Last Sunday was Fernando’s 28th birthday, which also happened to fall on Father’s Day. On Saturday, after taking a nap from arriving at 6am from taking a red eye back from Anchorage, I took him out to Sugar Land where I experienced Grimaldi’s New York-style pizza for the first time. Birthday festivities continued at Christopher’s Vintage Shave at the Sugar Land town center where Fernando experienced a true vintage shave with a straight blade razor and facial. The process he says was a little painful, but the results were worth it. His face hasn’t been that smooth since before puberty, I’m sure. We strolled around our favorite store, you guessed it, Costco, and hit up our nephew’s birthday pool party for the rest of the day. On Sunday we had a nice dinner of flank steak pinwheels with carrot risotto and Costco cheesecake with some of our good friends. I’m really enjoying having him back in town.

yummy pizza!

Pesto sauce with fresh mozzarella, basil and tomatoes

Getting a shave

Our shag rug finally arrived! So here are the pics of the house with us all moved in.

Den

Side yard accessible via our den

Downstairs bathroom

View from entryway

Family room w/ our new rug and shutters

View towards stairs and powder room

Our favorite balcony

Not sure what to do with this nook

It’s nice that the kitchen isn’t completely closed off

Dining room

Powder room

Love our stove and griddle

Lots of refrigerator space, but somehow it all get taken up

Our super quiet washer/dryer

Master bedroom

Master bath

My sewing room/ future nursery

I showed up to work and things were pretty non-eventful. I was essentially asked to do what I normally do in Houston–only for the users in Anchorage. That made things pretty easy. Tuesday morning, I woke up with I think might have been food poisoning. All I know is that I didn’t sleep well and I threw up a couple of times. After that, though, I was fine.

Being without Diane got old very fast. While Anchorage and the surrounding area is beautiful, it’s a lot more fun when you can share the experience with somebody. Here are some pics from the week.

Coastal trail a few blocks from my hotel

A recently built house in Anchorage

All houses are basically the same style

Anchorage Temple

Botanical Gardens

Pretty flowers

Flew to Anchorage–picked up my rental car and was shocked at the sticker price: $1650!! Sundays in Anchorage are pretty quiet. Downtown wasn’t very happening, but I still walked around and got to know the town a little. Had dinner at Ginger and it was OK. “House-made” ginger ale was terrible; the ginger was too strong. Halibut was tasty. Went to Earthquake Park and got attacked by mosquitoes.

World record halibut at 400+ lbs!

North-facing view from hotel room

9.2 earthquake ~50 years ago

More earthquake devastation

Driving through Anchorage

Fernando was gone for the past two weeks on his first business trip to Anchorage Alaska. Besides the fact that it sucked big time, I managed to keep myself pretty well occupied. Here are my latest completed goodies.

More baby shoes, yay! I’ll be sure to keep these coming. I went crazy at the store and came home with lots of fat quarters. I made this for one of my good friend’s precious new baby girl. The idea for the blanket comes from Fernando’s friend Dana. Thanks! It was super easy, I just wish I had a serger.

Yesterday, on our way back from Galveston we were stuck in traffic yet again. The glory about Texas its frontage roads. If the freeway is backed up, the frontage road is usually moving faster. Except in our case, the freeway backed up, we moved to the frontage road, then the frontage road was bumper to bumper and the freeway started to speed up and the dang on-ramp was miles away. Anyway, we were frustrated that our normal 1.5 hr trip to Galveston took over 5 hrs to complete, and that we drove my sedan and couldn’t hop over the median like all of the other trucks and SUV’s were doing to hop on the freeway.

We approached the toll booth on Beltway 8. We have a TxTag which allows us to normally drive through without having to stop and pay the toll. For some reason, Fernando is driving in the lane that is marked “Exact Change.” I’m thinking that this is strange, but maybe Ferd wants to get rid of some change or something. As we get closer, I realize we are going very fast, like 60-65mph, and I look ahead and see the usual stop sign and that red and white stick blocking the enterance to the road beyond. I yell “Stop! there’s a…” I closed my eyes and braced myself like I usually do when near death experiences happen…and WHAM! Without even slowing down, and possibly even accelerating, we hit it. Amazingly enough, the stick didn’t break our windshield, but bounced off, leaving a nice faint red and white mark as a reminder.

Sorry Ferd, but I had to tell. You scared me.

Yesterday, we headed out to Galveston for an annual sand castle building contest held at East Beach.  After what seemed like eternity of being stuck in traffic, we met up with Mark and Kyra Herbst.  There were a total of 71 castles all lined up to be judged in various categories such as, “that’s entertainment”, “most hilarious”, “let the games begin”, “most complex”, etc. The place was packed with people, but we were able to see it all within an hour.  Some were not so great, but others were fantastic. Common themes in several were Octomom, Geico cash, swine flu, and banks bailouts. Enjoy the pics.

The lineup

Octomom

Swine Flu

Ike’s Over Fest

Tejas pride

Prez Dispensers

Obama “dispensing” money we don’t have

“Swine flew”

One of our favorites by Rice U

The Kool-Aid man, oh yeahh!

Good Knight

Another sand castle

Burglar

This one’s for Jeff

Geico cash

Back in early May, we went to Brazos Bend.  It’s a state park located just south of Sugarland, TX.  Brazos Bend is known for being the alligator park.  It is a pretty large piece of land with camp sites and bike riding trails, but we just hit up its main lake.  We were glad we went fairly early in the day because it was so hot! It took a while until we spotted our first gator. By the end, we were good at spotting them in the water. We saw several ranging from about 2 feet to 6 feet. They were right along our pathway!

Picnic at the park

The dangerous pathway

Warning sign

Our first gator siting!

Camouflaged gator

Fernando in the look out tower

A dead upturned gator

Since we are coming up on our one year anniversary of living in Texas, we decided that it’s probably time that we visited Galveston. We decided to make it a day at the beach with Fernando’s brother and family.

We never experienced Galveston before Ike, so we didn’t really know how extensive the damage was, however we thought they had a pretty remarkable recovery since everything was pretty up and running. Although there were some areas of debris along the road and a few abandoned homes.  We decided to go to Stewart Beach since it is one of the bigger beaches out there. Beaches in California or Florida definitely take the cake as far as beaches go, but we still thought Galveston had its own beauty. At Stewart Beach, they charge $8 to park and unfortunately you are not allowed to set up your own canopy. They have chairs and umbrellas for a mere $25 instead.

Overall we had a great time. The water was amazingly warm (although a little brown) and we saw and felt several fish jumping out of the water and even spotted a few dolphins. We loved the old Victorian style of the homes, and discovered one of our new favorite places to eat: New York Pizzeria with giant slices of margarita pizza. Its always fun catch a little sun at the beach. The best part is, its only 45 min away from Houston! Forty five minutes away and you can forget that you are in Texas.

Stewart Beach

Jacob playing in the sand

Sophia

Hurricane-proof house

Non-hurricane-proof house

Beautiful beach houses

We went to this two weeks ago, but are just barely getting around to posting pics. For our Friday night date, we headed over to the Pasadena Strawberry Festival. H-E-B claims to make the world’s largest strawverry shortcake for the event each year. We purchased a slice for a couple of bucks and enjoyed our time at the festival. It was a small, community event with a rides, carnival food and shows (e.g., pig racing).

Pasadena Strawberry Festival

World’s Largest Strawberry Shortcake

Ladies slicing hundreds, maybe thousands of pieces of cake

Some delicious stuff

So many choices…

Happiness

A future cowgirl

Looked appealing

Large cookies

Who knew that pigs can swim?