Ace

The local news did a piece on Zoe's school. If you watch to the end Zoe talks a bit.
http://www.keyeproductions.com/AceAcademy/
This will be aired on Sunday.

Motivation

Some great stuff on my friend Robert's page. Scroll down and check out the stuff on motivation.

Tubing and spiders

Zoe and I went tubing down about 6 miles of the very slow Guadelupe river on Sunday. We rented three tubes from "Tube Haus" (many things around New Braunfels have a German theme)- one for each of us and one to carry the cooler full of lunch, snacks, drinks and sun block. It's a beautiful area, and the river is a nice mix of slow meandering, short rapids and interesting places to stop. We glided under big old trees thick with Spanish moss that would have looked at home in a bayou, paddled after turtles, and ducks who were so young they were still fuzzy. It wasn't long into the trip before Zoe was floating downstream assembling a little stack of cheese, turkey and crackers, as I built a salami and Easy Cheese sandwich on my belly like an otter. Well, if otters had ready access to Easy Cheese and salami.
Zoe's favorite stop was the spider cave. It was a neat little ledge/cave area eroded into one of the limestone cliff faces. The parts you can walk in are maybe a hundred feet long, with a few different levels of steps to climb around on. Some of the other kids noticed a hairy protrusion in one of the crevices around this area had some daddy long legs in it. They were grossed out, but Zoe and I were intrigued, so we examined them. It looked like a brown haired Fraggle was burrowed into the rock, but instead of hair sticking out they were really all spider legs and feelers. You could (and Zoe and I happily did) grab a fist full of them and pull them out. Then the big spiders- these were pretty uniform in size, spanning about 5 inches- would scramble around all over, and start bobbing up and down at you like angry lizards. They didn't seem to be injured by being picked out of the wall, but they did get agitated. The whole side of the cliff would just be covered with the bugs, dozens of them pulsing up and down and running around. We found 8 of these little enclaves of spiders in the first spot, and Zoe was enthralled with them. They'd get angry with us for a while, then slowly reform into their crack to do whatever daddy long legs do in their little congregations. If you're brave or really curious about what these look like, check out this video.
We floated down the river a short way farther and found a group of 20 somethings squealing about the spiders they'd found there too. A woman was being egged on by her friends to touch a little patch of them. Zoe wanted to tell them all she knew about the bugs as if she were host on the travel channel. She even asked me to advertise her show by bellowing to them about "The Amazing Zoe Spider Girl." They didn't care to listen so much until I helped her scramble up the ledge which looked oddly like a little stage. She stood before her audience with a grin on her face, and announced what the hairy wads were all about. Then she grabbed a handful of spiders and 30 or so of them cascaded in a column from her hands, scattering around her pink water shoes. The grown ups below her writhed, and itched and giggled. Zoe loved every minute of it, probably even more than seeing the baby ducks, or riding the rapids. Maybe even more than eating Easy Cheese straight out of the can on the river with her dad. She's only six, but she said it was one of the best days of her life. It was one of mine too.

Zoe, Stef and some bugs

Stef spent the early part of the summer collecting fennel and dill plants with yellow stripped caterpillars on them. They've been hatching for a few weeks now.
Zoe tells me this one is a female, based on the blue markings near her tail.

More Annie movies

The orphans listen to the radio show (watch this one first, and the second one makes more sense).
The orphans do their own radio show.

First two of a series of Zoe movies in Annie

Maybe
Hard Knock Life

Video game addiction

A fascinating article on video game addiction.

Zoe as Interplanet Janet

Much belated, but now that I'm putting together my own Youtube channel, Zoe's going to get a lot more air time. Here she is as Interplanet Janet.

Real estate envy

My favorite bike ride takes me about six miles round trip through the ritzy Regents Hills neighborhood where I get some fierce real estate envy. Most of the houses are in the $1mil range as far as I can tell. Here's my start, with my old man bike at our house:
Honestly, our house, the cars, and the bike are all just great. Well, the ivy could use a trim, and the lawn needs a bit of a cut, but I can't really complain.
But then you compare our digs to these mansions and I start to get jealous. This one is still in our neighborhood, and I believe was done by the same developer. The owners just took the design as far as it will go, and I stop and admire it whenever I go by.
The landscaping, the tinted windows, the driveway, the lamps, everything is put together with the final look in mind. It's got a little bit of a control freak vibe, but it looks stellar. Contrast that with a similar floor plan just down the street. It's by no means a dump, but it's pretty ordinary:
But these are from the realms of mere mortals. The heavy hitters follow. This next pair are both from the same house:
The garage/servants quarters attach to the main house via a breezeway, which leads into what looks like a court yard.
I have a thing for turrets, tile roofs and this color scheme.
These next three are going left to right around the corner, looking at the same beautiful abode with a three car garage. The garage with it's sharp wooden (faux?) doors is one of my favorite things. Like the white house above it's separated from the main house by a little breezeway.
Not the greatest shot, but this house has more trees than any other in the neighborhood. Plus if you zoom in you can figure out exactly where it is, which is why I took the shot.
The tile roof, a nice solid door, and a welcoming front make this one of my favorites in the neighborhood. It's big, but not overly intimidating.
Well, the eye candy makes for a nice bike ride, and this area is hilly, so it's a good work out too. Maybe these will inspire me to pop my career into a reasonable earning range to make one of these shacks mine.

Hanging with my girls

Zoe and I went to Zilker park a couple months ago and stumbled across a guy kite boarding. I love the weird stuff you find in Austin. Zoe was bummed because she fell in the mud. Being the larger than life stage actress type that she is, she can pout intensely, and 30 seconds later be thrilled to be alive.
And moments later she's stoked, despite the muddy paw:
The little cart thing on the right is a big skate board he was able to ride around with the big orange kite pulling him.
Zoe doing a zip line at her friend Molly's birthday party:
We all went to our local nursery to pick up some planting ideas, and they had a great little green house idea that fits with the square foot gardening Stef's been doing. Here it is closed:
There are hinges, and hinged support legs on this side that let you open the whole thing up comme ca:Zoe doesn't always like the nursery so she spends her time sighing, making beleaguered whining noises, and this face:
I like that there's still a little hint of a suppressed grin in there.
Yesterday Stef suggested we all head out to a little festival they were having at the Bee Caves Galleria. We had some vendor food, checked out the stalls and stores, and Zoe went "ice skating" on this neat plastic rink they'd set up:

Zoe drawing

Zoe drew this on my white board at work. It's her rendition of the movie "Cinderella II"

Creepy van

Last time I went to Silicon Valley for work I found this molester van in the parking lot of a movie theater. And people wonder why I get twitchy around clowns. Zoom in. It's really disturbing.

Zoe's new bike!

Zoe has a strange relationship with material possessions . She wants us to buy lots of stuff, but she's far less enthused with it once she has that stuff. She's quite thoroughly outgrown her first two wheel bike- her legs don't straighten past about 90 degrees when she's riding it, so she can't get a lot of power or speed going on it. So we said if she's good on the family trip to Mississippi, she could have a new bike. Well, she was very good, so the day we got back Zoe and I went to Toys R Us and picked out a nice new bike for her. She was very excited in the store. She was very excited in the parking lot. Then we got home. She mostly wanted to watch TV. She humored me with a couple laps around the cul-de-sac, and she hasn't touched or even mentioned the bike since.

Taking turkey

Rose breeders get to name their new flowers after themselves, their mothers, their favorite haiku etc. Cow breeders seem to choose the region they're from, like "Jerseys" and "Guernseys." It would probably be rude to name your new breed of turkey after your wife, so I'd name my new turkey breed "Jive".

Bad phrases

There are a number of phrases that, at least to me, say "I know I'm being annoying, but..." Here's the short list:
Actually...
Just FYI...
Just letting you know.
I'm not trying to be rude but...
Just sayin'.

"Actually" bugs me because it's the natural crutch of the socially stunted know it all, which I resemble way too much myself. It's hard not to imagine the little derisive dork chuckle before hearing, "Actually, the atomic weight of oxygen is 14." (That's a plant to see which of my buddies can resist correcting me.)
The top three give us a peek at the inner child screaming "I know more than you do! Ha, ha!" with a slightly more mature gloss on it. "Just" isn't an inherently bad word, but here it distances the speaker from their own message. It's a little confession that they don't want to be associated with the message, and they expect to get some flack for delivering it- either the listener won't care at all, or they won't like what they're hearing.

Sure, I love having more information about how things actually are, and I don't want folks to be rude, but these are so over used in irritating contexts that they themselves are tainted. They raise my hackles all on their own. If someone were simply to say, "Just FYI, not trying to be rude or anything, but you're actually the most handsome man on the planet. Just to let you know." I'd probably punch them.

Zoe on the white board

I had some stuff to fix at work, and Zoe and I were in the neighborhood because we'd just finished up a belly dancing class, so we wandered into the office. Here's what she drew on the white board:

Dragon Age: Origins

Tonight I finished the game Dragon Age: Origins. It was an epic scale and engaging to play. According to the game's tally I spent over 70 hours playing it, though it counts time left paused, which doesn't quite seem right to me. The combat style pretty much requires you to pause it a lot, and that time should count, but if I paused it to go have dinner, it still might rack up an hour. It's a minor quibble. Anyway, it's weird to think of how many hours I've spent playing one game, and I'm sure this one doesn't hold the record.

Games have progressed so far since the era of 8 bit graphics it's unreal. What Bioware was able to do with Dragon Age combined some of the best aspects of books- character depth and development, and an immersion into a complex and detailed world- with the drama and visual impact of a movie. Honestly (and I'm sure this is blasphemy to some folks) the style of back story Tolkien did in Lord of the Rings bored me to tears. Bioware managed to flesh out a world which was just as rich without it getting so dry and irrelevant. They did a great job creating styles for the different cultures in the game, and different environments to explore- the woods the elves lived in, the tunnels of the dwarven kingdom, the dream-like plane of the fade- it was all pretty neat. I would say a lot of the load times were pretty extreme, though a faster computer would have helped some. A lot of it was hard drive access time which is unavoidable with all the data they're trying to stream at you. Hopefully they leaned heavily on SIMD.

Over all, it was a pretty cool game.

Christmas pictures

Family door hanging

My dad and brother are both engineers too, and they seem happiest when their hands are busy. So I put them to work while they were here for Christmas turning around one of our doors. The door leads into one of the smallest laundry rooms I've ever seen, which is also home to the illustrious Beer Fridge. With the door swinging into the laundry room it hits the door of the washing machines, which is a roaring pain, and there's not enough room for a laundry basket. In short, it was a poor design decision that I've just been slow to rectify. So we did.

Here you can see my brother ironing something out with the bottom hinge while dad holds the door in place. I helped more than just taking pictures, honest. I mortised out patches for the new hinges and spackled over the old holes.

So now the door swings out! Thanks again for the help, guys!
I didn't grab any pictures of the deed, but part of our fence blew down while they were down here. The posts had rotted off at the bases. Ryan was a whiz with getting the old concrete plugs, and it gave me an excuse to buy a giant wrecking bar. We got the holes dug, the concrete poured, the poles set up and the dirt tamped down pretty quickly. All that is left is to screw the bits of fence back onto them.

Attic progress

I got the flooring you see below nailed in. It's never going to be gorgeous- this is just a quiet space to store some junk. This is only about half the space in this attic area, and there's still more flooring to fill in, but it's gotten pretty cozy already.
The flooring boards ended up being too big to fit though the hole for the stairs after the stair frame was in place, so I had to cut them up. They ended up being much easier to manage that way.

The flooring boards ended up being too big to fit though the hole for the stairs after the stair frame was in place, so I had to cut them up. They ended up being much easier to manage that way.