My five year old...

saw my picture on my blog and said, "Hey, that's you, Mom!"

"Yes it is."

"You look pretty," she said. And then she leaned over and whispered in my ear, "You always look pretty, Mom."

That girl always surprises me with what she says. Today is a nice day to be surprised.

That's a bit ironic...

You Should Be A Poet

You craft words well, in creative and unexpected ways. And you have a great talent for evoking beautiful imagery... Or describing the most intense heartbreak ever. You're already naturally a poet, even if you've never written a poem.

What Type of Writer Should You Be?

Learning A New Lingidy

Well, maybe it isn't quite a new "lingidy" that I'm learning, but rather it's that I'm learning a new way to pronounce words. Here are a list of local town names, the assumed pronunciation, and the Austin correct pronunciation:

Burnett: Bur-net : Burn-it

Buda: Boo-duh : Bud-duh CORRECTION (I was corrected on this today; it's not "Bud-duh" - it's "Byoo-dua")

Elgin: El-jin: El-gen

Llano: Yah-no: Lan-o

NEW: Manchaca: Man-chaw-kuh : Man-shak (Apparently, they just cut the chase and abbreviate here. I can just imagine how that happened. Some ol' cowboy was trying to pronounce the name..."Man-chalk....uh...man-cha-cha...ah, shoot! Dadburnet! Let's just say it Man-shak.")

San Marcos: Sahn Mahr-kohs: Sahn Mahr-cus

Basically, I'm afraid to ask for directions to go anywhere from a local for fear that I might end up somewhere I didn't intend to go. Although Poetroad and I have figured out that if it's a Spanish word, if we butcher it, then we'll get close to the local pronunciation.

Ice Storm '07

The snow never really accumulated, but the ice did. KJ (pictured here) said, "This is the best winter ever!"

Just as I predicted, the town practically shut down for about two days. And some nearby towns completely shut down. Seriously. The emergency scroll on TV read, " The city of Taylor closed until 1:00 PM." Now that is some ice storm! Thankfully, we never lost power and were able to easily navigate the slushy streets. Basically, these were bonus vacation days. Yay Texas!

Better than OK (so the Texans would say...)

It figures. The year we decide to move to Texas (and, I must admit, I was looking forward to enjoying some Winter warmth), is an "El Niño" year. That means that it is raining here. A lot. On Saturday, it rained three inches where I live (five inches down town). When I talked to my mom on the phone later that day, she said laughingly, "It serves you right."

Right now, it is 29 degrees outside, and a band of rain is headed this way. Freezing rain, that is. Of course there are those of you who have had to endure worse weather conditions in the past few weeks. But you have to understand that a little ice storm in Central Texas creates a lot of crazy. Hour by hour weather reports. Weather spotters. Grocery store picked clean (as if we might have to hunker down in our houses for a week). Then again, this is Central Texas. The city just might shut down with the predicted 1/4 inch of ice expected.

In the mean time, I've been walking around town wearing flops. Just today, I decided to dig out my winter coat (which I bought in San Francisco a few years ago). Although when I was outside a few minutes ago (wearing my flops), it didn't feel that cold. It's a "warm" 29 degrees. Must be the humidity.

So this is what it's like to live in Texas...

Hi, y'all! I've been here for about three weeks, and we've finally unpacked enough for me to take a second to post a post. Here we are at the Capitol! We even took the tour. You probably already knew that Texas was once it's own country. That was news to me! (No, I wasn't asleep in U.S. History class - I never took it; crazy, eh?) But knowing that Texas was once it's own country answers a lot of my questions about Texans...

Seriously though, I'm glad to back in the blogosphere, and I hope to have more time to post now that three are in school full time.