Austin Trip

It's been almost a month since the last blog entry. I apologize to those who have read this before and are interested in reading it again. I'll try and keep things up to date a little more often.

The first part of August saw us take a real four-day vacation to the City of Austin. Our good friends the Reeves recently moved to Austin last year so that Keith could take a job as the head producer for the City of Austin's cable channel.

The Reeves let us stay in their house just south of 290 on the southwest corner of the city. Quick access to the Hill Country, quick access to downtown...its a nice location. They have a Central Market just up the street.

We drove into Austin on the west side of town skipping past the traffic along I-35 that would be taking place on a Friday afternoon, and stopped shortly in the town of Leander, where HEB Grocery stores recently built a large HEB Plus store. The company is planning on building a similar style store and retail center in Burleson, so it was an opportunity for me to take pictrues and walk around the project enough to be conversant in the planning of the future project for my job.

We had make your own pizza night with the Reeves and Keith's parents who were in town that evening.

Saturday saw Meredith, the boys, and I driving into downtown and visting the Bob Bullock State History Museum. We toured the various exhibits including a history of the space program from the perspective of Texas. Many artifacts of the raising of LaSalle's ship from the Gulf of Mexico (thanks to the Texas A&M Department of Nautical Archeology) and a great interactive exhibit on the Texas Centennial of 1936 held at Fair Park in Dallas.

Alexander's favorite part was the Texas Spirit Theater which had interactive thunderstorms, loud noises, and many moving images of stories of the history of Texas.

Afterwards, we went to the original Kerbey Lane restaurant for mid-afternoon pancakes. We went to Austin Comics and I bought a Superman T-shirt to match Alexander's. We drove around the west side of the city for a while and met up with the Reeves at thier house for a trip into downtown to the Whole Foods national headquarters at 5th and 6th Streets and Lamar. We had dinner and watched the sun go down on the second floor veranda while the kids played on the playground. We then went to the Congress Ave bridge over Town Lake (now Lady Bird Johnson Lake) to watch the bats come out. We thought it was a little too warm for the bats, as many were swooping out, but they didn't come out en masse.

Sunday we had breakfast (yet again at a Kerbey Lane) and went to Bookpeople, the largest independently owned bookstore in Texas. That afternoon Meredith and the guys and I went driving around the hill country on the west side, saw her former home in Austin, and drove out to Lake Travis. We ended up driving back through all of the new housing growth in towns like Bee Cave and had a nice dinner back at the house.

Monday was a spectacular day in the history of the Stephen and Meredith Cook family. We set out in the morning to drive to the true Hill Country by way of Marble Falls and Burnet and taking a detour at a state park: Longhorn Caverns.

I've been to Natural Bridge Caverns and Carlsbad Caverns (at least three times) ... Longhorn Cavern was the most real experience I've had in a cave. We arrived only minutes prior to the 1pm tour beginning (no wait time) and we enter into a 64° cave in 100°+ weather. Our tour guide was a local geologist and historian. The cave is an active river cave. Rather than live stalagtites and stalagmites, the cave is full of sweeping curves etched into the stone from the flow of water. Whole circular rooms with sprial ceilings exist where whirlpools eddy through the cavern when filled. The most recent flooding in Central Texas this past May closed the cave system for several days.

The cave has been the host of Comanche tribal meetings, a 1920s speakeasy, possibly a hideout, and the site of much blasting and excavation in the 1930s by the civilian work program. The trip in and out is about 1½ miles. Alexander, Ford and Meredith were troopers.

At one point they turned out all of the lights for the experience of complete darkness. Alexander, who was holding my hand at the time gripped harder, but as his contemporaries in the tour group began to cry, he held on and was ultimately fascinated by the experience.

At several points through the tour we got muddy as there were still slick areas of the cave. There were several points were Meredith and I had to duck low to get through to the next cave room, while Alexander happily pointed out that he was just the right size.

Emerging into the heat and sunlight after an hour and a half, we washed off the mud and loaded back up into the car. Alexander and Ford promptly fell asleep for most of the remainder of the trip home.

I had never before felt this unified as a family. We had a terrific family memory, in which we were active participants in our lives and not sitting by watching it pass on television.

It was a great trip.

Star Wars Exhibit

A couple of weeks ago I took some time off to stay at home and to take Alexander to the Star Wars Exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Science. It is a travelling show staying in town from June to the first week of September. I received tickets to the event as a Father's Day gift from my parents. Alexander and I arrived at 9:00am to the museum and we were able to walk right up to the ticket window without waiting in the queue. This will have great significance later.

We got our package tickets to the event and to the IMAX movie "Special Effects". The tickets were set for a particular time to enter the exhibit. They had movie props including Luke's Landspeeder and many costumes.

The most interesting portions of the exhibit were the interactive "real science" experiments that showed off how the technology of Star Wars was applicable to real life. Alexander and I enjoyed building a landspeeder out of Legos with magnets on the bottom that would repel from some magnetic tracks. Then by placing another magnet on the back of the speeder and sending it through a series of electromagnets, they would propel the speeder along in a similar fashion to a mag-lev train.

Most of the other experiments had to do with the creation and programming of robots. Alexander enjoyed programming a R2 unit to work itself through a maze, and I enjoyed a robot that you could control to make it walk.

The exhibit ended with an animatronic C-3PO talking to the audience about different types of "real world" robots.

Alex and I had a great time.

Brave Combo Philosophy

Carl Finch of Brave Combo had some interesting things to say about isolation of society and listening to music. People just don't interact with each other much anymore. Here's the article.

Concentration

Having a difficult time CON-CEN-TRA-TING today. I have had what feels like a sinus headache for over a week now with no change. It's like a low-grade evil pulsing through and clouding all that I perceive and...I'm rambling.

Again, it's that concentrating thing.

There is a line from a favorite brit-com that applies:

"My short term memory has been erased. This I ascribe to the proximity of the magnetic coils from Starbug's rear engine. Secondly, due to the proximity of the magnetic coils, my short-term memory appears to have been erased. This, combined with the erasure of my short-term memory, has has left me a little disoriented, disoriented, disoriented." - Kryten, Red Dwarf


If I never hear about drilling gas wells in the Barnett Shale again I would be a happy camper. I don't care how much money you're pulling out of your 7,000 square foot hovel built in 1964...I don't want to deal with gas well drilling operator companies anymore.

I miss feeling relaxed.
I miss not having responsibility.
I hate having frustrating dreams about not getting work done.
I miss art and being creative.


I still haven't had that original thought - I'm looking for it everywhere.

Add 3 Sizes to your Email

I'm tired of spam. I go all weekend without checking my email. Mainly because I'm really busy doing other things... and I tend to not want to sit in front of the computer when I'm not getting paid for it, or working on a real hobby - or doing something nice for someone. But I'm bored this evening so I thought I'd try and see if anyone has connected to me. An lo and behold two women have contacted me that they would love to see me with a larger piece of my anatomy. And here I am trying to make my stomach smaller. (16lbs so far for anyone watching).

I'm mad at my email client for not filtering these emails. I'm disappointed because most of the email I recieve at home lately has been from bookstores that I've purchased books from or forwarded messages of chain letters...I would love to be able to sit down with one of my friends, or a new friend and just write letters back and forth, describing my day, the frustrations of life and the humor of which I seem to have to hold up to it.


I'm going to have to see the doctor again. The blood pressure meds aren't seeming to help. I've been religiously taking the BP meds, the blood sugar, 1g of cinnamon and a multi-vitamin everyday. The last couple of nights where I've been really tired, I've laid down and could hear my pulse in my ears. I've always been able to do that at night especially - even as a child. But it is combined with fatigue -I know it's got to be elevated pressure.

The weight loss, like anything, has had its ups and downs. I've started having complements that people have noticed that the weight has reduced in my face. I'm still having a difficult time seeing it.

I was asked a difficult question at church today. I was asked where I was going for vacation this year. I had to really think about it. I haven't been on a vacation that hadn't involved seeing family in over ten years. Since my honeymoon actually. Now we've gone to some really nice places - Ruidoso, NM - Burnet, TX - San Francisco, CA - Galveston, TX - and all over South Carolina, but since we've been married, we've never just taken a week off to go somewhere just us.

The first 7 years of marriage have been mostly taken up with working for the City of Denton. Going on vacation was really difficult while I was working there. We were constantly berated with yet another set of public meetings in writing the Comprehensive Plan and the Development Code. All in all we held approximately 250 individual meetings getting those projects done. Any time away from Denton had to (rightly) be spent visiting family for the holidays. We saved a lot of money that way and when I finally left Denton, I had 300+ hours of vacation built up.

I haven't been back to Europe since 1994. I haven't gone to Boston to watch the Red Sox with my friend Bruce. I haven't driven up the Mississippi River from St. Louis to Minneapolis like I wanted. I haven't gone sailing in Auckland Bay on the North Island of New Zealand. I'm always committed to meetings and schedules months in advance.

I'm not about to say "poor me" who doesn't get a holiday. The reason mainly is that it would be crass and wrong to say that it is anything other than my own fault. But to stretch a metaphor a bit, my sail has been full with job, volunteerism, babies, moving, caring about politics, the environment, for so long now that the rudder has been tied off. The heading is set and the halyard has been locked in.

I need an anchor


or the keel is going to wear away...

Nice Kids

Don't you wish that you could live your life as simply as children do? Things are good and bad. We pick up our toys when we're done. Nobody bothers us if we need to take a nap. Snacks are ok...and sometimes, just holding hands and being friendly is a great thing. Alexander and his friend Kendall are watching other kids hit a pinata at Alexander's friend Eddie's 3rd birthday party this weekend. They just waited patiently for their turn. Holding hands.

Hey Man, Like Wow... (Edited)

This post has been removed because the other Stephen Cook was insecure enough in his own business that he had his sibling post to the blog to remove a photo (taken from a public street). I didn't make any judgements or comments other than the fact we had the same name which I thought was funny.

Some people have much more problems than I do...

Update: It also turns out that if you type in Stephen Cook - and his title on the outside of his store...which I won't write here to avoid any further yopping...it turns up that this post had made it to the second in Google searches. I'm still laughing about that. No wonder he was mad. More people must have clicked on my link.