24/52 Trinity Bridge

A cell phone picture this week!  Pretty good view of downtown and the new Trinity bridge from the Trinity Groves "neighborhood".

23/52 Tough Guy

Cute one from camping a few weeks ago. I love that face he is making.

In other news, the poor guy has been sick the last few days with an ear infection.  On the other hand, that meant lots of cuddling.  Poor guy is on the mend though.

20/52 Spotlight

Texas really does have pretty amazing wildflowers.

18/52 Cactus Rose

Other photos from the last few days on the way... 

Waco Day!

B would tell me that when people down in Waco would ask her if it was weird to have a 'college student' stay with her, she would tell them, "he is just like my grandkid..."  Yesterday we took the kiddo down to meet her.  We thought she would like that since I have been living with her for about four years now and I am 'like a grandkid.'  She seemed to really enjoy meeting Oliver and it was nice to take her out to lunch and talk for a bit since I may not really need to stay at her play again from now on.  We shall see.  

Here she is with the kid. 

 And here is the three of us.

Thirsty

The last day or so we have been letting the little one run wild, free, and nearly naked.  He just wanted to show off his cloth dipes.

A slice of TX

Texas has some of the best wildflowers I have seen.  They will cover entire fields and are all along the highway between Dallas and Waco.  There are lots of the classic Bluebonnet, but there are lots of other yellow flowers, red ones that look like Indian's Paintbrush, and all these little white and pink ones called the Showy Primrose.  

The top picture is at B's place (which she has sold now!), and the bottom one is one of her neighbor's place. That second one seems very Texas.  

Moving or bust(s)

The widow sold her house and is moving now. This means there is all kinds of fun stuff around the house...

26 weeks and camping!

We went camping this past weekend because we thought it may be one of the last time that we can do that for a bit.  Apparently this week (many people's spring break) is a popular weekend and we were slow on the draw, leaving us with a campsite at Cooper's Lake State Park.  Turned out to be an alright little park, although there wasn't a ton to do.

We did, however, get to use the good 'ol dutch oven again, which is always fun.  We made pork chops with onions, mushrooms and cream sauce over egg noodles (think basically beef stroganoff).

We also were able to try out the new fishing pole I got for Christmas.  It is a fun pole because it collapses real nice, making it easier to take places.  The fishing was actually pretty terrible and I lost a lure, too.  

Fun tip: How can you tell which person fishing is from Colorado and which is from Texas?  Who is wearing North Face and who is wearing camo.  I was literally the only one (and Sara) not wearing camo.  

We figured the 26 week picture should be in front of the tent.  Our camping neighbors were impressed with our camping ability (because it stormed pretty good and they were in campers), but they were even more impressed when they saw Sara was pregnant (not making that up either... they told us).  

Starship Pegasus

There are a few must see sights on the drive between Dallas and Waco. I finally stopped today to take a picture of one of them. This is what appears to be an old restaurant or something like that. Driving by i always thought it had windows and everything, but that is not the case. This thing is actually just a fancy solid cement done with windows painted on it.

Stay classy, Italy, TX.

look out below

Well, it has been a bit since the last post.  Lots has happened and I was going to just do a photo dump with short captions and call it good.  I may still do that, but it still takes longer than just writing something quick and short, although not so much a re-cap.  But lets face it... who really likes really long blogs anyways?  The sugar to help the medicine of a blog go down is brevity.

A week ago I finished up SCUBA diving training and got the first certification.  The open water dive was a TX experience for sure.  It was at a SCUBA park that was out in the country:


View Larger Map

Driving out, the view is of rolling Texas nothing with cows grazing.  Stroll through the small town of Terrell, which I think may be best described by the picture below, which is an actual picture I found that someone else took.

The water was super murky, so we could only see like 5 or 10 feet down there.  They did have two boats sunk, but with few fish and no plants and, surprisingly, no coral, the boats are not so much fun.  Apparently the have an airplane under there somewhere, too.  Didn't see that.  Probably touched it at some point though.

Other new experience was fire ants.  They are terrible.  Pain - not so bad.  Itch - thought of having my feet amputated, but had second thoughts that this may be extreme.  Cheers.

Homecoming

Just a quick snapshot I thought I would share.  When I got home from CR our rose bushed were massively laden with roses.  I trimmed them back in the fall but was going to prune them more.  Weather must have been nice for then when we were gone and it looks a bit late for pruning now.

Real weekends

Since we had a some-what normal weekend, I thought I'd put a few pictures of it up.  Sara had the whole weekend off, or a two day vacation (she calls any time off - even if counted in hours - a vacation to feel better about it).  She ran the half marathon here in Dallas for the third year this year.  She did pretty good despite it being all cold and rainy out.  Here is is with others from the hospital.  

 They forgot to take a picture of all of them until they were on the train headed back home from the race.

We also we and got a Christmas tree.  Sara was super excited.  I was... well...  Anyways, we decided that it may be easier to just carry the tree home instead of taking the time to awkwardly tie it to the top of our car and drive just a few blocks.  I even almost beat Sara home.

That is about it I think.  Maybe Sara would have had more fun stuff to say.  She is working a lot right now in the little kid ICU and it is finals time of the year for me.  This was an attempt to productively waste time.  Enjoy.

Growing Season

From Photostream

Your growing season seems longer than most - an attribute I hope to export.

Made Fresh

From Photostream

Austin has all these little food trailers around. Alas we were never able to give one a shot... maybe next time.

Torn Pockets

Torn Pockets, originally uploaded by a b franzen.

We went down a little south of here to go bouldering today - while Sara labored away. It was awesome. Seriously. I think this park may have, in one day, changed much of my perspective of TX. There were trees. There were hills. There was green. There was rocks. There were other people outside, doing outside things. There were over a hundred bouldering routes. Seriously - it was really good to get out there today.

A few things:
I have no strength in my hands (ok, ok, it is more of a wide-spread problem than that).
Limestone can be fun to climb on.
Limestone can be sharp.
My hand hurt.
But just a few hours today will go a long way in building calluses!