KEC Krew

Express Train!

2011-10-04T20:54:00.000-07:00

Continuing my backlog of events, on the weekend of August 19th all of my roommates finished their internships. This meant that I had the place to myself! Well.... after I drove them to the airport. On Saturday morning I had to wake up at around 5 to drive Kyle to the airport, and then on Sunday I had to be up at 7 to drive Jacob to the roommate.

This sort of decreased my energy level to do anything during the day. Saturday I did some shopping and then Sunday I decided to go to a Round Rock Express baseball game. The Round Rock Express are the triple-A team for the Texas Rangers so they had a fair amount of prospects and I actually lucked into being able to watch one of their top pitching prospects, Martin Perez.

Eric told me that their stadium, the Dell Diamond, was one of the best stadiums in all of the minor leagues. I haven't been to that many minor league stadiums, but it was very nice. Below are just some pictures of the stadium and the game.

This is the view of the outfield and the bullpen.

The view, albeit blurred by the sun, from the outfield seats. The sun was pretty strong for the first couple of innings. The majority of the people sat on the third base side, which was in the shade.

However, I was able to get awesome seats by sitting on the first base side. 2 rows behind the dugout!! I think those are about the best seats that I have ever had at a baseball game. The Express were playing the New Orleans Zephyrs, the farm team for the Florida Marlins, so I was right behind the New Orleans dugout. I thought this was pretty fitting considering that I was planning on going to New Orleans with Katie and Will after my internship.

The game was pretty much a blowout. The Zephyrs scored 6 runs in the first 2 innings and pretty much ran away with the thing, but all in all it was a fun game to go to. Particularly after the sun went done and I didn't have to worry about getting sunburned.

One thing that I noted was that the Express had a lot of players who had been in the majors with one team or another, but weren't good enough to stick. So the proverbial AAAA player. I was able to see Chris Coghlin and Logan Morrison for the Zephyrs. I guess they were rehabbing injuries. However, Eric and I made a bet regarding Coghlin, so seeing him basically assured me of winning $5!

Hamilton Pool

2011-09-27T22:43:00.000-07:00

Well it has been forever since I last updated this blog and lots and lots has happened. But I am going to start with the oldest noteworthy thing and slowly get caught back up.... maybe by the end of the year I will actually be all caught up.

So during the first week of August we were able to get a half day off on a Friday and we headed to Hamilton Pool. Normally, the pool is very busy as only a certain amount of cars can get in at a time. We figured that going on a Friday afternoon would limit that and make it more likely that we would get in. And that was the case! We got in very easily and parked and headed down to the pool. One thing of note... I didn't drive!!!

It was about a half mile walk down a hill, so we set out.

We got to the pool and it was not very full... or at least it didn't seem that full. The only sad thing was that there was no waterfall. Normally a waterfall would be streaming down from the rock shelf.

We got in the water and it felt really great. The Texas heat made it so that the water was just really refreshing. We swam around and swam under the "waterfall", which was more of a drip coming down from the shelf. Afterwards I walked around the pool and snapped some pictures while the other guys kept swimming.

In the picture below you can almost see the waterfall... which is the drip that is coming down in basically the middle of the screen.... it was really small, and I think that the pool would have been much more impressive with the full waterfall, but it was still a pretty amazing pool.

I really wanted to walk to the river which was .6 miles away. It took awhile, but I finally convinced the guys to come along. Jacob was really skeptical... but since everyone else was going he begrudgingly came along. I made the mistake of not changing my shoes and so I ended up walking in my flip flops... which was not all that great of an idea... but I made it.... so that was good, just with some slightly dusty feet.

On the way we saw some awesome local wildlife! Well.. we say some vultures. I didn't see any dead animals... but it was pretty hot so they may have been following us expecting that we would fall over.

We eventually made it to the river, which was totally deserted and also totally warm! The water had to have been at least like.... 80 degrees or so. Or at least 78. It was also really low as the drought had clearly had an effect on the water levels.

Jacob was clearly happy that we came all this way for a low, hot river.

I really liked the river, it was secluded and actually had some really nice scenery. According to Todd the area was actually used in the movie "Predators", which is pretty cool, and I could definitely see why as it was kind of an exotic type place.

We managed to find the only shady area and parked there for awhile and enjoyed the area and the water... well I did anyway.

Jacob particularly enjoyed the view from his rock down the river and so he borrowed my camera and took a ton of pictures. The one below is the artsiest of the bunch. Mainly since it is Sepia toned...

Off in the distance we saw some creatures rumbling down the hill. They were really far away, but I decided that I wanted to figure out what they were. So I headed off down the river..... it ended up being a lot farther than I thought it would be, thought that might have been because of the heat.

I eventually made it to the area ad found out that... it was a herd of goats!!! I am assuming that they were wild goats? But I am not sure... it just seemed really weird for a herd of goats to be roaming around the wilderness.

Anyway, I tried to sneak closer, but the sentry goat noticed me and then they all tore off away from me and back up the hill and away from the river.

Finally, we headed back to the pool and dove in for a few minutes to cool off from our walk back. We didn't have long since the pool closed at 5:30. We swam around for a little bit and then headed back up the trail.

The Watering Bowl

2011-08-20T12:29:00.000-07:00

So one day we got home from work, and there, chilling out on our deck was this squirrel. It was kind of a tiny little squirrel, and it was sprawled out on our deck, for some reason directly under the metal bar of the railing. It's little heart was just beating as hard as could be, and it just seemed the the heat had sort of had an effect.

A black metal railing... cooler than being in the Texas sun

We sat and watched him for awhile and he soon ran away. Since we are in a pretty horrible drought in the state of Texas, we figured that we wanted to try and help him. So we put a bowl of water out on our deck. We didn't really notice any difference in the behavior around our deck, but one day, after a long arduous day of work... ok it was normal :P, we got home and there was the squirrel, drinking out of the bowl!!

Mission Accomplished!

I asked Jacob what we should name it, and he came up with Skippy. I thought this was a little bit silly, but since I asked him, well.... I had to stick with the name. Also there is actually a Skippy the squirrel from animaniacs, and as I am writing this Jacob claims that he knew that... although at the time there was certainly no mention of that. Anyway, we stuck with the name Skippy and now it is always a happy occasion when Skippy visits us. He still sprawls out under the railing... but at least now he is hydrated better!

I am not entirely sure that every squirrel we see is Skippy.... but it is funner assuming that it is. We have at times put some nuts next to the water and they always disappear, but we aren't positive what is actually eating them. It could be ants, or maybe skippy is actually enjoying them.

After a while, we started to see more wildlife, so Skippy must have told his friends that our deck was safe (at least it is funner to think of it this way). Our first other visitor was a rabbit. I had the honor of naming it this time and went with Clover. I am not sure why.... it seems rabbity. Clover occasionally comes by with another rabbit, which is cool I suppose. They have never gotten to the bowl as far as I have seen, but maybe when we aren't around.

Clover eating... not clover

We have also seen more birds around our deck. Below there is a picture of a cardinal, and recently there have been these tiny little birds that have been bathing themselves in the water. I feel kind of bad for Skippy since his water bowl might get dirty because of that.... but he seems to not really care.

Jacob and I were the ones who started the whole thing, but even Andy got into it and when his mom was here she asked why we had a bowl on the deck and he was worried she had moved it and that Skippy wouldn't have it anymore. Also the last words he said to me before he left were "Take care of Skippy for us!"

Update: This morning I put out some nuts for Skippy. Soon he hopped up and grabbed them and then took them and buried them, then came back for more. Here is video of one of is trips. After he was all done he had a nice long drink, then rolled around with a stick.

Food in Austin

2011-08-17T18:24:00.000-07:00

So I am sure that all of you have been eagerly awaiting the post about the food in Austin. Well... perhaps not, but since there are so many amazing restaurants in Austin I figured I would delve into. Also the weekend of July 30 we went to Guerro's, which is Bill Clinton's favorite restaurant in Austin, and supposedly he always goes there when he comes to Austin, as well as Franklin BBQ, which is one of the best, if not the best BBQ places in all of Austin. Since it was pretty much a weekend of food I figured I would just go into all of the food places in Austin that I have been to. This means that there are going to be lots of pictures in this article. I contemplated breaking it up into different posts, but figured it would be better to just consolidate them into one.

Guerros
On Friday we decided that we would go see the bat bridge and so we could eat somewhere close to there. I had been wanting to go to Guerros for a long time, and since it was close I recommended it to people. For some reason, probably because no one else really has an opinion, we went there.

It was ok... certainly not amazing, and I think the only reason that Bill Clinton likes it so much is because he doesn't have to wait in line. We got there in separate groups, which to them meant that we weren't ready. I tried to put our name in early so that we could get a table... but.... they wouldn't let us until we were all there. I thought this was amazingly ridiculous and it pissed me off quite a bit. We ended up having to wait about 30 minutes until our group all arrived, and then... then they said the wait would be another 40 minutes!!! I mean... geez... so I asked if we could sit outside and the wait was less for that... So we got seated about an hour after we got there.... which meant that we would have to be quick to get to the bats.

Sadly, at Guerro's, quick does not exist. They were slooooooow.... and we finished dinner about 15 minutes before the bats were supposed to launch. Jesse and Trish headed off to try and see them, and they sort of made it. The rest of us had to wait for the slow process of paying the check to be completed. Also.. they don't split checks... so that was fun! :P

Anyway, the food was pretty decent, it wasn't great, and it certainly wasn't worth the trouble. Shown below is what I ordered, which is supposedly what Bill Clinton gets when he goes there. The tamale was ok, and so was the enchilada. I liked the taco pretty well, but the beans weren't really all that good.

Franklin BBQ
On Saturday no one wanted to get up early with me to go to Franklin Barbecue, so basically Saturday was just sort of a lazy day. I ended up reading and just resting up, which was nice. But Sunday, I convinced Aaron and Daniel to get up early with me and go. Franklin's is a pretty small place and they are only open from 11 - 1, well... at least officially. In reality they are open from 11 until they run out of food. So you have to get there early or you will miss it entirely.

Of course, you can also get there slightly too early. So we arrived at about 11:45 and we were the 15th, 16th, and 17th person in line. We were also almost the only peoeple standing in the sun. There were two people in front of us and one person behind us who were also in the sun. So had we gotten there a little bit later.... lol

The people in front of us

Anyway, we had to wile away the time as we stood in line so we basically just talked about random topics and we played some triva and soon... although not soon enough given that we were standing in the sun, the doors opened. The picture below was taken slightly before that and you can see the line stretching past the building. It actually wrapped around the building... so there were a lot of people. At it was 11 AM on a Sunday!!

The people behind us

Anyway, we got inside and soon we were at the counter, Franklin, the owner, is actually a cool guy and ... given the quality of his food, very skinny. He is the guy in the blue shirt on the right side of the picture below. He also did all of the serving, which was cool and he clearly has a lot of pride in his food.

Soon we ordered and got our food. I wanted to try as much as possible, so I ordered..... every kind of meat. I figured that I could use it as leftovers. We were also pretty lucky since we got a table. It was pretty annoying, people would sneak inside and steal tables when they weren't even close to being able to eat. Franklin said that he would find us a table if there wasn't one, which was really cool. Below is my very very full tray of stuff. You can easily see the sausage, but I also got... pulled pork and brisket and ribs... lol.. and coleslaw, and bourbon banana pie.... so... it was a lot of food.

OMG... so much food. (I didn't eat it all)

Since they deserve there own close ups, I have included pictures of the individual meats. The first one were the ribs... and ... they were amazing!! Easily the best ribs that I have every had, just so tender and fall off the bone and succulent and wonderful.

Just looking at this picture makes we want them

Next is the Brisket and the pulled pork. The Brisket was also amazing. I actually liked it a lot more when I reheated it, it was easily the best of the 4 meats as leftovers... it just held it's flavor really really well. THe pulled pork was ok, but.... very overshadowed by the first two.

The finally two items are the sausage and the bourbon banana pie. The sausage was pretty good, again overshadowed by the ribs and brisket, but the Pie was really really good. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect since it was mostly a BBQ/meat place, and the sides were pretty lackluster. But it was very good. I was pretty full at the time, so I shared it with Aaron and Daniel

As we left the place I snapped a picture of the line. It was still back to the end of the building.... This was an hour after the opened. So Franklin BBQ is getting a lot of people coming and waiting... and I have to say, it was very very worth it! The food was amazing.

The suckers who got there too late

Chuy's
~~One of my roommates favorite...~~ By far my roommate Andy's favorite restaurant in the entire world, Chuy's is located in Austin, and he managed to convince us to go 3 times before I got tired of it.

The food there is ok, nothing special and I don't really understand why he loves it so much. They serve a texmex style of food as the two pictures below show. One of the cool things about the second Chuy's that we went to was that it was the place where Jenna Bush got arrested for a DUI! So that was interesting... I tried to tell myself that I was sitting in the booth were it happened, especially since Andy was talking about underage drinking... but it just wasn't happening

Overall, the food is decent, but nothing special, and I don't really recommend this place if you are only in Austin for a few days... or really... I don't recommend it at all.

Mangia's

Mangia's is a local pizza place that comes highly recommended by locals. And the pizza is ok, Jacob and Kyle didn't really like it so I ended up getting to eat most of it. It was chicago style deep dish with the sauce on top... which I haven't had much, but I enjoyed it. I thought it was better as cold pizza though. :) (I am sure that those sentiments are not shared by many people).

Taco More
The only other place that I have extensive pictures of is Taco More, which is a very, very authentic mexican place. When Daniel and I went there, we were the only non-hispanic people there. And when we went a second time with people from work so that Guillermo could go, we were again the only non-hispanic people there. It was a little bit intimidating at first, particularly since in the evening there was only one guy who spole english. But we managed. I ordered two tacos as well as a Gringa de Pastor, which is basically a little quesadilla with martinated pork.

They also had an amazing salsa bar, so it was fun trying all the different types. There was one that was super hot. The second time we went, guillermo, who loves spicy food tried it and at first he just poured in on his taco and was like, oh yeah, this is probably a 7 or something. As time went by he kept revising his estimate, all the way up to 9, and soon was just barely dripping it on his tacos.

The second time I went I got a cubano sandwhich.. there was another name, but I can't recall it, and a breakfast taco. The sandwhich was excellent and very filling, and the breakfast taco was also good.

Jesse got crunchy quessidillas which are much bigger than the actual quesidillas for the same price, they looked pretty good.

Finally, for some reason, maybe because we had 8 people, they gave us dessert... on the house! That was amazing. They had some tres leches cake, which is cake soaked or made with 3 kinds of milk and then some jello stuff and some candy bars. Jacob got a candy bar...... I went with the cake. It was really really good. So I think I made the right choice. I can get a snickers any time :p.

Other Restaurants of note

Fabi and Rosi, which is a really fancy European styled place. I went there for a group intern dinner and it was great. The food was amazing and the dessert was excellent. It is a little expensive, but really really good and worth a visit.

Torchy's Tacos A local taco place, that has really good cheap tacos, not as authentic as Taco More, but still very good. I like the Fried avocado one and the Democrat. Todd says there are two camps, Taco Deli and Torchy's. After being to both places, I am very solidly in the Torchy's camp.

Freebird Burritos This is a local burrito place that is pretty good. I didn't think they were incredible, but the food was good. However, of note is the fact that they make a super monsterburrito... which is really huge. We went there for Nico's last lunch. He got one... he is pictured with it below..... He said that was a small one. There is no way that I could eat that, but he finished it with ease.

Rudy's Rudy's is probably the second best BBQ place that I have been too. But I didn't make it to salt lick, so I am pretty sure those places were better. Kyle went to both places and enjoyed Salt Lick more, so I trust him.

Lick it, Bite it, or Both This is a local cupcake place that I went to. They make really good cupcakes. They are flat tops, which means the frosting is sometimes a little over the top, but they were really good. I particularly liked the Peanut butter ones (3 at the bottom).

The Monument Cafe I already talked about this place, but this is best southern food in the area. It is a little far away, about a 25 minute drive, but the food was sooo good, and they have fried pie!

I am sure that I am leaving a place or two out.... and I certainly haven't been to all of the places that I want to go too here, but this is a pretty good primer.

6 Flags Trip

2011-08-08T21:17:00.000-07:00

More Backlog! But this one will be shortish... since there is really only so much that one can say about roller coasters.... especially given:

1) I have a limited knowledge of roller coasters and
2) We stood in a lot of lines.....

While roller coasters are exciting... line standing is .... not. So I will skip most of the line standing. Before we left Andy informed us that it was federal law that we could get water for free from the park. This was a very good think to know... especially since it was about 102 degrees outside.

This trip was set up through the Sports Committee, which I am proudly a member of. At times I felt like we were actually the most effective committee. I suppose the T-Shirt Committee did make t-shirts... but we had a lot more events than the social committee, and they were all pretty successful...

Anyway, the trip was set up and we got enough people to get the group rate which was about $25 off the price of a normal ticket, which was really great. I strongly recommend dragging lots of people to 6 flags with you if you want to go :P

We all met at the 6 flags parking lot at around 9 AM so that we could make it to the park kind of early. It was about an hour and 40 minutes drive, so it was a little long. The park opened at 10, I think we got there around 11:30 or 11:40. We were supposed to wait a bit and everyone would show up and we could decide from there what we were going to do. But we waited and... no one showed up.... so after about 20 minutes we decided that we would just head out and do our own thing.

There were 6 of us and we were a pretty good group. One of the most interesting things that we discovered was that Kyle absolutely loves Roller Coasters... he even knows manufacturers based on the type of beams used on rides and had a lot of data that.... while interesting... I had no idea to even think to look it up. So at a few points during the trip we would quiz him about rides and stuff in general. However.... my iPhone did know about some wooden coasters that caught on fire which he was unaware of... so at least I know that he learned something during our quizzing. :)

The first ride that we went on was Goliath, which is shown here at night, but I assure you, it looked exactly the same during the day! It was actually a pretty great ride and we zipped through the line, I guess we actually did get there early enough to miss some people.

Emboldened by our quick line we went to the next most popular ride, Superman! Below is a picture of it while we stood in line. It is hard to really tell how awesome this ride was from this picture, but the ride sits right next to a cliff so a lot of the time we would zoom super close to the cliff, it added a lot to the ride, and we ended up doing this ride again later in the day (as the last ride).

Kyle describes it thusly: (all of Kyles quotes blatently stolen from facebook)

This was definitely one of my favorite coasters i've been on. It really used that cliff to its advantage.

After this ride is was getting quite hot, and so we decided that we should try out a water ride, so we headed to the tube ride. When we got to the line, there were lots of people actually leaving the line... which we thought was really weird. But we soon discovered why... the line was super super slow.... this was easily the longest line that we waited in and it didn't seem worth it. By the time we got to the front we were all hot and ready to get soaked... sadly... it was not really all that turbulent of a ride... but Greg did get really really soaked... he also had the bag with all of our phones... :P luckily, they did not get wet. Below is a picture of some random people tubing....

After the tube ride we headed to the Rattler, which we had watched while standing in line for the tube ride. The Rattler was a wooden coaster and ... it rattles a lot while you ride it. According to Kyle this is the triple helix of the ride... I am not sure exactly what that means... but I enjoyed this ride quite a bit. Here is Kyle's description of the ride:

This had some cool features. You can see its first drop, which goes into a few turns then a triple helix. Then you can see the second drop which goes into more twists and turns.

I think a lot of other people didn't really as it was too rattly for some and ... I dunno... I can't remember it was too long ago. :P

We got in line for the Rattler at like...1 something maybe? And we thought we would be donefairly quickly... but the line took much longer than expected... this led to a rather grumpy and hungry group while standing in line.... we vowed that we would get lunch afterwards, and that is exactly what we did! $12 burgers and fries for the win!!! They weren't really good.... but I was starving so they tasted great.

After lunch, we headed to the Roadrunner Express, because it was close and we figured we probably wouldn't be back in this area again. The line for this was actually super short and the ride was pretty fun (I think that the short line helped my opinion). As you can see from the picture below... the riders are totally hyped!.... or not.

After this ride we ran into some of our fellow interns and talked about our day... they had done most of the rides they wanted to already, mainly by skipping the tube ride. We still had a couple left so we headed away and across the park to Poltergeist, which was... a crazy ride. We started by being launched off the pad at about... I dunno... lets say... 80 MPH! (it was fast....) Then we zoomed through all these twists are turns, still going super fast. Before you could think.. the ride was over... It was kind of amazing. This was unfortunately, the one ride with very little shade in the line, so should you ever go to the 6 flags near San Antonio... do this ride earlier in the day :P.

We were contemplating doing the tower drop, but we walked by and the line was super long. Miriah also didn't want to do this, which only meant that everyone tried talking her into it... this didn't really work, but she did agree to go on it.

Since the tower was packed, we went to .... the spinning top ride... or something similar. This was a super short ride and we just were spun around and in a pendulum... it was very disorienting, but pretty fun... I definitely was a little queasy for a while after we finished.

After this ride we went to the spinning coaster, where the cars actually spun as you sat in them. This was kind of a crazy ride and the wait was much longer than expected, but it was AC which was very nice.

We hit the superman ride again, and because Nico asked, the whirrly gig (spinning chairs) I was easily the oldest person on the ride who didn't have a kid... so.... that might have looked a little awkward :p.

And then we were done. We headed back after a successful trip to the theme park.

I would rank the rides that we went on:

1) Superman - This ride was great, used the cliff very well, was exciting and fast and teeth rattling and fast and turny... (Can you tell I know lots of roller coaster words?) Awesomeness Rating: 9.5/10 (I have no idea what a 10 would be)

2) Poltergeist - From beginning to end this ride just did not let up, you started super fast getting launched into the ride and barely had time to get oriented to flying around the track before the ride was over. Awesomeness Rating: 9/10

3) Goliath - This may have suffered a bit from being the first ride and thus less in my memory, but I enjoyed this ride a lot, I just liked the other two more :) Awesomeness Rating: 8.8/10

4) Roadrunner Express - This was helped immensely by the super short line. The ride may have not been as cool as the Rattler... but the line was much much better... which made the ride feel better to me. Awesomeness Rating: 7.51/10

5) Rattler - The quintesitional wooden Roller Coaster... you will get rattled.... but it had some really cool parts and dives and worked really well. Awesomeness Rating: 7.5/10

6) Spinning Cart Coaster - This one was short, but the ride itself was pretty fun, and the spinning cart was very interesting.... It lead to some suprises which was fun. Awesomeness Rating: 6/10

7) Spinning Top - The line was super short, which was great, and the ride was fun enough, the queasyness wasn't so great, but still a pretty fun ride. Awesomeness Rating: 4/10

8) Whirrlygig - I enjoyed this... kind of... but... yeah... Awesomeness Rating: 2.5/10

9) Tube ride (only because of the wait... the ride itself was fine... but not worth the 1.5-2 hour wait Awesomeness Rating: 1/10

Chambers' Family Reunion 2011

2011-08-04T20:40:00.000-07:00

So I continue to slowly slog through all the stuff that I need to blog about. This time, our story centers on the weekend of July 15th when my dad's side of the family had our reunion. We have reunions every two years and it is usually just my dad's immediate family, so his sister, brother, and parents. Since he and his siblings were all born on July 20th, but different years!, the reunions is usually close to that day.

This year the reunion was set near Glenwood Springs, CO at the Sunshine Ridge Guest House, which was a pretty amazing place. Here is the view from the porch, where many a nights were spent just chatting.

Since I am currently on an internship in Austin, TX, I wasn't able to spend the entire reunion there. The reunion actually started on Thursday, but I wasn't able to fly in until Friday night at about 11 PM. I was met by my parents and Conor, we then had about an hour long drive to get to the house, so we didn't get there until about midnight which, since I was an hour ahead was actually more like 1 AM for me.

Needless to say, everyone else was asleep. My Aunt Wanda was kind of awake, so I briefly said hi to here, but I was pretty tired from a day of working and then travel, so I passed out pretty quickly. As was customary I was sharing a room with Conor. For some reason he took the small bed, which meant that I got the bigger, King Sized bed. (I suspect this may have been partly his mom's doing.... but he claims it was because he likes sleeping by the window.)

Saturday, July 16

I actually woke up at like 8:30 the next morning and headed out. The morning was pretty slow, but I eventually saw everyone except Phil and Laurie, who were off hiking. I spent some quality time on the porch with Conor, who clearly seems happy to be talking to me.

One of the traditions of the Chambers Family Reunion is that we do a puzzle. This started back in... 1999 I think when the family embarked on the most epic puzzle ever, of Napoleon leading the battle at Waterloo. This puzzle is actually now glued and hanging in my Grandparents house somewhere.

This year the puzzle was provided by my cousin Erin. There was a slight twist on the puzzle in that it wasn't actually the picture on the box. It was related, but it was actually a picture of what someone on the box was seeing. Here, Erin and my uncle Jeff fit the last few pieces of the puzzle in.

Since the morning was kind of slow, Erin, Conor, and I decided that we would go into town and watch the last Harry Potter movie which had come out the day before. Erin brought Conor and I Quidditch goggles to get us in the mood. Here you see Conor modeling the goggles on his "Quidditch" broom.

Luckily, the movie was in Glenwood Springs, which was only like 10 minutes away from the guest house, so we got to the movie way far in advance... well... maybe like 40 minutes. So we decided to walk around Glenwood Springs for a little bit. It is very much a tourist town, but the scenery is great and the bridge over the river was nice. It was so crazy to see it so full of water, especially since Texas is.... in a really bad drought.

At the bridge we turned around and headed back to the movie theater. Stopping only to fix our goggles so that the blinding wind speeds from our ~~dash~~ ~~run~~ fast walk! wouldn't blind us before the movie. I realize it looks like my eye is closed in the picture below.... I swear that it isn't. :P

The movie was really good, I mean it obviously requires some knowledge of the first 7 movies and preferably the books. But they did a good job wrapping up the series.

****SPOILER*****
SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON'T WHAT HAPPENS IN THE MOVIE AND YOU WILL BE MAD IF I "RUIN" IT

I think that Conor's review of the movie sums it up best. Voldemort does Forever, finally! That is pretty succinct right there. There was a lot of discussion about what his favorite part of the movie was... sadly I seem to have forgotten that.

Amongst my friends there has been much grief over the epilogue in which the kids are shown as 18 or so years older and they have kids.... the epilogue is exactly the same in the movie. I do have to say Draco looks amazing as an older gentleman wizard... I can't really describe it, but they made him balding and a little chubby... lol... it is a very good look.

Anyway, I enjoyed the movie, I thought it was very well done, and other than the plot problem that I have with the book, which was also in the movie, I thought it was great.
**********END SPOILER ***********

So when we got back from the movie it was my mom and dad's night to make dinner. I said that I would help, so we made fajitas, which I am passably ok at making. My dad grilled up some steak and pork on the grill, while I cut and cooked the veggies. We then mixed them together. It was a pretty good meal... which I am sure that this image of the fajita fixings does not really convey, but rest assured, it was edible! For dessert we had homemade banana splits since Conor had never had one in his life! So clearly we had to fix that.

In addition to my dad's family, my moms sister who lives in Denver came out to visit. They were staying in Glenwood Springs and came out and had dinner with us. Then my cousin Kyle spent the night with us. Before they left we had a game of "baseball", really there were only 5 of us... so the offense scored a lot of runs... but it was fun. Sadly I damaged a few of the whiffle balls. Yes... I am that powerful!

(Or maybe we had the wrong bat.... but I am going with powerful)

Sunday, July 17

So Sunday was another pretty slow day. The main activity of the day was the Women's World Cup Final... unfortunately... the U.S. lost. It was a pretty good/frustrating game... and I wasn't very happy in the result, so I went and sat on the deck for a while and read. My grandpa came out and sat with me and we talked a little and each read our books... at least until it started raining on us, which was a signal to head inside.

Phil and Laurie were in charge of the dinner for the night and it was pretty amazing. It was a slow grilled pork with pasta... it was really really good. I was just glad that I had made dinner the night before and was not after them.

After dinner we had a peach-raspberry crunch or cobbler that Phil made and sat on the deck and just talked, mostly about my dad and his siblings childhoods and stories from them growing up. I think that this was probably my favorite moment of the reunion. It was just really nice sitting with my family and hearing all the stories. I am fairly sure that I have heard them before, but it was still really nice :).

Perhaps the most exciting thing from Sunday was the humongous storm that happened around 12:30 AM. It actually woke me up, which is rare, since I sleep pretty deeply. But there was thunder and lightning really close and a huge amount of rain. It was a pretty epic storm really and.... words just absolutely do not do it justice.

Monday, July 18th

So this was the day that I was to fly out, but my plane didn't leave until about 6:30 PM, so there was time in the day to do stuff. There were two hikes that were happening. The first one left at like... 7 or 8 AM and was hiking up a ridge where some firefighters died fighting a fire. (Typing that is seems like an obvious statement... however... it is best to clarify... ). The other hike was with my parents and my mom's sister and her two kids and left at a much more reasonable time. It also promised a more scenic final destination... Hanging Lake!

Based on my descriptions I bet it is easy to guess where I went... I went on the Hanging Lake Hike.

The scenery is this area of Colorado is really quite breathtaking. I mean there are huge cliffs and the river was raging due to the storm from last night.

Since Kyle is in the boy scouts he took the lead. It was pretty rugged going in the beginning. As you can clearly see we were basically making our own trail through the terrain before we got to the trail head. We are lucky we had a guide such as Kyle!

Once we got to the trail, it was basically a straight shot up the cliff. It was a pretty steep climb, which meant a lot of stops on the way up. Here is one stop

Here we are underway again.

We eventually made it up the 1.25 mile hike and to hanging lake, which was really pretty. The lake itself was really clear and the waterfall was just gorgeous.

There was a log that led out to the middle of the lake, Kyle stripped his shoes off and hiked out to the middle. Here he is about to begin the hike out to the middle. Thos shows both the clarity of the water in the lake as well as another great shot of the falls.

A little ways up from the lake was the Spouting Rock... I was unclear about what this was going to be, but I decided to check it out to see exactly what it was, and I am super glad that I did. Here is a brief video showing it. It is called Spouting Rock, since the water seems to come right out of the rock, which can be seen in the video.

Here is a static picture that also shows it, as well as some people in the background that provides some scale as to how impressive this thing actually was.

Here is a picture of my dad and me behind the water fall. I am not sure exactly why he has a cowboy hat, seeing as he is from Oregon, but he loves that hat now (he had it for a week, but I swear he wore it whenever he could at the reunion)

Here is my dad and my Aunt Margo (mom's sister) behind the waterfall.

After checking out the spoutring rock we headed back to the lake where my mom and cousins were waiting. We then headed down the trail, which was... much quicker than the trek up it. We were soon at the bottom, and my mom had to say good bye to my cousins as they were headed home. Ok.. so technically we all said good bye... but my mom pretended to cry and I got it a picture of it... :P

We headed back to the house and we ended up watching some of the videos from old reunions, which was much funner than I was expecting it to be. It was really interesting/scary to see how much we have changed since we started doing these in 1997. It was so engrossing that I almost left late to catch my flight. We also had to scramble to take the group picture... and I guess it came out a bit blurry...

So on the way to the airport it was very stormy, like lightning and thunder all around us, so I was a little worried that my plane was going to be delayed. This wouldn't normally be a big deal, but I was scheduled to give my presentation on Tuesday, which was the next day, so my schedule was a little tight.

However.... it should be fine right? I had a few hours delay in Denver before my flight to Austin, so I had some leeway. Oh... How wrong I was!

So I was sitting in the terminal and my Dad, who dropped me off and was waiting in the cafe called and told me that a limo driver there said that if the plane can't land they just send it back to Denver... so that was my flight that might not land! The weather was a little rainy... but I thought they might be able to land...

Then the storm got worse and it was near white out conditions outside and it was hailing super hard and the wind was blowing straight at the terminal.. How the Aspen Airport is a little small but what happened next was sooo amazing that I don't think I will ever see anything like it again.

Water soon began to seep under the doors of the terminal. Here it is a few seconds after that started.

The flood continued to spread and soon it was taking over more and more of the terminal.

It even got all the way to the security checkpoint where they were using the little containers that we put stuff in to shovel water... it didn't work. We were soon evacuated and the entire airport was closed down.... I was stuck.

I called United immediately, but there was nothing to be done, I was stuck in Aspen for the night. I was really disappointed since I wanted to give my talk and I felt like I was letting my boss down. Luckily it worked out and I was able to give it Wednesday, and it went quite well... so my grand flooding adventure didn't hurt that much!

I took off the next morning and headed back home . I make it back to Austin at around 4 and headed homa nd rested up/pracriced sins I want to make syre that I do something correct.

Anyway, that is the famly reunion in a not so small nutshell!

Spelunking! and Kayaking!

2011-07-26T19:18:00.000-07:00

So it has been forever since this actually happened, but I blame... me being busy... so that is totally a valid excuse. This actually happened way back on the 9th of July. Man that doesn't seem like it should be so long ago.... but it is.

Saturday, July 9th
Anyway, Daniel, Jacob, and I went to Inner Space Caverns, which is this cave system that is about 30 minutes north of Austin. There are two tour types and we wanted to do the adventure tour which was a little but longer and goes into a super secret room..... ok, not really. Sadly, we got there too late and all the tickets for that tour were sold out.

So we did the simpler tour. Which was a little shorter but as it was the only one available, so we got our tickets and had a while to wait, so we walked around. The first thing we did was look at the store where I found a cool hat to where for our journey!

It was a little small for me, but I figured that small protection was better than nothing. We then wondered outside and found the place where you got mine for precious gems. If you bought this special bag you could dump it in one of these things and run water through it. The "precious" gems would then be revealed to you. We had Jacob pose as if he was doing it.... pretty realistic right?

Pretty soon our tour was about to start. So we headed to the little tram that would take us into the cave. We were pretty jam packed into in, and then we were off! Hitting speeds of 3 MPH!

At the bottom of our descent we all trucked out into the rarely explored cavern. Our first discovery was a primitive sidewalk built into the save floor. It made exploring much easier..... ok, so we weren't exactly roughing it. We were walking on a paved surface and there were lights built through out the cave system.... but there were still some cool sights!

First our guide, John, who was really awesome and if you ever go there you should definitely try to get him as your guide!, explained the difference between stalactites and stalagmites. Then we saw the soda straw stalactites. They are all hallow, and hanging from the ceiling... the hallow part leads to them being called soda straw... in case it wasn't obvious. :P

Next John told us that we couldn't kill the rocks or we could kill them. This didn't make much sense. I am pretty sure that he said more, but I was in the back of the group taking pictures and so I missed it. But we walked by a rock that we could touch and we all... touched it. Yay! I was going to take a picture of myself touching it. But my camera malfunctioned and I ended up getting a picture of my foot, but it sure is a good looking foot! (I will spare you guys the picture however :) )

We then ran into a few bats that were sleeping and managed to sleep through every single person taking a picture of them. Jacob thought that they might be dead and just put there so we could take pictures.... and I will admit that they certain didn't move and looked kind of like they might be dead. But I asked John and he assured me they were real.

The type of bat is the Easter Popistrelle.

The next sight that we saw was this weird kind of stalactite that looked sort of like bacon or something. It was hanging down in strips from the ceiling. I had never seen anything like it.

Next we headed into the area called the cathedral, which was this big open area that kind of echoed a little bit. This room was the first one that was discovered. Back in... some year, they were trying to build I-35, which was supposed to go straight over where the caverns were. However, the drill bits kept breaking. Eventually, the sent the smallest person on the team down the hole. He didn't really have much light, and you can kind of see in the picture below that the hole was. Basically.... not very big.

When he got down there. He looked around and he didn't have much light and he saw this big huge rock formation. He thought it was a bear. So he went scrambling back up the hole to the surface, terrified that the bear was gonna eat him. I cannot imagine how much crap he got when they found out that was actually a piece of rock. Well.... a giant rock anyway. It really looked quite cool when it wasn't pitch black.

Here is my first attempt to blind Daniel and Jacob by taking a picture of them in the cave. Luckily for them they were looking away and so the flash harmlessly bounced off the walls.

The next cool thing we saw was another hole in the ceiling. This one had a ladder and John explained to us that this was where the explorers had come down and also where they had built a method to circulate the air so that they would always have fresh air. I forget exactly what it was though....

The last stop on the tour was this little lake deep in the depths of the caverns. I believe that it is called Moon Lake.... since it is kind of shaped like a crescent. At least when there is lots of water. Sadly.... this was not one of those times. There was still a little bit of water, but not really as much as there normally is... according to John. Anyway, the cavern area around it and the lake was still a pretty sight, and supposedly some weddings have taken place in this area.

And with that we headed back through the cavern. The whole tour was about an hour and 40 minutes or so, which was a little longer than it was supposed to be, but it was pretty cool. I only touched on a few of the things... mostly what I remembered, but if you want to see all of my pictures for this trip, you can view them here!

Sunday, July 1oth
One the intern activities that had been set up was kayaking at Zilker park, but we missed it due to out spelunking expedition. One of the reasons we went spelunking on Saturday was because Jesse wanted to go kayaking and would be able to do it on Sunday. So we decided to wait and all go together.

I don't actually have any pictures from the kayaking itself, since I didn't want to risk my phone or my camera. I really wish I had taken one of them... probably my camera.

Anyway, Jacob, Kyle, and I got there much early, so we had to wait til Jesse, Daniel, and Todd showed up. It was kind of boring, so Jacob found these tiny train tracks and followed them.

Eventually, a little train came by. I am not sure what this train is for... since I don't think there is really a lot in Zilker park to see, but it was kind of funny to watch. For some reason Jacob really loved it.

While we were waiting a storm blew in and we could hear thunder and see lightning, which was kind of an ominous start. We were belted by huge drops of rain and eventually sought shelter in a little picnic area. (Only after Kyle informed us that hiding under a tree in a thunderstorm would be a bad idea :P)

Eventually the rain stopped and everyone showed up, so we headed to the kayak rental place and checked out some kayaks. Here is Jacob checking the water to make sure it is safe.

We had 3 two person kayaks. Jacob and Kyle, Jesse and Daniel, and Todd and me. We Kayaked for about an hour and our journey went out the little creek and all the way down the river/lake thing (supposedly a lake.... but man it didn't seem like one) until we reached the bat bridge. I am not sure how far we kayaked... but I will say.... 1.5 miles round trip maybe? I don't know.

One cool thing that we saw was this family of ducks, basically a mom and a lot of little ducklings swimming behind her. We also saw a nutria just chilling in the shallows comping on a reed and a lot of turtles diving away from our paddles.

I thought when we got to the bat bridge that we might be able to see them, but the bridge is designed... or maybe it just is this way and the bats moved in... but there are basically a lot of deep thin lines cut into the concrete. So the bats are all up in those lines and you can't even see them when you paddle underneath. Luckily, the bats weren't active so we did not get guanoed on... which would have been a little gross!

At the bridge we turned around and headed back. The trip back was much much harder as I was already tired and cramped up from my seat in the kayak. But we eventually made it, without any problems.

All in all it was another successful weekend in Austin!

Celebrating Independence with .... a waterpark!

2011-07-08T21:02:00.000-07:00

For the Fourth of July we got Monday AND Tuesday off of work, which meant that we had a lot of time to do stuff. Our main plan was to go to Schlitterbahn on Tuesday. We figured that while most people would have Monday the 4th off, they probably wouldn't have Tuesday off and we would have free reign over the park. It was a pretty genius plan! But that is a tale for later down in this post.

Saturday, July 2nd
Friday was pretty slow. Jacob and Kyle were a little bit hermity and didn't want to do anything. Kyle appeared to want to do something, and even said as much, but then when I tried to find something that he actually wanted to do.... I couldn't. I was sort of at a loss of what to do. But I wanted to do something. So I decided that I was going to take a trip to Fry's and then head to The Monument Cafe, which was about 30 minutes away. This place had been recommended to me by a guy who works in my group.

Side Note: If you want food recommendations ask as many people as you can. So far I have asked about five different people (I suppose 6 if you include Andy's recommendation of as much Chuy's as possible). All of their responses have been different and thus my list of places I want to eat has grown quite a bit.

Anyway, Owen, the guy who recommended this place, is from Alabama and so I believe he has a pretty good grasp on exactly what good Southern Comfort food is. He said that this was the only place in the Austin area that he would even consider going back to for chicken fried chicken and chicken fried steak. Basically, that sounded like a place that I had to go to. So I invited Daniel, another intern in my group, and we headed off. He was kind of surprised that my roommates didn't want to come... so I thought that might be a little bit awkward, but luckily it was fine.

It helped that the food was... absolutely amazing. I am not sure if this is what food is like in the southern part of the US, but if it is I certainly understand why they have such bad obesity rates.

I got a chicken fried chicken plate, and got my choice of about a zillion sides(16) and chose Fried Okra, Mashed Potatoes, and Potato Salad. I will admit that the potato salad was probably not the best choice but.... I lost track of the sides and that was the only one that I remembered.

I was really really full but..... on the menu was Fried Strawberry Pie and there was absolutely no way that I could pass that up. I mean look at it!So yeah, if any of you are ever in the Austin area, I strongly recommend The Monument Cafe.

Sunday, July 3rd
As it seems like our new tradition is, we decided to go for a hike. Last weeks hike was pretty successful and so we figured that we should do it again. Ok... actually, it was something that was free and something that my roommates kind of wanted to do, so we did it. I sort of made them choose the place since I was frustrated that they never made any choices. So they picked McKinney Falls State Park, which is renowned all over the.... state? for it's falls.

This time Daniel and one of his roommates, Robby, came along, so it was a full ride. It was about a 30 minute drive to the park and then $5 per person to get it... which was a lot more than I was expecting.

The park ranger warned us that the river was a little low due to the drought but that we could swim in the river if we wanted to. None of us brought swimming gear though.... but we headed out for the Falls trail.

We almost immediately came across a really nice looking swimming pool and I really wished that I had brought my trunks.

And of course, feeding into the pool was the lower falls, shown in all the powerful uh.... glory in the picture below. We had to be really careful crossing it as we could have been swept away!

After that slight disappointment and me running the "Boy that sure is a powerful waterfall" line into the ground, we found the trail head and started off. The trail was basically a loop, and it started off with the ruins of the Grist mill... which... had something to do with grist? I am not positive, and I am too lazy to look it .... oh fine! It is a place that turns grain into flour.

Just down from that we found a little path to a little secluded part of the river. Jacob did he best effort to run on water and made it to the other side of the river.

We found our way back to the trail and headed out. There was definitely a lot less exploring on this trail than on Bull Creek, but mainly because he sort of had the whole dry creek bed to walk on. We did explore a little bit and even found a wild blueberry bush. The berries were ok, certainly not sweet at all, but edible, and a week later I am still not sick.

Jacob has a distinct hatred of using maps and GPS as you can see from his grimace of hate as he looks at my phone which Kyle is using to verify exactly where we are on the trail.

This trail had a lot of different plants and regions of vegetation on it. One example was the cactus, which only occurred on the first part of the trail and as you can see had some buds... or ... something. There was also some regions that seemed like forest and some that were more marshy. It was an interesting hike.

While this trail was not nearly as excited we made pretty good time and were some back to the trail head where the ruins of the homestead home were there. The place had been gutted by a fire and was really fairly small, but it seemed pretty nice for an old home.

After our hike, we thought that the upper falls might be more powerful and waterfall like... we were... mistaken.

We did a bit of exploring and everyone else climbed out into the rocks in the middle of the river. which was pretty easy to get back from.

Daniel however.... decided to be just a little bit more adventurous and leaped down onto a rock in the middle of a swimming hole by the upper falls. He then became stuck and we spent the next 14 minutes or so analyzing how to get him up before finally just pulling him up. It was kind of a ridiculous scene and inspired the attention of a couple of girls, who I believe filmed the whole thing.

After the rescue we headed home for the day. This hike wasn't quite as fun, but it was still a pretty good adventure.

Monday, July 4th
Sadly in Texas fireworks are completely banned, which meant that most of the events for the fourth were cancelled. There were supposedly a few fireworks shows, but they were kind of far away and I didn't want to drive all that way and have it be super packed. I was a little sad that I didn't get to watch fireworks, but I suppose it wasn't that bad.

Kyle, Jacob, and I went to the intern BBQ that was held at the pool at our Apartment complex. It was actually a really good crowd and was mostly just a bunch of interns hanging out, grilling burgers and swimming. It was pretty low key, but was fun as well.

Other than the BBQ the most exciting thing that we did was to go shopping .... not quite exciting enough to talk about.

Tuesday, July 5th
So as I mentioned, our main plan was to go to Schlitterbahn, which is a water park that is about an hour south of Austin. We figured that Tuesday would be a good day to go and that the park wouldn't be very crowded. In some respects we were right... however.... it was still packed. So I am not sure that it really made much of a difference. I wasn't brave enough to take my phone or camera on any of the rides, but luckily I was able to create some mock ups that showed what we did.

We started at the old park, which was nicely shaded and had some slides and tube rides. They weren't as exciting or cool as the new rides that have been built recently, but the park itself was much nicer and they used the river very effectively. Even emptying a few rides out into it. We spent the first part of the day there.

Probably one of the coolest rides was the speed slide, where we got going up to maybe 30 MPH going down it. It was so fast that I just had to close my eyes on the way down, Kyle managed to scrape up his elbows trying to slow himself down, but here he his showing how best to hold your elbows to avoid that sort of thing.

The second part of the day, which was the majority, (2-8 PM) was spent in the new park, where all of the really cool tube rides were. This was were the crowd made it hard. I think that we spent probably about....3.5 hours just waiting in line, which was a lot, and kind of dampened the day. The first big ride that we tried was the Wolfpack... which I strongly advise not to take unless the line is really really low. It is sort of slow and windy and just not very fun. We stood in line for like.... 2 hours for it. I was very very disappointed in it.

However, the other rides were amazing! The master blaster was great and is sort of like a roller coaster only in water. We were carried up and around and down all the while being splashed and soaked. You had to be careful to not let your butt drag too low or it would sort of bounced as your swept around.

As you can see from the below pictures. We had a really awesome time!

Particularly Daniel.... doesn't he just look so enthused!

The other awesome ride was The Dragons Revenge. I actually think this was the one wait that I enjoyed in the new park... well partly enjoyed. The split the wait up, where you first waited at the bottom of the hill to get a tube and then walked up the hill with the tube expecting to get to use it... only to be very disappointed and have to wait in another line. But at least the top line was interesting and there was lots of water. The ride was also pretty awesome. A lot like Master Blaster, with some uphill and very roller coaster like. There was supposed to be a spinning tunnel and a dragon projected onto a wall of water. Sadly, that was broken.

After that the only thing that remained was for Jacob to try the surfing, which he did pretty ably

Rating the rides I would say:
Master Blaster
Dragons Revenge
Dark Night
Hillside Tube Ride
Speed Slide
Rapid River Tube ride
random slide that I don't remember the name of
Tram between the parks
Drive from Austin to the park
DEAD LAST: Wolfpack!

And that was the weekend, it was long and fun, and also sort of hurt my work week, which was short and I had trouble focusing on it!

Exploring Austin, Part 1

2011-06-26T14:44:00.000-07:00

So I have now been in Texas for about 2 weeks and have been doing a little bit of exploring and doing things. Last weekend was mostly recuperation for me as I basically did not have a break for 2 weeks. I had to finish my school stuff and pack and then I drove for 4 days and then I got to work for a week. So pretty much I was very tired. The first day I basically just chilled, and I got an oil change and went grocery shopping. Basically it was really nice to just not do much. I also looked up things to do in Austin. One of the things that was listed was that the Orion Capsule from NASA was visiting and also there was supposed to be a free IMAX showing. But.... we were too late :P lol. But the capsule was still cool. This is supposed to be the replacement for the space shuttle.... of course, it isn't going to be able to be launched until about 2016 or so. I am not sure that I really agree with the policy, but it was cool to see the capsule.

And ... that was pretty much the excitement of my first weekend. It wasn't really a whole lot, but I really needed to rest up. This weekend contained many more activities.

The first activity on Saturday was to go to an Alamo drafthouse and watch Cars 2, which Kyle, one of my roommates was really excited about. It might not have been my first choice, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought that I would. It was pretty clever and it was sort of like a Bond movie... only.... well with cars as the main characters. :p

The Alamo Drafthouse is really cool. It is like a normal theater only you can order food and beverages, such as beer and wine while you watch the movie. They also have a very strict policy about Cell Phones and if you are caught using one then they have the right to kick you out of the theater. They also do events like sing alongs or Pancake theater, where comedians do a sort of MST 3K type thing for a really bad movie.

After the movie was over we headed back to the apartment to get our swimming stuff and then we headed down ot Barton Springs Pool, which is an aquifer fed pool that is really close to downtown Austin. The pool was really awesome. I would say that the temperature of the water was probably around 65 degrees, and compared to the 100 degree weather it was kind of shocking to get into. I had to just dive in or else I am not sure that I would have been able to really stay in.

Here is a picture from our spot in the shade. It sort of shows off the pool.

This is a picture from the end of the pool, near the dam that creates it. There were not many people there as it was a bit deeper. In the majority of the pool you could stand up in it, and it was probably about 5 feet in depth on average.
Here is a picture from the other end of the pool where it is much shallower and sort of has a beach if you don't want to use the stairs that they have created on the side of the pool.
The creek that feeds into the pool was very dried up, so I am not sure if the pool is going to get lower as the summer goes on, but this is a picture of that creek. It doesn't really show off the dryness, but it is! I swear it!

If you would like to see all of the pictures from Barton Springs Pool you can follow this link:
Barton Springs Pool.

After wards we went to Chuy's which was vaguely famous, since it was the restaurant where Jenna Bush was caught drinking when she was underage. After eating there I can see how she got away with it. One of my roommates, who is 21, ordered a margarita, but they didn't card him. I guess he looks older than 21? lol... not really.

Anyway, I wanted to go to the Bat Bridge to watch the bats fly out at dusk, but we finished dinner slightly too late to be able to see it, but we drove by, so now I know where it is... I guess that helps? We also drove through downtown, and it was really pretty. All of the buildings were lit up and the capital building was in the middle of it. I definitely want to go back and check that out. Then we headed home for the day.

Today Kyle, Jacob, and I went out for a hike. We choose a trail that was very very close. Actually, just at the bottom of the hill near our apartment.... but we drove. :) Which actually turned out to be a very good choice, since walking up our hill after our hike would have been much too difficult.

The trail was called the Bull Creek trail and in a couple of places it crossed the creek, which made it pretty difficult since we had for..... oh wait, no we didn't, we are in a drought! This is the "creek".

We ended up walking down the dry creek bed for a while, then suddenly.... a fire hydrant! In the middle of the river. I can't figure out exactly what it was for. Considering how dry the river bed was.... I am guessing that it was to fill up the river. Someone should definitely turn it on.

Eventually after walking down the trail a bit more, we come upon some actually water. It was very still and wasn't moving much... but it was water. Jacob was unimpressed.

I think that this area would be really fun if there was more water. There was a rope swing further down the trail that would have been really fun if there had been an actual swimming hole there. Instead there was a pitiful little pool that was full of rocks.

There were a lot of trails that led up the ridge and we scrambled up one, but we quickly got to a point where we could go no further. So we slowly backed ourselves down and kept going down the trail.

We ran into a random guy and he tried to tell us there was a trail that led to the top of the ridge and pointed us to a trail.... I stared at it and could easily see that it ended about 7 feet away at a fence, but the dude insisted and when I just stood there, he ran up and showed us how to get around the fence. We decided to not go that way.

If there wasn't a drought I think that this area would be really amazing, but as it is, the river was dry and it was very hot. So we headed back to the car before we collapsed due to the heat.

For all of the Hike pictures go here.

We then went to the store and got some stuff for a BBQ, and eventually headed down to our pool. It was packed as there was a party going on, but we were able to squat at a grill and make some burgers, which was a good ending to a busy weekend.

Go... Southeast! wait... that doesn't sound right?

2011-06-22T18:59:00.000-07:00

As some of you may know, this summer I have an internship in Texas. Since I had heard that there is very little public transportation in Austin, I decided that I should drive. I am not quite sure that was the correct decision, since it was a long, long drive. About 2000 miles, which took about 36 hours over 4 days. I had contemplated doing it in 3, but I am glad that I didn't, since that would have been way too many hours per day, and I was already tired when I ended on most days.

So I left on Thursday and after bidding adieu to Sprinkles... who seemed... slightly ambivalent about me leaving, I headed out. I always forget how absolutely boring much of Eastern Oregon is.... here is an example. In fact the most interesting thing about this picture may be the bugs splattered on my windshield.

At the end of the first day I pulled into Boise, Idaho. It was a pretty good 9 hours. I actually contemplated going farther.... but I sort of had to do a drug test for my internship, and it was either stop at Boise and do it on my way to Texas, or drive up to Portland the day before I left... so Boise it was.

I woke up early Friday and headed to the drug testing place. I tried to drink a lot of water before I went... but.... it wasn't enough. So I ended up having to sit in the drug testing facility drinking water.... for about an hour. That was annoying.... but I finally got it out of the way. Then about five minutes down the road, I was forced to stop at a rest area.... as I once again would have been able to take the drug test. I ended up having to stop several times in the next 3 hours, so that was fun :).... although it did diminish my travel time.

By the end of Friday I had made it to Green River, Utah which is kind of like an oasis in the middle of the Utah desert, but at least the barren landscape provides for nice sunsets.

The next day I got up bright and early and headed out. It resulted in lots of empty roads, but the landscape was very pretty, so it made the drive a lot better.

Early in the morning, probably around 10 or so, my car passed the 200,000 mile mark. I took a picture to commemorate the milestone. On a random side note, my car did very well. I was a little worried about the whole trip and so I was very careful about using the AC too much and spent a fair amount of time with the window down.

After my mileage milestone, I then encountered a first for me. I was slowed by a cattle crossing in Northwest New Mexico.... which was interesting. I got flagged down by a cowgirl, then all of a sudden lots and lots of cows rumbled across the road and just sort of stopped in the middle. Finally they got organized by the uh... cowboys and cowgirls... cowpeople? lol... that doesn't sound right, but anyway, they were soon out of the way and I was back on my way across New Mexico.
I couldn't really get a good picture of it, but the Arizona fires caused the sky to be hazy and the smell of smoke to linger in the air for almost all of the day as I drove across the state. About halfway through I realized that my arm was pretty warm and the sun was beating down on it, so I figured that I needed to put some sunscreen on... but... it was too late! I got burned just driving in my car! :p Luckily... despite what it looks like, it didn't hurt much.

The third day ended in Clovis, NM which is right on the border of Texas and that meant that the last day was basically going to be nothing but Texas! Unfortunately for my entertainment.... there is even less going on in Northern Texas than Eastern Oregon!

Well that is not really that true, there are loads and loads of Windmills (The electric generating kind). I swear that there must have been something like.... hmm... 745... but that is just a rough estimate.

So my last stop before Austin to fill up my car and get lunch was in Sweetwater, which must have been ironically named, because I did not see any water, and certainly nothing that could be considered sweetwater, whatever that is... (sugar water?)

I arrived in Austin at around 4 PM or so.... I am in a pretty nice complex. I am in a 2 bedroom apartment with 3 other interns, but it is nicely furnished. So that is a perk, and the price is very good since the place that I am working at is picking up half of my portion of the rent.

Anyway, here is a picture of my bedroom, mine is the not messed up bed.

Here are a few pictures from my desk at work... I got a window seat!

Which means that I get to daydream and stare out the window, and also occasionally get to see window washers or birds flying around, which is also a nice distraction.

Finally, here is a short video tour of the apartment.

KEC Krew Game Report

2011-04-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

Teamwork and offensive rebounds helps KEC Krew destroy Believe

By Duc Le, KEC Krew Beat Reporter

It’s been a nice day, the weather has been really good as the sun was shining, and the sky couldn’t be bluer. And here we are, in the basketball courts of Timberhill Athletic Center, watching a historic KEC Krew basketball game. Yes, you read it right, today marks the establishment of this KEC Krew game report, funded with 3 bottles of beer and 2 buritos, thanks to the generosity of Bill Gates. Today we are wearing red, and the other team is wearing white.

It’s been two minutes since the game started, and Alan Fern had already scored 4 points, as he usually does, dominating the glass and towering over his opponents. Following him are David and Jun, who combine to score 3 more points. What an amazing beginning for the team in red.

The scoring of both teams slow and at the 7 minute mark the score is 9-2. The Krew is doing really well in this game, particularly on the defensive end of the court. One of our opponents dribbled around, trying to drive to the basket. He was met by a wall of defenders and had to pull back and throw up a shot. The posture, the angle, the momentum – everything was right about the shot. The only thing that was wrong is that it missed the basket. Jun grabbed the rebound and streaks down the court Instead of shooting, he passes it to Chris, who was cutting down the middle of the lane. Chris was fouled shooting and made one of two free throws. Pretty good job Chris!

Later in the first half the other team had the ball. They tried to pass the ball around to scatter KEC Krew’s “concrete” defensive system. After a while, one guy tried to shoot, but was cut short by an amazing block by David. They were able to retain possession of the ball and one guy grabs the ball, drives down the lane and tosses up a desperation shot. The ball drops right into the basket. What a shot! It was really nice effort. But, that was a travelling foul, and the shot was negated, which frustrated the team even more.

The KEC Krew is doing really well. Jun has the ball, drives towards the basket and pretends to shoot but actually passes it to David. With all his Polish pride, David took the ball and nicely places it into the basket without shedding any sweat.

The dominance continues and later on offense, Eric was holding the ball. He fakes a shot and then throws a bounce pass to Jeremy, who turns around and quickly passes the ball to Rob. With all the experience and confidence of a CGE president, Rob stands calmly at the 3 point line and, slowly, he takes a 3 pointer. The ball swished through the net. What a shot.

As we were on fire, the other team began to get really physical. In one sequence Chris was pushed onto his back chasing after the ball and Rob was crawling on the court and trying to pull the ball from the other team. They eventually got the ball and Jeremy was forced to foul into prevent a fast break.

With 23 seconds left in the first half, a furious combination happened with the ball whipping from Eric to Alan to Jun and resulting in 2 points and a five point lead, 25-20, for the Krew. Unfortunately, a the other team came down quickly and threw up a 3 that banked it as time expired, leaving the halftime score 25-23

In the second half, the defense got much better, particularly in the early minutes as the Krew got several steals and forced many poor shots. On the offensive end, Alan’s size began to become a factor, garnering many offensive rebounds, resulting in easy put backs or more offensive opportunities. With the defensive intensity picking up, this led to easy points. With 7 minutes gone in the half, Rob blocked a shot and several plays later Jun followed suit. These blocks led to easy run outs and lay-ups for the Krew.

The other team seemed confused about how to attack the zone, and they were just passing the ball around a lot. The ball was finally thrown into the block, but Alan was waiting. He stood like the greatwall in front of him and the guy in white could do nothing but turn the ball over. Nice defense, Alan.

While the shooting continued to be streaky, the defense continued to be stingy. Eric stole the ball from their point guard and streaked towards the basket, attempting a lay-up, which missed. He was able to get the rebound, but missed the putback. Alan grabbed the miss, and again missed. This was kind of unlucky but OK. We are doing so well today.

Jeremy is on fire today. Besides being a really good defender, he is really active in the center of the court. Once in a while, he grabs the ball and takes a shot and gets a three point easily.

With two minutes left in the game, we are up by 20, but the boys in white are coming back. They hit two 3 pointers in a row, but not a problem. Jeremy kills their enthusiasm by softly putting the ball in the basket. Then Jun takes over, scoring 5 quick points, giving the boys in white no hope for revenge.

Final score: 66-43. Crazy game today, The crowd here at Timberhill Athletic center is on their feet and I have never heard it this loud before. They are chanting for their heroes. This is a day that will not soon be forgotten!

Beer Update!

2010-12-16T20:58:00.000-08:00

Just a quick beer update:

The first thing is that we had a very active fermentation of our wheat beer, which resulted in some yeast in our airlock, as can be seen in the following two pictures. This happened on Sunday, or at least that is when I noticed it.

For the last week I have been shaking the bottles of our brown to try and get it carbonated and so today I tried our beer. As the picture below shows, our beer is no longer flat! I have been shaking it up everyday for the past week and today I tried it.. and... bam! Overflowing beer! lol... That can be seen in the last picture.

Flat Beer and Dry Malt

2010-12-11T13:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we made our third batch of beer, as well as did a long awaited taste test of our second batch, which was a brown.

Sadly, it seems like we did not quite get the process totally down, and we aren't naturals as we thought after our first batch that turned out amazing. So the beer itself tastes pretty good, however, it is kind of rare that we get a bottle that actually has good carbonation. It seems like most of the bottles we have tried have ended up flat, which was disappointing. So I have begun the process of shaking bottles every day to hopefully agitate the yeast and get a little bit of carbonation. It is like my own version of the shake weight.... only slightly less suggestive. :p

For our third brew we decided to make a wheat. Mainly because Eric wanted to try a beer that used only one kind of malt. This way, we will know how the malt affects the beer and thus will be able to make our own recipies. I am skeptical of this, but wheat beer is fine with me, so I went along with it.

Mainly I am skeptical because there are so many different variables in the recipies, sice as different kinds of yeast and different kinds or hops and then the extract, so I am not sure that we will be able to tell... but its a nice thought.

For this brew, we had a guest brewer, Rob Hess. We told him about our brewing after one of our basketball games and he was pretty interested and wanted to see what it took, so we invited him to brew with us, and see how easy it was.

As always we started slowly, we tried our beer and cleaned the stuff and then put the malt on the burner. Unfortunately, we forgot to .... actually turn the burner on. But once we got that going, everything went well.

This beer is much lighter than what we have made in the first two brews. We can even see the bottom of the pot!

The beer eventually darkened up as it got hotter and closer to boiling.

We took the malt out and then brought it back to a boil. And then it was time to add the extract. Unlike the last two beers that we made, this recipe called for a dry malt extract, which wasn't quite as fun as the syrupy extract, but it was certainly interesting.

It also made the beer really foamy....

The rest of the process was pretty similar and hopefully it will turn out well. Rob seemed to enjoy the process and said he made get a kit of his own. So more beer makers! Woo hoo... we are slowly making the world a beerier place!

Sheng's Game 9 Review

2010-12-10T12:02:00.000-08:00

Since our brewery has taken off we have been able to bring it a beat writer to follow our awesome basketball team, and also to practice his written english.

His review of our latest game is below: (Note the pictures are from a previous game)

************************************************************************************

It was a wonderful win for the team!

Our team did pretty well at the beginning of the game. The other team got the ball to start, but Eric stole the ball and passed the ball to Jun. I wished that he had taken the shot. In the next minute, Eric again passed the ball to Jun, who made a shot. After that, Chris shot successfully, with an assist from Jun. In the first two minutes, we scored 4 points.

In the following minutes, we were stuck on 4 for quite a while. We shot several times, but we missed all of them. In addition, we had many turnovers and fouls. The other team got several points during this time, especially the big fat guy, who may be the best player on the other team. After eight minutes, the scores was 4 to 7. In another following three minutes, we still didn't score a basket.

This is maybe one of the patterns about how our team performs. In the last game, we scored the first 9 points of the game and then we were stuck for a long time, while the other team scored 19. I should check whether our performance follows the 80/20 rule, which is very common in computer science. Newton's law has taught us that objects at rest remain at rest unless acted upon by external force, which implies that one needs more effort to get points when the team is in a stuck state than when it is in a regular state.

Back to the game, we recovered thanks to Travis's successful shot at the 11th minute. After that, we got many good passes and shots. For example, Travis passed the ball to David who made a shot, Alan made one of two free throws, and Eric had a nice shot, which must have been too nice since it caused an argument between our team and the score keeper who didn’t record Eric’s shot.

This momentum was kept for the remainder of the first half. Eric got another basket in the following minutes, followed by Jun making another field goal and one of two free throws. Jun then had a nice drive and pass to Rob, who made our first three-pointer of the game. The other team was lucky and did well too. In the last 25 seconds, they got a three-point from way behind the arc. At the end of the first half, the score was 19 to 24.

During the break, Duc and I had an interesting talk with the score keeper. He though that we were from KFC and were selling fast-foods. In fact, we are doing (E)lectronic things rather than (F)ood things and we are the KEC team.

In the first several minutes of the second half, we did OK but they did really well. We got two two-pointers during this time: David got a nice offensive rebound and put back, and Chris made a good pass to Jun and Jun made a layup. Meanwhile, the other team scored about 11 points, I guess. The big fat guy made several three-pointers and the black guy (maybe I should not say this, but how else should I describe that guy?) made both his free throws.

In the fourth minute of the second half, there was a huge mess. We had the ball, tried to shoot but missed, got the rebound, and then tried and missed again. This process was repeated several times, finally Chris passed the ball out to Travis but he missed it.. The whole mess ended when one guy on the other team hurt himself accidentally. The injury was so serious that he had to lie on the ground for several minutes before he was able to be helped off the court.

The next following minutes were the golden time for our team., Eric passed the ball to Jun, who made a three-pointer. Travis made another one shortly after that. Eric passed the ball to Alan twice and he made one two-pointer. On the next possession Alan passed the ball to David, who made a layup. After these baskets the score was 33 to 39. Eric made two straight three pointers which brought loud cheers from our team and the score was tied 39-39.

The next several minutes were close. Although they scored four points, we got five. Travis hit a three-pointer with the assist from Jun and Alan made a two-pointer with an assist from Chris. We were ahead 44 to 43.

Our lead was expanded in the following minutes. Chris stole the ball and made a layup. Then Jun passed the ball to Alan for a layup. On the next possession Travis made another three-pointer. After this the other team seemed to lose its morale. They did not score in that time, even missing their free throws. The game ended with several fouls from which we got another three points. Jun made one of two and Travis made both of his free throws. The final score was 54 to
45.

Besides our shooting, our performance for the overall game was good. It was quite impressive that Alan got 5 rebounds in the first several minutes and that pace was kept for the whole game. David also got some nice rebounds. Eric's defense, Jun's passes and the others’ perfect cooperation all contributed a lot to the success of the game.

Thanks for your guys' playing. You all as a whole made the game interesting, exciting, impressive and successful.

Sprinkles takes a trip

2010-11-30T15:31:00.000-08:00

So the Thanksgiving holiday has come and gone, and with it came my typical trip to my parents house. This trip marked the first time that Sprinkles would:
1) Go on a long car ride
2) Interact with other cats for a long period of time.

The car rides themselves were.... a bit loud. Sprinkles meowed a lot from her cage, but we made it safely, and I suppose that is the main point. I tried telling her everything would be all right, she just meowed a little louder. I almost let her out of her cage, but the one time I had let her do that before on the way home from the vet she managed to squeeze between my steering wheel, so I felt it would be safer to leave her in her cage.

So we got to my parents house and Sprinkles immediately set up shop on one of their chairs. At this point their cats are not inside the house, so everything is safe, and Sprinkles explores around and then lays down:
She basically stayed in that chair for the entire day. Broken only by her interaction with one of my parents cats, who came in and whom Sprinkles followed around the house hissing at until she confused/scared him enough to make him leave. At first he was interested in her because she was different, but it seemed after being hissed at he just sort of lost it and left. So Sprinkles controlled the house.

During the party, she was set up on the chair for the entire night, and everyone talked about her, but whenever anyone would go up to try and pet her she would either hiss or nip at them or hit them with her paws. It was kind of funny, people still thought she was cute though.

Sprinkles during Thanksgiving dinner:

Sprinkles looking at the leftovers:

The next day Sprinkles met the other cat, who was too scared of me to come in the house, but they had fun watching each other through the window. They are very similar in marking, so it was almost like they were looking in the mirror. It was odd since she seemed to like this cat, but whenever the other cat would come by she would hiss and growl.

However, her dominance of the house continued and she reigned supreme on her "throne".
Whenever the other cat would come in, she would follow him around and make sure that he wouldn't get too comfortable. Here she has followed him to the door and he is now begging to get out.
Here she corned him under the bar:

Here she stalked him while he was sitting on the scratching post.
In general he didn't seem to worried about it, but he did tend to back off, by the last day, he was hissing back a little.

During my trip we also went and got our family Christmas Tree. Once we brought it inside, Sprinkles was interested and walked around in and sniffed it

And of course... played with the water and the branches:

Once all the ornaments were up, she even jumped and played with them(sorry for the unnecessary tilt.)

The great tasting

2010-11-16T22:36:00.000-08:00

So we weren't really sure if our beer was totally ready, but it had been a week and it was recommended to wait about a week and then maybe wait a little longer, but we were really excited about trying it and there was a blazers game on, so we combined the game with our first tasting.

We stored the beer in the fridge had a beer to whet our palette. Then an hour later it was time to try it. Here we are pouring ourselves our first glasses. Pictures courtesy of Chris B, who is not pictured.

I was a bit nervous about it, I was worried that it was going to not be all that good. I was pretty sure that I would still drink it, since we had went through a lot of work to make it and I had sat with it as it burbled and carefully counted each burble as it happened... well not each one, but pretty close.

Anyway, .... It was great! I am not sure how to describe it, but it is beer and very drinkable and I found myself saying that I would maybe even buy it from the store. I still don't know how alcoholic it is, based on the hydrometer, I think it is probably about 4.5% or 5% maybe? Andrew was the one who thought that it tasted the worst when we first tried it and he was impressed by how much better it was and how much it changed.

I have handed out some of the beers already and we have gotten a few reviews back, which are below. If I have given you one of our beers and you would like to share a review you can leave a comment or email it to me and I will add it below:

Eric's Video Review:

My Dad:
"It was good. It was malty. Excellent chocolate stout. Good buzz, alcoholic content must be higher than advertised."

Anonymous Review 1:
"It was good. It was pretty good. It was a little bitter towards the end."

Anonymous Review 2:
"It is good.. it's not easy. I do not really know how to describe it..well the only thing I am pretty sure is that I would definitely be willing to pay to get this beer.. I think it tastes a little chocolaty and a little sweet."

Anonymous Review 3:
"I would definitely buy it in a store! It was rich and creamy, with a hint of coffee and chocolately taste to it, not hit you over the head chocolately like at Block 15, but a subtle natural hint of chocolate that I really liked. The aftertaste was a little bitter and lasting, but not bad at all, while the middle and end notes were fantastic"

We still have a few beers left for sharing so if you would like to try one let me know and we will see if we can work something out.

Beer Bottling and Brewing

2010-11-06T14:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the third step in the brewing process. Bottling! Our beer has been fermenting for slightly more than 2 weeks and despite the fact that we didn't actually do any measuring to ensure that it was ready, we decided to bottle it! To be fair, it is only suppose to ferment for 2 weeks, so we figured that it was probably good. I suppose that the end results will determine this though. :)

In addition to bottling we decided to brew another batch of beer at the same time, so it was going to be a busy evening.

The first step was to clean and delabel the bottles. To do this we used Katie and Will's dishwasher, since mine doesn't really work. This process actually took a lot longer than I had expected. Specifically taking the labels off. We loaded all the bottles in the dishwasher and then had some dinner.

Since we had a lot to do we had to start the process of brewing and bottling while the bottles were being cleaned. So we went back to my place and started that.

We started the water boiling and then began the sanitation process. We had to sanitize a lot of stuff. Below we are starting the process and sanitizing the bucket so that we can add the sugar to our first batch of beer. The sugar will be eaten by the yeast and will help to carbonate the beer, at least that is the hope :p.

Once everything was sanitized and we boiled the sugar mixture up we began the process of mixing the beer. This required us to create a siphon and to suck the beer out of the carboy and into the bucket, which would then slowly mix with the sugar and stir it around. Chris B. who we determined was the least sick did the siphoning. This went well, although at several times during the process the tube curled up and got a little messed up. Thus we determined that we probably needed a little tube at the end to have better precision.

Here is a picture of the siphoning in action:

At the same time we started our next batch of beer. This time we are making a the Best Brown Ale. Which is... supposed to be brown. This one used a lot fewer malts but it still seemed almost as dark as our first batch, although it did lighten up after a while.

Once we mixed the sugar it was time to actually bottle. The two pictures below show us in the bottling process. It was actually pretty easy since the tube had the automatic thing that would only dispense if it was pressed down.

It was still a little bit messy, mostly because I wasn't as careful as I could have been. We also ran out of bottles and so we had to run over to Katie and Will's and get a growler for the last 1/2 gallon or so. We aren't sure if it is going to carbonate as well as the bottles, but we figured it was better than nothing.

I didn't actually do any of the capping, but Eric and Chris B. both did and it seemed to go smoothly, they both were a little nervous about the whole thing at first and were worried that they were going to break the bottles, but it was easy and once they got over that worry things seemed to go smoothly.

We loaded the beer up, which Sprinkles quite enjoyed.

We then stored the bottles and finished our next batch. It seemed to go much faster this time, but was actually only about 20 minutes faster. However, since we were doing bottling and stuff the whole time, it just seemed to go much faster.

Our first bottles of beer could be done in about a week and then we will be able to taste it!

Secondary Fermentation

2010-10-31T23:29:00.000-07:00

So our beer has stopped bubbling a lot and so it was time to transfer our beer from our bucket to the glass carboy, which will house our beer for the next couple of days. We had been planning on making another batch of beer, but due to Eric coming down with the plague we were unable to do that. So I simply transferred the beer and we are holding off until later this week.

Anyway, here is the setup of the transfer:

This is what the inside of the bucket looked like:

The first step is to start the siphon, which basically just means that I suck on the tube and start the beer coming out the tube, and I used that to fill up our test tube so that we could take a hydrometer reading. And then I attached the tube to the little filler thing and stuck it in the bucket. The siphon looks like this:

The whole process took about 20 minutes and the end result of the bucket was... this:

It looks a bit.... uh... well it looks just a tad gross. But I am glad that the beer is no longer in that junk. Look at the nice clean carboy of beer! I managed to get a little bit of the gunk in there, but hardly any.... which is good.

So I moved the carboy into the closet and Sprinkles checked out the new addition. I wrapped it with a blanket, cleaned the other stuff and tidied up from the process.

The hydrometer reading was a lot lower than before and I am not sure exactly what that means. After we were done boiling the max alcohol % that we could get was 7.5% and now it is about 3.5%. But the taste that I had was actually pretty good which was encouraging. It just might not be very alcoholic.

Pick a Photo, any Photo

2010-10-26T11:44:00.001-07:00

So today marks the first game of the Portland Trail Blazers season. The Blazer's have this contest where fans can send in photos of themselves in exotic locations wearing blazer gear and try and get their picture on a broadcast.

Since Eric and I both failed last year, (Note: I don't see how Eric failed, he took his picture at Stonehenge!!!!) we decided that we would coordinate and take pictures with our blazer shirts on in Spain. We didn't coordinate that well and only did it on one day, but it was the visit to the Alhambra, so we got a lot of pretty good pictures.

Now you, my loyal readers (all... 14 of you?), can help us pick the photo to send in to the contest. The photos are below and there is a poll on the left hand side of the blog. Please vote for your favorite and help us pick the best photo!

1. Generalife Fountain Photo - A picture a a fountain in the Generalife palace.

2. Crystal Palace Doorway Photo - A picture near a highly decorated doorway in the Crystal Palace.

3. Crystal Palace Pool - The pool in the middle of the Crystal Palace.

4. Crystal Palace Pool Take 2 - A different angle of the pool and Crystal Palace

5. Upper Ramparts of the Palace of Carlos V Take 1 -
6. Upper Ramparts of the Palace of Carlos V Take 2 - The second angle at the palace of Carlos V

7. The middle of the Palace of Carlos V - Showing both the upper and lower stories of the Palace.

KEC Krew makes beer

2010-10-23T21:43:00.000-07:00

Eric and I have been talking about brewing beer for a long time and so when I moved into a bigger place that had room for storage we decided that we would finally go for it. On Thursday we started our first batch of beer.
(Note: if we ever come up with a name for our brewery I will probably make a blog specific to that, but for now, it will just be updates on this blog)

So the whole process took quite a while, since we were a little nervous about actually buying the stuff. We first looked online at the prices, and found quite a few cheap options, so we were conflicted. We went into the brewing supply place in Corvallis to check it out and we looked at the prices and they told us that their list of kits were on the website so we decided to go back and compare the stuff online with the stuff at the store.

First, the website didn't work, but eventually we got it sorted out and we determined that the store was a little more expensive. But we decided that we would probably get better help there if we built a rapport with the guys who worked there in case we had any problems later on.

So the guys there are really cool, and I highly recommend them if anyone in Corvallis is looking to start brewing. Anyway, enough about that, on to the .... "exciting" part. The brewing of our first batch of beer!!!

We decided to go with a stout since then we don't have to be careful about it being clear since it is already dark.

So the first step of the process is that we had to take the yeast out of the fridge. And we had to do this at least an hour ahead of the start of the rest of the process. We did this as soon as we got to my place, and then we had some supper. Beer soaked brats! We watched the baseball game while we ate. And we ended up starting a bit later then we anticipated, but ... we were hungry! Also, Eric eats slow :p.

So Chris B and Andrew, who were going to show up sometime in the middle of the process, ended up showing up before we even started.... lol, I am not sure if the were disappointed or not, but it worked out, and I am glad they were there for the whole process.

So then we actually started. The first step was to fill our bucket with about 3 gallons of water. We did not plan well and my biggest measuring cup was 2 cups... :p We needed to fill it with 48 cups! So we took the two cup thing and filled up a pitcher until we knew were 10 cups was. This was a little bit better. And the bucket soon contained 3 gallons.

Eric fills the pitcher with water!

Next we had to add the specialty grains or malts to the water and raise it to a certain temperature. The grains for our beer were:

1/2 pound Crystal Malt
3/4 pound Roasted Barley
1/4 pound Chocolate Malt

Luckily, the brewery place ground them up for us, which was great. So we added those to our little mesh steeping back, shown below, and then we added it to the pot. We had to add a little bit of water so that most of the grains were under the water, so we ended up with 4 additional cups of water.

Pretty soon the water was dark, it happened so quickly, as you can see below. We also added a thermometer, as we had to heat the water to 170 degrees. The thermometer was deftly tied on by Chris B.

The next step was to wait for quite a long time. We had to wait for the water to heat up to 170, which ended up taking about an hour, so I think that next time we are probably going to turn the heat up a little bit. So that meant we had time to dink around.

Sprinkles got to play in the box that the pot came in.

And then she watched us play a board game. She was good and didn't run across it much... only once or twice :)

So once the water finally got to 170 degrees we had to turn the heat off and let the grains steep for 10 minutes to get the flavor out as much as we could. After we did this, Eric squeezed the bag to get even more out. This wasn't in the instructions... so if the beer is horrible.... we can blame this ... or many other things we probably did wrong :)

So then we had to add the Malt Extract, which is shown below. This stuff was very very thick, it was sort of like molasses a little bit. We all tasted it and... it was ok I guess... lol, but anyway, into the mix it went! We had to get as much out of it as we could, so we ladled water into it and mixed it around and Chris B managed to get most of it.

Then we had to bring the mixture to a boil. So we stirred the extract very well to avoid it burning and sticking to the bottom and brought it to a boil. We then had to add the hops to the beer. In our case we were adding 1.5 ounces for the whole 60 minute boil and then adding .5 ounces for the last 10 minutes.

Just a note about hops. The hops adds the flavor and the aroma and the bitterness. So the longer hops are in the boil the fewer aroma and flavor it will add since the heat degrades it. So hops added for 60 minutes adds only bitterness, hops added for the last 15-5 minutes will add a little bitterness and lots of hoppy flavor and a little aroma. Hops added for the last 10 minutes adds mostly just lots of aroma.

So our hops looked like this.

And then dumped into the mix they looked like this.

We had to stir them around and fully saturate the hops so that there wouldnt be any thermal blanket that kept the heat in and messed things up.

So then we had to watch it carefully since we didn't want it to boil over, but either my stove isn't powerful enough, or our pot was too large, or.. something, but basically we our just natural beer brewers and so we just didn't ruin it! Woo hoo!

So halfway through, after 30 minutes we added Irish Moss, which is neither Irish, nor Moss, but seaweed. It helps to clarify the beer by coagulating the proteins. We also added gypsum which will harden the water. I already have pretty hard water so we didn't add as much as the beer called for. er... the recipe called for.

With 10 minutes left we added the last of the hops. And then I went to get the ice bath ready so we could cool the beer. I dumped 2 bags of ice into tub and then filled it up with water. Sprinkles was, as you can see, very interested in the water. I had to pick her up and move her so that we could put the pot in.

We had to add it carefully so that none of the water splashed into the mixture since now we need to be extra sanitary and careful. Here Eric is cooling the pot and mixture by rubbing ice against it.

And here he takes the temperature. We had to cool it off to about 75 or 80 degrees so that could add the wort. We managed to make it to about 85 or so and we called it good since we knew that we had to add cold water to it before it was done.

Here, Eric takes the temperature of the mixture.

Sprinkles really wanted to get in and play with the water.... a lot.

So once it was cooled, we had to filter the hops out, so we bore the mix out and filter the hops and then poured water threw the hops to get more of the flavor out.... we had a very small filter. We might need to get a bigger one next time. I used a spoon to scoop the hops out and a few got into the beer... another potential reason our beer could taste bad.
So then we had to aerate the beer, which basically just meant that we would be shaking it and getting it all frothy. And then we tossed the yeast in and sealed it up and we were done!!!

Oh, we also took a hydrometer reading. Which consisted of using a turkey baster to get some of the mixture out of the fermenter (the bucket). This tells us exactly what the potential alcohol volume of our beer is. It will probably fall a bit, but this is the max that it could be. At the time our max is about 7.5%

And then we sealed the beer and we were done!

Our beer all shaken and sealed!

Our first beer all nestled into the closet!
The beer has begun fermenting, which is great news and we are getting some bubbles. We should get a lot at first and then it will decrease until it is only bubbling once a minute and then we will be onto the next step.

Stay tuned!

Lessons learned in Spain: Tips and suggestions

2010-10-10T22:01:00.001-07:00

So I have officially been back for 2 weeks and it seems like I am about fully adjusted. It took a surprising amount of time for my sleep schedule to actually get back to normal. 2 years ago after the trip to Germany I don't remember having that hard of a time adjusting once I got back, but I guess I might have, or else I have just gotten older :p.

Anyway, over the last couple of weeks I have contemplated Spain and the things that I learned. So in case people are interested these are some tips and suggestions, both random and maybe helpful, They aren't in any particular order since that would take probably to much time and I am not really a good planner when it comes to my blog entries, I just sort of type.

1. Sangria is great (for any meal) but the most cost effective way to drink it is by buying it at the store. The store sells it for a euro, and the restaurants sell it for about 10 euros. Don Simon may not be the best Sangria, but it is certainly more than 1/10 as good.

But the Sangria at restaurants can be a lot funner, especially when you get sugar on the rims!

2. If you are going to stay for more than a week in one town you should definitely look into getting an apartment. In general if gives you a bigger place and a kitchen and possibly a washer/dryer. It also gives a sense of home that can be nice.

3. Most of the hotels in Spain don't seem to do breakfast so unless you sleep as late as we did everyday you are sort of in limbo for breakfast. Actually, this may just be because we stayed in places that were on the lower end of the price spectrum. But regardless you should be prepared.

4. Menu del Dia is amazing. Whenever possible during the hours of 2-5 PM you should try to have Menu del Dia at a restaurant. It is usually a great deal, and unless you order the french fry omelet is usually really good.

Pictured: The only bad Menu del Dia that we had

5. Avoid at all costs restaurants that have huge colored signs. These places usually are huge ripoffs and are specifically designed for tourists who don't want to bother having to speak Spanish to order food. We went to one of these places (the first place we went to) and it was the most expensive meal we had. It was also (except for maybe the last dinner) probably the worst meal that we had. But at least we got to watch chubby spiderman work plaza mayor.

6. Speaking of Spanish. If you don't know Spanish or at least a little bit, I highly recommend stealing... er... borrowing a friends old iPhone and using it to help translate menu's and signs. This was very helpful, at least I thought so.

7. Dinner Roulette. While this is certainly not for everyone, especially for people who are picky about what they eat, or vegetarian, or.... picky? I don't know what else, it can be very fun. While translation programs can help, there are times when you won't be able to translate a whole lot on the menu. In these cases, I actually thought it was fun to order kind of randomly and see what happens. I certainly don't recommend doing this for every meal. But you can end up with something like this:

The proud winner of Toledo Dinner Roulette!

8. In a pinch a baguette is the greatest meal ever. But it is so so much better when you have cheese and meat. It is also a lot better if you can get it sort of fresh. However, you have to be careful as you can get tired of them after awhile. They gave out free baguettes at the conference, and I got one at every meal, but I never ate one. So yeah... baguettes = awesome, but if you eat too much of them over 2 weeks you no longer can eat them.....so you have to be careful.

9. Spain has very strange souvenirs. Seen while there: figurines that looked very much like KKK figurines, lots and lots of aprons, lots of magnets, cats that seemed like they were probably free, although I am not sure how you would take them home, lots of weird tile patterns that seemed cool enough except that every tile cost 8 euros, making them very expensive patterns.

10. Before you go, look up what the cities you are visiting are famous for. This will help inform your gift buying/purchases for yourself. For example, Spain in general is known for Olive Oil and Brandy, or Portugal is known for Port. This can be helpful if, like me, you don't know how to shop for souvenirs. (Thanks to Katie for this tip)

11. If you can travel with 2-3 friends. It makes the trips much more enjoyable, although you also need to be understanding with your travel partners as if you are with people for several weeks there are bound to be times when they, or you, may briefly snap. But, just know that they do like you for who you are. Because you're good enough, you're strong enough, and gosh darn, people like you!

12. Always try to speak Spanish. At least attempt it. We got a lot of people who rolled their eyes at us when we asked them if they spoke English first thing. A lot of people where very helpful, but if you can try to initiate in Spanish, and then if things don't really work you can ask if they speak English.

13. Try to remember if you agreed to get people gifts. And if you did agree, then you should get those gifts as soon as possible or you may forget them entirely.

14. Alkazars are, by rule, awesome. If there is one in the city that you are in, visit it!

15. Always thank the people who helped you out during your trip, and so without further ado, I would like to thank:

My Parents for supporting me and helping me finance my trip. For commenting on my blog and for sending me Spanish lessons before hand.
Eric and Allison for putting up with me and being great travel partners for our time together in Spain and for buying most of my stuff after I paid for the hotels. The trip would not have been as fun or as entertaining without them
Chris Bogart for translating for us and traveling with us for a few days and making the Granada trip a lot better. Also for making us breakfast almost every morning during the conference. That was amazing and deserves a lot of props.
Markus for hanging out with me during the conference, for letting me watch him play poker during the not so interesting talks, and for writing and presenting our paper on SheetDiff
My fellow graduate students at the conference that made the banquet amazing (the wine helped) and made the nights and breaks during the conference fun.
Katie and Will for watching and loving Sprinkles while I was gone. I could not have asked for better sitters for Sprinks, and I am sorry that she kept you guys up lots of nights. Also thanks to Katie for actually trying and completing my horribly difficult trivia quiz.
Allison's mom for being my biggest fan in Washington, for telling her friends about my blog, and for sending an email
All of my readers and friends for reading my blog. It was fun seeing how many people were reading and enjoying my writing... well maybe not my writing, but at least enjoying our adventures. It made it much easier to sit in hotel hallways fighting for internet signals to upload my photos and post the daily entry.

Thanks again to all of you. I hope you enjoyed our travels, and perhaps I can find something entertaining to write about in the future. Until then. Salud mis amigos.

No me gusta being sick and traveling

2010-09-30T20:31:00.000-07:00

So this post will probably be pretty short, but since you all have followed me through this much of the trip you deserve the .... thrilling conclusion!

So as I have mentioned before, Eric, Todd, and Chris B. are all going to the EUSES meeting, which starts at 9, so they are planning to leave at 8:08 (because it has a lot of symmetry, it can be flipped around or turned sideways and it is still a palindrome!). So they again have to get up early. Markus who stayed with us has to leave at about 9 to go catch his flight.

So Chris B sets his alarm, but it fails to go off. It was set up only to work on weekdays and since it was a Saturday it didn't go off, so we all woke up a little late. Since Chris B. had to get ready I decided to at least start making breakfast for everyone. I don't think that it was nearly as good, but it certainly wasn't bad. Markus says that the potato peel that I left on the potato was poison and that we were all going to get sick.

Soon it was time for everyone to go and then I was alone. I read some and finished my book (well before Eric), and I did a little emailing, which I had been ignoring for quite a while. After a while I headed out to explore Madrid one last time.

As I have mentioned before my day was cut short by an illness. I am not sure what it was, it might have been food poisoning, but whatever it was I was confined to my bed and so that was not very fun. I basically stayed in bed all afternoon and evening and slept rather fitfully and hoped that I would be at least a little better for the travel day the next day.

So the next day, Sunday, was the day that we were to head home. My alarm was set for 530, but I actually woke up without it, and I was feeling a bit better, so that was good. We got ready and we left a little bit late at about 630. On the way to the airport, the metro was packed with people just coming home from partying. The majority of them were very drunk, and it was a little strange to see.

The trip to the airport went well enough, and after figuring out some confusing signs in the airport and some very unhelpful airline desk people we checked in. We were a little concerned since they only gave us tickets as far as Vancouver, which didn't really make much sense to us, but there isn't really much that we could do about it.

The security line was ridiculous, it was just very slow and unorganized and every time someone set off the metal detector, they stopped the whole line and made us wait. If we had been late for our flight then this would have worried me. Eric threw away his water bottle that he has had the whole trip (from Vancouver on the way over). He regretted this throughout the rest of our trip as he always tried to find someplace to get water but they were about 3 euros.

So we had to wait a while for our flight, and I actually was able to eat a nectarine, which was the first thing that I had eaten in... about 15 or 16 hours, so that was good, and I actually felt hungry, so I was hoping that the worst of my illness was past. Eric went and got a little pastry with most of the rest of our euros.

The Spanish airport doesn't actually announce when planes are boarding, so we sort of had to wait and pay attention. We noticed that people started lining up, but then for about 20 minutes and never moved so we just sort of waited, then it finally started to move and we got in line and were the 2nd to last people on the plane. We ran into Alessio on the flight, which was crazy. He was headed to Sweden... I think?

So... I slept for the entire flight to Frankfurt, which was nice. Eric read his book. So that flight was very smooth. We got to Frankfurt and we took a bus to the terminal and walked around trying to find something to eat. We finally settled on a little restaurant. 1 of only 3 places there! pretty poor amount of choices for a major airport. Eric regretted not getting beer. We both got a hot dog and a pretzel. The pretzel was great, the hot dog was ... ok. I took some pepto bismal tablets just in case.

Here is Eric ordering.

We waited for our plane, and right after boarding Eric passed out. Not for very long, but I have photographic evidence!

The flight from Frankfurt to Vancouver was long, I watched a few movies and read and slept a little bit. It actually went faster than I thought it would. It helped that there was no one behind me so I just reclined for most of the flight, which was nice.

We arrived to Vancouver and had to go through customs and then get our bags. And for some reason we had to go out of the security zone and check in again, which seemed so ridiculous to me. And because of this... we missed our flight. It was very annoying. We were there 45 minutes early, but we had to be there an hour early to actually get our bags loaded. If we wanted to we could have gone through security with all of our bags and ran ahead. But I had some liquids that I had purchased, so I didn't really want to do that....since I would have had to dump them out.

This means that we had to talk the 830 flight instead of the 445 flight.... so it was a long wait. It sort of went quickly.... although all we did was sit around. We got some food and then right before the flight Eric got a cup of coffee and took a quick nap. Then on the flight we both slept the whole way. It was only an hour flight, but it was a good nap.

We arrived in Portland and got our car. We got a minivan!

Before we left for Portland, we sent an email saying that we were going to be late, in case any of our fellow OSU travelers were going to be late as well. After getting our car, we went back into the terminal and Viola! an email from Chris B. sent right before Eric opened his computer. He had just arrived. So we waited a little bit and then he got to ride home with us.

That was good, since I was tired and had problems staying awake, so he was able to talk to Eric and then about Salem I was able to stay awake the rest of the way.

So I got home at about 1:30 or so... My bed never looked so good.

It was a great trip, and a pretty successful conference, but it was nice to be back home.

The Conference: Stats!

2010-09-29T21:04:00.000-07:00

So during the conference one thing I did to not fall asleep and since it was actually really very interesting I took stats of attendance during the different sessions as well as computer usage and the differences between macs and windows computers.

As a guide, these are the session titles:

0: Opening Keynote
1: Assisting Programmers
2: Debugging
3: Games & Learning
4: Spreadsheets & Nuerons
5: Graph & Model Transforms
6: Web Programming
7: Spiders & Graphs
8: Closing Keynote
9: Understanding Designers and Programmers
10: Visual Languages & Formalisms
11: Panel and Close

I did not start keeping stats until the 3rd session, and I was too nervous during the 4th session as Markus and Eric were talking. So sadly, the graphs are not entirely complete.

The first graph is about session attendance. You can certainly see the drop off as the days go on. Although I don't have a lot of information for the first day. It also shows that modeling is one of the most poorly attended sessions, and gaming was one of the highest. The red vertical lines mark the separation of days.

The next two charts have to do with computer usage. In the first chart we see Mac usage in blue, windows in red, and computerless in green. In general Mac usage for outweighed that of Windows, while actually computerless was very high. I should have also counted sleeping people... but that would have probably been a little sad :).

The final chart shows the actual percentage of computer usage for each session.

The Conference: Day 3

2010-09-28T16:08:00.000-07:00

We have reached the final day of the conference, the culmination of the trip and the day that I, after what has seemed like ages get to present.

I am sure that you can tell by this picture that I am... wait... I look mad, that doesn't make any sense.

Anyway, the day started, once again early, luckily I wasn't feeling any effects from the banquet and the copious amounts of wine that I drank. My stomach did feel a little queasy, but I was able to eat that breakfast that Chris B. made, which was good since I needed to eat before the presentation, it helped a lot.

I just have to say that Chris B. made breakfast almost everyday of the conference and it was great, having food prepared and not having to worry about getting it was very nice.

So there had been some debate about whether or not we should go to the last keynote since it didn't sound incredibly interesting, but I woke up early and Eric wanted to go since he had attended and paid attention to everything. Chris B seemed to indicate that he wasn't going to go, but he actually ended up going with us.

We were...slightly late. I am not sure by how much, only a few minutes I think, but the keynote was actually surprisingly well attended, there were a lot of people there and considering that the banquet had been last night and that it had ended late, I thought there would be less people.

I do have to so, that I was slightly distracted since I was thinking about my own presentation, but the keynote was... hard to pay attention to. The material was interesting enough, it was about security for UML diagrams and how to set it up. The presenter was German and at times his accent was a bit tough to follow and his slides were soooo packed with information that it made it difficult. Anyway, here are my notes from the keynote:

Why do UML diagrams need security? Did I miss something?
Germans, as they tend to strive for perfection, are the perfect people to do security stuff
1 security break in 100,000 years is too much.... wow
This guys answers are sooooo long :/

And then it was over... the time had come for me to present. Since the keynote went a bit long, there was only a 15 minute break. I tested my computer to make sure that it connected, then I went and got a snack and walked around a little bit to calm down and headed back into the room. I ran into Chris S. (my adviser), and we talked a little bit about the presentation and I said that it was a bit long and he advised me that I should take my time on the data since it was the most interesting part and then if necessary I should speed through the last part. Then he told me that I had done this before and that I would be fine. Simple words, but they steadied my confidence.

Here is a picture of me during the presentation. I am not sure how it actually went. For the most part I think it went well, but I did run long and had to zoom through the last couple of slides, so unfortunately, it was not as good as I would like, I was a little flustered when the guy running my session held up a sign that said STOP, but I plowed through and sort of delivered an ok finish.

I got three questions... well one was just a comment about how some of the data that we had found matched some observations that Margaret (OSU professor) had found in a previous study. The questions were not all hard to answer and then it was done.

The next talk was sort of a blur to me as I sort of had to calm down a little bit from giving my presentation, but I actually got a little interested in it as it went on and in general the whole session was really good.

My notes:

Carlos Jenson (OSU) Diagramming in Open Source
People don't know what UML diagrams are and people are using power point presentations to communicate
many view diagrams as an altruistic thing that they do to be nice

The next presentation was about bug reports and the words in bug reports and how to improve how they reported.

Notes:
Lots of people start questions with a compliment, interesting but nice.
people Game the system by saying things such as "all users experience this" etc
Resolution times for different bug types... previous work... this would be interesting to see

The next two presentations were short papers, but I actually asked a question about one, so that was kind of cool.

And then it was time for lunch. Before I could head out to lunch Michael Coblenz came up and talked to me about my presentation and about some ideas about where to go with it, which was really nice, and I think we are going to pursue one of these.

We talked for a while and then had lunch. During lunch, Eric and I sat by the guy who did a presentation on SpiderTimeTrees. I had noticed him sitting by himself for most of the conference and so I figured it would be nice to sit with him, and I like Germans for the most part. They are friendly people. ;)

We had a good conversation with him and then it was time for the final session of presentations. This was again a lot of presentations about models, which didn't seem to interest a large portion of the crowd, but it was pretty well attended. There were a few people that had problems staying awake, but I think for the fact that it was the last session, people did a good job.

So here are my notes:

The presentation was about live sequence charts that would update and you could zoom on certain parts
Why don't graphical models scale well?
Because they are too big?
Live demo... brave, it went well enough

2: The presentation was about uh... some kind of modeling. lol

Cool Russian Accent (Note: he was Portuguese)
Eric is using his computer, he was trying to not do that, but he is paying attention
He is calling the objects blobs, which I guess is fine it just sounds really funny with his accent
Wow, actually showing semantics. very rare for VL/HCC
Where do the extra lines come from?
V & V? oh...Verification and Validation

Hmm... so I didn't take notes for the rest of the presentations, but I did sort of pay attention.

The final session of the day was a panel thing, which Martin warned Eric would not be good, and he was kind of right. The last few minutes were actually interesting, but I wish that they had just allowed people to ask questions for most of the time.

So then it was all over, we had a last little goodbye session and then headed home.

Last shot of a bunch of professors (and Scott) walking at the train station:

Eric and Chris B at the train station:

So we set it up to go out around 8 or so for a kind of simple dinner, we didn't want to go all out, since we sort of did that the night before. Markus and Jacome were going to come join us.

Before hand we just hung out at our apartment. Eric got lonely since Chris B and I were just hanging out in our room. So he joined us.

Just before we left Eric started a load of laundry. He managed to wash his wallet. So we had to struggle a little to get it out and then he wrung it out. You can sort of see the water coming off of it here:
So Markus soon arrived with his stuff, he decided to just spend the night on our extra mattress. Soon Jacome and his professor and Nuno, another Portuguese student showed up and we headed out. The first stop was this restaurant that Alessio had recommended to us.... it was.... well it was far from the best place we went and it was very expensive. I also managed to make us look like fools since I tried adding the bill up and I got it wrong and then we asked the guy about it... and... then we added it again and in fact they were right... so... yeah.

Afterward we headed to the Belgian bar to see how Cuban friend once again and have some nice beer. I had to go get cash, so I am not quite sure how or what we ordered, but sadly the Cuban guy didn't seem to recognize us. Here is our table:

We sort of got tapas, at least chips and... some weird nut bowl thing. We had good conversation, and other than Markus, who has better German beer everyday, enjoyed our beer. We didn't really stay out late, and we soon headed home.

Eric had previously purchased a French? Maybe Spanish board game called Tasso, and so we cracked that out and played a few games of it. It was pretty fun actually, and it was a nice ending to the night.
Eric, Todd, and Chris B. had to go to the EUSES meeting the next day so we didn't stay up that late. And thus ended the last day of the conference.

The Conference: Day 2

2010-09-28T11:18:00.000-07:00

And we're back! So as I mentioned Eric was going to be presenting on the second day of the conference, in the first session. Markus was also presenting (first overall) the paper that I did with him and Martin. I was actually a bit nervous for Markus' presentation since I was worried about the questions that he might get and basically didn't like not having any control over how to answer things or how the presentation would go.

So Eric got up really early and wanted to leave early for the conference. It started on Day 2 at about 9:50 and we left at about 8, so way early. Sadly we didn't have any breakfast food, but Eric downed a baguette that he saved/stole from the cafeteria during lunch the previous day. Chris B. and I both went with him, but we peeled off and went to get breakfast at a nearby little restaurant near the conference. We had a pretty good Spanish Omelet, so that was nice.

When we showed up, Eric was practicing before hand:

There was no way I could do that. I guess everyone prepares for talks in their own way, but I have always preferred to not think about it day of. I practice the day before or something, but doing it right before is just too much for me.

Anyway, the time soon came for the session to start. Here are the three presenters for the morning. The third guy is Jacome, who came to OSU last year to work with Martin. Coincidentally, he ended up writing a paper with Martin and was presenting it. That meant that all three presentations during this session where going to be papers that Martin was co-author on.

So, first up was Markus. Here is is setting up. I foolishly sat too far away to get really good pictures, and I didn't really want to use the flash... so the quality is not all that great, as I am sure you all noticed from the pictures yesterday.
Markus' presentation went really well I think, his introduction was really stellar and he did a good job presenting our work favorably, despite some shortcomings that both of us were aware of. He got a few questions, the one contentious one, and one to be expected was about why we thought our tool presented the data in a better way than other tools out there. He did a good job handling that one.

As I mentioned I was nervous for Markus', but I was also oddly a little nervous for Eric's, so I didn't take notes for any of these. Jacome went after Markus, and then it was time for Eric:

Eric's presentation went well and he got a lot of question. Maybe the most so far? I don't know. DANG! I should have kept track of the questions each presentation got.

A lot of the questions were about philosophers and why the stuff he was doing was useful, which seemed pretty odd. At the break he was surrounded by professors and they debated about philosophy and it was all a little surreal. But it seemed like at the very least he had created a lot of discussion and so that was good to see.

The next session of the day was about graphs and model transformers and these kinds of sessions are hard for me to pay attention too... but I tried. I wasn't all that successful and ended up watching Markus play poker a little too much.

Then it was time for lunch. As an example of the stuff that we had here is a picture of our meal, this is Eric's and the thing on the left is rice with tomato sauce and an egg. Eric claims that he and Allison eat this all the time, which seems... interesting.. not sure I could do that a lot. The plate on the right is a slab of ham and potatoes, which was pretty good.

The session after lunch was about web programming and was fairly interesting. The first talk was about programming by example and the web. The line I liked best was he put a graph up and was talking about people's programming experience and expertise and it was listed on the scale from amoeba to god, which I found pretty interesting. There are soooo many things in between those two... well at least I assume that there is.

Jill, another OSU grad student, gave her talk during this session and other than having problems getting her computer set up she did really well. She had to use another presenter's computer as the two tech guys who loudly clomped down the stairs couldn't figure it out. She talked a lot about self efficacy, which I then had to explain to Markus, as I guess that word doesn't translate to German.

The final session of the day was a lot about graphing and how to improve them, etc. This was very very poorly attended, but we went! and we were rewarded with an awesome presentation, which I will present without comment:

After the conference we headed home and we had a short time to rest/I worked on my presentation. It sucks to be the only person that I know who hasn't finished their presentation. It means that it will be in the back of my mind during the banquet that we have to go to.

We could have gone to the walking tour, which basically just walked around Madrid and explored stuff that we assumed we had already seen, at least Eric and I. So Chris B and Eric and Todd rested and I worked on my slides, trimming them down and going over them in my mind. At this point I haven't really fully practiced, so that is a little disconcerting. And I don't practice before we leave. Which means I get to do it late at night... joy!

So we walked to the banquet and on the way there we got treated to a great street performance by what I can only assume to be Don Quixote and Shakespeare. Although... I guess it would make more sense if it was Don Quixote and Miquel De Cervantes... but .... I wasn't smart enough to think about that until just now....and as Eric says, I wear out my e's and a's but not my backspace key... so it is too late to erase that. Anyway, I had no idea what they were saying, but there was a huge crowd and they seemed be be enjoying it quite a lot.

Anyway, we got to the place where the banquet was supposed to be, but it seemed like we were the only people there. In fact there were like 2 people there. Adam Carter, shown in the picture with Todd and Chris B. below, and Mary Shaw... who didn't seem that into talking to us. We all almost sat together, but then we figured that would be bad, so Eric and I sat at a 6 person table and Todd and Chris B. sat at a 4 person table.

Here I am sitting at our table waiting for people to join us. I am wearing my new shirt, which on the way to dinner, both Eric and Todd said they liked. Then this spurred a conversation about the phrase "I like the cut of your jib" Which Eric had never heard....
Anyway, the food at the banquet was amazing. We got portions of four appetizers. They were:

Crawfish Salad- this was absolutely wonderful. Maybe the best thing that we had all night. Although, since it was first, it was also the only time I wasn't full.
Fried Anchovies - A little salty, but quite good.
Ham Croquettes - Similar to stuff that we have had before
Something..... I think it was Spanish Tortilla, but I really have no idea.... it sort of all blended together

Ah, so we were sitting at a table with Michael Coblenz, who I actually talked to a lot during this conference. He is working on Numbers at Apple and so is interested in the spreadsheet stuff that I am doing. He wouldn't tell me any of the ideas that he had, since he couldn't (or didn't want to) give anything away. He didn't trust me I guess. But it was nice to have someone that was pretty interested in stuff that I was working on.

The other members of our table were Bernie, who has been at the last couple of VL/HCC's and is pretty familiar. He is kind of a jokster or a trickster and is good at getting people to party and have fun, which is a useful skill. With him was John Daughtry... who... was sick and sat next to me >(. I was not happy about that. There was supposedly a sickness sweeping through VL/HCC or at least some of the students and that was not cool at all. He was very obviously sick and I did not like that he sat next to me one bit.

The final member was Sandra Fan, who studies at UW and did some work with board games and online content. Eric loved talking about this and told her about BoardGameGeek.com which is one of Eric's favorite site. It was actually crazy how many people at the conference liked board games. Also cool, she actually did some online game creation using Google Wave, mostly for its forum ability, sadly this was not enough for Google to put that aberration out of it's misery, but I still thought it was cool that someone actually found something useful for it.

For the main choice we got a choice between, Cuttlefish (in their own ink!!!!), codfish, ham, or beef cheeks. Most of the people at our table got the beef cheeks. Eric, always the rebel, got the cuttlefish. Now he had cuttlefish before (in Malaga), but....that did not prepare him for this dish:

Surprisingly, it turned out to taste fine I think... I am skeptical even to this day (a whole 5 days later!). I was so stuffed but the time that the main course came that I wasn't sure that I could eat it. But I managed to... it was tough though..... So I loosened the belt a little bit.

Here Eric is at the banquet... picking at his cuttlefish?

So the banquet ended and people trickled out and soon it was just us and... lots of half empty or mostly full bottles of wine. Of course we could not let this fine wine go to waste could we! of course not. So.......... we drank it. All of it. I am pretty sure that the staff hated us since we were the only table left and we were pretty high on wine... but they were just going to throw it out anyway, and we paid good money to come here (sort of, only if you count the registration fee). So we weren't going to waste it. I wasn't sure that this was the best choice for me since I had a presentation the following day.... but everyone was doing it, and I had already had a few glasses during dinner... so it was hard to resist.

note: I did not mean to drink that much during dinner... but they kept filling up my glass! Even if it wasn't empty! And before I knew it, I had drank a fair amount.

I am not sure how much we finished off, but it was a pretty good amount, we were all very happy. And Stephen (a guy who joined our table to drink), first got candy from the bathroom, which at the time was .... oddly hilarious, then suggested that we all go to lazer karaoke.

On the way home, we actually walked right to the lazer karaoke place, so they all went in, but I... deciding that I should actually practice once before I gave my presentation decided to go home with Chris B. and practice.

So I did that and practiced... I was 4 minutes too long, which was not good. But I also had to take 2 bathroom breaks in the middle of it because of all the water I drank to try and sober up. lol.... Eric and Todd got back at like 2, which was about when I finished practicing and so I went to bed, wondering if I should have practiced more.

Luckily, the wine made it easy to sleep! How did my presentation go???? Tune in Next blog for the exciting conclusion to.... The Conference!!!!

Dun Dun Duhhhhhhh!

The Conference: Day 1

2010-09-27T17:36:00.001-07:00

So it has been quite a while since I updated this, and for that I am sorry. I wasn't able to post about the first day of the conference since I had to prepare for my presentation as well as go to the conference banquet. The next night was celebratory and so I was up late and so was too tired to blog.

So I figured that I would be able to catch up on Saturday since after walking around Madrid a little I began to feel not so good and then I started feeling really bad and my stomach gave me problems and I just couldn't bring myself to write anything, in fact mostly I was just passed out or laying on my bed all day. Then Sunday was a travel day. So, basically I am begging your forgiveness but this was the earliest that I could write this. So I will split the conference up into the three days, and then lump Saturday and Sunday in one, since Saturday will be interesting to no one.

I also have some stats for the conference, but I think that I will just put those on the last days.

Ok, so the day begins bright and early, especially compared to the wake up times that we have had in Spain. Both Chris B. and Todd are presenting today. So even though we woke up early, Chris B. was still practicing as I got ready.

I look like I am sleep taking this picture, but .... well I have no idea what I am doing, I was tired, Chris B. is going over his slides though, early in the morning.

So then we headed out on our long walk to the train station, well not really long... it was about 10 minutes or so. The conference actually started at ... 9:15, and so we left at about 8. Since there are 4 of us using just one bathroom we all staggered out wakeup times so that we wouldn't all be jostling for the bathroom. Chris B. also made us breakfast which was really great.

Anyway, we get to the conference easily enough, the train ride takes about 20 minutes and the total time is about 45 minutes or so.... the day before the guys had gotten lost trying to get back to the train station so I had expected it to ... be sort of confusing. However, the walk was pretty straightforward.

We checked in and I talked to Chris S. (I know another Chris!), my adviser, about Spain and tapas and all that jazz. He was confused about our failures in trying to get tapas. I explained to him that we were trying to get free tapas, I am not sure that I really explained it all that well though.

So I got checked in very quickly since we were pretty early and I got to check out the free swag, usually one of the funner parts of checking in. However, I already knew what to expect, which was good since otherwise I would have been even more disappointed. Basically, we got a bag full of brochures... which... is not really swag, but more like advertising. I could understand if they had to do that for sponsorship money or something, but it was a little lame.

It sort of reminds me of this scene from the best christmas movie ever: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K8-kNuDgoA
and since I can't find any video that has the reaction, here is that as well
http://space.canoe.ca/group/movies/video/view/25937

Luckily, I didn't react like that... otherwise I may have been kicked out of Spain.

So the conference was supposed to start at 9:15, but it ended up starting late, at about 9:30. The first part was just an introduction and they talked about what was going on and then we got a keynote by Ed Chi. I thought the keynote was pretty good, I do have to admit that I didn't really know about Ed Chi much, everyone else seemed to know him before hand and thought he was great... I guess I just don't follow researchers enough.

Picture of the first session (introduction)

So in the room where the presentations are there were only 2 outlets in the whole room.. 2! So Markus and I made sure to sit by one, since it is a valuable resource and perhaps it would allow us to rent out power to people... or else just use it at least.

One of the things we used power for... Markus playing only poker during a talk:

The first group of presentation were about assisting programmers and featured a presentation by Andy Ko, it seemed like his idea was pretty simple but he did a good job presenting it and it looked very useful. The next two presentations were about uhmm... something, (looks at program) I guess a code completion tool and a metric to navigate API's. The API tool looked interesting. The most interesting thing about the Code Completion program was that the presenter gave it while reading from paper notes which... I don't think I have ever seen at a conference, so there are always new and exciting things going on!

Then we had lunch! It was cafeteria food, but it wasn't bad at all, and there was soooo much of it. well... it was a Menu del Dia, which was exciting. I sat with Markus and then Carlos Jenson, a professor at OSU sat with us and talked about Spain and the menu. Then Andy Bagel and Martin sat next to him and we talked about random things like wine importing and vegetarianism in Spain, which I think is next to impossible.

The session after Lunch was the all OSU session and featured Scott, Todd, and Chris B. all presenting there work:

Here is a picture of Scott presenting. He dressed up and even wore a coat!

So here are my notes from Scott's presentation... this might be embarrassing...
Concurrent Programming/Debugging
I like the little spider pictures
Complexity has an effect, so more complex leads to a better score when using diagrams.
Creating diagrams did improve scores
complexity was related to affect
diagram quality related to reasoning ability
looking harder always leads to finding bugs.

The last note was related to a question that asked whether or not Scott thought that the improvement in scores was more based on the fact that when they created the diagrams made the user think more about the problem, which made it easier for them to debug the problem.

I liked Scott's presentation, I thought it was well done and pretty interesting.

Next came Todd:
Again, here are my notes for Todd's presentation:
He should take his hands out of his pocket
He starts out a little nervous, but gets better
His eye contact is better now
Mental Models are stubborn? (Just like normal models?)
Does AutoCoder work for any code set?
runtime is better than logic
Eric asked 2 questions about logic

Basically Todd was presenting a tool that was trying to automatically code uhm... code sets for transcripts and stuff like that.

Last in the OSU group was Chris B. Chris is always a good presenter:

My notes for him are a lot less detailed:
The thing with the properties and related work was really good
no questions :/
ah good, people started asking questions.

Lol... wow those are bad notes, I may need to stop including the notes that I take.

So then we had a break. Oh! So the two breaks during the first day, Eric, Todd, and Chris B. had to stand in the hallway by posters and talk about them if anyone stopped by, so during the breaks I brought them coffee and some of the treats.

The treats were little like croissant, which for the first day I thought was great, but as time went by I got more and more tired of, until by the last day I just couldn't bear to eat them anymore. Some variety would have been really nice... or german pretzels :P

The final session of the day was really interesting. It was about Games and Learning.

The first talk was about seeing if the things people learn about while programming games and be used to created scientific programs. I am not sure that I would have put the focus quite like this. But I think this is really interesting. If people are learning the same kinds of things, then they should obviously be doing whatever interests them. I also thought that I may be able to use this work for something, but I am not positive.

The next couple of talks were good and interesting as well.

So the first day of the conference ended and we headed home. Luckily this time we did not go in the wrong direction, although I did have to argue that my way was better. We went their way. (only because I knew it would eventually get us there)

On the train ride home we talked to this guy Alessio who worked at the university and he gave us a bunch of tips on places that we could go to eat, so that was really cool.

On the way home we again stopped to see the turtles. I don't think that Eric will ever be tired of looking at those turtles:

Right out of the train station we were talking about being hungry and then we walked by this place that Alessio suggested and so we decided that we would stop and try it. So we stopped and got the calamari sandwiches that he recommended... they were ok. Not sure they were worth a recommendation, but they weren't bad.

Todd and Chris B. went out for the night with some people. Eric stayed into Practice and I stayed to finish my slides. Eric didn't end up starting his practicing until like 1 AM... so he got to sleep pretty late, like 2 AM I think. How did he do? That is a story for another Post!

Spain Trivia Game

2010-09-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

Hello loyal readers,
To see how many of you have been paying attention to my blog and to what depth, I am hosting a trivia game! The first person to answer the 24 questions below and email me the answers will win a 5-10 euro prize! The people who went on the trip with me are not eligible.

Email the answers to cwc1983@gmail.com

If no one has gotten everything correct by Saturday I will have to pick the person with the most correct responses.

Good Luck!

List all the food/entertainment things that both the Walkies and I brought:
What superhero did we pose with in Madrid?
What 3 restaurants did I go to on my Madrid evening walk?
What was the name of our bike tour guide?
What brand of beer is Rudy Fernandez on a box of?
What museum did we go to twice? How much did it cost?
What dish did Eric and I end up ordering when we failed to get tapas the first time?
What is Eric and my favorite cheap meal?
What animal was in the Madrid train station?
What treat did we get on the ZocoTrain?
What was Eric’s dream the first day in Sevilla?
What sporting events have we watched on TV in Spain?
Which actor does Eric think is a heartthrob?
What are the four people depicted carrying Christopher Columbus’s Tomb?
How many cats has Eric tried to make friends with? How many has he been successful with?
What did we feed the cat in Granada?
What was Allison's favorite animal at the Zoo?
How many panoramajama’s have there been on this trip?
Where was the only water fountain we found in all of Spain?
In what city did we do laundry?
What city was the first place we actually did tapas correctly?
Other than Spanish what type of food did we have the most of?
What is one reason why more people make out in public places like parks in Spain?
What has been YOUR favorite post and why?

The Grad Consortium, Madrid and Free Tapas

2010-09-22T12:24:00.000-07:00

Well, today was the day of the grad consortium as well as the day that Allison left, so basically I was on my own for most of the day.

Allison departed at about 6:00, I think? I was not yet awake, I have heard that she made it safely home. I may now lose one of my more consistent readership cities as Allison's mom may no longer read it.

So this will be a short blog, but I just would like to thank all of you. Even if you didn't comment, I did know that people were reading as I could follow along and see how many hits I was getting, and it was a good feeling knowing 20 something people were enjoying my blog.

I also got a compliment from an OSU professor about my blog at the conference, so that was neat :).

Ok, so anyway, the rest of the roommates had to leave at like... 7:30? Sometime that I am not aware of, since I wasn't involved in the planning. I do remember walking up and hearing them chopping potatoes and some talking and then going back to sleep and then waking up and discovering that I was all alone, which was something that basically hasn't happened since about... September 8th.

So I read a little bit, have I mentioned yet that I have blown past Eric in our book? Well I have, not that I expected anything less, but I know Eric had high hopes. There are very few people that I believe can outread me.... of course there are probably lots of people who after we are done with a book would be able to test on it better... maybe?

So after reading, I finished up my presentation and then I had a small lunch. I was waiting for Markus, my friend from Germany to arrive, since he was coming in and we were going to check out Madrid. Unfortunately, he had a lot of bad travel, and so he wasn't able to make it. So after I while I just struck out into the city to explore a little bit.

I actually really love walking through Madrid. I have a fairly good sense of direction which helps a lot, but the city, actually all cities in Spain

So I needed to get a shirt for the conference, I managed to pack not enough polo's... which was silly of me, I should have planned better than that. So that was my primary goal while walking around. I went into a few shops and finally settled on an olive greenish polo that was pretty nice, as well as not expensive. I can also wear it again, so that is nice.

I then went and got a few more post cards. I realized that Allison took some of the postcards home that I had purchased, which was a little unfortunate. I then walked around a little more. And I saw a couple of cool things:

The first... well not cool thing, but I walked by the Church of Scientology:
It was huge! and fancy and I could have gone in and got tested for free. I figured, I didn't really need that, so I walked on by, but I thought that the size of the place was funny.

I saw what I think was the congress of Spain? I am not sure since it seemed so unguarded. Only like 5 policeman, all sitting in their cars smoking, but it said Congress of the ... something. :p

The final thing I saw was the funny bull statue, that was interesting only in that it looked very mad, the shirt says Crazy Bull.

So eventually I headed home and looked up how to get stamps and went and did that. I had to do it entirely in Spanish! It was actually not as bad as I would have thought, and really it was kind of smooth.

Then I got ready to go to the Welcome reception, except a few minutes before I was going to leave, Eric contacts me and says they aren't feeling the reception so they are just going to come home, which is fine with me, it means I don't have to travel! :)

I also arrange it so Markus comes back with them. So eventually, they show up, it turns out they turned the wrong way for the train and so they had to walk to the next train station which was about a mile away.... :-/ Not very fun.

So they show up and we eventually go out to eat at a little place near here. The lady spoke english and yet did not understand our orders. Chris B. tried ordering a Spanish Omelet and she was like, Spanish Omelet? and he was like Yes. And she said.. A Spanish Omelet? and he again said yes and point to the picture on the menu. And she said, its eggs and potatoes, and he said yes, I want that. She finally just accepted it. I am not quite sure what she was trying to tell him or thought that he didn't know.

After dinner we split up, they all went to get their posters while Markus and I went to drink a beer and talk for awhile. I took him to the place where they had belgian beer but sadly they were closed, so we just went to this little shop right under Hotel Cruz Sol. And we got tapas!!!! We ordered a beer and they brought us two chicken wings. lol... it wasn't the best tapas, but they were legitimate tapas and we weren't even trying. It is like... we are learning! :)

That was pretty much the evening. We tried going to bed early since we all had to wake up early for the conference. We sort of didn't succeed at that, but we tried!

Zoopendous!

2010-09-21T14:58:00.001-07:00

So... I think this is the title that I promised to use, but I am not exactly sure. It was a pretty low key day today. Eric, Chris B, and Todd were headed off to go get their posters made and then were planning on working on their presentations for the day. So it was up to Allison and I to find something fun to do.

Depending on how you feel about art, it was either good news or bad news that all of the museums were closed on today, as it was a Monday, and apparently no cool things can be open on Monday's. I suppose this is one way to avoid people having a case of the Mondays... so at least that is something.

So, we decided to go to the Zoo! A baby panda had just been born at the zoo, which made me think about it, and Allison seemed excited. Our stop was on the same metro line as the people actually doing work, and so we all headed out together.

Here we are in the Metro station waiting for the train. Eric is trying super hard not to look at the camera since I mentioned that I like action/candid shots better. I am not sure that is working for him.

So the train ride was pretty smooth. We made the transfer and other than the train losing power on the tracks at a stop, everything went fine. Once off we had to walk a little ways to the zoo, but soon we were there. It almost appeared as if no one was there. In fact, we could barely find any place to get in. We finally found a ticket window and bought our.... slightly too expensive tickets and then we were in. Don't get me wrong the zoo was cool and huge, but each ticket was 18 euros... which was, other than hotels and transportation the second most expensive thing we have done all trip! It would be the most expensive, but my tourist trap lunch from the first day was 19 euros. Curse you chubby spiderman!

Anyway, the zoo was entirely empty... I really mean entirely:

So.... can I just take a golf cart?

The only people that I actually saw were a couple making out by the bathrooms... so, we pretty much had the zoo to ourselves. The first stop was to the flamengoes, there was a little thing of bird seed there, and Allison wanted to feed the birds.
So she got some and tossed it out to them. They were very receptive:

This is the flamengo reaction to food, it is also the typical reaction to sun, rain, wind, yells from annoyed zoo goers and air horns.

So, Allison gave up and I finally just started tossing the bird food as far as I could get it to go and it started bouncing off the flamengoes. After getting hit by like 5 or 20 pellets, one of the birds finally looked around and noticed something. ONE! WE concluded that the flamengoes are just not very smart.

We continued walking and soon found the penguins. They were actually rather boring as they just stop around. A couple swam a little bit, but in general they didn't do anything.

We saw a few more exhibits, including the seal and sea lion and some rhinos, and then we stumbled across the elephants. I like elephants, they are sort of my own chosen animal.... lol... I am not sure you can choose an animal, but, I like elephants...
The next stop was the kiddie zoo, where I got to feed the goats. The goats were very very excited about being feed. A little too excited considering that they were already super fat. I tried to make sure that the little goats got food too since they kept getting butted out of the way.

One of the main exhibits at the zoo was that you could buy a ticket to walk with the lemurs. I have to say, that doesn't look particularly fun, they are all asleep.

In fact I think I make a better and more active lemur than those guys.

Directly across from the lemurs was Allisons favorite animal at the zoo the Leopard. It was pretty cool, even if all it did was yawn and stare at the lemurs hungrily.

Here is Allison with the Leopard scratching in the background. Better watch out Gort!

Strongly challenging the leopard was the giraffe's which Allison has always liked and has many socks of.

This giraffe enjoyed rubbing against the railing.

Oh, hello there. I'm a giraffe!
The zoo had a lot of little antelope things as well as a few camels. This was the cutest little antelope since it would run around and nip and things and then dash away really fast.

So we realized that we could catch the Seal/Sea lion show if we hurried so we ran to the monkey exhibit... which was ... huge as well as stinky and kind of gross. It was just covered in garbage and the monkeys were... not very sanitary. It was kind of crazy.

This little monkey had this doll and he really loved it. He would kiss it. And then he would hold it down by his crotch, and then kiss it again... then it fell and he went sliding down the pole to retrieve it

So after that we hustled to the show and arrived just before it stated. It was a pretty good show. The smaller seal was by far the best and the trainer seemed more into too. The show was pretty good, although all of the music was disney music remade in spanish, which was a tad creepy.
After the show we tried to get food... only to discover that all the places at closed at 4:30. (Note... technically, it was 420 when we were trying to get food so I think that they just closed early since there was no one there)

So we kept walking around and we saw some more antelopes and we saw a lot of chimps, then we saw some orangutans. This one had a baby that it was very protective of. The orangutans were cool... and very smart. One came over to the window and stared at us.

We came across the meerkat exhibit and despite these little guys being the fatest meerkats I have ever seen they were still on the look out for predators.. they couldn't decide about me, the lookout stared at me for a long time:
Finally, we showed up for the dolphin show, which was really cool. The dolphins pulled this little girl around in a boat and then did flips and jumped through hoops. It was great, best part of the zoo I think. My camera did not do a good job capturing this at all... but here is a picture: oh... lol... the first picture is just me sitting there... you can tell the place is pretty full, we were lucky to find a seat.

Here is a picture of the dophins doing tricks!
The final exhibit was the bears, which were really funny, they would roam around and pace and then stop and stare at these pigs and just stare at them. All three bears would do this! The pigs got restless and hid. so the bears started pacing again!

At the exit to the zoo there was a giraffe ride that Allison got to go on. She seemed very excited... almost as excited as the horde of kids that followed her up the stairs.
(Note: Not a real giraffe despite how life like it looks.)

And then we were done. We headed home, hungry but satisfied that we had seen the entire zoo. It had been a good day.

We had to get dinner on our own since the other group ate without us, but that allowed Allison to get snacks for her flight, so that was probably good.

It was sad to see Allison go, since she has been a trusty member of the group since the beginning, but I can't claim the conference would have been super exciting for her.

Eric may or may not guest blog the missing piece of today, since I couldn't be in two places at once.

Until tomorrow loyal readers!

Bob Barker your country... er... Spain needs you!

2010-09-20T15:59:00.001-07:00

I am sure that many of you are familiar with the typical ending to the price is right where Bob Barker implores people to spay and neuter their pets. Well Bob Barker, or someone like him needs to come to Spain and start that campaign, because there and tons of stray cats here.

Often they don't seem entirely like strays as several places people have set out food for the cats to eat. For example, in Madrid, the cats at the botanical gardens had a plate of food set out for them when we walked by. This was similar in Malaga where we walked by a construction zone and there was a cat eating off a paper plate. It quickly scurried away when we stopped.

I am not sure if there is a reason why there are so many cats here, as I mentioned before it could be to try and counter act more worrisome pests such as mice or rats, but it seems like there might be better ways to deal with it.

Below are the pictures of the cats we have seen during our travels. Almost all of them are included, along with some short explanations.

MADRID
So we started noticing this in our first stop, the city of Madrid. While there were not a whole lot of cats in the streets or the main parts of the city, it did seem like there were smart enough to find safe places to stay, such as the Botanical gardens.

Here is the first cat we took a picture of. It is at the botanical gardens in Madrid, and it wouldn't be Eric's friend.

As I mentioned before the park was full of cats, and someone was also putting food out for them. This cat is sunning itself on the window of a building in the garden.

TOLEDO
Since this was our first stop we figured that this might be an isolated event, especially since we only noticed this at the botanical gardens. However, this was not the case. At our next in Toledo we ran into the river cats. These cats, which seemed like mostly young cats, were playing with each other, chasing around and fighting near the river in Toledo. The city did not seem to have a lot of cats, but this may have been because the cats were too lazy to climb all the way up the hill.
The cats were pretty skinny but they seemed to be full of energy, at least they were chasing each other around.
SEVILLA
Sevilla was probably too warm in general to house a large population of cats, although their certainly could have been some around the river. However, we did not see any. After our first trip to the river in which we saw lots of graffiti and not so scenic sights, we did not go back.

However, we did discover a fair amount of cats in the Alcazar gardens. It seems like this would be a great place for them. Not only is is shaded and cool and has lots of places to hide, but there are also a ton of birds for the cats to hunt.

The first cat we ran into seemed to feel like it controlled an entire pathway in the garden.

The second cat was hunting peacocks or ducks in the garden. It wasn't successful while we were watching, but you never know.

The other cat that we found in Sevilla could be described as more of a desert cat. In fact it was braving degrees over 100 Fahrenheit and didn't seem to be bothered by it at all. In fact it just found a shady spot and was napping when we ran across it. I offered it some water, but it seemed fine with it and wandered off to find some shady area that was undisturbed.

MALAGA
Malaga while, very temperate, did not seem to be home to a ton of cats. We did find this one that seemed to be enjoying the nice weather. It was also breathing from it's mouth, so hopefully it was ok. We saw some cats that were under some cars, but we couldn't really take pictures of them. You would think that cats would love Malaga since it is basically like one huge litter box with all the sand.

GRANADA
Granada was the city with by far the most cats, although we may have just not been looking in the right places. In general, you could split the cats into three groups:

The street cats: Slightly streetwise, seemed to be used to humans, found on the streets, they were generally pretty brave.

This street cat was staring down a car:

These kittens were fearless as they played in the streets. Their mom was less so, but she carefully watched them:

They have even taken to riding motorcycles:

The Canal cats: These cats were all found in the canal and seemed less comfortable with humans, but they seemed like a huge family. There were there both days we walked by.

A group of kittens huddled together for warmth:

A kitten that reminded me of sprinkles, only not as awesome or energetic:

Lots more cats under the bridge:

Some cats would even jump to rocks in the middle of the stream/canal and clean themselves.

They were also avid climbers and were able to take advantage of the canal wall.

The final group of cats was the palace cats, which seemed undisturbed by anything, almost with a sense of royalty ingrained.

Here they are sleeping in the shade:
This kitten looks regal/evil, like we shouldn't be taking it's picture.

In short, Bob Barker, Spain needs you to help control the stray cat population. I am sure there is an opening... and since you aren't doing the price is right anymore, you could start the Spanish one, El Precio Correcto. (I am sure that looks like I made it up, I swear that is the actual translation).

This post is dedicated to Sprinkles, who I hope is still being good. I have gotten reports that she is growing lazy!

All we needed was a guide!

2010-09-20T13:29:00.001-07:00

So, this is going to be a pretty short blog post since basically we did a lot of traveling and sitting around. So I will be adding another special edition blog post later today, that should be of particular interest to my feline readership.

So we sat the alarm for 9 AM, and it went off and we kind of all staggered awake slowly but surely. The bar next to our window had been open late again and so it turned out that Eric didn't actually get to bed until like 5 AM since it was so loud and he was working and he just couldn't get to sleep. But it is Eric, and he is used to a lack of sleep, so I am sure that it will be fine.

I actually think that Eric operates better on little or no sleep, it is like his default mode. In fact, look how excited he is about our bags being packed.

So we had been planning on going to breakfast at the hotel, but we haven't finished packing and it is about 10 already. Our bus leaves at 11, so we are a little bit worried about how that is going to go. We decide to skip out on breakfast since,
a) It was not that good to begin with
b) it took forever to get
c) we figured that we could get better food at the bus station.

So we head down to check out and we ask the lady for a taxi. The front desk has been less than helpful our entire time at this hotel, and we thought that we would just ask them to call a taxi. And the lady informs us that she can't call them because they probably wouldn't answer the phone since it is a Sunday...was it a Sunday?... wow, yes it was a Sunday.

So she explains that we should just walk up the street to the taxi stop and that would work better.

Get out of my hotel! but... taxi?.. GET OUT! (not really, she didn't yell at us)
So we walk up the road and we find a little taxi sign, but there are no taxis, so we are unsure about what to do. We decide to head up the road some more since it seems like there might be more taxis at a more major road.

We luck out, there are indeed taxi's there. I had been worried that the lady was just trying to drive us away and had just told us there were taxis up here to get us to leave. So we snag the first one in line, load our stuff off and away we go!

We get to the bus station in relatively good time, showing up at about 10:30. However, there is no food! What are we going to do. We need food if we are to survive for the 5 hour bus ride. In sort of a mild panic we head outside to asses our options, which are thus:

1) Run down the street to the McDonalds
2) Run across the street to some little cafe's

The cafe's are closer, but we don't know exactly what they serve, they might actually be real restaurants and we can't get anything to go. We gamble and choose the cafe's. The first place we walk into is actually a bar and as we stand there I figure we should at least check out the other place and so I bound off to the next store.

She doesn't speak english!!! yikes.... So I brokenedly ask "... uh... comida para llevar?" which means food to go? She sort of understands and says si, and so I ask Cuantos Minutos? And she rambles at me in spanish and I assume she is basically saying something like it depends on what you order.

I tell here one moment and run back to the other place and gather the group. We order our sandwiches and Allison gets an apricot thing. We are in good shape it is only about 10:45. So we head back across the street to the bus station and get on our bus. There is no bathroom on the bus which is very troubling, and seems weird considering it is a 5 hour bus ride. I guess Spaniards have amazing bladders?

So we head out and the bus is pretty smooth. Eric and Chris B. work on their conference stuff, Allison, who had a very talkative seatmate who told her multiple times that he made a lot of money, listened to her iPod and I read some more.

Eric working:
The bus ride is smooth enough, but it turns out that the bus actually stopped... so we didn't have to go hurrying around for food. We could have just eaten at the most amazing rest stop ever. Not only did it have tons of food, but the bathrooms, while containing weirdly sloped sinks, were actually clean! Also, there was a museum of olive oil on the second floor.

I am not sure this picture shows it clearly, but this is us in the bus stop.

The stop was 30 minutes and so we grabbed some food and then we ate and used the bathroom and hurried back on the bus. I was actually the last person on the bus. (I waited until the last moment to go to the bathroom, just in case)

The rest of the bus ride was pretty uneventful. I have now passed Eric in our book though. Which Eric is sad about. I try not to talk about it a lot though.

We arrive in Madrid actually a few minutes early and we head for the metro to get to our apartment. Being in Madrid is almost like old hat for us and we easily navigate the metro and our soon on our way.

Here is Allison and Chris B. on the metro. You may have noticed by now that they were all wearing greenish shirts. I felt left out, but I did not have anything that was green. Woe is me! I guess that makes me stand out more?

We arrive at the apartment at 4:30 and magically run into the guy we are supposed to meet as he is going in. What an amazing coincidence! It was great. We had been worried about how that was going to work.... We have to get cash to pay the rent, but that works out way better than we thought since the ATM is just about right below the apartment, and the guy was really nice. He even gave us a really good tapas recommendation!

Todd is somewhere in the city and so he soon finds his way to the apartment and our party is strengthened by one, once again. Since we are all CS majors, we tend to huddle around and use WiFi whenever we can. Here we are IM'ing each other in the same room instead of just talking ;).
I decided that I need to do laundry, so I start that. This is supposedly a washer/dryer... at least that is what I assume since there is not a dryer in the apartment. I don't really know how that works. We should have asked the guy before he left. So I start a load of laundry and hope that everything works out ok. I don't add my conference stuff since I want to make sure it works before I do that.

At 8 we are supposed to meet with one of Chris B.'s friends from Denver who now lives in Madrid teaching music at a school. His name is Chris Suazo... which is yet another Chris... so... I am not sure yet how I will get around that.

Anyway, he takes us for a little walk through Madrid or a very small part of it on our way to a few tapa's bars that he knows. He his great! Knowledgeable and friendly, and he knows his way around. Walking around Madrid again actually feels pretty comfortable, we are in the same basic area that we were in last time and despite the fact that we were only there for three days I seem to remember the area fairly well, which is nice. Oh... so I asked him why so many people in Spain made out in parks and roman ruins and he informed us that it was mostly because they often don't have places of their own. The either shares flats or even live with their parents, so parks are one way to sort of be out on your own.

He takes us to a tapas bar and... it is full of people. Absolutely packed, this is the type of place that we have been scared to go into. But he leads us in and explains that you have to order from the bar (which Eric and I and you have to wait around for a space. So he orders us some ciders and he gets 3 plates of tapas!!! Wow, and they are all amazing. We stand around unsure what to do and eventually we see some space that has cleared so we head back there and maneuver for a spot and settle in.

Here is Eric and our trusty guide, enjoying tapas in our little corner. The tapas are great, and we can't believe that we actually got 3 plates worth! We get another round since we figure that we are kind of settled in and so we should enjoy it while we can.
THREE MORE PLATES OF TAPAS!!!! One is croquettes, (basically jalepeno poppers only with a sort of ham paste, one is garlic fries, and the other is ham on bread)

After our second round, people are beginning to crowd in and to try and steal our area. Also Chris Suazo gets a call from his partner and they are going to go to this little fish market place that is just down the road, so we manage to wrangle ourselves out of our corner and like hungry wolves going after prey, the patrons of the bar soon fill in the area.

We get to the bar pretty quickly, and Chris Suazo, is friends with the bartender and they shake hands and he tells him that we are his friends from the U.S. and that he is showing us around. The bartender is amazing. We order a round and.... get more tapas!!! Hurrah!
One of our plates of tapas:

Chris and Chris and Todd talking and enjoying Tapas.We order another round and we get more Tapas, in fact, we even sometimes get tapas just because the bartender thinks that we look hungry. (like I said, he was great)

Here is a shot of me... explaining something or ... I don't know what, all the tapas (read the drinks that came with them) sort of went to my head.

We also ordered sort of a russian roulette kind of tapa. Some huge plate of peppers and there are just a few that are really super spicy and then the rest are mild and normal.

This is what they looked like. I wasn't close enough to the other plate to count. But I got 1 very spicy one and 1 medium spicy one and eric got 2 very spicy ones and 3 medium spicy ones.. soo... I win? I don't know how to keep score. The peppers were very good though. When we got the played we were like... woah! and the bartender smiled and said "Ooo lala" Did I mention he was awesome?
Soon Chris Suazo's partner arrived with a friend and more drinks were order and more food was brought to us. It was like a never ending supply if tapas! It was amazing.

Allison also got in on the party, drinking several hard ciders and sangria like drinks.

Eventually that took a toll:
By the time we were finished with tapas we were all very full and very happy. Allison pounded her last drink and to commerate the bartender notice and... brought us more tapas, some more little croquette things.

We finally say our goodbyes and profuse thanks to Chris Suazo for being our guide and showing us great tapas and helping us through it and we head home for the night.

I check my laundry and... it isn't really dry... so I am not sure what exactly is up with it. I decide to just hang it up for the night and let it dry. (This works pretty good as in the morning they are nice and crisp and dry)

Yay for laundry!

Ala-Ala-Alhambra, Alhambra, Alhambra

2010-09-19T17:24:00.001-07:00

AHA! I finally have the upper hand. It appears that at this stop my windows machine actually seems to get the internet better, while the macs seem to be slow and sort of in a queue type system where one works well and the others barely work, and then once that computer is done another one will work.

So the hotel that we are staying at had a continental breakfast, which was good because the place outside of the window was really really loud. The bar was sort of open until about 5 AM or something like that....and they were loud for the entire night and so that made it tougher to sleep than we should have.

So we stumbled out of bed at about our typical time of 10 AM, the breakfast ended at about 11 AM and we headed down to the breakfast. We weren't expecting much... however, the place was very confusing. We walked in and wondered around confused about where we sat and what we are supposed to do. We eventually just sit down and try to get the attention of someone. The guy eventually comes over and we order the breakfast... I guess there are no options, since they don't ask us. We thought that we would also get tomatoes... sadly this is what we got:

This is my second coffee of the trip and I again load it up with sugar and make it bearable. I figure that this will probably help since then I didn't get a whole lot of sleep. Well I got about... 6 hours, so not too bad, but we have a long day ahead of us, so I figure that it wouldn't hurt.

We hang out in the room for a little while and make arrangements for tomorrow, getting our bus tickets and trying to call the apartment that we are staying at. Sadly, we can't get a hold of them and so we head out. We hope that it is not the bad phone in the room, which Chris barely figured out how to use.

So we finally head out and Allison decides that we should do lunch so that we can hit the Alhambra as early as possible. We find a restaurant with a nice view of the monument. It also had a Menu Del Dia, which we were excited about and it was pretty cheap. But they tricked us! They didn't include drinks! So we had to pay more than we thought, but it was good, so that's ok.
Allison was super excited about her pasta, which she has had a lot of recently. Actually, in general we ate a lot of Italian food in Granada... which is very strange, since it doesn't seem like a very Italian place, but that is just sort of how it worked out. We also fed a cat that was walking around. We gave it a whole bunch of shrimp heads. It plopped out below Eric's chair and chilled with us for a while. I guess we made a friend. Perhaps the cat treat idea would be good.

So after our lunch we headed out. We were a little later than Allison would like, but we were still kind of on time. We head up to hill. It is a bit of a trek. We find a couple that is trying to automatically take their picture and I offer to take it for them. I figure they will just use the same pose, which was sitting on a little rock. Instead they run to a tree and make out.... and want me to take a picture of that.... so I did... but it was weird.

Here is the road that on the way to the Alhambra. it is pretty steep. But definitely the fastest way to go.

We also find a dungeon, which I point out. Since this is the second or third dungeon I have noticed and pointed out, my companions seem to believe that I really like dungeons... so, I get my picture taken with it. I am not sure where this belief came from, I don't actually like dungeons.

So we finally make it there and we stand in line for our tickets and we wait for a while and then they send us off to a little machine that allows us to pick them up really easily. That is nice, since then we don't have to wait in line. So we walk in and then we find ourselves in ... a castley garden place? We walk around a little and find a sign pointing to the palaces.

To help things make some sense, I am adding a map here and I will refer to it occasionally. This is something that I haven't really done before, however, almost all of this blog is about the alhambra, so I think it will be helpful. The numbers aren't the greatest, but hopefully they will help:

We walk down the cool pathway and look through the little window hedges. Chris seems a window that captures his interest and we also notice a french garden that is set up near what used to be the town of the Alhambra. (About 33)
The Alhambra was set up in 3 parts. The first part was the town part, and I guess they also got the gardens. The second part was the palace part, which housed like three palaces, or two and a cathedral, and the third was the military part which housed the alcazar.

I think the towns people lucked out. They got cool gardens with trees that had weird little nut fruits. Here we are checking one out. Chris B. informs us that it is a French Garden since it is more trimmed and cut nicely. (about 33)
We finishing walking through the small gardens and town and then we come to an exit? An exit? How can this be the end. We are really confused. I swear, sometimes the way that the spanish run their monuments infuriates me. I think that I could do a much better job of it than they do. First of all, don't put an exit in the middle of the monument. That makes very little sense and will just confuse people. Second, don't make it confusing when you can and can't visit and have the guidebooks say random different things. Just those two changes would make a world of difference.

Also... allow people to take pictures.

So after we finally figured out that the exit was just so that they could control access to the generallife, the area outside the town, on the other side of where we had walked, and that we could get back in at anytime with our ticket. We figured we were safe. So we went off exploring.

The first place we found was the banos! (45)

Here are Eric and Chris B. walking into them, Allison makes a brief appearance, or her shoulder does.
The banos were cool, lots of cool arabic writing and some cool architecture, I am leaving much of it out, since we will get to pictures of some slightly more impressive places, and I don't want to overload you too much.

So we continue walking down towards the palaces and we find some more cannons. I don't know why, but I am legitimately and think that we should get our pictures taken with all of us manning a cannon and pretending like we were firing. No one was really excited about this, so Allison just took our picture with us gesturing at the cannons. Slightly disappointing as you can tell by my enthusiastic gesturing. (37)
Next to the cannons there was the door of justice. We wondered who would answer the door, since it wasn't unlocked. So Eric knocked. (39)

Sadly, no one answered the call, so we moved on. After a quick bathroom stop, we moved on to the Palace of Carlos V. (42) We have been seeing his hotels all over Spain, and even stayed in one in Toledo, so this was truely a special moment, to see exactly how his hotels compared.

The short answer.... not favorably :P

The palace was pretty cool. The outside was a huge square building with lots of little lion knockers all the way around the outside, so that was pretty cool. The inside was a huge circle with columns and such. It was pretty impressive. It was also time for a panoramajama.

Here I am heading to start the panoramajama time.

Here is the end result. While I was doing this a whole bunch of Asian tourists came up and took a picture with me in the background and they were laughing about it the whole time. I am not quite sure what was funny about me talking pictures, it was exactly what they were doing.

We walked around the palace and of course went upstairs, but the only additional thing to see was this weird art museum that didn't seem incredibly interesting. So we headed over to the Alcazar, which was the fortress part of the castle. (1-10)

Here I am looking at the entrance to the alcazar, a pretty imposing view.
So we walked around for about 1 minutes and then went up to the first rampart thing to take pictures. The walkies posed for some potential christmas shots, while I did... what else... a panoramajama!

Outtakes from the photo shoot:

The panorama that resulted from this wall thing. (7)

We also got all of our pictures taken here, a pretty intrepid band of explorers if I do so say. Also since I thought of it just now. We forgot our sunscreen application since it was cloudy when we left the hotel. But luckily it seemed to not affect us much. I may have gotten a little burned. But not bad at all.

Eric really liked the view of the town and kept talking about how picturesque it was and how impressive it was, etc, etc. Here he is pointing out a basketball court, I think.So we walk a little farther and then we find some stairs, and of course, we went up them. I am not sure why stairs hold such an appeal.. I guess because there could be new cool stuff up them. Allison never seems nearly as excited about the stairs, which is a little sad, but understandable. The stairs let us out onto the wall (4) and we check out the view before heading back. That is another thing that I would change about the monuments, they are never continuous. There are lots of breaks in the path and so you have to go back the way you came and you lose all of your progress.

Here Eric and Allison climb the stairs.

After we get down we walk through the ruins of the barracks and check it out. (1) I notice that one of the window things as a whole bunch of round rocks. I hypothesis that the rocks are either skulls or dragon or dinosaur eggs. I am rewarded for my ingenuity with a picture. Not easy to see the eggs, so I am pointing at them:

We then head up the tallest watch tower (2) and enjoy the view/take a panoramajama. :) Lots of them in this post! By the way, these panorama's are about 3% to scale, so they are small compared to what I have. So if anyone is interested in the big ones let me know.

We head down and check out the small gardens. Allison stops for a drink. I stick to my trusty nalgene bottle, at least that I know is safe.

We are looking at a hedge trimmed as a star in the gardens.
And then we are done. We check out a little store nearby, but sadly, the guy doesn't let Chris look at the antiques and then laughs at him, so we leave, down the hill. Past the stray cat population. I wonder if cats are considered good to keep around since then they kill the rats, etc.

Of course, I didn't think the plague was a big deal anymore... but maybe that is the cats!

So our tickets to the main palace is for 6 and so we need to look at some other stuff, so we head down the hill. Then Eric says that he thinks we shouldn't go down there, since it is a long walk, it was a very good call, since the thing(54) we were headed for is actually nothing, so we would have been very dissapointed.

So we head back and we check out the cathedral (44), then head to the generalife(47-50) and walk around a little bit. It is basically just a really cool garden/forest with a palace. We aren't able to finish checking it out before we decide it would be good to go line up for the palace. Rick Steves told us we could line up early.

We get there and there is almost no one there, but the girl says we can't line up yet, so we sit down and wait in the shade. Then I go and check it out and people are lining up! despite the fact that they said we couldn't. So we rush back and I sort of crowd in the front, because I think it is silly to have to wait behind lots of people since we were there. I am sure it doesnt matter... but I get vindictive about little things sometimes.

So these are just some of the photos in the Alhambra: (12-21)

Allison with a very impressive door:

Eric checking out the courtyard. You had to wear your backpack on your front so you wouldnt hit anything.
A very nice picture of Eric and Allison with the fortress/palace in the background.

The walkies explore one of the many intricate walls in the palace:

Allison in one of the rooms:
Eric and Chris B. in the palace
Some of the walls were just amazing, very intricate and... very much work was done on them.

Unfortunately one of the main attractions, the lion fountain was in construction, so we only got to see videos which wasn't nearly as cool as the real thing.

Here is the group posing in front of windows:

We then walked through the gardens which were really nice. I spotted some stairs and bolted up them. No on followed me, so I made them pose for a picture with the garden background.

So that was pretty cool. I was a little sad, since the books had hyped it so so much, and then access was sort of restricted, only a certain number of people every 30 minutes. I thought it was cool... but not as cool as the Alcazar in Sevilla... or even the one in Malaga. Perhaps with the fountain. That room was really cool, but with construction stuff and missing the centerpiece it just wasnt the same.

So we head to the generallife and the first thing we look at is the farm land. With a very interesting crop:(49)

We find more stairs that lead to the gardens and the generalife palce. Eric and Chris B. walking up the stairs:

This palace (50) was impressive. Very pretty, very picturesque, a cool fountain thing that everyone got their picture taken with. We bucked... oh no, we took pictures too :)

Then we find another fountain thing! This palace is so much better and greener!
In the gardens of the palace there is this staircase that has water flowing down it, it was pretty cool. I am not sure if this picture shows it off though. We make the joke that Alhambra espcial beer much be made with this water, since it seems like it is very special water.

Here we are leaving the last palace through a cool walkway of vines.

Finally, we walk back through the generalife towards the exit. It was a successful trip, we managed to see everything, including the cats! We are also very hungry.
First of course we have to stop and get something from the bookstore! That is an almost constant experience. The only place that didn't have it was the Italica, and I strangely missed it. It is a nice book end to a monument, it allows you to see what they think is important and then you can compare that with your own opinon.

Walking back we found a whole bunch of wedding dress models taking photo shoots, so I figured I would include one.So we finally make it back to town and we are trying to decide where to go. So we just start heading back to the hotel. And we pass a couple of places and I have no idea what people are looking for, so we keep walking. Finally I ask and they don't really know.

That inspired the following conversation, where everyone confiremed that they didn't know where to go. that is captured below.

Finally we decide to go to this place we walked by the day before and so we head off in that direction. It takes me a bit longer to get there than I thought it would, but we are soon there. It is another Italian place. But... we got Tapas!!! We werent even trying!

Here is one of the tapas. This one was great. Little ham rolls with like a creamy nutty filling.

After another succesful day, we take a group portrait.... I am hiding... and then we head back to the hotel to listen to the partiers all night