A little white to add to that red outfit.

St. Valentine's Day in Austin this year brought a little unexpected weather condition, snow.

That's right, snow in central Texas. It was a wonderous day. Of course, you had to be up at 7 to see it, because by 10am it was all gone. The snow started out as sleet and small hail the day before, then some rain in the evening, then about 1am it started snowing. At our place we accumulated about 1 1/2" of snow, a good portion was already starting to melt when I woke the family up at 7:30 to check it out.

So we bundled up and headed outside for a little frolicking. Being in Texas we don't own snow pants, snow boots (or moon boots) or gloves designed to repell moisture, and this wasn't the packing kind of snow. Still, we had a good time throwing snowballs at each other and making snow angels. There was probably enough for a snow man, but that would have required some effort. As it was we took a walk around to the end of the street, which turned into a walk to Starbucks, which turned into me running back to get the car, which turned into a trip to the mall to buy clothes and stuff.

After we got back from the mall, Mrs. Austin and I got ready for our big V-Day date. We were going to Phantom of the Opera, then a romantic dinner at Caramelo's, a highly rated Italian eatery downtown. Phantom was outstanding. Mrs. Austin has never seen it, this will have been my 3rd or 4th time. She was overwhelmed. A few parts of the show surprised her and I have the bruises to show for it. After the show we had about 4 hours to kill until our reservation time, so we bought some bread and feed the ducks on Town Lake. Yeah it was cold but we were dressed very much like a Mamas and Papas song.

We also dropped by Book People and actually got a few things. This whole time Lil Miss Austin was playing with the baby sitter. Yes, I got tickets to Phantom AND dinner at a great restaurant AND secured a baby sitter. I'm a thoughtful bastard and you know it. The day was awesome, it was the best Valentine's Day I've ever had, Mrs. Austin agrees and thanks to the snow, one of the better days we've had altogether.

This was icing on the cake.

So, here's some pictures of the snow, it's a lot so if this page takes 15 mins to load, I apologize, I tried to keep them small this time. Plus, in a week we'll have faster upload time.

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Oh the fun of being slightly available.

Ok, so all five of you who read this no doubt know by now that I'm having technical problems with the server. It's up from about 6pm when I restart it, till about 9 am the next day. Perfect viewing time for all my constituants. Mrs. Austin has officially had it with my moping and skulking about, heavy exasperated sighs and feelings of doom and dread because I can't get the freakin thing to stay connected. She wants me to call a technician or spend more money on getting a more stable line. She's sweet that way. Whatever we can do to make it work, just do it. Her analogy was effective as well, something about a flute and a toothpick.

Anyway, I've got a few more things I can try, then it's the official call to tech support. I'm not going to say I'm rigging my system to work, I'm using actual factory issued equipment and licensed services, software and firmware. The issue is, I'm trying to run a website on a line that's not static, so part of the setup requires some translation and monitoring and, shoot, it's just not clicking. I'm finding out it may be the router that doesn't do well with this setup, it may be that my ISP doesn't handle client routers well, at this point I'm guessing. The problem with calling a tech and having them come out is I'm sure they're not going to be really happy about helping me setup a web server instead of using one of there hosting services, or getting around the dynamic IP instead of paying for a static. But I mean seriously, $30 extra a month for 1 IP I'd use and 4 I won't? I don't know, I may have to take a bullet for the team, (team being me and my sanity) and call them up and just do whatever they tell me. It's admitting defeat and it's accepting that I'm weak and stupid and can't learn enough to make this work, but such is life. I feel like that most days at work anyway.

I'd like to take this moment to wish my cousin Hillary, Happy Birthday.

This picture will be up for a couple hours I'm sure, but please check back in the evenings as it should be up after 6pm. This is a family portrait drawn by Lil Miss Austin. She's gradually gone from scribbles, to circles, to circles with dots in the middle, to more than one circle together, then connected with a stick, and now rudamentary human figures. She's got almost the whole family, but here's what I have so far.





My comic book friends have already said she needs to work on her anatomy and perspective, so we're doing that. I think it's neat that she's drawing. I'm always trying to give her some scrap paper to doodle on, and hopefully she will wile away the hours in school perfecting her craft and become an artist like her father, grandmother, uncle and late grandpa. That'd be cool.

Of course it'd also be cool if she just kept growing and learning and being friendly, I won't set the bar so high.

More late.

Good eggs need bacon grease.

So far the new diet has been going well. If you take a look at the sampling of food in the above image, that's actually my breakfast. Few pieces of real bacon, two eggs cooked in the grease left from the bacon, Atkins bread ($6, HEB, not kidding) and real butter. Wash it down with some decaf coffee, with Sweet 'n' Low and a few spoon fulls of whipped cream.

Yeah, this is a diet.

And guess what, I can have this EVERY SINGLE DAY!! So, not a bad thing, you might think. Well you might be wrong. After a couple weeks of this nonsense I'm about ready to kill my family for a freaking glass of juice or an apple or a bagel with cream cheese. Don't get me wrong, this plus the running and I've lost 10 pounds in just over two weeks. I am just getting pretty tired of naked chicken wings, bunless hamburgers, italian sausage with no sauce or pasta. I've learned a lot from this new structure, how to count carbs and calories and sugars. It'll be helpful, I'm sure. But as soon as I'm done here, I'm gonna get a Coke.

Something else I've had fun working on lately has been our web server. (I say "our" because it hosts the pictures for the family site here as well as the comic book site. I'm sure Mrs. Austin would say it's 5% hers, 95% mine. That 5% she's splitting with Lil Miss Austin too by the way.) The web server has been just so much fun to work on. It's almost a guarantee that there will be down time, I even have a clock to show how much precious temporal juice this thing has left. By my calculations, all these photos and images have about 3 1/2 weeks until they disappear for another 4-5 days.

I do have the resurrection down to a science. Once the thing falls apart, I've jumped it enough times to know how to get it back up and running. It's the things that pop up in the meantime that make you crazy. It's like that game where you're going on a picnic and take an Apple. I'm going on a picnic and I'm taking and Apple and a Basket. Apple, Basket, Carrots. Apple, Basket, Carrots, Dingo...and on and on. Well at this point I'm going on a picnic and I'm taking you all down with me because if one more thing goes wrong with this, I'm going to hire a hitman to take the machine into a field and have it put down execution style.

Mrs. Austin continues to do "pleh" with the pregnancy. For every warm and snuggly moment where she breaks down and buys a new stuffed animal and a blanket, there are 47 moments of falling, aching, not sleeping, eating weird, not eating at all and being iritable. So, pretty much normal. Lil Miss Austin is getting to be a BIG WHINER. Man, I haven't heard this much nasal in speech patterns since The Nanny went off the air in '99. I'm sure there could be more things I could complain about, or report on, but this little nugget has stuck in my brain like a commercial jingle because that's what I'm hearing all the time. She can't sit for 2 minutes without that dipthong "Da-addy" removing the marrow from my bones. She's at that funny age when she still requires a lot of attention, but is pretty self sufficient. It ends up looking like she's both starved for attention and doted over. Who knows. I'm pretty sure that I've got it all figured out, just in time for a second one. Oh yeah, I've got this parenting thing licked.

All of you who are laughing may leave now.

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To give you an indication of how things can go from really serious to downright silly, I'd like you to meet Wilson Fruit. Wilson Fruit is the product of 3 people living in a 1400 sq ft house all being within the same 3 sq ft right around dinner time. At dinner time we have to figure out a way to feed a 2 year old, a vegetarian and an Atkins diet. Plus we've all just returned home from work and school, 2 of us need naps, the other needs a foot, back, face, tummy rub, and we're all just grumpy.



So out comes Wilson Fruit. Wilson Fruit made us laugh, cry, scream with joy and jump up and down with excitement. Wilson Fruit, sporting the spikey hair and bugged out eyes, is giving us his pattened Cheerio Pout, something Little Miss Austin is trying very hard to perfect herself.

Wilson Fruit came at a time when everyone was on each other's nerves and was about to snap. It would have been another long evening of yelling, time outs and slamming doors, but luckily, we had Wilson Fruit to break up the monotony of the every day homelife and help us remember that we can laugh, even if it's at food we can't eat.

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Reorg

Just a quick update. As much as we all like to think that this site has nothing to do with Mr. A's comic book site, it in fact does and you can now see that by trying to locate any of the recent photos on this site.

Rest assured I'm doing all I can to resolve the situation. I moved web servers from Pepperjack's hosting to my own server and the DNS lookup may take up to 72 hours, so give it some time. Plus I'll have to make sure I don't have to edit ALL of these entries to reflect the new address. (That last part is going to be a nightmare if it is.)

So that's about it. Mrs. A starts her new job today as bringer of technology to uneducated and sick children everywhere. It's both noble and lucritive, we applaud you.

Saw the game last night. Yes, yes, I saw that too. Couldn't help it. Even if I didn't I couldn't help but hear about it the next day, could I?

Oh well. Good game though. I have a friend that thinks it was TOO good, that somehow the league, unimpressed with viewer ratings and getting wind of the "fans" saying they're watching for the commercials, concocted an elaborate scheme to make sure the game ended with a field goal in the last 4 seconds.

Still no cure for cancer.

Pictures will be back soon, promise.

Yes, yes. With new job comes new do. Mrs. Austin sports her best new look of 2004. I'd go into who the stylist was and the clothes she was wearing, but I'm currently a cross between a comic book fanboy and a bigfoot so don't look for any tips from me. I like the new do, I told her so, as well as all her coworkers. Done and done. (If you haven't figured it out yet, click the "web page" to get a better view.)






A little before the folicle follies, the trio had made it's way to Zilker, as mentioned previously, well here are the photos. As you can see, it was chilly for Austin, a nippy 45?. This morning wasn't better, at 35?. A brisk jog at 5:30am is a heck of a way to start the day, at least it's not Detriot.

So we fed the birds. Then we headed over to the springs and fed the ducks. Then back up to feed the birds. Toward the end it was getting pretty brisk and Little Miss Austin had devolved into a girl/cat and ended up just chasing any pigeon that was white.

We're also in Chinese New Year. At least, that's what her school told us. I'm not Chinese so I don't know for sure, but I should know because I fancy myself a worldly guy, knowledgeable of all things cultural. But alas, the request to wear red snuck up on me. In her lunch box was a treat we found later than night. All the kids got red envelopes with characters on them, characters I'm guessing that have something to do with it being the year of the Monkey. In the envelopes there's suppose to be money, but being 2, what good is money, so they had little chocolate in foil coins.
Remembering this very late, I gave LMA her envelope while Mrs. A was reading to her. We opened them and LMA knew immediately that it was candy. We made a deal that if she went to sleep right then, she could have the candy in the morning, and we put the coins on her night stand. Well, this morning rolls around and we find all the foils are open and there's chocolate on LMA's face and some on her bed. Little stinker. I guess that's why she was so quiet last night, sneaking candy.

This will remind my parents of me hiding chocolate syrup under my bed.

We also went to the Children's Museum. That was pretty fun. Nothing like walking into a building and turning to your toddler to say, "Ok, go have fun. We'll follow." We did, then had dinner, then hit a book store. It was a grand evening. LMA loved the Children's Museum, so much so that we had to promise a toy at the gift shop to get her out of there with minimal breakdown.

Superbowl is this weekend, I will be watching for a 2nd installment of the Rubberband Man Office Max commercial. I couldn't even tell you who's playing or the names of any of the players. I do know that the Colorado Avalanche are in first place OF THE ENTIRE NHL! Not the Pacific West, not the West, the entire league. This is exciting news. I'm excited, are you? Yeah, admit it. You are. You're a closet hockey fan. Superbowl is on Sunday, but I know you're just dying for the NHL All Star game and the playoffs. That's when real athletes show up.


On a side note, did you ever get a piece of news, or talk with someone and get a story that you could absolutely nothing with? Ever have a phone call or get an email and the person says, "Now, you can't tell anyone this, but..." I'm currently involved in this. I wish I could talk with someone, other than Mrs. Austin about this. I told her, she's excited for me, but it's news that really only applies well within my little outter family clique. No offense to Mrs. A at all, she's as excited for me as I am about her political opportunities or her going back to class, which is to say very excited, I just wish I could brag a bit, show off that I have information that very few others have. It differentiates me from the drooling fanboys.

Eh, I better stop there.

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New stuff

Yep, she'll have Trump's job in no time.



All the waiting and nail biting is over, Mrs. Austin finally got the promotion she's been looking for. It's not really a promotion, but it's not a transfer. It's a little of both, actually. She got into a new team that will offer her a bit more cash while it's new, plus instead of large corporations her clients are schools and medical facilities, so there's the high moral value as well. We're all very happy for her.

Nothing else really going on. School has started up for Mrs. Austin again, Lil Miss Austin is still going to school, and I'm still trying to do my comics. We're all either working or not home or trying to do something on the weekends that doesn't involve watching Law and Order. But in reality, all we're doing is watching Law and Order. This last weekend we went to Zilker again to feed the pigeons and ducks. It was a little chilly so we were all bundled up, and there weren't a lot of folks there, but the people that were there had brought their kids to feed the birds.

And whoever thought up this Atkins regiment (I guess that would be Dr. Atkins) should be horsewhipped. For those of you who are considering it, let me ask you a few questions. Do you like juice? Do you like chewing gum? Do you like chocolate or coffee or milk or a nice hoggie roll? Too bad! You can't have any! No sandwhiches, no noodles, no ketchup, no salsa! You can eat meat, cheese, eggs and about 40 vegetables that no one's ever heard of. That's it. I don't know why I'M on it, I'm the pasta/chocolate/toast king. I need sugar and chocolate in my coffee. I need Macaroni and Cheese. I need a Chuychanga with sour cream!

And that's why I also need to lose 20-25 lbs.

So on top of running I chose to alter my diet even further and give it a jump by doing Atkins. Mrs. Austin has been VERY supportive during this trying time, even allowing me a small relapse to see if my wooziness and lack of focus was because I was physically deprived of things I was used to, or my head was so pissed that I couldn't have a Coke that I made myself sick. (Now that I think about it, I'm still not sure which one it was.)



You have GOT to give me more SUGAR! These jumping jacks won't do themselves!


Daddy, what exactly is ammortization?


Some times, it's cold enough that you need to share.


The pregnancy is going as expected, we have another visit today, normal stuff, but so far all is well.

Actually, that's a bit of a simplification. It's going well in the way a land war in Asia is going well. The baby is doing fine, the mommy is, how shall I put this, out of sorts. I won't delve into matters more than that, but suffice it to say it's been stressful.

Meanwhile, Lil Miss Austin is being just the same ol' hyperkenetic, percocious little ragamuffin. She's become very good with cleaning her room and helping clean the house. She likes to feed the dog and, recently has discovered how to use the pump for the hand soap to get copious amounts of liquid clean all over the sink. She's very proud of this last bit, wanting to show us how clean the sink is. She still doesn't want to sleep, nap or sleep in, but she's 2. About the only thing she doesn't want to do is get up for school. I think I'll develop a new tactic on trying to wake her up at 6:30 on a Saturday and tell her it's time to go to school, then head back to bed myself, assured that I will now have another 90-120 minutes of bliss before she figures it out.

She's also taken a leap of speach in the last few weeks. It'd been months while she toiled away on such banalities as what color is the banana and how many trains are there. Suddenly her vocabulary increased to include such words as "yet" and "only" and "because." Because was the big one. Just yesterday I asked her if she like the names Ainsley or Cloe for the new baby (don't worry, we don't know what it is yet) and she said, "No, I don't like Cloe." "Why is that?" I asked. "Because Cloe makes me mad." (Ainsley makes her happy, I don't know the distinction on that.) The point is, even though it sounds both cute and depressing, she used "because." Before when asked "why" anything, she'd say, "Um, dunno." So this was huge. She's also using more averbs, which I think is probably the hardest grammatical pollen grain to grasp. She's starting to grasp time as well, events that have happened or may happen. She knows that "tomorrow," "in two hours," and "soon" all pretty much mean the same thing, but they are different from "yesterday" or "last night."

It's a big move approaching 3, and it's fun to watch. She's running more solidly, can put her clothes on by herself, can get clothes out of the drawers just by asking and can do all the bathroom stuff she needs. Lately we've been putting her cups on the lower shelves and she can get water from the door of the fridge or juice boxes and snacks from in the fridge. She's almost totally self reliant and it's wistful and melancholy.

Oh, and she and I measured her feet yesterday, her's are 5 1/4" and mine are 8 3/4"

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Love you sis.

Rose Bowl Madness

You know, just when I thought I had a handle on Mrs. Austin, she does something completely unexpected. Something so monumentally out of the ordinary, it's both frightening and amusing at the same time. Just more reasons why I love her.

She cries at parades.

Now before I get hogtied for my prose, let me clarify by saying she cried at seeing her High School's marching band perform in the Rose Bowl parade.

Still not convinced? Ok, she cried because she was in this marching band in high school.

*sigh*

The high school I'm talking about is Permian High School out of Odessa, Texas. Ah, now I see the nods of understanding.

You see, in Odessa, since the gas and oil boom have pretty much dried up, there's basically one thing left in the town that defines it; high school football. There's Odessa High School (OHS) and Permian High School (for some reason MOJO is used here as well, but I can't find where this came from.) Permian was apparently the third school in Odessa, OHS being one of the other two, the other I don't know. But, the rivalry was between OHS and Mojo. The rivalry was so intense that Permian High's parking lot stop signs were black and white so as not to match OHS's school colors of red and white.

Yeah, that's what I said.

So anyway, Mrs. Austin was a flautist in the Panther's Marching Band. A band, by the way, that has gone 40+ years with what amounts to a perfect score for Marching Band along with other performing band areas. Mrs. Austin's brother was in the band as well. The school, indeed the whole city, was centered on football and the band and anything involved with them. If you look at the Mojoland website you can see it's primarily about football. I'm sure in doing a search for Permian High School Drama, the only thing you'll find would be a commentary on the movie Varsity Blues.

At noon after a blissfully lazy morning on New Year's Day, a shock of realization went through Mrs. A's brain and she flipped the channel to the Rose Bowl parade and started the digital recorder. "Permian was going to be on in the first half hour of the parade," she said wistfully.

"So why are you recording it now?" I asked, knowing I was stomping on sacred ground.

"Just in case," she said with a tilt of her head like I can imagine an astronaut's wife might look when commenting on going past the 3-minutes of radio silence upon re-entry.

Sure enough, the last band to be seen in the 2004 Parade of Roses was none other than The Permian/OHS Composite Marching Band. 400 plus members all told. They were the largest band in the parade. They played some song that suggested that even though they wore composite uniforms and marched under a combined name, Permian was the major force being represented. Tears flowed, hearts jumped into throats, phone calls were made. I sat quietly sketching my superheroes patterned after the forces in quantum mechanics and wondered just what I'd gotten myself into 7 years ago.

Merry Solsmastivus

The magic of the holidays this year has been transposed from one child to another. The feelings of anticipation and wonder and joy have now infused a younger heart. Lil Miss Austin is well aware of who Santa is and that he brings presents. It'll be a while before she understands the meaning of Christmas, whether they be pagan, christian or commercial reasons. At this point all she knows is that she has presents to open and toys to play with.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The holiday actually started before December 25th. LMA's school had an International Night. Not to be seen as Scrooges for avoiding any kind of holiday party, but being comprised of children from nationalities that may not recognize Christmas, the school did a very interesting thing and put together an International Holiday Night. The children were encouraged, but not required, to come representing a country. Being the 1/8th Italian that I am, I decided Italy would be a safe bet. I wanted to do Canada, dress her up in a little hockey outfit, but you also had to bring a dish and I didn't think LeBats Blue would have been wise at a school function. So we went with Italy. You can't really tell from the photo, but she's supposed to be a gondola pilot.

And let me tell you, these school functions are just a MAD house. First off, the herding of the kittens began shortly after we arrived as the teachers attempted to coral the kids onto the stage so they could sing...maybe shout...the three songs they had to push through. The microphone was given to a couple of the older students to "lead" the children in song. Most of the kids were just flapping their sandwich board flag signs around, or hitting each other with their hats. One little gentlemen with the microphone was obviously destined to be the next Rage Against the Machine lead singer. The whole night was a bit unnerving and eventually Mrs. Austin requested we leave before she take a life.

With any family that has new children, there are also grandparnets. With every marriage, there are also in laws and parents. With every Christmas, there is always a visit. With us it's either a drive to Conroe, Texas or a flight up to Colorado. This year we stayed in town because of Mrs. Austin being pregnant and we had gone to CO last year. A quick 3 hour drive later and we're in Conroe. All the family is there and this time we were the last to arrive. We got there just in time to see the Santa on the JetSki, apparently an East Texas tradition. I have no idea. We hung out for a bit, crashed at the hotel and returned the next day well rested and ready to start ripping into the presents. (I'm not overly sentimental or religious, can you tell?) Mrs. Austin's family and mine differ usually, but I can pin point one aspect for you today. There will be crying on Christmas! It happens every year. One person gives someone or a group of people a gift and the tears flow like Niagara. I was guilty of it one year; Mrs. Austin got me a playstation when I first moved here and the thought alone made me weepy. I knew she hated video games, so it meant a lot. But these people are just masochists. They're purposefully out to make someone cry and it's usually family oriented, meaning the two of us that married into the family are left looking at each other and saying, "So, uh. Wanna go smoke?"

But it was a good trip and after a fine dinner the three of us headed home. Christmas Eve arrives (keep in mind, Solstice was on the 22nd, so the rest of this is for the Catholics) and we find Mr. Austin working a half day at his lovely job. The market was open on both Christmas Eve and the day after Christmas. The reason for the day after is the market can't be closed for 4 days in a row. See, you learned something today, good for you. So after my token appearance at work during which I got real good at Diamond Mine, I came home to find Mrs. Austin geared up for a new holiday tradition. This was something I'd heard about, but had never been involved in, unless I was 3 and my parents did it that one time and I just don't remember, that doesn't count. She wanted to make a gingerbread house. Yeah, that's what I said. A what? You mean, to eat or just make? (I'm clueless.) So we did our best, she made the structural parts and I assembled the candy. We got some frosting and graham crackers and went to it. Well, while it was a complete hoot to do, I'm just glad we don't work for HUD or something because we suck at building stuff. Unless it comes with little interlocking pieces and instructions, I'm in a fog. After a good bit of eating candy and frosting, the house just caved in on itself. We put it outside for whatever birds or cats wanted it. Good foundation of knowledge for next year.

The big day was at hand. This year I could feel the roles reversing from child to parent. I was no longer welcoming the sweet glow of the Christmas tree as I crept into the living room to see what Santa had left. This year was mostly about LMA, but a good deal was to see if Mrs. Austin liked the gifts I got her. So we stayed up late putting LMA's new bed together and moving gifts under the tree. The next morning LMA slept unusually late, but seeing as she's not quite 3 years old, I don't think the anticipation has worked its way into her system yet. She's been thinking Santa had been to our house for about 2 weeks, so she still has that temporal thing to work on. So just like my dad before me, I put on a bathrobe, made some coffee and started looking under the tree for things to hand out to people. It was a good time. Mrs. Austin started to feel a little under the weather so the rest of the day was kinda dark and medicated, but it was still jolly.

Now I have to work on thank you cards and shopping for some more stuff. One bit of the holiday I like is that immediately after December 25th, you have a guilt free day of going and buying anything you want, even if you got all you wanted for Christmas.

Yeah I'm a merchandise whore, I love having things. So what.

May Your Holidays Be Filled With Magic.