to the front at the beginning of the service and tell about their significance and leave them in the front, then some people up front cut up all the bread while the minister is talking, and then everyone in the congregation files up to the front and takes a piece of bread and gets a cup of juice.  Sort of like communion, but since it's a Unitarian Church, they don't call it that.

Anyway, this year, they also wanted a child from the congregation to stand up front and say what he/she is thankful for.  They originally asked Fellan if he would do it, but he didn't want to. Marxo, however, enthusiastically volunteered to take his place and started rattling off a list of things she was thankful for.

She wrote them down on a piece of paper and then memorized it  (but took the paper up with her, just in case).

Marxo's "Thankful" speech

It says: "I'm thankful for my mom and dad because they give me food and a home.  I'm thankful for my brother because if I didn't have him I'd have no one to play with.  I'm thankful that we pay taxes so that me and my brother can go to school."

The original version of this said that she was thankful that we had money to pay for school, but we had to explain to her that everyone who owns property pays taxes and that's what pays for school.  I love that she just incorporated that right into it and didn't try to find something else to change it to.  Proud of my little socialist. ;)

Chick Flick(s)

This past weekend, the boys had a Cub Scout campout, so us girls were left to our own devices for Saturday.

I talked Marxo into going shopping with me because we needed to get some Christmas shopping done for my family.  (Every year we trade off which family we spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with - this year, it's Thanksgiving with my family and Christmas with the husband's family.  And, as long as we're up in Nebraska for Thanksgiving with my family, we also celebrate Christmas while we're there.  Which means we have to have our Christmas shopping done before Thanksgiving for my side of the family.)

Anyway, we headed off to Walmart to get some shopping done and afterwards, we swung by IKEA to get a late lunch.  I actually left from IKEA with only one purchase for less than $4. I was impressed with myself.

By the time we got home, it was getting towards late afternoon and Marxo wanted to use the computer to look up some information on a school project she's doing for dance class.  She's supposed to answer a bunch of questions about Gene Kelly.  We (or at least I) had a lot of fun looking up videos of Gene Kelly dancing. That guy was good!

Then it was time to figure out what to do for supper (turned out that some leftovers needed to be eaten) and then start our evening of movie watching!  I figured now would be as good a time as any to introduce the concept of the "chick flick" to her.  I wanted to watch Steel Magnolias, but figured that would be too sad for her.  Then I was torn between a couple of different movies, Sleepless in Seattle and the original Footloose.  We finally settled on watching both of them.

We popped some popcorn, and ate some candy (that we had gotten earlier in the day at Walmart), and popped some more popcorn and had a great time watching the movies.  And then we ate some more candy.  :)

Marxo thought Sleepless in Seattle was just "OK" and I have to say that I agree with her on that.  But she really liked Footloose.  I had a hard time watching a young Kevin Bacon taking out his frustration by dancing his way through a warehouse.  It seemed a little melodramatic to me, but I guess as a teenager in 1984 when it came out, that must have been really cool because I remember everybody loved the movie back then.  (while watching it, however, I realized that I had never actually seen the movie!)

It was a fun evening, though, and most of all, I enjoyed just hanging out with my little girl. My mom will be sure to tell me that "before long, she'll be off to college!" And more and more, I realize how true that is.

Marxo is Eight!

Today is Marxo's birthday!  This picture was taken while they were walking to school this morning just at about the moment of her officially turning eight.  :)

Eight years old today!

Help, I've fallen... off the face of the earth

I'm pretty sure this happens every year around this time: I seem to completely fall off the face of the earth.

School is back in session and 4th grade is kicking our butts.  I can't believe the amount of work that is required of 9- to 10-year-olds these days.  I remember 4th grade and I most definitely was NOT expected to spend time outside of school doing anything like homework.  The reason I remember this is because I desperately wanted homework!  I had a brother four years older than me who got homework every day and I wanted some, too!  (yes, I was that kind of a nerd-kid...)

But anyway, as I was saying, we've had some trouble getting transitioned into 4th grade with Fellan.  The first week of school was awesome.  The second week of school was abysmal.  The third week of school was only slightly better, but we seem to have been getting a little better every day since.  At this rate, though, it will be Christmas break before we get back to the high of the first week.

I can't remember if I mentioned that we had some educational testing done for Fellan again this past summer.  It was the same testing that we had done last year - we wanted to see if getting his eye problems corrected did anything for him and his dysgraphia.

We finally got the test results back a couple of weeks ago.  She confirmed again that he has dysgraphia, and had some good news and some bad news for us.  The good news is that his overall IQ score has gone up quite a bit over the year and that's mostly due to the fact that his eyes are working together now and he's able to process some things better.

The bad news is that he's still having the same troubles with writing.  And since he has gotten older but his writing ability hasn't matured, it's actually considered to be worse this year.  This is particularly bad news because the standardized tests for 4th grade include two hand-written essays as part of promotion requirements for him to go to 5th grade.  (Damn you, George W. and your standardized testing!)

We've met with his teacher and given her his test results and the recommendations from the woman who did the testing.  Luckily, his teacher this year has had kids with dysgraphia before, so she's familiar with it.  And she has no problem with modifying his work so that he can physically write less.

She also told us that she knows there are ways to allow a student to type the essays for the standardized tests and then have a teacher/counselor transcribe them onto the official paper.  But we need to get him classified as ADHD to have that type of accommodation.  The school district apparently doesn't recognize Dysgraphia as an official diagnosis.  The hoops we have to jump through...

In other news, I have pictures from our trip to Colorado (which includes pictures from the US Pro Challenge bike race!) and pictures of a science project that has already been done for this year's Science Fair.  So there's more to come, hopefully soon!

Mugging for the camera

I didn't intend to leave that sad post up at the top of my blog for so long, so I'd better post something to lighten the mood.  Which means, it's time for a kitten picture again!

I think I've finally decided that the orange and white one in front here is my favorite...

So Darn Cute!

Goodbye, old friend

This past weekend, our neighborhood grocery store closed.

Fiesta was a great grocery store.  Our neighborhood is quite a mix of ethnic backgrounds and monetary income levels and the store did an amazing job of catering to everyone in such a small space.  The produce was always fresh and varied, there was a Hispanic section with everything you could imagine, an additional "ethnic" section with all sorts of imports, and one of the managers was the self-appointed wine steward for the entire neighborhood, getting awesome deals on really good wines and passing his knowledge and savings on to the customers.  I could run to the store, grab milk, wine, grapes, flour, and parmesan cheese and be back home within 10 minutes.  Plus, they played "oldies" music from the 50's and you couldn't go shopping there without singing along with the tunes.

Last year, though, the abandoned old apartment complex across the street from Fiesta was bought by another grocery store chain, HEB.  They made quick work of tearing down the old and putting up a brand-spanking new grocery store.  It opened in November last year.

Now, don't get me wrong, the HEB is a very nice store.  They had a web contest where neighborhood people could choose from three different architectural designs before they started construction and they built the winning design.  It has a large organic produce section, a bakery, a cheese section (complete with cheese expert who will help you find whatever you want), a big wine/beer section, a pharmacy, and an outdoor patio where they regularly have live music playing.  It's pretty much everything you could ever want in a grocery store.  They even built the parking lot around the huge oak trees out front and they have a permanent "food truck" in the parking lot.  Very fancy and very politically correct.

So when the HEB opened, everyone started wondering when Fiesta would go out of business.  I mean, who would go to such an old, run-down store right across the street from such opulence?

Me.  That's who.  And apparently everyone else who ever frequented the Fiesta.  Every time I went to the store, the HEB parking lot was full, but the Fiesta parking lot was just as full as it had ever been.  And I would run into the same people I used to run into at the store.  After the initial fear wore off, we all became confident that our beloved Fiesta would be able to weather the storm.  It seemed that the people who shopped at HEB were not former patrons of Fiesta.  We weren't sure where they were coming from, but don't question a good thing.

And then it happened.  It was rumored that a developer bought Fiesta's shopping complex.  But no announcements were made and business continued as usual.  Then it was confirmed that Fiesta's shopping complex had been bought.  But no announcements were made and business continued as usual.  Then suddenly, at the beginning of July, Fiesta announced that its last day of business would be July 15, 2012.  They're going to build a big apartment complex on the site.

Trying to look on the bright side, I told myself that at least now I wouldn't have to feel guilty about the little shopping that I had already started doing at HEB.  I mean, when you have a cheese expert available to you, why not take advantage of that?  And if the organic section is as big as the whole produce section in the little Fiesta, doesn't it make sense to go there to grab the ingredients for your salad?

So, this past weekend, we stoically made our last shopping trip to Fiesta and bought several things we didn't need - as a sign of solidarity.  And even though I was sad to see the rusty old shelves peeking out from the last of the canned goods, I thought it wouldn't be all bad to have a bright (naturally-lit-through-skylights!), fresh environment to add to my shopping pleasure.  Here I come with my guilt-free conscience to HEB!

But last night we needed to run to the grocery store for milk.  Like we end up having to do about three times a week because our refrigerator is so small (don't get me started about our refrigerator...) and we were struck with the sudden knowledge that we wouldn't be able to just run into the store, grab some milk and be back to the car in the span of about two minutes.  We wouldn't even be able to make it to the dairy section in the span of two minutes after parking, walking through the parking lot to the store, and then walking through the entire store (with intentionally mis-aligned aisles, which must somehow either make the store not seem so cavernous or make people buy more stuff, but end up just pissing me off), and a wave of sadness and regret washed over me.

New is nice, but our friendly neighborhood store, that timed their over-buying just right and ran extension cords from generators to their cash registers during the power outages of Hurricane Ike to make sure nobody went without staple foods, will always hold a special place in my heart.

RIP, Fiesta