Couldn't Stand the Weather

Pretty and Real. And warm.

2012-01-22T14:10:00.000-06:00

One of the blogs I used to read fairly regularly is Like Mother, Like Daughter, which is a mixture of domestic advice, crafting ideas, and reassuringly old-fashioned parenting guidance from two or maybe three generations of mothers and daughters (and therefore, possibly grandmothers) in one family. Some members of the family home school; they garden assiduously and live fairly frugally, by which I mean that they make an effort to repair things that break, avoid buying new things, and make a lot of things themselves. They (or at least some of the team) are also very Catholic, more Catholic than my mother was, which I find interesting. They have customs and faith traditions I have never heard of, which says some unflattering things about 1970s Catholic schooling, at least to my mind. I haven't read it frequently enough to sort out who the various names refer to, except for the darling baby, Pipo. It's worth paging through just to see his photos.

Anyway, the blog itself is beautifully designed, and they have a nice custom on Thursdays, called "Pretty, Happy, Funny, Real" where they publish photographs that fall into each of those categories. Some are decorations, some are of the garden, LOTS of them are of the aforementioned Pipo. It's a nice 30-second distraction. My photography skills are so poor, and my schedule is so chaotic at present that I could never undertake such a regular project but I do recommend checking it out.

But on the 'Pretty" and "Real" categories, here is something that caught my eye today:

Yarn Harlot (the worlds most famous knitting blogger - see my sidebar) has been on a mitten spree. Aren't they lovely? I have not attempted mittens but have made Lucy some gloves several years ago that matched her school uniform, and I made myself a set of fingerless gloves back in 2010. I want to try mittens, particularly I want to make some of the fabulous Latvian mittens that have been popular in knitting circles in the last few years. Like this:

or this:

Last year, Santa brought me (at my express direction) this book of Latvian knitting patterns.

It seems that Latvian girls traditionally knit themselves a hope chest of mittens, most of which were distributed to guests and helpers at their wedding. Some women in the book gave out over 80 pairs. Such beauty and generosity, and warm hands.

Aging gracefully, or not

2012-01-11T22:27:00.001-06:00

A woman in my neighborhood bookclub jokingly recommended How Not To Act Old by Pamela Redmond Satran to us all a few months ago. I didn't know the book but found it cheap on half.com -- a site I thoroughly recommend if you like used books. This book is a silly but occasionally pointed list of habits, manners of speech and basic idosyncrasies that those of us over 40 probably have, which the author claims are out of step with many people under 35.

So what, you may say, and you're right. But it is true that if you have, say, a boss who is noticeably younger than you, or if you work closely with younger "peers", and I use that word deliberately, it is useful to know how not to give yourself away, so to speak. How not to lose that important peerness.

Some of it is funny and other parts are a little crude but I have to admit that I have taken several recommendations on board. For example, I no longer wear reading glasses outside the house. I have progressive contacts, and very trendy -- almost too trendy, actually -- blue framed metallic glasses, that correct my mild astigmatism on the top, and allow me to read everything on the bottom. The progressive lenses hide the reading bit. The author points out that it is just too tempting to wear readers on the end of your nose and look over the top, which just looks awful. No one under 40 needs to do that. And if you're coloring your hair and going to yoga and joking around about Jenna Marbles (ha! did you get that reference?) with your work pals, you do not want to spoil everything by looking like Mrs Claus at an odd moment.

Here are some other useful recommendations:

Learn to type on your smart phone with your thumbs and make sure you are wearing your contacts so you can read your txt msgs without holding the screen at arms length
Stop leaving voicemails; no one listens to them. They just check call history and if they want to talk to you they call you back. Or txt instead
Don't talk about health problems.
Don't talk at length about your children; talk about yourself. This is difficult when you're flipping between your school parent friends (with whom you always talk about children) and your younger work friends, but I think it's important. Many of my nurse friends at UT have kids, but we don't discuss them. I learned this when Jess txted me at the hospital to tell me the school bus had crashed (no one was hurt-- and it actually rear-ended the disabled kids' bus). I was half laughing and half horrified and related this to several nurses sitting around me, whom I then realized were much closer in age to my children than they were to me. They found the whole business hilarious.

Here are a few other funny admonitions I try to remember:

Don't be unable to find your cell phone because you put it in a different place each time
Don't yell into your cell phone (Jess complains that I do this)
Enough with the Jane Austen worship- guilty.
Don't start conversations with strangers - well, thankfully compared to most Texans, I am positively reserved.

The book also lists things that are now "old" but used to be young, like Harley Davidsons, dinner parties, dried flowers in the home, acrylic nails, Paul McCartney, and the expression "surfing the net".

Like many cute books, this one was originally a blog and you can still read it at http://www.hownottoactold.com/. So there is quite a lot of filler in it to flesh it out to a book of 200+ pages and 185 lists. But I have vowed to stop dating myself by pointing out, for example, that I was already married and living in London when the Berlin wall came down; that I covered Margaret Thatcher's resignation for a regional newspaper; or what the IT industry was like before the internet. None of that is necessary information; it's just something I used to contribute to suitable conversations, because I'm amazed myself at how fast things have changed. Not anymore.

Oh! and I am on Twitter, you know: amyberkleyellis. You can follow me. And if Jessica reminds me how to do it, I'll follow you back.

Run pony, run pony

2012-01-09T13:03:00.000-06:00

We are off to Fred's first piano lesson this afternoon. Great excitement.

I believe he is the most musical of my three children. He sings all the time, can sing Frere Jacques in a round and seems to pick up melodies with hardly any effort. He plays on our Yamaha Clavinova whenever he can, and picks out tunes. I have waited until he was 5 to start, because I didn't think he could sit still long enough to make it worthwhile. Then I was lucky enough to make friends with a local Suzuki teacher, who told me very sternly that I Was Late. She was half joking, but only half.

We had a meeting/interview at her house before Christmas and although he was a little shy at first, Fred enjoyed himself and did everything she asked him to. We have been dutifully listening to our "Twinkle Twinkle" variations on CD and and he is learning to identify notes on the keyboard.

You know who I'm talking about?

2012-01-04T10:57:00.004-06:00

I have a terrible memory for movies and celebrities' names. Even book titles and authors slip away shortly after I've read them. Here's an honest example, and I'll have to google this to find her at the end of the paragraph. There is a popular woman author who has written a dozen or more contemporary books about women and families (I think). I've read at least two of them. Her name has an A in it, but it's not Anne Rice (vampires - my sister read all of these) or Anita Shreve or Anita Brookner (I'm always mixing these two up in my head. I like Anita Brookner's brooding English writing very much.) The woman I'm trying to remember wrote a book about couples who adopt a Chinese orphan, and have various troubles adapting to it. I remember that it was very good and that I was the first person to check it out of Molesey Library.

OK, it took me about 5 minutes to find her; in the end I had to google "American woman novelists Ann..." but I found Anne Tyler on the list. The book was Digging to America, published in 2006. But it really annoys me that I can't remember the name of the book or the author. I remember the story and where I read it and my pictures of the action, but the names slide away.

This failing is particularly annoying when I'm trying to argue with someone, or at least make a point, and the evidence I need -- the examples, authors, films, musicians -- has slipped out of my grasp. Often it happens in a moment, as I'm beginning the sentence, and by the time I get to the point, I've lost my data. My aural memory is good; I can remember pieces of music, or even sometimes the way the missing name sounds, the number of syllables it contains and what consonant it begins with.

Earlier today I was groping for the name of Darius Rucker, (very cool country singer, former lead of Hootie and the Blowfish, who had a rebirth in the industry and reinvented himself as a country singer). I kept saying, Desmond Morris (British anthropologist and author of the 1970s classic Man Watching) instead.

If this is an early sign of dementia, I would like to know now.

Back to normal, I hope.

2012-01-03T18:06:00.001-06:00

I took all the decorations down yesterday, with help from Fred and Jessica. This is a Good Year for holiday decorations, in that I had lots of time to sort through all six -- count 'em, 6 -- boxes and organize them so that I know where everything is. One box for lights, indoor and outdoor, even though we didn't do any outdoor lighting this year. One box for decorations that do not coordinate with next year's theme, now marked "Archive - checked 1/2012 -AE - Box 6 of 6". This will only seem excessive to those of you who have not unloaded an international shipping container, or four.

Christmas in the red boxes; Easter in the pink box; Halloween in the orange boxes. Lovely.

I also did what I do on good years, and wrote myself a letter for next Christmas. I put it in an envelope, wrote a reminder on the front to open it on November 1, 2012, and buried it in the bottom of my In Tray. In it, I told myself sternly to get started on holiday preparations early. "Make mince pies in November", I said. "Buy more candles", "Remember you have two spare presents in Box 1" and "Preserves were good idea for teacher presents". I used to get really excited and make lists of knitted gifts I was going to start on in June, but I am more realistic now.

It makes me feel a little apprehensive this year too, hoping that nothing untoward will have happened by the time I open it. By November, Fred will be in school, Lucy in college, and I hope I will be a good third of the way through a masters degree. But things might not go so smoothly. I had a big birthday in November -- not a big number, just big to me. Big in that I am a little amazed by the number 47. Since I've been a nurse, I've become all too aware of what the far side of the hill (as in "over the hill") looks like. I'm not there yet by some way, but I can see it. In gloomier 47 moments, I think all we can hope for is to avoid disaster, in health, housing or finances. But fortunately, most gloomy moments are interrupted by someone sticking a YouTube video under my nose, "Mum, you've got to see this", or by someone else presenting me with a drawing of a dog, sort of, with "I ruff you" scrawled on it in large stick letters.

In good 47 moments, I remember that I'm old enough to know what I want. I'm old enough to skim shamelessly through bookclub selections that aren't worth reading; to listen to the parenting trials of my younger BabyMama friends with patience and detachment, reminding myself that I've been at this business since they were in high school. I'm old enough to recognize my own flight responses, which are particularly strong after a hot dry summer when all my plants died, and do not mean that we need to move to Los Angeles the minute Jessica graduates from high school. And I'm pathetic enough to take pleasure in six labeled boxes of Christmas decorations stacked in order of access priority waiting for next November.

Dream within a dream?

2011-12-28T13:52:00.003-06:00

I have seen very few movies in the last 10 years or so. Phil refuses to go to the cinema, claiming that it feels like a waste of an evening. But he is happy to watch anything at home, so we have recently vamped up our Netflix subscription to two separate queues - one for Lucy and Jessica, and one for us. And I have stopped waiting for an evening when he can join me and am now just watching films with the girls instead.

As a result, we've seen A LOT of movies in the last few months. Most of these we should have seen when they came out, but we're a bit behind the times. Here are our hightlights:

Easy A
The Queen's Speech
The Social Network
Julie and Julia
3:10 to Yuma
Grapes of Wrath
Little Miss Sunshine
Gran Torino
Black Swan
The Blind Side
The Hangover
Invictus
and finally
Slumdog Millionaire

They were all pretty good. Little Miss Sunshine is my favorite. The girls have had a Disney retrospective and decided to see all the animated films they missed as children, so we've also had The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules (awful) and Mulan.

For Christmas, Lucy got Jessica the DVD of Inception, which Jess saw at the cinema a few months ago. I picked her up that evening and she was so blown away by the movie and its complicated plot she could barely speak in sentences. "It was just so incredibly cool" was about all she could say. We all watched it two nights ago, and spent half of a car journey yesterday talking about it. As I got confused watching Hermione fiddle the Time Turner in HP3, I was not optimistic that I'd be able to follow Leonardo DiCaprio in and out of three levels of dreams, but was determined to make an effort because Jessica was so excited to share it with us.

It was worth it in the end for the special effects, Michael Caine and Ellen Page. And Jessica's conviction that really, we're all actually dreaming.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-25T11:29:00.001-06:00

I realize I am jumping in early here but Phil is out for a Christmas row and the children are playing, and I've been trying to be a more consistent correspondent.

We've had a lovely holiday so far. School finished over a week ago thanks to Christmas falling on a Sunday. We hosted Phil's office Christmas party (for job #2, the small private equity firm) which meant a long slog in the kitchen on Monday, but Lucy and Jessica were fabulous help and we pulled it off. Never mind that we found the dessert cheesecakes waiting out in the screen porch the next morning. I don't think anyone minded...

We decorated with our Bollywood theme this year. At its most basic, this means no Red and no Silver. It also means no victoriana or gingham or other homespun-type things. It does mean lots of magenta, glitter, colored lights and exotic things like peacock feathers. We last did this the year Fred was born, but that Christmas is a bit of a blur to me.

pillowpets x 3

One of the many joys of having teenage daughters (and there are many!) is that they jump in and contribute to Christmas magic. It is no longer just up to me. Surprises emerge that I knew nothing about. Fred has secrets with them, and they know things he wants that he has never told me.

Jessica helped him with the Santa snack. "By the time they get to Texas, the reindeer will want a change from apples." And someone is willing to play Hungry, Hungry Hippos over and over...

Phil has planned Beef Wellington for Christmas dinner, and we're going to take a walk with Lulu and our friends' dogs, which we're babysitting. On Boxing Day, the girls are making breakfast and we're going out for a long walk in the hill country. Other than that, I'm going to finishing icing the cake (ouch!) and then help Lucy...

Yea!

catching up

2011-12-24T10:00:00.001-06:00

I've been a poor chronicler this year, but I'm in a better position now that I've moved our Picasa library of 11,000+ photos to my regular computer. This took most of a Saturday afternoon earlier this month. It was one of a number of projects I've been getting around to since the semester ended.

There is a big part of my brain which says I should not have started my foray into academia until about a dozen small- to medium-sized projects were finished in our house. These were the finishing touches after our last remodel. But I was so tired of the whole business, and I have only a limited interested in decorating and organizing that I jumped ahead. I also felt my age was making any decision more urgent. But this meant that we've spent the last 9 months stumbling over piles of things that needed putting away, and being unable to find things that we knew were here, and living as though we were still expecting plasterers and electricians in at any moment. I'm getting to several of them during the Christmas vacation.

And although I've complained repeatedly here about the heat and drought, we did have a great summer, with many visitors.

My lovely cousin, Sarah Berkley, and Aunt Barbara stopped in on their road trip from Connecticut, where Sarah has finished college, back to Eugene, OR. Sarah is the youngest in the very long line of cousins on my dad's side of the family. I had never met her before.

(Sarah plays the piano beautifully and my dad used to make her play 4 hand duets with him when she was little.)

(Sarah talked to us about the dreaded college application process, which Lucy was about to start)

My sister, Laura, came for a week during their "flyback" from Beirut. They spent almost two months with her in-laws in Pennsylvania, and joined in the Krisko family beach reunion. We had a fabulous time, despite the heat, and I barely saw Fred for most of the time as he ran around with JT and Ruby.

(In the very western bar at the Driskill Hotel)

(at Austin Zoo)

And if anyone else is as freaked out by the passing of time as I am, here is a little comparison:

(JT and Fred during a visit at Dad's house in 2007. James is 4 and Fred is 5 months)

(JT and Fred in 2011. James is 9 and Fred is 4)

So Fred is the age JT was when we were living near them in Surrey. I don't know how that happened so quickly. Here's another favorite:

East Molesey 2008

But I digress. I am a fool about old photos. Our last visitors were Phil's sister and her husband and family who came to see us from London, on their way to Victoria Island, BC, where they spent a week in a wilderness cabin, relaxing and whale watching.

Lucy and Jessica with cousins, Emma and Helen Reith, on the "W" at Westlake High School

Emma and Helen had never been to the US, and got a kick out of the crazy Texas high school customs. They ate barbeque, swam at Barton Springs and visited the capitol building. It was over 100F every day they were here. I think they were relieved to move onto to Canada.

Start of the Christmas Season

2011-12-23T20:45:00.004-06:00

Fred was 5 earlier this month. For me, his birthday is the start of the Christmas season - about a week after Thanksgiving. I used to move my own birthday cards out of the way as the Christmas cards arrived, but now I move mine out of the way to make room for Fred's. I have only now uploaded photos.

He is at an absolutely delightful age, before school or unkind older children have intimidated him. He tells us he loves us several times a day, sings outloud and plays games with imaginary friends and dogs, and runs around the house bellowing car noises, rocket explosions and dinosaur assaults.

We had 6 friends from his pre-school over to play, along with his long-time buddy, Grayson. This is Real Grayson, and not Pretend Grayson. Fred was so enamored of this boy that over a year ago he morphed into his imaginary friend. Pretend Grayson can be a handful: sometimes he's 18 and drives a monster truck; other times he is a little older than Fred and can do things Fred can't, like skateboard or play fancy video games. Sometimes Pretend Grayson is mean and says bad words and spits and Fred won't talk to him.

Fred also has an imaginary dog, called Liefer, who is sometimes a Boxer, and sometimes a Labrador. Liefer emerged about the time our old dog, Kiera was re-homed. Leifer is very good and doesn't bite people. There used to be another dog, called Chumley, who was occasionally a Pug, (because I love pugs) but often just a brown dog. Fred told me the other week (this is well after we adopted our 8 yr old very gentle German Short-haired pointer, Lulu) that Chumley was gone. He had bitten lots of people and scratched and growled at everyone and Fred had to give him back to the dog rescue people. So now we just have Lulu (real) and Liefer (pretend). Oh, and there is also a pretend cat, called Alex, who is good friends with our real cat, Ollie. But Alex is very quiet, and only comes out when we're at the pet store buying cat food. Then he needs special imaginary toys.

Pyrex Love

2011-11-09T14:40:00.001-06:00

About 6 months ago, I was in a patient's home giving wound dressing instructions to her sister, when I looked across the kitchen and saw the same set of mixing bowls my mother had when I was a child. I was so surprised, I asked the woman how she'd managed to hang onto them, because they had to be old. "They're Pyrex," she said. "You can find them in second hand stores and garage sales. That set goes for about $60."

I was intrigued. I hadn't realized they were Pyrex. I always associated Pyrex with clear 9 x 13" casserole dishes and measuring jugs. Officially they are the 400 Series Primary Colors Mixing Bowl Set, and you can read more about them HERE. They made a second set with very 1970s oranges and browns, and another with pale pastels, but all are beautifully colored bowls with glossy white interiors. Mom always used the largest yellow one for making Christmas cookie dough, and she mixed scrambled eggs in the tiny blue one.

And my patient's sister was right. You can find them easily on Ebay and occasionally on Craig's List, and I did. So now I have my own set. And every time I take them out of the drawer, I think how lovely they are, and how wonderful of Pyrex to make something so solid and useful -- oven, freezer, microwave -- also so pretty. And it's also like having a comforting image of my mother beside me in the kitchen.

I also quickly discovered that Pyrex made loads of pretty kitchenware. Back in its heyday, which depending on your preference, seems to run from the 1940s to sometime in the '80s, they released sets of patterns and periodic one-off items, which are now collectible. There are dozens of patterns for casseroles of various sizes, mixing bowls, and my favorite, refrigerator dishes. These were used before Tupperware and its ilk were invented, and are popular again, with all the plastic/BPA concerns. Here is a lovely collection from a crafts and vintage items blog, Girl With A Mini (and used with permission!)

My own little collection consists of a set of refrigerator dishes in that perfect avocado green flowered pattern, plus two small casseroles and a butter dish (golden butterfly - not difficult to find) but I do use them every day. The refrigerator dishes are perfect for all leftovers and stack neatly in with nesting lids. Beautiful design. The expert on all things Pyrex, especially what we affectionados call "vintage pyrex" is the Pyrex Love website (www.pyrexlove.com). It lists all the patterns and dishes with links to current eBay listings for anyone interested in buying.

The really bright 1970s patterns are my favorites, along with the Americana mixing bowls.

Better by far than eBay, though, is to rummage through garage and estate sales. My friend's mother thought it was hilarious that I'd fallen in love with the workhorse kitchen gadgets of her generation at brought me a set of pink refrigerator dishes which she'd purchased for $3 at a garage sale in Vermont. Those will be a gift.

Rain and Samadhi

2011-10-09T17:12:00.003-05:00

It rained today, properly. It also rain a little yesterday, but only in 10 minute showers. One of them yesterday was enough to start the berm -- the little flood ditch at the back of our yard -- flowing for a few minutes, but it stopped a few minutes later. But early this morning it really finally let loose and rained hard, for about three hours. Fred came into my room about 5, to ask politely "if I minded the lightening and thunder." I said, no, but offered him space under the covers. He stayed for a little while but went back into his own bed.

I lay awake worrying about the ditch, and whether the debris would block it under the fence again, and at about 6am, I got up, and went downstairs and outside into the rain to check that it was flowing. The pool water level was definitely up so by then we must have had already an inch or more of rain. The mud, where there used to be grass, was squishy under my bare feet and the and the trees seemed to be hissing in the water, but the little berm was flowing fine. So I went back to bed.

So yesterday was the first proper rain since May 19. And in that time, we've had 91 days of temperatures over 100F. (The average for Austin, as I've mentioned before, is 12 days; the previous record was 69.)

Later in the afternoon, I met an American Buddhist monk, in burgandy robes. We were standing outside two mobile homes, in wet woods up in the hills between Dripping Springs and Austin, at the site of new Therevada temple which is currently under construction. The monk is Bhikkhu Cintita Dinsmore, and I met him as part of a community health project I am working on, that involves Burmese refugees in Austin. That is why I was there, and why I stupidly moved to shake his hand, before my acquaintance elbowed me in the ribs and whispered, "you can't touch him". Oh yeah. I'm sure I knew that somewhere along the line.

Ashin Cintita, as I believe everyone calls him, is the abbot of this temple, which is one of several Buddhist temples in Austin, but this is the main one for the Burmese community. We went out there to meet some influential Burmese and to talk to them about our project to help Burmese refugees who have hepatitis B and C, and to encourage them to get treatment. Hepatitis is nowhere near as glamorous as TB, or AIDS, and so doesn't get a lot of attention, but according to recent estimates, more than 1 in 5 Burmese tests positive for HepB, and there is little help for them here, especially once their initial six months of Medicaid runs out.

This project, which is the main focus of my public health practicum (N375-RN at UT, if you're interested) has just about convinced me NOT to pursue public health as a career, which is sad, as I believe it is intended as inspiration. Trying to navigate the US healthcare system at its lowest end, for the poor, ignorant and illiterate, has left me banging my head against a wall.

Lovingkindness Meditation
Dukkhapata ca nidukkha
Bhayapata ca nibhaya
Sokapata ca nisoka
Hontu sabbe'pi panino
(three times)

May the suffering be without suffering
May the fearful be without fear
May those who grieve be free from grief
So too may all beings be.
(three times)

There. That's better, isn't it...

And if the rain and the robed American monk and the Burmese enclave in the Texas countryside weren't surreal enough, here is the plan of what they are building:

Wow. The slab is laid, the Dharma house is being framed, and 21 tiny meditation cottages are already built and housing the workers. The gold on the model of the building alone was dazzling. It seems this part of Austin reminds the Big Monk (not my American friend) of the part of Burma where he comes from, and so this has become a Major Project and weirdly -- somehow -- money has been flooding in from Burma to support it. With a military junta, the monks revolt and Aung San Suu Kyi being the only things I've read about Burma in the past few years, I wonder how this kind of support can be spared.

Ashin Cintita writes a pretty cool blog called Through the Looking Glass, in which he describes how he left his corporate job and family and became a monk. I've added it to my blog roll on your right.

Actually, it can get worse

2011-09-07T19:29:00.000-05:00

On Sunday afternoon, we decided to go visit Bastrop State Park, which is about 30 minutes drive east of Austin. We'd never been there before but knew it had a nice lake/river because they offer Learn To Fish classes that I'd investigated before the mega heatwave set in. And it was Labor Day weekend and we were all home and it was Not Quite So Hot because it was so windy, so we decided to try to take a walk.

On the way out of Austin, I pointed out smoke on the horizon sky and we had a debate about whether it was smoke or dust, because all the fields are so dry. As we got closer to Bastrop, we agreed it was smoke, and started googling on our phones (as you do) to see what had been reported. Nothing came up. Around 2pm we go to Bastrop and saw lots of cars parked along verges and, strangely, two horses and riders standing in the shade at a gas station. Being me, I started talking to the man in front of us at the cashier line, and he shook his head and said yes, it was a big fire and the only way he was going to get home to College Station was to "go all the way" around via Austin, because the roads were closed.

We thought maybe the State Park was ok, because it was on the other side of the road. It wasn't.

Lucy took several photos out of the car, and they mostly looked like this except that where we were the smoke was really black. This was the closest I'd ever been to a wildfire, and it has haunted me for the last few days.

We drove home rather nervously. Winds were 35mph with higher gusts. By this time the internet had woken up and was also reporting fires in Spicewood, west of Austin, in Pflugerville, northeast of Austin, and in the Steiner Ranch subdivision northwest of Austin. I used to see home health clients in Steiner Ranch, which is described in the press as a "sprawling, upscale community of more than 4000 homes". We came up onto the over pass on Capital of Texas Highway, which gives a great view over the hill country, including our neighborhood. No smoke in our area but we could see plumes in different directions.

By Monday, more than 300 homes had been destroyed in the whole area, all of Steiner Ranch had been evacuated, which is quite an effort, and another fire started in Leander, north of Austin. The winds were dying down but the two fires west of Austin were only partially contained, and the Bastrop fire was going crazy.

This is official footage from Texas Parks and Wildlife of the Bastrop Fire yesterday. The winds have died down today so we hope it's not moving quite so fast.

According to this morning's paper, more than 700 homes have been destroyed. The Bastrop fire is now two fires, a big one, which is 30 percent contained, and a small one, which is 20 percent contained. The smoke from Bastrop can be seen in Mexico, I heard today. Here is a an amazing photo from Austin.

And there is no rain forecast through the middle of September.

Better Days Ahead

2011-08-29T16:52:00.002-05:00

It can't last forever, can it? This weekend Austin matched all-time temperature records with 112F recorded at our local air force base. My car, which is a bit neurotic, claims it was 115F on Sunday afternoon, which was the highest temperature I'd ever seen on a thermometer. And we all sat here jealous of North Carolina and New Jersey and Long Island and poor Vermont with all that rain.

I am amusing myself by imagining how nice it's going to be when it does rain. The bad scenario would be lots of piddly little showers; what we want is one huge 2-3inch accumulation Texas-style thunderstorm, but that may be pretty destructive too.

Here are some more weather anecdotes. A good friend of mine had her first child in August 2007. She says that summer, it didn't hit 100F until August, and there were only four days of "triple digit" temps. She is Canadian, and has just returned from her summer migration to some cabin up on a lake, where she was, no doubt, surrounded by birch trees and cool breezes. She also said that during that long, pregnant summer, she hiked in the Barton Creek greenbelt twice a week (she is extremely fit) and then swam in the creek before returning to her car. I have never seen water in Barton Creek after about June 1. So this is NOT a normal summer and we shouldn't put the house on the market quite yet.

Here is encouraging information -- check out those little lightening flashes!

Austin, TX (73301) Weather

Save This Location

Updated: Aug 29, 2011, 4:05pm

UPDATE DATA

Video: Austin's 60 Second Forecast | Irene's Legacy: Catastrophic Flooding

TonightAug 29	Tue30	Wed31	ThuSep 1	Fri2	Sat3	Sun4	Mon5	Tue6	Wed7


Partly Cloudy	Partly Cloudy	Sunny	Isolated T-Storms	Scattered T-Storms	Scattered T-Storms	Scattered T-Storms	Mostly Sunny	Sunny	Sunny
--High	106°	103°	96°	94°	99°	98°	97°	99°	99°
77°Low	75°	76°	75°	76°	77°	76°	73°	72°	76°

Waiting to Exhale

2011-08-25T23:05:00.002-05:00

Austin and most of Texas are in the middle of an awesome drought and a record-breaking heat wave. It is the result, we're told, of the normal effect of La Nina in the Pacific, which is dry Texas summers, compounded by a freak high pressure over the southern middle of the country. It has been sitting over Texas and parts of Oklahoma for nearly two months and has resulted in more than five weeks of daily temperatures of over 100F.

In addition, it hasn't rained for more than a few minutes, since mid-May. I know this because my yard flooded on May 12, just as I returned home from my court date for a speeding ticket. On Phil's advice, as he had been busted recently as well and sought advice from bolshy Texans, I had appealed the charge and got a much better deal than if I had just paid the fine, which is a salutary lesson in assertiveness, for anyone facing a similar predicament. After my light-hearted conversation with the handsome prosecutor, who clearly earned his living by charming errant Westlake housewives, I drove back home slowly, not only because one of the conditions was that I behave myself for the next six weeks, but also because it was raining sideways. It was a fantastic, scary Texas storm that overwhelmed the berm at the back of our house. Debris from upstream became caught in our wrought iron fence and the yard flooded less than 30 minutes. A berm, if you were wondering (I had never heard the word until we moved here), is a raised barrier, separating two areas. But in our neighborhood it basically means an arroyo or flood trench.

We call it the Snake Creek, because it looks like a good place for a snake to live, and we wanted Fred to stay out of it, especially the deep bit and he's scared of snakes. So instead of reading or knitting peacefully for the precious remainder of Freddie's preschool morning, I was out in the thunderstorm, up to my shins in water and sludge, trying to unblock the shallow part of Snake Creek -- the space under the fence. It took over an hour, and I only managed it in the end by removing the main cause -- the large rock we'd placed in the berm to stop our old dog, Keira, from digging her way under the fence when she was a puppy.

It also rained the next Thursday, I remember. Another impressive Texas storm. And all of Austin greened up beautifully in the next week. But in June it got hotter, and in July hotter still and there was no more rain.

A month or so ago, I put my faith in Caribbean hurricanes, but they are thin on the ground so far this season. Don dissipated over the Texas coast once he ran into our fabulous high pressure system. And Irene looks to be headed for Florida and the Carolinas.

So basically, we are waiting. Waiting for the planet to move, for the the Jet Stream to move south, which meteorologists predict will happen in two more weeks and end our 100F+ temperatures. We have already beaten the record number of days above 100F, which was 69 back in 1925. Austin's average, we learned while we were still back in England, is 12 days. In 2009 we came ludicrously close to the record, with 68 days but Fall sneaked in by the first week of September and the thermometer stayed at 98 and 99 and somehow we missed the record. Yesterday was the 70th day, so we're well away now.

This a photo of a boat house on Lake Travis, just northwest of Austin. The water is normally up to the trees.

Here are a few observations. Everyone calls it "the oven", which sounds funny but that is exactly how it feels when you step outside. Our a/c has broken down three times this summer -- mercifully the upstairs unit only -- and we have a good repair agency, but it is not nice to wake up at sweating at 3am and worry for 2 more hours how long this will last.

Three friends have threatened to move. "I told David (husband), I am so done with this," my neighbor said firmly. She is from New York and considers this weather "inhuman". Trees are dying all over town. Perfectly healthy deciduous trees are turning brown and losing limbs. And there are towns in west Texas, where they have had little more than 1 inch of rain since last October, that are running out of water completely. Read more about that here.

We are living in Stage 2 water restrictions, which I wrote about back in 2009, which means we can use our built-in sprinkling systems two days a week only, between 7pm and 10am. This is laughable, not only because many people flout the regulations, but also because you are allowed to 'handwater" with a hose when ever you like, and to use a conventional sprinkler -- the kind you can move around -- at anytime. I don't care about the lawn, which is brown in many place despite the sprinklers. We have been working to save our trees, which involves watering the canopy area intensively for and hour or more (on your legal watering days, of course) about every 10 days or so.

As Irene is heading north, my next hope is Tropical Depression Ten. Corpus Christi and Galveston are just going to have to take one for the team.

No Relief in Sight

2011-08-08T11:33:00.000-05:00

Austin, TX (78746) Weather

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Old Dog, New Tricks

2011-05-04T21:22:00.000-05:00

I've joked many times in the last few years about my multiple mid-life crises. Nursing school, one more baby, moving back to the US and my triathlon races all seemed to qualify. But the truth is that I've always liked the idea of making changes and have been (stupidly?) convinced that they would all be unqualified improvements on the status quo. And really, most of them have been, even though I've still not broken 29:30 on a 5K and am still frightened of swimming in open water.

So the latest plan, and the most current self-improvement, is to start my Masters in Nursing (MSN) at UT. The course is about 4 semesters, and because of their enrollment procedures, I won't officially enroll on the program until Fall 2012. That also happens to be when Freddie starts kindergarten, and when Lucy starts university, so it's appropriate, I think. I am, to my embarrassment, the last member in my family to get a master's degree (Rita is working on her PhD), which feels funny because I always considered myself academic, but the UK is less open -- or was for the last 20 years -- to people changing careers and direction and anyway, MSNs are thin on the ground there.

And in fairness, I flirted with several "second careers", including law, violin teaching, and, if I'm honest, horticulture/garden design, before settling on nursing. So I have some years to make up. My plan is to study the Public Health Nursing concentration and use my years of experience in socialized medicine, as patient and nurse, to single-handedly transform the US healthcare system. Or not. But somebody needs to do something, right?

Because my undergraduate degree is not in nursing, I am enrolling through the "bridge"program, which requires me to take four prerequisite courses, some of which are available online. I am taking the final exam in the first course, Elementary Statistics, next Tuesday, and that is why The Basic Practice of Statistics, is in my Current Reads list.

This stats course has been great, actually. It's been great because it's been 28 years since I took any kind of math class, and I never had stats or calculus; a fact which I'm thoroughly ashamed of now. Many of the other students in the class were not born when I took College Algebra and Trig my senior year of high school. I haven't publicized this fact, as you will appreciate. It's also been great because I've taken the class at Austin Community College which I've found to be a fabulous institution, far, FAR better organized than my nursing program at the University of Surrey. My stats teacher is Bulgarian, with a PhD in the subject and a passion for teaching it to novices. She also teaches at St. Edwards University, a private liberal arts college in Austin, and works for the OIG busting Medicare fraud, among other admirable things.

And it's also great because I'm getting an A. Until the last test, I had a 98% average (she puts bonus questions on the tests so total points are often over 100) but I bombed the last test after missing two classes, so now have only 90%. I intend to redeem myself on the final. I just need to nail down two-sample t distributions from last time and make sure I'm proficient with chi-square and regression inference, which we learned in the last two weeks.

Once this class is over, I apply to UT, initially as a "non degree-seeking graduate student", which means I don't yet need to sit the GRE. I'm planning to take two more bridge courses in the fall, complete my formal application (including the GRE) by the December 1st deadline, take another prereq and maybe some initial courses in the spring semester and start the full program in fall 2012.

So here's my excuse for missing two stats classes:

Phil's mother came to visit and we had a great time. This photo is from the Rollingwood 5K race, which we all ran. Phil won his age group (Thundercloud Subs vouchers!), Barbara was runner-up in the over 70s, and I managed not to walk. Pathetic, yes, but it was really, REALLY hot. If Jess hadn't been injured, we'd have made a killing.

Twinkleberry

2011-03-28T09:56:00.001-05:00

I have been making progress knitting. It's partially a case of Finish-itis, brought on by a few days with temperatures in the 80s which push me towards light cotton crochet or silk knits instead of bulky, itchy wools. It is also a general push for reorganization now that our remodel Phase II has finished and we've begun putting things back and sorting out what works and what doesn't in the new-style house.

The remodel started last August and finished in early Feb. Since Thanksgiving it's been pretty much "done" except for a dozen or more items on the punch list. I decided it must be called a Punch List because by the time you're through it you're ready to punch somebody.

But it's done now, so what was an outdoor patio beside the garage surrounded by overgrown, mosquito-breeding myrtles, is now a large dining room with a galleried loft office space that was built into the roof of the garage. It is lovely.

The nearest bit of the extension is a screen porch (to foil mosquitos mentioned earlier). I have more photos of the inside to organize. Alongside all this, we put a new roof on the whole house, had Texas Gas connect us to the mains so we could install a gas cooktop and barbecue, and had the icky popcorn ceilings in the upstairs replastered and all the bedrooms painted cheerful neutral colors. We'd been planning to do this more or less since we moved in, so lots of storage considerations and furniture purchases had been put off until we knew what we would be living with. Now we know, so there's lots of work to do.

Here is a pleasant distraction:

My first proper knitted socks. I did a thicker pair 18months ago because I couldn't bear the thought of fingering weight yarn and 2.5mm needles. These are official. They are Twinkleberry by Beth LaPensee (she has some Nutkin socks too, for you Beatrix Potter fans) in Shibui Knits Sock. The pattern is a pretty lace with a short row heel and toe, which stumped me for a while. You can see in the picture that the right sock was my first effort. They are now washed and blocked and beautifully soft, and will wait until we all put socks on again, in like, late October.

Leningrad on my mind

2011-03-23T10:32:00.002-05:00

It just so happens that I have read three books on the siege of Leningrad in the last few months. Two were for my Vino Libro bookgroup: City of Thieves by David Benihoff and The Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah. The third, The Madonnas of Leningrad, by Debra Dean, was for my local Rollingwood bookclub. The first and third were very good but I found The Winter Garden pathetic. I am convinced that Hannah read the Madonnas and thought, okay, I can write something similar, and I said as much to my closest VL friends, but then, I am a cynical old cow. The others really liked it.

I thought City of Thieves, however, was wonderful. And the coolest thing is that I just finished it 20 minutes ago and I read it ON MY PHONE. Last months I got a new smartphone -- a Droid -- and I am still admiring its clever design. It came with an application to link to my Kindle, which means I can read books while waiting in line at the supermarket, or, I suppose at red lights. Very dangerous. The screen is barely 2" by 3 1/2" but held sideways, it is comfortable to read and I can swipe page turns at about the rate I can read the screen. It works surprisingly well.

10 Things I miss most about England (excluding people!)

2011-03-22T10:28:00.002-05:00

This is my personal list. Other members of the family would include Liverpool FC, Basil Brush and Jammy Dodgers...

10. Porkinson's Bangers

9. Indian Restaurants

8. Have I Got News For You (especially with Boris Johnson)

7. Tesco Home Grocery Delivery

6. Public Transportation

5. Gardener's World, Friday night 8pm BBC2 - especially Bob Flowerdew. Please tell me he's still on it...

4. John Lewis .

3. Walking to shops, library, schools and parks

2. My allotment in West Molesey

1. And above all,

working for it, using it and just knowing it's there...

New finds

2011-03-21T09:15:00.004-05:00

A few weeks ago we discovered the MT Supermarket in Austin. It's a huge Asian grocery store up on north Lamar at Kramer with food from Vietnam, China, Indonesia, Japan and the Phillipines. We'd been to Asian markets in London, but this one, seemed amazingly exotic. Maybe our senses have been a bit dulled by almost three years in Texas.

The store was at least as big as a large Target, and was doing a good business on a Saturday afternoon. I had not realized there was so much demand for Asian products in central Texas. The rice section alone was huge with burlap sacks of rice in dozens of varieties piled up four feet high on pallets. The produce section had several items we'd never seen before and the catfish and lobster tanks kept Fred enthralled. When I first moved to London I used to love the feeling of being almost lost in unusual or alien circumstances, like walking around Southall or Hounslow, or even just old-style London street markets. But it's been a long time since I felt that wonderful disorientation. So many items in this place had no English labels on them; and we kept picking up items --mushrooms? tiny fish? dried peppers?-- and trying to guess what they were.

Here's some of what we brought home:

Dragon Fruit, which has to be the most beautiful fruit, but we didn't like the taste.

Tea Biscuits, which I got mainly for the tin.

Instant miso soup which we've not tried yet.

And who can resist Hello Panda cookies?

The other nice surprise was the housewares sections. Rows and rows of dishes, saucepans, steamers and other items. We had been looking for tea and coffee mugs like the ones we used to buy in England. It sounds easy enough but Phil has definite prejudices. The mugs have to be of nice china or porcelain, and they can't be too big. (The rest of us love the huge Starbucks mugs with world cities on them. We could have had London, Austin, Dallas, and San Francisco after last summer's vacation but Phil vetoed them because they are too big.)
But MT Supermarket had a great selection. They are a little thick but have amusing lids and built in tea strainers.

Previously we had a small collection of mugs decorated with cats and others with dinosaurs. Maybe we'll just move to dragons.

Closure

2011-01-29T20:02:00.000-06:00

Keira has been adopted. This is a relief as she is no longer sitting in a Doggy Rehab kennel at Austin Pets Alive! (apparently you have to include the !). The adoptive family was supposed to be someone with no children and few men in the household --to avoid her biting triggers and possible risks to children --, but I don't know whether that was actually the case. I was told family has a lake very near their house, and so I was able to remind them (through APA! -- you can't contact them directly) that she loves to swim and would retrieve sticks from the water for you all day long if permitted,

So we're moving on...

And I just want everyone to understand that This Had Nothing To Do With Me.

His name is Simon, and he's a 9-week old "Lynx-point Siamese" -- at least he has Siamese in him, even the vet agreed with that. I'd never heard of a Lynx point before, but Lucy has found dozens of convincing photos
on various cat-lover websites. He definitely has a Siamese voice and shouts insistently at us at meal times, and whenever we shut him in the laundry room, which we do frequently because he is terrorizing Ollie, our long-suffering 3-year old tabby cat.

Lucy got him from a friend at rowing, who'd adopted him and then discovered that her father is allergic to cats. At least that's the story. I had nothing to do with it, except of course to go out and buy an extra litter tray, kitten food, and drop $100 at the vet for inspection and initial shots. But he is adorable.

Foliage

2011-01-01T18:56:00.002-06:00

Earlier this year I knit Emilee Mooney's Foliage Hat. It is cleverly designed as you knit from the top - at the crown - to the ribbing, instead of the other way around.

It is also a lace pattern, and I knit it in Elsebeth Lavold Chunky, a beautifully soft angora and wool mix.
It was not easy to knit and I went wrong on the lace pattern several times, but it was so lovely to handle that I actually got about as far as the picture above TWICE, and then frogged (ripped it out) back and did it again to try to get it right. This yarn is largely responsible for my slow conversion into a Yarn Snob. Until a few months ago I considered myself happy to knit with just about anything, and stoutly defended acrylic yarns for their washability and general baby friendliness. But Elsebeth Lavold is a great seductress, and the fabulous orange color has a bit of yellow around the edges and it shines in certain lights and when no one is looking you can rub the ball against your cheek and wonder how many rabbits it took to make a 50g skein.

And here it is finished:

There are a few errors in the lace but it is beautifully soft and warm. And Jessica even borrowed it to wear to the high school regional cross-country championships up in Fort Worth, where it was really cold.

And here it is after Keira got a hold of it one day last month while I was at work.

Yes. All that work, and genius in the design and the spinning fell victim to canine neuroses. And after all the badness that for some reason tormented her despite all the love and training we tried to give her, and after all the tears and frustration I went through when one of the painters she'd bitten bit kicked her in the head weeks later right in front of me while she was muzzled in my own kitchen, and after all the times I've had to remind Fred since then that Keira is not coming back... I decided I have to push back against this negativity. Knitting always feels positive - an act of creation. I recently read about a young impoverished knitter buying thrift shop sweaters and unravelling them for the quality yarn, and really, Elsebeth is worth it. So I spent a peaceful hour on New Year's Day unravelling it, separating the chewed and ruined ends and pulling apart the fuzz-locked strands, and I have a little over half the yarn recovered and wound into a ball.

I have another 50g skein of it in my closet, too. So maybe it will be something bigger than a hat this time.

High Holidays

2010-12-30T23:12:00.002-06:00

I've come to enjoy the American "holidays" schedule which revs up with pre-Halloween decorating in October, runs through Thanksgiving and Christmas and ends appropriately with a bang on New Year's Eve. They all seemed separate to me as a child, with each in its own month, but as an adult in the 21st century, it's one big ride through the last quarter of the year. Valentine's Day is way out there on its own.

We've been much too harassed in the last 3 months with Phase 2 of the house remodel, which included a two-story addition and a new roof; a job hunt for me, which seemed to involve a number of wasted Fred-free mornings in interviews and research; and an extremely painful, psychosis-inducing rehoming of the dog.

House remodel is nearly finished and photos will follow. New job took more than a month to organize but after interviewing with four different companies/organizations, I have taken a job in home health nursing, part-time, three days a week, roughly 9-5. It means I will take Fred to school myself and be home for dinner. It means I no longer have to wake up at 530am to go to work, and I no longer work weekends, or major holidays (my last shift was Christmas day.) My anxiety level has decreased dramatically, which was interesting as I hadn't realized how stressed I had become. The new company is a specialist geriatric nursing company, and I will be doing lots of wound care, which I love. I am also starting the "bridge" courses I need to enter UT's Masters in Nursing program in a year's time. I plan to specialize in public health nursing, which should fit nicely with 20+ years experience with socialized medicine. My first class is elementary statistics at Austin Community College, which will be a challenge as I stink at math and could barely understand the course synopsis. But Phil eats this kind of thing for breakfast, and I will just join Lucy and Jessica in the queue for homework help.

The dog was much harder so I'm just going to run through it quickly. She bit 5 people in the last 12 weeks. Four were workmen on our house, all unprovoked. One bite drew blood. After the 2nd bite, I called in a respected local trainer, and we reduced all her freedoms, installed a safe zone in the house for her and muzzled trained her. She continued to adore all of us, but was becoming increasingly anxious and upset, particularly around men. She barked insanely when anyone came to the house. Over Thanksgiving, she growled every morning at my Aunt Sara, a dog lover, who was staying with us. When we went out for a walk to McKinney Falls State park, she bit a complete stranger, who was a good 1/2 block away from us and had no dog with him and wasn't even approaching us. I decided that was it - we were facing a lawsuit. Austin Pets Alive! pretty much agreed and took her back to doggy rehab. Jessica was furious, Fred grieved for a few days and Lucy was happy because it meant more time and energy devoted to Ollie, our cat. I have to say I was desperately relieved and for more than a week I jumped every time I heard a neighbors' dog bark. I hadn't realized how anxious I was about her, how she would behave with our babysitter, and whether she would bite someone on the street.

She is up for adoption now, I believe, but must go to a home with no kids -- despite the fact that she never hurt any of us -- and preferably no men, and they think she would be good to be an additional dog to a household so more dominant dogs would make her behave. Very traumatic, and also a huge relief.
Fish, we think are the pet for us. Pretty fish, swimming in a cat-proof tank.

Here are some cheerful Christmas photos from our Boxing Day walk at McKinney Roughs

Lucy took 129 photos in about 2 hours on that walk. She is obsessed with photography and fills our iphoto with dozens of the cat, Jessica, leaves, rowers, sparkles on water, etc.. I was starting to complain again about it as we uploaded the camera when I looked at them again, and realized she's getting really good. Some of them are beautiful, especially the landscapes. I may make a Lucy Photo of the week side bar....
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Happy Thanksgiving!

2010-11-25T12:08:00.000-06:00

The Pumpkin
by John Greenleaf Whittier

Oh, greenly and fair in the lands of the sun,
The vines of the gourd and the rich melon run,
And the rock and the tree and the cottage enfold,
With broad leaves all greenness and blossoms all gold,
Like that which o'er Nineveh's prophet once grew,
While he waited to know that his warning was true,
And longed for the storm-cloud, and listened in vain
For the rush of the whirlwind and red fire-rain.

On the banks of the Xenil the dark Spanish maiden
Comes up with the fruit of the tangled vine laden;
And the Creole of Cuba laughs out to behold
Through orange-leaves shining the broad spheres of gold;
Yet with dearer delight from his home in the North,
On the fields of his harvest the Yankee looks forth,
Where crook-necks are coiling and yellow fruit shines,
And the sun of September melts down on his vines.

Ah! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West,
From North and from South comes the pilgrim and guest;
When the gray-haired New Englander sees round his board
The old broken links of affection restored,
When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more,
And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before,
What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye?
What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie?

Oh, fruit loved of boyhood! the old days recalling,
When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!
When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin,
Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!
When we laughed round the corn-heap, with hearts all in tune,
Our chair a broad pumpkin,—our lantern the moon,
Telling tales of the fairy who travelled like steam
In a pumpkin-shell coach, with two rats for her team!

Then thanks for thy present! none sweeter or better
E'er smoked from an oven or circled a platter!
Fairer hands never wrought at a pastry more fine,
Brighter eyes never watched o'er its baking, than thine!
And the prayer, which my mouth is too full to express,
Swells my heart that thy shadow may never be less,
That the days of thy lot may be lengthened below,
And the fame of thy worth like a pumpkin-vine grow,
And thy life be as sweet, and its last sunset sky
Golden-tinted and fair as thy own Pumpkin pie!

Swaddling for Teenagers

2010-10-15T22:59:00.003-05:00

It's 10:15pm on Friday night. Lucy has just called from the Westlake v Austin High football game, and despite several texts to the contrary earlier this evening, she now needs a lift home. I worked a crazy 12-hour shift and my feet hurt. I went from 630am to 2pm before I had lunch. Phil gave Lucy an early morning driving lesson at 7am, took Fred to preschool and waved Jess and Lucy off to school before putting in a good 8 hrs himself. Then he came home to release our babysitter and made dinner for us both. Yes of course. Where will you be? We're leaving now.

She calls again two minutes later. She is shouting over the crowd, because Westlake is winning and it's another 4th down in the last 5 minutes. Instead of meeting her at the Library car park, please could we go over to the People's Pharmacy parking lot, because her stuff is in Hannah's car. This requires facing the main post-game traffic. Yes of course. See you in a few minutes.

We don't ask: why can't Hannah drive you home herself, especially if all your school bags and rowing kit are in her car? We don't say, have you and Hannah have been arguing about something? or is Hannah is in trouble with her own parents and now needs to get home without a detour through Rollingwood? Or may be Hannah has been drinking and you don't want to get into her car. Does Hannah have a boyfriend? I have no idea. "That's the car park by the dentist, isn't it? of course, we'll be right there."

Westlake won, 53-13. She comes in dragging her school and rowing bags. She looks amazing in very short denim shorts and a "Beat Austin" t-shirt and fashionable flat sandals. She buys all her own clothes, with allowance and baby sitting money. I realize I haven't seen her since 10pm last night. I also realize, a bit guiltily, that I'm not really sure who Hannah is. I think there are two Hannahs, one of whom rows, and wears big bows in her hair, and whom I've met, but the other....

And she is hungry. Phil makes her a toasted cheese sandwich and, quite unnecessarily, slices her an apple. She pounces on my November Martha Stewart Living magazine. When questioned she reports glumly that she is likely to be bowing the 'B' quad instead of holding a "middle of the boat' position for the 'A'quad. I don't know how to respond to this, but gamble that it might be more fun to have a more responsible position in the 2nd boat. She is not convinced. Oh, and she has to take the PSAT tomorrow. Can we take her to the high school for 8am?

Yes, of course. What time do you think you will be finished?

True Story

2010-09-21T22:15:00.003-05:00

So we were driving out of Fran's Hamburgers when Lucy saw the goat. We'd been to Fran's to check it out because several of my nurse buddies at work recommended Fran's, along with Dan's Hamburgers. It seems that Fran and Dan used to be married, when they ran Dan's Hamburgers. But then they got divorced, so Fran opened her own place and so now there's Fran's and Dan's. And Dan's is supposed to be better, but Fran's is on South Congress, which is near to us and a super cool place to mosey around on a hot afternoon. South Congress's biggest attractions are Hey Cupcake! (one of the first trailer food vendors in Austin) and even better (because it's air-conditioned), Hill Country Weavers. HCW is the most amazing yarn store in Austin, and most likely Texas, and certainly among the best in the whole country. I can waste HOURS there, wandering around stroking skeins and comparing yardages and chatting to other similarly deranged people. Unfortunately, Jessica, Lucy and Fred and not nearly so fascinated, so I hardly ever go.

We'd eaten at Fran's, which, as described by enthusiastic nurses, was definitely a dive. Moderately amusing as dives go, but even the jalapeno burger, which I gamely ordered, was not great, and definitely not a patch on P Terry's, our favorite Austin burger joint. So after lunch we climbed back in the car and lurched out onto East Mary street, because I didn't fancy trying to turn my enormous Ford Expedition left towards Congress and decided it would be easier to drive around the block.

"Goat!" Lucy exclaimed, from the back seat. Lucy and Jessica have a complicated system of determining who gets to sit in the front seat. I don't understand it because it never gets discussed. One child automatically climbs into the front seat while the other negotiates Fred into his car seat and slides in the back seat beside him. Sometimes they alternate, other times, by the mysterious reckoning, one child gets two turns. I imagine it has to do with the length of the journey, but it seems much safer not to ask.

"I'm not kidding. There's a goat back there. Turn around, it's a big goat!" she said. I was at the next interesection by this time, but the residential streets around south Congress are quiet with 1930s woodframed houses. The crossroads were clear so I made an ungainly u-turn in the middle and headed back up Mary street. "It was on the porch of a green house," she said. "At least, I think it was a goat, but even if it was stuffed, it's pretty big..."

And there he was, standing on the porch. A big, hairy goat with curling black horns. We parked alongside the house and admired him. He was much bigger than our 8-month old Labrador, with a long coat like an Afghan hound. He had his head through the 1970s fake wrought iron bannister and was standing quietly. After a moment we realized that the reason he was standing quietly was that he was stuck. Somehow he'd got his enormous horns through the railings and couldn't get out. I got out of the car and walked up the driveway towards the little front yard, which was enclosed by a low fence. The yard was covered in junk--piles of old furniture, pallets, plastic bags -- and it stank, especially in 85F+ temperatures. And the house was decrepit and looked only barely habitable. But the goat looked well cared for and had a little doghouse in a corner and lots of straw laid around. And he was clearly stuck and couldn't reach any water. I walked up towards the house very timidly and called out, but you could see that the window a/c unit was on, and no one would be able to hear me. The windows were covered too.

Now I like to think I'm confident and good with people, and I've been in and out of plenty of really unpleasant council houses in suburban London with the community nurses. But then I was generally dealing with older people and had the protection of a uniform. The owners of this place would have to be eccentric at best, and at worst-- what? Would drug dealers be likely to keep a goat on the porch? What if it was a crack den? Are there still crack dens or have they been replaced by something more nefarious? And this is Texas, where we all know that just about anyone can have a gun. I had three children in my huge, clearly suburbanite car with the air condition roaring behind me. And I had no tool with me to bend the railing.

I wimped out. I went back to the car, and googled animal control on my Blackberry. I called 311, the City of Austin's information line, and asked for animal protection. The woman was very helpful and seemed surprisingly unfazed by the description of a large goat stuck in a porch railing and promised to get someone out there.

Then we saw one of the neighbors taking out her garbage. Her house was clearly a product of the south Austin gentrification occasionally bewailed in the Statesman and had children's toys visible in the back yard. I decided she was most likely not a gun-toting crack dealer and went over and explained the situation. "Oh poor Nick!" she said immediately (Nick being the goat). She walked across the street with me, opened Nick's gate, and picked her way up the porch stairs to the front door and banged on it shouting the owner's name. No one answered. Nick didn't move either. She reached down and patted him gingerly on one horn. "You silly, goat. What were you thinking?" She turned to me. "They were definitely here earlier. But my boyfriend has a good crowbar, and we'll get him out." I was definitely ashamed of my timidity by this point and mentioned that I'd called animal control, wondering vaguely if that might antagonize the eccentric owner even further. "Oh... they're okay really. I think they were trying to remodel the place and ran out of energy." We looked around at the mess and the flies a bit skeptically.

And they did rescue Nick. We got a follow up email from animal control thanking us for our efforts. And a week later we went back to see him.

Impressive horns, aren't they?

From our Middle Eastern Correspondent

2010-09-20T22:37:00.003-05:00

Last week I finally managed to Skype (v. intransitive) my sister who is now living in Beirut. She moved there after spending almost four years in south east England - two of them after we left for Texas. She has been in Beirut since June and spent the first month or so living at the Four Seasons hotel, where my brother-in-law is an executive sous-chef. Now they have their own large apartment.

Here is an assortment of her observations:

* The weather is fabulous.

* The people are extremely friendly.

*There is only one "supermarket" type store around and it's very expensive. They shop in the old fashioned way at the green grocer, then the baker, the butcher, etc..

*Her two darling children are treated "like rock stars" everywhere they go, especially Ruby, who is petite and blonde.

*Laura's early efforts to speak Arabic have been greeted with laughter and cheers of appreciation.

*They've had some hilarious experiences around Ramadan. They tried to participate in the fasting for about 3 days, but then gave up. Laura says it's particularly impressive that no one drinks water all day when it's 90F+ outside. Dwayne ran into issues because there was no one willing to taste during the day in the kitchen.

* The kids have started at the German school in Beirut (which apparently does a lot of teaching in English). The American School was full when they got there. So far James loves his Arabic class.

*The hotel (which was a new start up for the Four Seasons) is doing well and Dwayne loves his work.

*People have assumed they were British (the children had developed accents after years at British schools) and were complimented on their "bravery" when they said they were American (presumably for coming to live in Lebanon). Laura gleefully points out that Beirut has not been bombed "since at least 2008" -- but says the place feels very safe.

Here they are visiting Byblos, which was founded in 5000BC and is believed to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.

Finished Object

2010-08-24T19:00:00.001-05:00

Sweet Pea Shawl by Amie Hirtes, crocheted in Takhi Yarns Cotton Classic. Started it last summer while we were in the rented house and actually finished it in June, (after interrupting it with several other items) but it needed the fringe. I had never "done" fringe before and kept putting it off imagining it would require a few hours of focussed effort to figure it out. In the end, the actual fringing took about 45 minutes.

I've left it on the piano where I can admire it, but I'm definitely going to wear it out in the evenings.

Big Adventure

2010-07-10T13:02:00.000-05:00

Lucy and Jessica leave for London tomorrow morning. I am working, so I will not be able to see them off at the airport, nor to make sure they haven't accidentally put sewing scissors in their carry-ons (as if they would), or left an iPod on the security screening conveyor belt (as Jessica did last year), or missed the final call for the flight to Newark because they were in the bathroom, and so on and so on. I think this trip is a bigger step for me than it is for them....

I'm sure they will be fine. Lucy flew to Cincinnati alone earlier this summer for the *cough* US National Youth Rowing Championship (if I haven't mentioned this several times already!) and not only changed planes in Dallas, but had to catch the shuttle train to a different terminal to do so. On the way home her flight from Cincinnati to Chicago was cancelled, and she was rebooked onto a different flight with a different airline, fortunately straight to Austin, and managed to get her bags back, and make the change all by herself.

This time they have a 3-hour flight to Newark and then a 3-hour layover before their evening flight to London. My mother-in-law will meet them at 645am at Heathrow. Once they've found each other , I will stop worrying. But it's going to be a long Sunday from this end...

Death in a Strange Country

2010-06-27T21:33:00.004-05:00

Oh, how I love the summer holidays. No school timetable, no homework stress, no slightly underslept teenagers to negotiate with... I will happily ferry children to art classes, friends houses and the mall, knowing that there will somehow be enough hours in the day to get everything done, and when I'm at work I worry about them -- and our Longhorn babysitter -- far less.

We all go to the library and return with stacks of books and dvds. Lucy is tearing through the Gossip Girl series with a bit more determination than I'm sure it warrants, but she's also just finished Anna Karenina, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and Laurie Lee's autobiographies so I"m not too worried. I consider myself a boringly serious reader, but I also am a fan of Commissario Guido Brunetti and generally have one of his adventures lying around the house or secreted at the back of my Kindle.

Here is evidence that I am not alone in my enthusiasm for Donna Leon's Venetian detective. I have never been to Venice (yes, I know, 20 years in Europe and I never got there. A waste.) but when I do, I'll be sorely tempted to take the Brunetti Guided Walking Tour. Phil will have to pretend he doesn't know me....

And it seems that German television is dramatizing 16 episodes for broadcast. Here is a picture of Uwe Kockish, the German actor who plays the Commissario.

Hmmmmm. I'm not convinced. He's too smartly dressed and too edgy for my Guido. He should be clearly middle-aged with a bit of a paunch, especially after all of Paola's pasta and red wine lunches....

Keira at 6 months

2010-06-23T19:19:00.002-05:00

So I finally managed to hang onto a dog for more than three months.

She's clearly a keeper.

She's fallen madly in love with a beautiful German shepherd cross who lives behind us. Here they are playing Pyramus and Thisbe.

Very sweet. Except that in April and May they gradually dug under the fence in six or seven places, and Phil has been stomping around laying stones in the holes. Now that it's hot they've stopped their affair.

She has started proper dog school, for an hour on Saturday afternoons, and this week finally ran the Town Lake trail - 5K - in 90F+. She is a real Austin dog now. I should probably get her a bandana to wear around her neck!

Things You Thought You'd Never See

2010-06-23T19:04:00.000-05:00

Yes, that's me holding a gun. Or rather, a rifle, if I remember right. Or maybe it was a shotgun. Someone explained the difference to me at the time, but I can't remember it now.

We were clay pigeon shooting (or shooting skeet, as it's called here). I missed both times but it was the first time I'd ever fired a gun. We were celebrating Jessica's (and some friends') graduation from 8th grade with a Ranch Party hosted by our friends, the Meades.

That's a bit freaky too, isn't it. Fred loved the whole business. He hung around with three 9-10 year-old boys. and took a shot himself. He missed too. But then, he's only 3 1/2.

We spent the day swimming in the lake, visiting with other guests, and then drove to a hilltop for a campfire as the sun set. Lovely party.

Ok, not the last post

2010-06-23T14:50:00.002-05:00

Well, this blog is back.

I received several thoughtful notes from friends regretting its passing, which was unexpected and very sweet. But I discovered in the last few weeks that I missed it myself. After 18 months of writing these entries, the habit has become ingrained, and I found myself composing entries at odd moments. Writing has been a part of my professional life since college, and these days I seem to write little more than:

PT DENIES CP; VITALS REMAIN WNL; WILL CONTINUE TO MONITOR.

So, here are a few updates:

We are sending Lucy and Jessica back to London for a week in July. Have just purchased the tickets and lined up three visits for them to family and close friends. My biggest concern is the 3-hour layover in Newark. Once they get to London I'm sure they'll be fine. I suppose I might also be concerned that they will throw themselves onto the tarmac at Heathrow and sob "Oh why did we ever leave!" But I can't really control that. Maybe it will be cold and rainy....

The Last Post

2010-04-16T11:04:00.001-05:00

I have decided to end this blog. We're here now, and settled in. The last piece of the jigsaw was really put into place with my RN qualification and new job. I'm running short of amusing Texas observations, probably because it all seems pretty normal to us now. I no longer feel qualified to make cross-cultural commentary....

BBCAmerica keeps us up-to-date with The Rugby and Jeremy Clarkson's latest antics and we seem to have adjusted to the broad Texas voice overs in the local TV commercials here. I have been meaning to run Google Analytics on this blog and see how many people are actually reading it, but I want to thank everyone who has commented and kept up via email and FB.

I am writing another blog about our garden here in Austin. It is very gardening focussed, with lots information on specific plant varieties, boring essays on composting and soil pH, and accounts of attempts at biological pest control (my friend is in the market for a rat snake to keep in her garden). You probably won't like it. But if you want to take look, you can check it out at www.thetrug.com and tell me what you think.

Back on the Chain Gang

2010-04-14T18:01:00.001-05:00

New job started 3 weeks ago. I had one looooong 5-day week of orientation to start it all off. And boy, was I glad to get onto "the floor" and back to 12h shifts where you don't miss out on the rest of your life all day, every day. I don't know how everyone else does the 9-5. But then, most people don't have a slightly anxious 3 year old waiting for them at home....

It's a big change, nursing in America. I guess there's a whole separate blog there, waiting to be written but I'm not sure if I can be bothered (as they're fond of saying in England) to do it. With all the changes to US health care waiting in the wings, and so much anxiety about it among members of the public, it is definitely a hot topic. In my first week of proper nursing (and I'm being preceptored, so am not carrying patients on my own yet) I've been quizzed about socialized medicine by patients, their families, and other nurses. Most are genuinely curious. Others are very critical. Here are some of my early observations of the differences between nursing in the UK and Texas:

The social side of things feels wonderfully familiar: a sassy ward clerk who basically runs the whole unit; the immediate bond with everyone else you encounter in uniform; the contempt for doctors who write illegible orders. Here, the television running all day in the break room is showing Oprah instead of Tricia, and the eccentric surgeon wears cowboy boots instead of a bow tie, but it feels the same. Weirdly, just like London, the pharmacy is run by incredibly elegant, aristocratic Indian women.
The unit is slightly better equipped than either of my London hospitals. So far, there are enough IV pumps, towels and, amazingly, nursing staff to go around. It is also extremely clean.
Patient/nurse ratios are lower. RNs consider themselves very hard done by if they have to run 6 patients. Our minimum at Kingston was 8, and occasionally up to 12.
The hospital offers room service for meals. This is new. Patients phone in orders from a menu, and their selections are limited if they are confined to a diabetic or "cardiac" diet. Food is served anytime between 7am and 7pm. Patients love it; nurses are not so sure. It does make pre-meal blood sugars a little hard to get if you're not watching...
On the technical side, blood transfusions are always run concurrently with saline, and all IVs are on a pump, with no free hanging drips. Most medications are referred to by their brand name, which I find very annoying as I've had to relearn them (eg., Lasix = furosemide; Flagyl = metronidazole; Coumadin = warfarin). I'm trying not to see it as sinister brainwashing by the drug companies, but it rankles. Nurses can administer all controlled drugs, including morphine, with only one signature, but do have to double sign for insulin, which doesn't make much sense.
The Patient Care Techs (or health care assistants as they are in the UK) are much better trained and I suspect, much better paid here in Texas. They work very independently and are permitted, with informal training, to do far more complicated tasks, including urinary catheterization. They are well respected too.

These are just a few of my observations from the first week or so. The main points are that I like the job very much. I have very clued-in, competent managers who are regularly on the floor, and the cafeteria makes excellent breakfast tacos. All good.

Heard on The Writer's Almanac

2010-03-29T21:24:00.000-05:00

Cleaning up after the Dog

by Jason Tandon

Pull plastic bag from pocket
and wave it like a flag

or diploma. Make sure many people
congratulate your care
for the community.

Check bag for holes.
Double check.

Inspect stool for odd hues.
Greens, blues, blood.

Evaluate consistency.

You don't want to leave smears
on the sidewalk or grass—no prints.

Getaway must be clean.

Prepare to go in for all of it.
Hold breath.
Grab, clamp, reverse bag, twist, knot, cinch.

Smell hands.

Hold loaded bag high in the air,
assure onlookers that Everything is Okay.

If a cop should cruise by,
his crew cut bristling
in the sun,

hold that bag higher,
so he, too, can salute
your contribution.

The bomb diffused,
the world a little safer, a little cleaner,

will not offend the deep treads
of someone's shoes.

"Cleaning up after the Dog" by Jason Tandon, from Give Over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt. © Black Lawrence Press, 2009. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

New Job

2010-02-28T17:59:00.002-06:00

After some nail biting reverses, I have accepted a position on the med/surg telemetry unit (how's that for a noun string?) at St. David's South Austin Hospital. It is about 8 minutes drive from home outside of rush hour. It is full time and Days Only. Hooray!

I am interviewing nanny-type people at the moment, and have met a lovely UT grad who is waiting to start medical school in 2011.

St David's is instituting a new uniform policy on April 5th whereby all the staff in different colored scrubs according to their jobs. RNs will wear navy blue tops and bottoms with the words "Registered Nurse" embroidered on the front.

I will start at the end of March, with one week's corporate orientation and then a nursing induction of a few weeks mixed with ward work to follow.

Rainy Day

2010-02-10T16:10:00.002-06:00

Sleet, rain and temps in the 30s. Yuck. My friend Hope assures me that she's never seen a winter like this in the 10 years she's lived in Austin. Funny that everyone was saying that about the heat last summer too.

Here are our efforts of the afternoon:

Nothing like the inspiration on the cover of Southern Living, but they do taste good.

Tomorrow is Fred's first ever turn at Show and Tell. He is planning to bring in a toy school bus and talk about how it goes Really Fast. And the cookies are for the Valentine's Day party on Friday. I hope they last that long!

Third Time Lucky

2010-02-01T20:34:00.007-06:00

Introducing Keira, our new dog.

An eight-week old Labrador - Golden Retriever cross (who looks totally Lab at the moment) adopted from Austin Pets Alive!, an organization working to make Austin a "no kill" city. You can read more about them here.

She is darling, but then every puppy is. We've named her Keira, the English version of the Gaelic Ciara, because it means "little black one", according to a totally random naming website we found, and because we all like Keira Knightley. Keira Knightley, is a British film actress, originally from Teddington, Middx, which is right near where we used to live in England. We loved her in Pirates of the Caribbean and in Bend It Like Beckham, and we liked her as Elizabeth Bennett - although Jennifer Ehle was better but a really hard act to follow.

Many friends will know of our past trials and tribulations with rescued dogs, especially Stella, who loved me and Phil and hated Jessica. She also bit the vet, who told us firmly to send her back to the rescued organization. Here she is just for nostalgia.

It was an emotionally wearing experience.

My father TOLD us at the time to get a puppy. My whole family is dog crazy and I have been wanting one for years. Let's hope we've done it right this time. Keira's mother was rescued by APA! and adopted while still pregnant. She had 10 pups who have spent their whole lives with their new foster family frolicking in the back yard with an 18 month old child. I think this is as close as we can come to a sure bet.

New Things

2010-01-24T14:38:00.008-06:00

I think I've said before that I love the turn of the year, and the promise of a fresh start. I am continually marking times and events in our lives -- sometimes just in my head, but often in conversation with the children -- to say, "when we get to X we can look back and remember how we did this", or remember how we felt, or remember how awful something is, because in the future it surely will have been worth it...

And today we pass the 18 month mark here in Texas. And I've been thinking about all the new things we've discovered and how we've changed.

Before we moved to Texas, I'd never eaten tamales, or mole (sauce) or fish tacos or black beans or barbecued brisket. I had never thought of making nut butters out of anything other than peanuts. I'd never heard of panko or queso or chipotle and didn't know how to pronounce it. (It's "chi-pote-lay", I'm reliably informed. We giggled when we heard people in Montana say "chi-pottle").

I didn't know what a Cougar was (the slang term) or a triathlon. Lucy and Jessica didn't know what "mocha" was or how to say it, and neither had ever dribbled a basketball. I had never seen anyone wear cowboy boots with a business suit (the pastor at our church does, and somehow it looks ok). I didn't know you could eat prickly pear cactus.

We've broadened our social circle noticeably too. Before moving to Austin, I really thought that all fundamentalist Christians were politically and socially conservative (they're not). I had never made friends with homeless people or corresponded on the internet with someone I'd never met. Jess and Lucy have friends who are devout Jews, Catholics and Evangelical Free Church members, and have socialized with them at their faith community's youth groups, and invited their friends to ours. Jess's best friend goes to a non-denominational bible church and was recently baptized in her own swimming pool. We go to dinner parties where the host (a former college football player with very sporty children) not only says grace, but prays for the continued health and athletic success of all the talented children present (and that includes ours!) We know several vegans, and to my amazement, I can now prepare suitable meals, and even CAKES, for them.

We have all participated in homeless feeding programs which was a new experience. Homelessness is a big problem in all southern cities and our church is "downtown" -- ie, urban, by their standards -- and heavily involved in feeding and housing initiatives run by the city and other churches. We're becoming much more community-focussed -- a sure sign of middle age. Phil went so far as to write a letter to the city of Rollingwood after they removed the Christmas decorations in front of the city hall (He was complaining about the overdone political correctness) and he is on the board of a community health clinic for the poor and uninsured. We watch a lot less TV than we ever used to, partially because we have not settled on a provider (cable, satellite etc.) and so have only 3-4 channels, but we have three computers and use them a lot more than we did in England. I think that's partially the effect of teenagers in the house.

I certainly drink less than I did in England, but that's age too, and I think I've softened my outlook and feel I am gentler and more relaxed than I was in the past few years. Maybe that's because the people around us seem to be so polite and genuine and occasionally taken aback by the kind of sarcastic banter that used to make up so much social discourse in London. I'm sure that's not a British- American thing, but a big city-small city difference. Phil says the two cantankerous people in his rowing circle are both ex-New Yorkers and that their behavior is noticeably different.

Job Hunt

2010-01-15T19:05:00.003-06:00

I have started to apply for jobs. That is premature of me, in some ways, because I'm not yet licensed in Texas. But several people, nurses and two hospital HR reps, have encouraged me to do so.

It's complicated. There's the business of finding a job, writing a resume (done) and applying online; and there's trying to work out how we're going to manage at home if I'm working, and what level of stress we all can handle. The most complicated option is a full-time job working a normal hospital rota, where you do different days each week, at least in theory, mixed in with occasional weeks of nights. That is what I did in London for my first job. But Phil had a job where he ran his own time and department, and the girls were at least old enough to be in school and think for themselves, and Fred was a baby, and I had a wonderful, flexible professional childminder (or licensed, in-home daycare, as they call it here).

Now, Phil's job is a little more tightly defined, as he's developing a new career, Fred is older and needs some kind of preschool, and while the girls can manage, they have more demanding extracurricular activities, such as rowing four days a week! But there are ways. I could work part time, which would be only two 12-hour shifts, and get one of them on a Saturday, or I could do 2 nights and maybe a Saturday, and so on...

So all my thoughts about what kind of work I want to do are really held up until I get an idea of how flexible managers are willing to be. I applied for a job on a "med/surg" ward at St. David's hospital (one of the two main hospital groups here) late on Wednesday night, and got a call from the HR department at 9am the next morning! So at least they're reading their emails. We had a brief phone interview and she promised to pass my details to the ward manager.

I hadn't expected to get that quick of a response. Everyone says that "They" are desperate for nurses, but several other people have told me that there are seven nursing programs in the Austin area, all spitting out graduates, so competition is tight.

But... I have found the whole search process very exciting, and that says to me, that it's time to get back to work. I'm sure we'll manage it all somehow.

Secret Pleasures

2010-01-08T10:00:00.007-06:00

I mentioned earlier that I received a Kindle for Christmas. It is a wonderful toy and I think it's absolutely the coolest piece of technology since the iPod. The page/screen is extremely easy to read in all lights - even in bright sunlight -- and it is really better than a normal book when you are reading in bed.

I have to say too, that I am not really an Early Adaptor by nature. When I first heard of the Kindle, more than a year ago in an article about Oprah Winfrey in London newspaper, (she's a fan) I thought it sounded like a silly, experimental gadget. But it really is cool. It can hold something like 1,500 books and once I started playing with it, I found myself jumping from one to another, each time straight to the place I'd left off reading the last time.

But like all good things, it has a dark side: You can buy books in secret without anyone knowing.

This is huge. For many years after I had children, I had a terrible time buying clothes. My body had changed shape, and being completely gormless about fashion and cut and shape, I was lost when my previously easy-to-fit figure changed. I spent many, many afternoons wandering around Kingston-upon-Thames, Guildford, and Chelsea, in and out of Hobbs, Next, Whistles, Gap, Muji, John Lewis, Esprit, Top Shop -- you name it -- trying on all the wrong things and getting frustrated. Most of the time I would end up in Waterstone's bookstore cruising their "3 for 2" paperback specials instead. I did read a lot of books, but we ended up with far too many lying around the house and most of them were only just worth reading the first time.

But with a Kindle, no one knows if you buy books. How amazing is that? You can even delete the book after you've read it. It's probably not surprising that one of the main categories on the Kindle book website is Erotica. It is the perfect vehicle for any surreptitious reading. So here's a confession. One of the first books I bought was: Cherry Ames - Student Nurse by Helen Wells, which was a fun read, but I didn't tell Phil about it.

I first heard of the Cherry Ames books years ago when a boy at college started calling me Cherry Ames (Amy --> Aim (nickname) --> Cherry Ames, he insisted, due to my cheery personality which matched the heroine's). There are dozens of Cherry Ames books - Cherry Ames 1st Floor Nurse; Cherry Ames Cruise Ship Nurse; and even, Cherry Ames Jungle Nurse. The books were published between 1943 and 1968 and claim to have inspired generations of women to go into nursing. The covers of the books tell all.

Department Store Nurse??? Helen Wells' style reminded me of Beverly Cleary's books for older children (The Luckiest Girl, I remember was one) that I read as a child, and the nursing details were very cute, especially when they describe washing out the rubber gloves, winding bandages and the new high-tech iron lung. Cherry gets into scrapes, is told off by the grouchy senior surgeon for wearing blusher (she has naturally rosy cheeks) and almost falls for a handsome young intern. At the last minute Cherry decides that really, she is in love with nursing, which is a good thing because it's pretty clear that if she got married she would have to quit.

I spent half and hour last night cruising around the Amazon website downloading books. Loads of traditional classics, 19th century poetry and histories are all available for free. "This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers." . Well I am very, very grateful to them all. In my mind I imagine a dedicated group of people keying in all of Thucydides, George Eliot and Twain, but I'm sure in reality it is done in a much more efficient manner.

A Bad Day

2010-01-07T17:05:00.006-06:00

Fred is having a bad day. He has spent a good part of it in tears, and another big part of it shouting at me for various infractions, such as driving the wrong direction, driving too slowly and generally not doing what he wants me to do.

I keep watching him for signs of impending illness, but aside from streaming tears and snot when he's really worked up, he seems fine. I think we got off to a bad start this morning with Day 2 of his Big Boy swimming lessons. He is three now. I don't think I posted any party pictures so I will now, just to remind myself how wonderful he normally is.

There. They were on Facebook, but those of you with better things to do than cruise around my FB photo albums can see them here.

Anyway, as I said he is 3 now, and so is eligible for proper swim classes at the Y. Lucy and Jessica were in regular swim lessons at this age - more or less -- but we've decided that with a swimming pool at home, it is essential that he learns to paddle safely as soon as possible. And he'd already done the Mommy and Baby class with me without too much stress so we figured it was time to push ahead.

Well, Tuesday was the first class and he spent it lying on the steps in the lovely, heated baby pool splashing and playing with the toys and refusing to do anything the teacher asked. We have the same smiling, patient teacher we had with the Mommy class, and she was asking only things he'd done before, but he was having none of it. The other 4 children in his class are a little older, but not much -- none is older than 4 years -- and all are complete fish, as far as I could see. They all star floated, kicked with noodles, blew bubbles and jumped in with great enthusiasm. "I was watching," Fred said afterwards, and earnestly promised to join in next time.

Next time was today and it was much worse. He sobbed in the car all the way to the Y that he "din wanna go simming" and when we got to the pool side he threw himself around my shins and wailed for me to come in the water with him. Lucy, many friends will remember, was frequently reluctant to participate in just about anything, but she would just stamp her feet and refuse. There was none of this melodrama.

So eventually I prised him off and compromised by removing my black knee-high boots, rolling up my jeans so I could sit with my bare feet in the water next to the class and join in with "Simon says put your ear in the water". Eventually he stopped crying, but he wouldn't float or kick or blow bubbles, even though he does this when swimming with us.

And the rest of the day was pretty much down hill from there. We met my Knitting Maniac friend, Rebecca, for lunch and he refused to eat the cookie she bought for him, and then expressed outrage when she and I shared it between us. I put him down for a nap but he wouldn't sleep. I took him out to the music store to pick up Jessica's flute which was being repaired and he wailed all the way there until I put a Led Zepplin CD on (we were in Phil's car)

and then he complained loudly when I tried to skip through a particularly irritating guitar solo. I have skipped Jessica's basketball game tonight because I just couldn't face dealing with him in the bleachers, although he normally loves to watch, and am aiming for boiled egg and toast and early bath.

Hook 'em

2010-01-07T08:31:00.007-06:00

I'm sure you are all aware of the momentous event taking place this evening (7pm CST). Shops are closing early here, Jessica's basketball game has been brought forward an hour, school meetings have been cancelled. Everyone wants to be sitting in front of a television set, somewhere, to watch the University of Texas Longhorns play the University of Alabama Crimson Tide for the BCS National Championship. Here is what I know about the whole business:

* we are ranked no. 2. They are no. 1

* there is a lot of controversy about the ranking system (popular vote vs statistics)

* our quarterback Colt McCoy (could you have made up a better name?) Did Not win the Heiseman trophy, which is a kind of All Star of the Year award, which of course is a dreadful injustice. Their running back, Mark Ingram, did.

* there is some kind of jinx about winning the Heisman and then losing the championship game; at least, it happened once before.

*Mark Ingram's father, who is an ex-NFL player, missed his parole meeting in order to see his son play in some major game, and is going to have to spend more years in jail as a result. The crime is some kind of money laundering or extortion. This was held up by some in the media as a great example of fatherly love....

*umm, that's it.

But the best story of all, is about Bevo, the 2000-pound UT mascot mentioned in previous blog entries. This week Bevo has traveled from Austin to Los Angeles in an air-conditioned trailer to attend the game. Here he is, having arrived safely in a paddock in the suburbs.

And you can read about his eventful journey here. We all love Bevo, having met him in person at the Houston Rodeo, last spring. Bevo has his own wikipedia entry, which you can read here. It mentions, among other things that Bevo XIV attended George W Bush's second inauguration in 2005, and those horns measure 73 inches (183cm) tip to tip.

Go 'Horns!

Wildlife

2009-12-29T11:39:00.000-06:00

We had two exciting Texas experiences before Christmas.

First, I spotted the cat dragging something larger than usual across the yard. I mentioned it to the electrician who was working on the house, who said, "Does it look kind of like a dinosaur?" I said yes. He said "That's a Horny Toad". And it was. A huge kind of lizard quite rare in Texas. It's scales are beautiful - almost like feathers. Fortunately, Ollie the Texas Cat only scratched its leg from what we could see. And we were able to photograph it.

The other really cool thing happened as part of Phil's engineering and flood control project, which has just about finished. The embankment on the far side of the pool is now grown in with random grasses and weeds, and we intend to plant a border of Native Plants, as they are most likely to survive the difficult weather and terrain. But while scrounging around for rocks, he found this:

Cantelope!! growing wild. Or semi-wild, as they must have been dropped by an animal or lost garbage. There were three melons and we ate 2 of them and they were perfect! I can't wait to see what I can grow with a bit of nurturing!

Back in the Saddle

2009-12-28T21:41:00.002-06:00

After taking four months off, I returned to my triathlon class at the YMCA today. That is just one of a number of pleasant activities I can resume to now that I've passed that exam.

Today the only attendees were me, Lucy and Jessica (who came along as a one-off because they were on school holidays and the coach is fond of them), but it was wonderful to be running on the Town Lake Trail again. We spent most of the time doing a track workout at Austin High School, which is about 1 mile from the Y. After some running drills and a warm up, we ran 6 quarter-mile laps of the track with 1 minute rest intervals and were supposed to decrease our time on each lap, ie, get faster. This is a pacing exercise. And just to give you some idea of what poor shape I'm in, Jessica ran her slowest lap at 2:40, and her fastest at 1:20. I started with my slowest lap at 3:07 (UGH!) and ran my fastest at 1:49, but that last lap was murder and I was almost sick at the end. We swim on Wednesday

Happy Boxing Day!

2009-12-27T14:39:00.005-06:00

We celebrated Christmas on the 26th, Boxing Day, because we spent most of the 25th traveling back from a fabulous skiing vacation near Big Sky, Montana. I have returned feeling very refreshed and enthusiastic, having left a week ago completely stressed and convinced that it was all going to be too much hassle. That's shows you what a bit of luxurious living can do.

Here is one of the views from the top ski lift - guaranteed to lift your spirits:

Here, very briefly are a few updates, which I will expand upon shortly:

1 - Despite a horrible experience on the day, I passed the NCLEX. I got the results 4 days before we left town. I now need to pass a small examination on the Texas Nursing Act, called the Jurisprudence exam, but it seems that is a doddle. Then I am a licensed RN in the state of Texas.

2 - It looks like Fred is potty trained, at least during the day. He wore underpants every day on vacation and had only one accident, despite taking baby ski lessons in 15F temperatures with complete strangers, while wearing a zip up snow suit and ski boots. I don't know how he managed.

3 - Boseman, MT has the nicest airport I've ever seen. Even nicer than Austin, because it's smaller. It has only 5 departure gates makes it easy to run from the restaurant to the gate and the views from the windows are spectacular.

4 - Father Christmas brought me a Kindle, which I have decided is absolutely the coolest item of technology since the iPod. Not only can you read anywhere, and switch it to voice narration if you need to do something distracting, like cook dinner or pick up stitches for a sock gusset, but Amazon is selling dozens of classic novels for free. This is fabulous as outside of book club selections, that's about all I read. I have downloaded - wirelessly from across the house - the King James Bible, Alice Through the Looking Glass, (which I'm ashamed to say I'd never read), some short works by Edith Wharton which delighted me because I'd never heard of them, and Pride and Prejudice, which no one can ever grow tired of. Last night I went up to bed at about 1230am, after we'd attended a neighbor's After Christmas party, and I read until 230am without even realizing it. And you can adjust the type size if you can't find your glasses....

Aminophylline, Amlodipine, Amiodarone, Amytriptyline

2009-11-16T19:27:00.007-06:00

The exam is 4 weeks away and while I've made progress, I fear I will run out of time. I threw money at the problem last weekend by spending $140 at Barnes and Noble on an up-to-date drug guide, the 2009 edition of Saunder's NCLEX-RN Review, complete with CD-Rom of 4000+ practice questions (I'd been working from the 2004 book I bought back when I started training), and two spiral bound reporter's notebook style booklets: a collection of drug flash cards with supposedly mnemonic cartoons, and RN Notes, a surprisingly accurate and useful instant guide to just about every aspect of nursing I can think of.

This all has helped. I told Phil that they must have dumbed down the exam between 2004 and 2008 as I seemed to be getting more of the questions. But I think it has more to do with the simple number of hours clocked. My brain has finally woken up, and things that I stared blankly at a month ago -- even though I knew that I used to know it -- now make sense. And my memory of work experiences, specific patients, conditions and advice from helpful nurses has returned. But it was weird that it all had been filed away so deeply. It probably didn't help that I just finished reading Still Alice, by Lisa Genova, a wonderful, painfully vivid book about early-onset Alzheimers. I found myself staring at phrases like H2 Receptor Antagonist and muttering that I didn't know anything about it, very much like Alice in the book. And then I dug out the notebook I'd carried on the wards at Kingston Hospital, listing contraindications, side effects and other useful information about H2 receptor antagonists, and dozens of other medications...

Here is proof that I did once work as nurse -- the only photo of me in uniform. It's Christmas Day 2007, about 6am, my second-to-last day of work.

Drugs have been a particular problem, but I found them difficult the first time around. The medication names always seem to me to be almost random collections of syllables. Until I started working and actually administered them, metronidazole and metroclopromide were all but interchangeable in my brain. And when I first came to London, so were Fulham and Feltham; Islington and Isleworth; Hemel Hempsted and Hampstead. None of the names of these London "villages" had any meaning for me until I'd been there quite a while, and had driven around by myself and could specifically attach people to the various places, such as that Fulham was where Rick lived and was therefore fashionable; Feltham was on the way to Phil's parents' house and had a rare drive-thru McDonalds.

So now, when I do a practice exam, I am taking a little comfort in the knowledge that the stuff I've covered in my review schedule, I know fairly well. I still need a few hours each on oncology, maternity, pediatrics, renal, IV drug administration, eyes, skin disorders, ECG interpretation, AIDS and HIV, and blood products. And there just aren't that many days left. But I've been lucky with exams before...

Motivation

2009-11-06T16:38:00.005-06:00

I'm having a hard time making blog entries, because if I am not playing with Fred or doing domestic duties, then it seems to me that I should be studying. And if I'm going to skive off completely, then I might as well make myself happy and knit.

The problem is that I am scheduled to take the NCLEX on December 11th. I am overwhelmed by the things I've forgotten in the last 18 months, and more seriously, by the things I never learned, which I need to know in order to pass. American RNs do several activities that British RNs do only once qualified, after on-site training such as giving IVs and taking arterial blood gases. They do other things that British nurses either never do, or do only after taking on advanced qualifications, such as auscultating chest sounds. I did know this, having lurked around on several nursing sites before I started training. So I knew that I would have to make a big jump up to the exam level. Thousands of nurses from all over the world do it every year. What I did not expect, was to have only 8 weeks in which to do it.

The practice books I have are full of sample questions, many of which I am getting wrong. I have met a wonderful neighbor who is an RN and now a lecturer on the faculty of UT school of nursing. She came over the other morning and talked with me for two hours about the exam and how to practice for it, and what items are most important.

What annoys me is that many of the things I need to learn are things which I would have expected to learn at the University of Surrey, but did not. Things like the normal lab result ranges for blood counts, and the side effects and contraindications for the 50 most commonly used medications. I can't really remember what we did instead of all this. I remember multiple lectures on various NHS and Department of Health initiatives, on the benefits of socialized medicine, and repeated labs on how to move patients safely, to avoid injuring ourselves and - presumably - lawsuits for our employers.

will post some more cheerful photos this weekend.

Legal at last

2009-10-14T22:36:00.003-05:00

Here's a nice thing. I finally have a Texas driver's License. That is huge. Americans know how necessary that is, and how absolutely taken for granted it is by everyone except foreigners. I couldn't walk into Lucy's school without an elaborate explanation to the security guard about how UK licenses didn't have the magnetic strip she was trying to scan into her ID sticker generator, and that, Yes, I did live here, but No, I hadn't yet got around to getting a license, and Yes, I really must do because it would make HER JOB so much easier....

It was a HUGE palaver, as they say in England. I had to start completely from scratch, despite waving my old Illinois license which expired in 1992 (and such a sweet photo!). Starting from scratch means a huge identity parade, consisting of every legal document I've ever owned, followed by The Written Test, followed by the Road Test. Each phase meant getting to the Department of Public Safety before 7am to queue up, and phase 1, the document screen, involved a 3-hour wait. Luckily phase 2 - the written test - involved enough of a wait that I managed to skim the Texas Rules of the Road booklet, which enabled me to pass the test. There were some totally unfair questions about the penalties for drunk driving ("on a first offense, is the penalty A: $10,000; B: $5,000 or C: $2000." The answer is C, but the penalties go up steeply for repeat offenses.) And actually the written test involved pressing buttons on a computer screen and no writing at all. I only just passed with 85%.

The road test, which I took just before school started,was a complete fiasco, because after leaving the house at 615am to queue up for a later test time, I returned to the DPS, drove into the test line and was told by the tester that my car was not only unsuitable for testing, but not road legal. It seems there is a kind of MOT in Texas, at least a vehicle emissions test, which was completely news to me. And my car's had expired 3 months earlier. However he took pity on my pseudo English accent and sent me to a garage around the corner which would administer the emissions test for $28. I drove home to collect all 3 children who had been splashing around in the pool, drove into the garage and parked all four of us, including Fred's buggy, in their tiny waiting room. Half an hour later, we raced out with the pass certificate in hand, drove around the corner to the DPS, and queued up for the test a second time. I sent Fred and the girls for a walk in 104F heat up to the Wendy's restaurant on the next corner with instructions to buy ice cream, and waited my turn. The same man beamed at my documentation, asked me to drive around the block and complete one parallel parking maneuver and passed me.

It came last week in the mail, followed by a $200 deduction in our car insurance premiums, as we're no long aliens, in their eyes. And Texas no longer includes height and weight on their cards, no doubt because everyone lied about it anyway.

Authorization To Test

2009-09-23T18:33:00.008-05:00

It's weird to me that I have so many lovely friends here and none of them know anything about my recent career upheavals, and that's probably a good thing. And being a SAHM (stay at home mom) for the last year and a half has been fun, although it will be better once the building work finishes. But all that is about to change. After six months of completing online application forms in the US and UK, repeatedly emailing the registrar's department at University of Surrey and waiting in computerized phone queues, the grandly named Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools, and the Texas Board of Nursing have suddenly come together and approved me to take the NCLEX, the US national nurse licensing examination.

The approval came yesterday via a cell phone call while standing in the beer aisle at Randalls, and thankfully Fred was tired and quite happy to sit in the driver's seat of the little tykes car attached to the front of the shopping cart (wish they had those in Tescos!) while I explained my situation to the woman from the Texas BON.

The NCLEX is administered with what's called computerized adaptive testing, which means that you answer a certain number of questions (for the RN exam, it's 75) and then the computer checks to see how you're doing. If you're passing, you've passed. If you're failing, you've failed. If you're borderline, it lets you go on and answer some more questions, up to 260. You are given 5 hours to complete it. If I don't pass I can apply to take it again.

So, now, I have to hit the books. 18 months of brain atrophy to overcome and the pharmacology is going to be especially difficult, I fear. Fortunately, Fred has just started 2 mornings a week at a mother's Co-op pre-school, and I plan to do the very Austin thing and sit in a nearby coffee shop and study for three hours, at least when I'm not taking my turn as host mother at the pre-school.

He went Monday for the first time and enjoyed it. They said he led the class singing the Barney "clean up, clean up everybody everywhere" song...

But back to the nursing business... I don't know when the next exam date is, but I'd prefer at least 3-4 months of revision time. And I'm officially NOT thinking about where to work, or what kind of work to do; I'm just trying to pass the exam. I'm hoping that walking into Seaton or St. David's (the two big hospital groups in Austin) waving my RN license, will be the best way to talk my way into a flexible part-time position. Or maybe into a super cool fast-track graduate preceptorship thing where you do a multi-department rotation and after a year get to run the ER.... OK, not after a year. But it would be fun to have the experience. I do miss working, and I really miss the NHS, using it and working for it. Really. The NHS is part of the reason I became a nurse in the first place. But that's a whole other story.

Smug

2009-09-15T22:12:00.006-05:00

It's over. The heat is gone, and everyone is creeping out of their air-conditioned houses and meeting up in parks and playgrounds and sitting out on porches, and talking again about how great it is to live in Austin. And of course it is. It was lovely today -- about 80F and sunny with a light breeze, and the memory of those 68 days of 100F is fading fast. (And if you were following, it was only 68 days, and we did not break the 1925 record.)

And although Rollingwood's Stage 2 drought restrictions are still in effect, we had at least 7 hours of rain over the weekend, and a flood in part of our backyard, after an old French drain failed (we think) and spilled a stream of water from the higher streets behind us down the embankment in the back yard. Fortunately our pool design was a good one, and the water just went around it. Jessica and I spent more than 2 hours channeling it into the Berm (or overflow creek) at the back of our house. We started out innocently enough, arranging rocks and diverting the small flood stream away from the patio, but escalated into major excavations as I ended up digging a 8ft long channel from the back of the pool to the berm, so that the water would flow away safely. It stopped raining in after an hour or so, but the forecast was for more the next day, and I didn't want to take any chances. Rollingwood has no storm sewers and its public works dept. acts as though we're all living on the frontier (except regarding fences) so I do not expect them to take any responsibility for flood control.

And if that wasn't enough adventure, it rained so much that the pool level rose almost to overflowing, and we actually had to DRAIN it for about 15 minutes. (Are you getting the irony here?) We had to unravel a flat coiled hose connected to a waste valve and stretch it out towards the back of the yard, turn off the filter pump and basically throw it into reverse. And the water sprayed out over the already sodden grass until the level in the pool had dropped about an inch and a half.

Parts of Williamson Co., north of Austin, got 7 inches of rain on Saturday. We got over at least 3-inches, they said, not counting our self-inflicted bit.

Robin Yarns Vintage Tea Cosy

2009-09-13T22:47:00.013-05:00

I was surfing around Ravelry and other sites looking for Tea Cosy patterns and other cute household items that might make fun homemade gifts, when I remembered that I had some fun "mid-century modern" patterns of my own that might be worth exploring.

This crocheted tea cosy pattern was originally published in a small 1960s British pattern booklet entitled Robin "Oddies" #2040 and priced at 14p (about 25 cents?). Robin yarns are still available from Thomas B Ramsden, a British yarn manufacturer based in Leeds. You can learn more about them here.

The booklet was given to me by my mother-in-law, the wonderful woman who taught me to knit back in 1993 and changed my life. I have edited the pattern only by amending the old UK crochet hook sizes, and by changing the UK stitch names to American. Very cute and easy...

I had intended to publish this pattern but then realized that there may well be copyright issues to deal with. So I contacted Robin yarns to ask for permission. They responded very promptly via email and said yes, go ahead...So here is the pattern:

TEAPOT AND EGG COSIES

Materials:

3 balls double knitting yarn in the following colors

2 balls light

1 ball each medium and dark

4mm (US6) crochet hook

I used leftover skeins of Jaeger DK 8ply (yes, very posh tea cosy but I liked the colors).

No gauge is specified. Finished size is 6 inches high x 11 inches wide at the base, and will stretch easily over a large teapot.

My tension is quite loose at 13dc to 4 inches.

Make two pieces:

With 4mm (US 6) hook and Light make 37 ch. Work 1 sc into 2nd ch. from hook, 1 sc into each ch. to end, turn with 1 ch.

Next row: work in sc, turn, break Light, join in Dark.

*Next Row: 2 ch., work in dc to end. Turn, break Dark join in Medium.

Next row: 2ch., work in dc to end, turn break meduim, join in light 1 ch.

Work 2 rows sc, break Light, join in Dark.*

Rep. from * twice more do not break Light.

Continue in sc. with light to 5 ins from beg.

Next row, working in sc, dec 7 sts.evenly over the next and each of the following 3 alternate rows. Work 1 row. Take 2tog to end of row, fasten off.

Leaving openings for handle and spout, join pieces tog.

Make a loop from double yarn and sew to top. Press lightly on wrong side using a warm iron over a damp cloth.

Egg Cosy

With 4mm hook and Light, make 27 ch. and work as for teacosy until the 2nd rep of patt. has been completed, do not break Light. Continue in sc until work measures 3 ins. from beg.

Dec. 6 sts. evenly over the next and each of the 2 following alternate rows. Work 1 row.

Next row: Take 2 tog to end of row. Fasten off, join seam.

Make loop and sew to top. Press as above.

Going for the Record

2009-09-02T09:35:00.004-05:00

Normally, we're told by the meteorologists, Austin gets about 12 days of "triple-digit" temperatures each year. This summer we've had 67. In the last week of August they were displaying a calendar on the evening news showing the high temperature at Austin's airport each day of the month, and it was 100F or higher on all but two days, with three or four days remaining.

The record is 69 days, which was set in 1925, and the general consensus is that we've come this far, we might as well break it. But wouldn't you know, we could be running out of time. Just this week something seems to have shifted and it's been noticeably cooler in the mornings, even if hits high 90s during the day. And then there are all those hurricanes flitting around the west coast of Mexico and they seem to be sending us a few more clouds and occasional thunderstorms.

And anyway, now that school has started it FEELS like summer is over even if it isn't. And the crazy weather has been going on so long we've pretty much adjusted to it.

A few updates:

We are back in our own house, which is wonderful. We have no television, and no access to the living room, no hot water upstairs and EVERYTHING is covered in dust, but it is still - to my mind - much preferable to being in the rented house. We just wipe down surfaces every evening, move the chairs back into the kitchen to eat and go to bed early as the workmen start at 730am each day. We are still dithering about the tiles for the downstairs but the whole project is remarkably on schedule.

Phil has accepted a formal job offer from the local firm of actuaries he has been working for as an intern for the last three months. He has passed the first two of the five major examinations towards becoming an actuary, and is also modernizing the company's IT systems. I've tried to point out to him that this is a huge accomplishment, considering that he has broken into a completely new field, in a city where we knew almost no one, in terrible economic circumstances. And all he's said is, "well, I've got an inside office, instead of one with a window"... Ah, the English modesty...

Home and Away

2009-08-05T19:00:00.006-05:00

We're doing a lot of driving at the moment. The renovations on our house started three weeks ago and we are currently living about 20 miles away from home in NW Austin, where we have rented a furnished 3-bedroom ranch house for a month. It feels like a very long month at the moment...

The neighborhood must have been one of the early "planned communities" back in the 1970s when the house was built. There are two free public swimming pools within walking distance and a lovely park with a shaded playground across the street. But after three weeks we are all tired of being crowded together, of cooking in an inadequate, unloved kitchen and and trying to clean someone else's house. I am embarrassed to admit how depressed I feel living with cheap, mismatched cutlery, brown polyester bed linen and a buzzing fluorescent light in the bathroom. I'm sure I never used to be such a snob....

We're also weary of living out of the car while we trek down to Rollingwood every other day or so for band practice, school registration and other activities and to check on the house and pool. Fortunately my Mama friends have been exceptionally hospitable and I've been able to camp out in their kitchens for several hours, swilling iced tea while the boys play. But we all want to go home.

Here is one major accomplishment:

The pool at home is finished, full of water and delightful to swim in. And no, we didn't have to buy the water from outside. The drought restrictions were repealed at the end of July.

The entire yard around it is trashed after the whole sewer pipe fiasco, and with our current triple-digit temperatures, we aren't about to start planting for a while yet.

The other good news is that we're running away to my sister and her family in Wisconsin for a few days before school starts. There they think 85F is hot. I can't wait.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

2009-07-10T09:16:00.007-05:00

After weeks of negotiation with stone masons and our local building inspectors and three days of mosquito-bitten forays into the undergrowth holding the end of a measuring tape, we now have a fenced yard.

We have "privacy fencing" ie., wooden panels, at the back, and "ornamental iron" as it's called although it's really steel, at the side and around the long road frontage at the front and far side by the pool. Because we have a pool, or almost a pool (see below), the fence had to be at least 6 feet tall and "unclimbable" (I'm quoting from the city regulations) and because we're sort of a corner lot, it also had to be 15ft from the edge of the road.

This caused huge contention at our house because Phil was convinced that 15 ft would put it too far down the steep slope at the far side of the pool to be much of a screen. But we've learned that fencing is a contentious subject in Rollingwood. Here, it seems, you can cut down trees almost at will, and you can have a submarine-style propane tank in your yard and you can neglect your yard and house, but if your fence is out of line, the local fence vigilantes will report you... So we considered the process of Applying for a Variance and appealing to the Board of Adjustment (have I mentioned that this is a city of 1400-odd people? their local government is unbelievable) but were told our chances were slight and the application fee alone was $250. So we toed the line and actually, as I suspected, it will be fine. I even sat out one morning watching as the deer came across from a neighbor's yard hoping they would look affronted but they simply went onto the road.

The pretentious stone columns were my idea and very expensive, but they have drawn several compliments and I'm convinced they will be worth it. Somehow the whole lot looks bigger once you enclose it, and several areas of what was rather scruffy space have now taken on gardening potential!

THE BAD NEWS is that three days before we were scheduled to begin the final plastering and filling for the swimming pool, the director of public works came to my door to tell me -- regretfully -- that the city had moved to Stage 2 Drought Restrictions that morning, and as "I knew y'all were gettin' close" we would not be allowed to fill the pool, at least not from the mains, which is the normal practice here. The city's water consumption had topped 800,000 gallons for four days straight, which was the trigger. Normal consumption is about half that figure.

So under Stage 2, you are not allowed to fill any pools (even a baby's paddling pool), you can only water your lawn or garden one day a week between 7pm and midnight or before 10am, and you are not allowed to wash cars, boats, etc.. Temperatures have been at or over 100F on and off for 22 straight days, apparently, and this is not normal, everyone tells me.

So all work has come to a halt while we wait for rain, lower temperatures or a combination of the two, which will enable the city to return to Stage 1. It rained twice last week but that is not enough. I have investigated purchasing water, which is the custom in other areas like southern California. We'd need 22,000 gallons to fill the pool, which is 11 tanker loads at between $75-$100 per load. You can do the math - at the moment we're going to wait.

If you can read this, you're too close...

2009-07-09T18:09:00.004-05:00

Bumper stickers are very big in Austin. I guess it's all part of the alternative, hippy vibe. There are several cars driving around with literally dozens of stickers plastered all over the trunk, bumper and rear window, advocating everything from religious tolerance to ultimate frisbee.

And even among the more suburban soccer moms, it is customary to buy a white cut-out sticker for the rear window of one's car to announce to the world that one's child is a member of a sports team, music or dance group or some other club. We noticed this immediately last fall, and dutifully spent $2.50 on a winged shoe when Jessica made the cross-country team, and then did it again for basketball. Almost every car you see driving around Westlake displays at least one of these.

And a very few display what must be the highest accolade in this football crazy place: a Westlake Football helmet sticker with their son's name and jersey number one side of the rear view window, AND a megaphone sticker with a red W on it above the words Westlake Cheer - Kaitlin (or Ashleigh, or Caroline or whatever) on the other. A daughter on the cheerleading squad and a son playing Varsity football - that's got to be the ultimate family success story... The stickers do make identifying friends' cars easier and are good fundraisers for the groups involved.

Even funnier, I thought, were the yard signs we first saw last summer while house hunting. "St. Andrew's Wrestling - Michael" or "Rollingwood Waves Swimmer", almost like a living blue plaque on a house in London. At that time they were often surrounded by competing "McCain/Palin" and "Obama '08" yard signs. We've got one at the moment because they make me laugh, but may have to take it down when Phil gets tired of moving it to cut the grass.

The Honor Roll bumper sticker is a given. I'm convinced there must be a market in second- hand stickers, because EVERY car parked outside the school, or driving around at the weekends seems to have one. Jessica refused to get one, and kept accepting the Honor Roll Pencil instead for a few grading periods until I nagged her, and pointed out that not only was it an essential part of our American experience but also that unless we had one, everyone would assume she simply didn't have the grades.

Happy 4th of July!

2009-07-05T13:08:00.031-05:00

There is a long-running joke in our family of pretending that the 4th of July is a subject of bitter personal humiliation for Phil. I think it all evolved years ago during visits to some wonderfully eccentric friends of my parents in northern Michigan who enjoyed ribbing him, and my sisters and their husbands found it hilarious and kept it up. Up there, of course, he was probably the only real European for hundreds of miles and quite a novelty. His standard reply is that the only reason Britain lost the colonies was that it was "our second team, playing away" - the point being that the varsity squad was busy saving Europe from Napoleon...

He did considering trying to find a Red Coat soldier costume to march in for the the Rollingwood 4th of July parade, and I'm sure they have one at Lucy in Disguise, Austin's amazing costume and drag queen outfitters, but it would require quite an effort at 98F to walk for an hour in a wool frock coat and powdered wig so we settled for decorating the wagon..

I was asked to coordinate the children's activities at the little BBQ and fete that followed. Apparently it's the only time all year when we all have the chance to eat hot dogs at 9:30am. Our stalls offered facepainting (by Lucy), patriotic nail designs (by Jessica), squirt guns targets, water balloons and a hula hoop competition. All very successful, thanks I'm sure to years of girl guiding experience...

Then the Rowing Club held its annual Firecracker 500, which consists of silly races and BBQ on the Town Lake. Lucy's Quad prepared themselves appropriately.

We had perfect seats for the evening fireworks.

Lucy spent most of the evening on the water or in it, which was probably the best seat in the house.

It was over 100F for most of the day (that's her - the third head from the left!)

HOT

2009-06-21T11:50:00.002-05:00

Last week it hit 100F for the first time, and the forecast for this week is "triple digits" every day. My Austin Mamas playgroup has organized swimming (or paddling) pool dates for 4 days of the week, at different FREE Austin outdoor pools. Swimming in lakes, rivers is the key to enjoying the weather.

Our own pool is now back on schedule, and we MIGHT be swimming by 4th of July weekend. Very exciting. Equally important to me, for some reason, is the construction of the fence, which should begin on Wednesday, once the stone mason's team have completed the six 6 1/2- foot pillars that are going to be spaced around the front and side yard. Once the yard is fenced, I can start planting without worrying about deer eating everything. We also won't have escaped dogs running all over, and it will just feel a bit more settled to me.

But then, our internal renovations are now scheduled to begin either July 6 or 13, and that is going to make living here so awkward that we're planning to take a vacation so that they can demolish the stairs and walls all at once. And that means one boring, sweaty afternoon moving everything - furniture, dishes, electronics - out of the down stairs and up into the relative safety of Fred's room. Ick. But it will be wonderful when it's over. And this time we have an architect working with us, who acts as a project manager and kicks the contractor if they don't leave the place tidy, or give us notice before they switch off the water...

How to Entertain Small Boys

2009-05-28T12:04:00.007-05:00

Swimming pool contractors started last week. Two very impressive bulldozer-type machines, one big and one little, were parked in the yard for two days while we confirmed the final layout and Rollingwood building inspectors approved the design, about which more later.

Then once they started drilling we had an excavator like Mike Mulligan's Mary Ann, for those of you with fond memories of that book, with an interchangeable front end for drilling and scooping. Every 3-4 hours a dump truck appeared to take away the tons of limestone that piled up in the yard.

There is a lot of limestone, as you can see, and very little topsoil. It is a wonder anything manages to grow. This photo is of the deep end, which will be about 6ft once it's all finished.

And it was all going -- well, swimmingly, -- when the pool crew chief, Randy, (Don't Laugh, we've all just about got over that in this house) phoned me last Friday and mentioned in a very polite drawl that they'd hit a pipe.

We talked about it. It could be from the old septic system, as Rollingwood only went onto mains sewerage a few years back. It could be some kind of storm drain. We had a lot of rain on Saturday but no noticeable ill effects. Then on Monday the RW public works guy came around and sucked his teeth, and climbed down into the pool and (ewww!) stuck his arm up the pipe and pronounced it dry. (I said "Snake" very loudly while he was doing it just to see him jump...) He made a number of worrying comments: "someone went to a lot of trouble to put that in" and "there was a pipe there on the city's drawings" but he didn't know what it was for... And in the end Randy stood on the side shaking his head and asked me to go inside and flush the toilets a few times. When I came out, he said, "Yup. It's your sewer pipe" and we stood there and watched the toilet water draining down into what would become the shallow end.

So now, we have an even better digger here: a 7-ton rock saw, which bears a strong resemblance to the Channel Tunnel digging machine, which is embedded in the South Downs outside Dover, with a cheeky "For Sale - One Careful Owner" banner draped across it. Special plumbers are using it to dig a trench through the limestone, Around The Pool, to re-route the sewer pipe and then connect it to the mains access near the street. At our expense of, course.

It is an extremely impressive piece of equipment. It is also surprisingly maneuverable which is a good thing, as they're trying to tuck the trench in between the side of the dug pool and the edge of the garage.

Some Bigger Boys are finding all this entertaining too. Phil asked me to go out and video the rock saw in action for his old rowing partner in England, who has been following our drama with interest. Once it's on YouTube, I'll post the link.

Summer has arrived

2009-05-14T11:26:00.005-05:00

April and May have had the least pleasant weather we've encountered so far. Rain, which is welcome really as Central Texas is in the middle of an enormous drought, and many overcast days. Many, like 3 in a row, which I realize is nothing by northern European standards, but feels like a lot here. And then, almost right on schedule, it hit 90F/33C in the first week of May. We gave in, closed all the windows and turned on the air conditioning and so can no longer hear the freight trains in the night or the wacky crickets. But at least you can snuggle down under your blankets. When we researched Austin last year, we learned that they had more than 100 days over 90F, and of course some of those days may mean just a few hours in the afternoon, but it's still a third of the year. It's a bit more humid at the moment after the rains, and you notice that when the sun comes out and the air gets dryer it becomes noticeably more comfortable even when it's hot.

And for everyone who is not on Facebook and hasn't seen the photos, my first triathlon 2 weeks ago was great fun. The swim was awful, as I got distracted at the beginning when someone found another competitor's ankle strap computer chip floating in the water, and there was a great scurrying while everyone checked their own. Then there was a section where the lake was so shallow that it dropped to waist deep, and we were scraping our hands on the bottom. And basically I forgot everything I'd been trained to do and floundered along the whole distance, emerging panting, exhausted and furious. But the bike ride was better and the run was almost fun.

This was taken about 2 minutes after finishing, with Coach Valerie on the left and my lovely friend Suzanne on the right. Here is Suzanne taking the plunge:

And here is our final, more composed medal picture:

As far as results are concerned, I didn't do well at all. It was a much smaller race than I'd expected with only 120 or so participants. I came 86th overall. Suzanne came 66th. In my age group I did even worse, coming 15th out of 17, even though I had to compete in the 45-50 age group because my birthday is at the end of this year.

I know what I did wrong. I "sauntered" through the bike ride, according to Suzanne who should know because she overtook me (having started later as she's younger). I have since practiced keeping a regular speed/cadence even when going downhill, which is the secret to endurance cycling, and have great hopes for the next race, the Trek Women's Series Triathlon, which is this Sunday.

I do NOT have great hopes for the swim at this next race. It is more than twice the distance of the last one, and the only thing that kept me from withdrawing completely (I'm not kidding) is the fact that this race is so famous and so "user-friendly" that they have Swim Angels who will swim with you and other volunteers holding foam noodles so you can rest as you go along. If you need to, you can swim from one noodle to the next. You can't make forward progress on a noodle, but you can hang there and catch your breath. That 'il be me. But once I'm out of the water, things will be better.