Lake Travis

A few of us went on a super fun weekend getaway to Lake Travis in Austin.

Bro. Williams, who was in the Bishopric of our old ward recently bought a lake house out there. Katherine was chatting with him and he invited her out with some friends. Here she is on one of their jet skis.

Wendy and Kristin are swimming here right off of their dock. They were having fun on those little noodles. I love Wendy's pose.

They had a really nice boat and there was a lot of tubing going on. I got this one where Katherine's getting a little air. I didn't tube due to the terrifying ride I had a few summers ago.

Here's a little photo refresher to remind you of my terror! Sorry I look like a sumo wrestler.

Here are Bro. Williams and Katherine on the boat. You can tell he's been on a jet ski.

We were riding around and some people were tubing when Bro. Williams' son Eric came by on the jet ski and splashed us really good. I think I got it the worst.

I sure like these girls! We had a lot of fun!

One of the coolest things we did was we all piled in the boat and rode it over to the restaurant that's behind Bro. Williams. We had dinner there then rode back to his house.

Eric was taking Samira and Ali out on tubes with a jet ski. It was pretty cool. He gave them a more extreme ride than Bro. Williams did on the boat.

It was so pretty out there and the weather was great.

This is a view from the small lake house out to the lake.

This is just a slightly different angle. I wanted to get the dock in the picture.

Behind the little lake house is this bigger one that they're working on. It was pretty impressive.

This deck is on the big house and was awesome!

This is the other side with the hot tub!

This is the view back to the little lake house. This was such a fun place to be. I hope we get to visit here again!

So long Washburns!

I really like having family close here in Houston, especially since my immediate family isn't in Texas anymore.

We had a family dinner the other night and Claudia made some Cafe Rio pork burritos that were DELICIOUS!

The only sad part about the dinner was that it was a farewell dinner for the Washburns who have now moved out east! I need get out there and visit them and my cousin Jason's family sometime!

School's back in session!

So, it's that time of year again!

The week before the kids came, we had all sorts of meetings. During the big convocation a bunch of us got to ride there in a limo again. Someone donated two of them to take us to the convocation.

This is half of our limo group!

Here are the rest of us!

I had to put this picture of the Kindergarten team in for Susannah since I know she misses a lot of these ladies!

Here's my class this year. I took them outside for this picture, but it was way too bright!

This indoor one turned out much better. I think we're going to have a good year, though they're pretty chatty right now!

Here are their silly faces.

Sorry this picture is on it's side, but I forgot to flip it when I downloaded them to my computer. Our first grade Spanish Immersion teacher got this as a gift from one of the parents of her students and I thought it was so cute! It reminded me of the diaper cakes people sometime make for baby showers!

Jack Johnson

A few weeks ago I went to an AMAZING concert in The Woodlands.

JACK JOHNSON! Who doesn't love this guy?

Wendy and I got tickets before summer and had been super excited. We met for some grub before and then walked over to the Pavilion. We were in for some interesting weather, though, as you may be able to tell behind us!

We had a pleasant surprise - we ended up sitting right behind Misty, Nichole, and Cynthia.

It started pouring down rain in the middle of the opening acts. It was a serious thunderstorm! Cynthia gets the friend of the century award, though, because she sat behind Wendy and me and shared her umbrella with us. We all still got soaked, though. You can't really tell in this picture.

We were soggy the whole concert. Luckily it stopped raining just before Jack came out, but we had little puddles in our chairs and it was humid enough that we just didn't dry off! The good thing is that it really cooled the weather! We've had a HOT few weeks!

Katherine showed up just after the rain stopped. She worked her magic and got in for free. I don't know how that girl does it!

We were back far enough that I couldn't get a good picture, but I took this one off of one of those big screens.

Here's a video of part of one of his songs.

After a while, I walked down closer to try and get a better picture. Sorry this one is so dark.

Here's a video of him singing Banana Pancakes - one of my favorites!
The sad news for the day besides being caught in the rain is that one of my Surfah slippers broke. They were pretty old. I got really muddy walking down to get that last picture and instead of carrying home and cleaning off muddy broken slippers . . .

I decided to just throw them away after the concert. I was trying to make a sad face here, but didn't have a lot of success.

I'll tell you what - I have even more respect for Jack Johnson after going to his concert. Not only is he a great singer/guitar player, he's also very nice and he's very classy. I say classy because he didn't say a single swear word or make any inappropriate comments. Way to go! Also, he's been with his wife for 17 years and he's from Hawaii!

Bad luck!

This post is long overdue. It's been a few weeks since I've blogged and I've got some catching up to do!

I'll start with my string of bad Comcast luck. Right when I got back from my trip to WA and AK this summer, our Internet wasn't working. Comcast came out and fixed it. The next day, our cable went out so they had to come back out. I had requested another phone jack put in, but the repair guys couldn't do it - an installation tech had to do it. He came not long after these other issues. He . . . "made a damage" as you can see in this picture.

Apparently, he was in the attic walking on a beam and one of them wasn't nailed down very well. It tipped and he fell through the ceiling - well his foot did - up to his knee.

He was kind enough to push the insulation back up until it could be repaired (at no cost to me, of course).

A few days later it was back looking as good as new. I am absolutely not trash talking Comcast. They were very quick to fix everything - I just had a serious string of bad Comcast luck! :)

My projects

As part of my last full week of freedom before I'm back to school commitments, I have been pretty busy on a few things.

One of these has been my shower. I don't know if any of you ever run into the problem of nasty stuff getting behind the caulk and being impossible to clean, but my shower was really bad. I pulled out all the dirty caulk then spent hours scraping and cleaning out the gross stuff. This picture is after the caulk was removed and in the process of scraping.

Here I am all gross during the caulking phase.

And, finally the finished product. I love it now! I hope it lasts at least a little while!

This last weekend, my friend, Katie threw a Canadian party where the main event was to watch "Strange Brew." I hadn't seen it before, but am now a big fan. It is very dumb, but very funny, eh?

This fits in the "my projects" post because I offered to bring something to the party and got assigned to make a 7 layer dip that looked like the Canadian flag. This was my attempt. It's really hard to control diced tomatoes, but it turned out alright!

To Destroy You Is No Loss

I just finished an amazing book called "To Destroy You Is No Loss." It's an amazing true story about a Cambodian family's survival through the Khmer Rouge (Communist) take-over during the 70s that resulted in about 1.5 million deaths.

I would highly recommend it. I didn't know anything about this. I guess I get too focused on my own life too much.

The book club in my ward read this and a couple of the women found current links and stories about this. This video is about one of the Khmer Rouge child soldiers who's making amends. The complete article is HERE.
THIS ARTICLE is a sad one about the sentencing of one of the executioners.