Holiday Rewind

This may have been the longest Christmas ever. Not that good times weren't had by all, but good times were spread out over an inordinately long period of time. First, Rob's parents and grandmother came into town before Christmas for a week of visiting. This led to a lot of my favorite pastime - touring around Austin. It's always nice to have out-of-towners giving me an excuse to check out the touristy stuff I don't get to often, and sharing a few of my favorite hideouts. I tried to spend more time visiting than photographing this trip, but below are some shots from our trip down to Gruene. If you've never been to Gruene (sounds like Green), it's a beautiful old hill country town near San Marcos. It's quite touristy, but a great place to spend an afternoon shopping and taking in some riverfront scenery. Definitely eat at the Gristmill, and check out the Gruene Dance Hall - the oldest continuously running dance hall in Texas.

I had time off from work during the week of Christmas, but unfortunately Rob had to work - even on Christmas day (boo!). I spent the day baking an inordinate number of cookies and really giving my KitchenAid's motor a run through its paces. I made peanut butter blossoms, sugar cookies from a recipe I stole, and chocolate chip cookies with M&M's. Here's the thing about chocolate chip cookies - make them from the standard Toll House recipe, but replace the vanilla extract with almond extract. You will thank me.

After Rob got off work, Althea and Sunil came over to share Christmas dinner. I use the term "share" loosely as we essentially had two separate meals, but ate together. I am now referring to these friends as "The Vegans". Luckily, they did not have a problem with sharing a table with flesh eaters, so holiday happiness prevailed. Plus, they brought a really yummy salad to share so we did have some overlap. 

The weekend after Christmas, we hit the road to Houston for a second (third? fourth? where are we and who are you people?!) celebration. As per my usual routine at my parents' house, I did a lot of nothing and it was wonderful. I did get to see more recent sonogram pics of the nieces and/or nephews to be, which was good since there's nothing so much as a fuzzy picture that actually looks like a tiny foot to make me believe this isn't all some giant ploy of Nathan's to get more toys. He may have been ridiculously naive when we were kids, but somewhere along the way he's turned into a master schemer. I take some credit for this turnaround, for better or worse, since his early years were fraught with the often dangerous ideas I had for him to try out - to make sure they were safe for me, of course.

Ok, so where was I? Right, so New Year's Eve came 'round and we were once again without plans. Our wedding anniversary is in mid-January, so the idea of paying a premium to class it up on New Year's has always seemed a little dumb to me. I'm also a bit past any desire to start my new year with my head in a toilet. So what to do? Luckily, Austin has an annual celebration called "First Night" that is basically a giant street art festival on New Year's Eve. This year fit all of my requirements for a good time: it's free, it's guaranteed good people watching, and it's just far enough away from 6th Street to make me think no one will puke on my shoes. Oh, and they were planning to burn down a very large and very beautiful clock that people had stuffed with New Year resolutions. Excellent. Now, sadly my camera battery died right after we arrived due to what some people might call poor planning. Luckily, I have located a much better prepared photographer's documentation of the main event:

BURN BABY BURN! Oh pardon me... just had a small relapse there. Anyhoo, the clock burned around 8:30, but we stayed downtown to check out the other displays and listen to some music. We only caught the tail end of the aerial dancers in City Hall, but we were present for the child-genius who stepped up to the speak-your-mind-ish mic set up and simply said "Marco". An appropriate response was gained. We also added paper butterflies to the thousands already hanging from the oak trees outside City Hall. A side note on why I love this celebration, and Austin in general: We were watching a band around 10:30pm, downtown, and found ourselves in a crowd that included families with kids, people on their way to a club, and a guy dressed as Batman for reasons clear only to him.

We celebrated New Year's Day by joining the Vegans for lunch at Mother's Cafe. I've wanted to try out Mother's for some time, but wasn't sure if Rob could handle the meat-free menu. Well, it was super tasty and even Rob enjoyed himself. Add it to the list of restaurants I enjoy in a city meant for eating.

Now it's back to business as usual, with the exception of planning an anniversary trip soon. Hope you are all looking forward to great things in 2009!