Tonight we went out to dinner at a nice steakhouse on Greenville Avenue, and we got unusually good service. Lots of attention from the waitress and then the (heterosexual male) restaurant manager, who came by at the end of our meal to tell us dessert was on the house. As we were eating our sorbet sampler, I looked across at Ed in his “looks about 80 dollars more expensive than it is” haircut, smart guy glasses and argyle sweater, and I thought “they think he’s a restaurant reviewer”.

It works if you work it.

January

A year ago today we were in Big Bend, seeing a part of Texas we hadn’t seen before. The next day, New Year’s Day, we drove up to Fort Davis and went for a hike in the Davis Mountains. Then we visited the McDonald Observatory, which was unfortunately closed for New Year’s. But I still got to go into one of the big telescopes, because, well, it wasn’t locked. No lights though, and I didn’t want to start flipping switches. Before leaving West Texas we also visited Marathon, another quirky little old town. We had coffee in a little shop that had stacks of the Santa Barbara Independent (!) to read. Another surprise that day, I ran into my old friend Quinton at a gas station near Abilene!

We also made a quick trip to Orlando for Ed’s birthday, right in the middle of grapefruit season. Yum! And we saw manatees!

I attended a fascinating class taught by Edward Tufte.

February

After our wonderful trip to Taos last year, we decided to try skiing there this year. On the drive there, we got to see the Cadillac Ranch covered with snow, and a herd of mystery animals which I later found out were pronghorns (Texans call them antelopes, but they aren’t really). We saw another herd of these later – they really are beautiful.

This time we rented a house on the Rim Road. A great house in a good location for skiing, but the roads were snowy and Rim Road is called that for a reason. Did you know I have a phobia about going over a cliff in a car? We did not die though.

The skiing was fantastic, not crowded. We also snowshoed one day. While we were having lunch in the lodge one day, our neighbor texting me a photo of our house with snow falling furiously. It snowed 13 inches in Dallas! I was sorry to miss that even though we were enjoying even better snow in New Mexico. When we got home, every other house in Dallas had a snowman in front.

We saw John Prine in concert over at SMU; he was very good (and funny, as we knew he would be).

March

One of our favorite restaurants burned down.

I took Mia to Dallas’ St. Patrick’s Day parade, which is pretty raucous and fun.

April

Ed and I took a Saturday morning bike ride over to the lake, had a great 22-mile ride, but on the way back as he signaled a left turn, he hit a reflector in the road and went over the handlebars, fracturing his collarbone pretty badly. It required surgery, and still bothers him. Quite a setback, as he was trying to get back into shape.

But, I got an iPad!

May

Mom and Dad visited for the world premiere of Moby Dick at the Dallas Opera, and I think they would say it was worth the trip. How the heck can you make a stage set about a whaling ship? Well they did it, and it was spectacular.

June

So hot. It got up into the 100’s early this year. I was going to try riding my bike every day again this summer like I did in 2008, but gave up.

July

Ed, frustrated by not being able to exercise and continuing to gain weight, decided to go on a diet. I, who had gained weight in sympathy, agreed to join him. We cut out alcohol and most of the usual things you don’t eat on a diet, and lost weight rather easily. Who knew?

August

Still hot, so I went to California! It was great to see the Steeles. I arrived during Fiesta, which was something I hadn’t seen before. There were cascarones (confetti eggs) smashed everywhere. In Texas you only see those on Easter. We attended several dance performances and ate some great food. I also went kayaking one day at Campus Point (with Kevin), went to the Botanical Garden (with Aidan), biked down Gibraltar Road and at Ealings Park (with Nico), went on a few hikes (with Linda), saw the movie Inception and went climbing (poorly).

September

By this time it should be obvious that we really like Taos. We went back yet again for two weeks. This time we rented two houses for two different experiences. The first week we stayed in town, which was nice because we could walk to restaurants and into town. The second week we stayed at an isolated house up a private road in the foothills near the ski mountain. This house was phenomenal, we liked every detail. It had a little writer’s cottage out back, and we tied our camping hammock out there. One night we slept outside on the second-story deck under the stars. In the mornings we could see the hot air balloons rise and then dip into the Rio Grande canyon. The only downside of the house was it was a one-mile drive down a very rutted dirt road just to get to the road to town, which was another six miles or so. The road was not bikeable (up anyway).

So this trip we went on several hikes and one backpacking trip. It was cold backpacking, but we were well-prepared. We even brought our iPads and watched a movie in the tent (just to say we did it). We went biking one day, Ed’s first time on the bike since his accident. He had a tough time; it was windy and he didn’t feel stable on the bike. We tried to bike another day, but after driving about 45 minutes, we got out to start riding and he felt it was too windy for him, so we drove back and I rode by myself up to the ski area, which is now an annual tradition for me. We also both bought new climbing shoes, and went bouldering. I feel better about my limited climbing skills now; it had just been so many years since I had climbed anything.

Yesterday one of my friends on Facebook posted “When was the last time you did something for the first time”? Well one thing I did for the first time this trip was fly fishing. Ed has wanted to do this for a long time. I thought I would be bored to tears, but I actually loved it. It’s nothing like regular fishing. You don’t stand in one place for long, you have to be smart and use strategy and skill, and the scenery is beautiful. And, I caught a fish!

Last year I was successful in my attempt to get cheap tickets for this year’s Austin City Limits Festival. They give out a few hundred for $50 (regularly $185), and I snagged two by watching Twitter and refreshing the page constantly. The festival was fun, we saw Black Keys, Spoon, Beach House, Broken Bells, Phish, Flaming Lips, Mountain Goats, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, Sonic Youth, Gogol Bordello, Pete Yorn, Lucero, Black Lips, Manchester Orchestra, Temper Trap, Deadmau5, M.I.A., Devendra Banhart, Portugal, the Man, Trombone Shorty, Robert Earl Keen, White Rabbits, Blind Pilot and Lance Herbstrong.

October

The two big October events here are the State Fair of Texas and Halloween, and we participated in both. The Phantom of the Opera was back on Swiss Avenue:

We were invited to Ed’s cousin Nicole’s wedding in Buffalo, so we combined that trip with a visit with Mom and Dad. I flew up ahead of time and spent some time with them, and then drove their jeep up to Buffalo and picked Ed up at the airport there. We stayed at the Roycroft Inn in East Aurora, something Ed has wanted to do for a long time. The inn was built by the Roycrofters, and Arts and Crafts guild. Ed’s sister Colleen stayed there also since we were. She didn’t know anything about it, thought it would be a regular hotel. The funny thing is that it turned out she used to work across the street from the place and didn’t know what it was.

The wedding was nice and it was nice to see all of Ed’s aunts and uncles and cousins again. I hadn’t been to Buffalo for a long time. We also went to see the Darwin Martin house, a Frank Lloyd Wright house. The main house is still being renovated, but we got to go into two of the other houses on the property. House house houses.

November

We went back to Austin to visit our friends Mike and Carla, and we had a relaxing traditional Thanksgiving with just the three of us. Last year it was just Ed and me, and we decided to do South American food instead of turkey with the fixings, but I missed it, so this year it was back to the old standbys.

For Erica’s birthday we took her and four of her friends out to dinner here in Dallas, which was fun.

December

It was a good year (fractured clavicles notwithstanding) up until the first of December, when Ed’s stepdad passed away. We made another trip to Orlando for the funeral. We were glad we have been going there more often lately, and Ed will always treasure the trip he took to Ireland with Bud et al three years ago.

Unexpected travel in early December means a rather frantic holiday preparation season (at least for me, who procrastinates until December). But I (kind of) got everything done by Christmas, and we had another relaxing day. We had to laugh at all the winter gear we got each other as gifts. We had lobster pot pie instead of fondue for Christmas Eve dinner, and prime rib for Christmas. Yum.

I think that’s it. I’ll try to do better next year.

I have a post planned with pictures and video, but today we had to instead scramble to book flights, pack, line up kitty care (thank goodness for great neighbors) and get ready to fly out first thing tomorrow.

It feels strange to go to Orlando knowing our bartender won’t be there waiting with two Boodle’s martinis in hand.

No kidding, Dallas had its first real white Christmas since the 1800’s this year. On Wednesday night when I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt I was thinking about making a joke post about how our chances for a white Christmas seemed to be slipping away. I really had no idea that snow on Christmas Eve was a possibility. Normally I would have been ecstatic to see a forecast of two inches in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, but this year, Erica had to work that day and was planning to drive home in the evening. And she doesn’t really have snow driving experience. But despite having to deal with snow the whole way, seeing two overturned SUVs and being delayed about an hour and a half by frozen overpasses, she made it home safely. So then we could enjoy a winter wonderland walk down Swiss Avenue, manhattans and paella.

Our Christmas mittens from Linda (as seen above) were a hit. Last week I went to my neighbor Mia’s Christmas play, which was about a little girl who lost a mitten while playing in the snow and hoped it would grow into a mitten tree. The play was adorable; her Montessori school includes preschool age kids who sang  the songs and then covered their ears when people applauded.

We all got great presents; Ed and I got top-grade cookware and Erica got a bunch of kitchen appliances. We should open a restaurant.

This Christmas was an exercise in flexibility. A lot of people in West Texas were stranded by the snow, including Mia and her grandparents, who didn’t make it home from a visit to El Paso for Christmas until late today and even then had to get creative with their route. Erica only had Christmas Day off of work. Our planned Christmas meals (fondue Christmas Eve and paella Christmas day) were disrupted by Ed accidentally having a huge ham dinner delivered here instead of to his parents’ house. So we had paella last night and tonight I had fondue and Ed and Erica had the ham. We all had the side dishes and desserts.

We only have patches of snow left tonight, but it’s cold again and Mia and I put out various freezing experiments: stacks of ice shards, bowls of water, leaves and seeds, etc. All the things northern kids traditionally do but southern kids can miss out on if nobody is paying attention.

A fun Christmas.

And this is why people shouldn’t share cameras.

I got home and downloaded the shots, and saw that they were all terrible. Ed had changed the ISO speed to 400 for Halloween, and hadn’t changed it back. He doesn’t even really know how to use his camera (which I bought for him), and I guess he got tired of me complaining that he always set it to auto after insisting he needed full manual control. Anyway, it’s his camera, so it’s my fault for next checking, and next time I will.

I fixed the golden tree a bit, but I guess need to go back and try again. Hopefully the wind will cooperate.

(p.s. the kayaking was really fun)

Yesterday Ed and I went biking around the lake, then the three of us went to see a movie (Juno, which we all liked a lot). After the movie we had a drink in the theater bar waiting for it to get dark so we could drive around Highland Park and look at Christmas lights. The lights were good, although not funny like the lights in Woodland Heights in Houston.

This year we had our fondue outside by the firepit, which was nice. We had chocolate fondue, too. We had our karaoke Santa hooked up to my iPod playing Christmas carols in the dining room. Every year when we do this, I forget I have The Santaland Diaries in my Christmas playlist, and crack up when I walk in to see Santa lipsyncing to David Sedaris.

Ed decided to line the sidewalk and porch with tealights for some reason. It looked pretty. And wasn’t the full moon beautiful?
We had a modest Christmas morning this year, having gotten some of our presents early (spinning bike for Ed and me, plane ticket to San Diego for the Holiday Bowl for Erica), but Santa still brought a few things so we’d have things to play with today. Erica and Ed were surprised to find a Wii under the tree. Erica opened the Wii and said “ooh, now we need to get Guitar Hero”. Luckily, Santa had left Guitar Hero III, too! We also got some books, DVDs, cold weather bike gear, a large Buddha statue, a sailboat cover, a homemade candle, a high-tech cooking thermometer, a packaging opener, CDs, gift certificates, iPod accessories, straws to play with, and more. Oh, and Erica got all of the “good players” and the coach of the UT football team to sign a helmet for Ed, which is something he has wanted.
We had Christmas dinner with our neighbors across the street, who have lived there forever and tend to collect various neighbors for holidays. They probably had about twenty people come and go during the afternoon. Somebody in their family had received a ping pong table for Christmas, so they set it up in the front yard (temporarily) and held an informal tournament.

Now we’re back home, Ed is napping, Erica is playing Guitar Hero, and I am contemplating my next (and possibly last) move in the online Risk game I am playing with a few friends. Merry Christmas, everyone!

• 10. Skiing at Winter Park in Colorado It had been years since Ed and I had been skiing, so this partially work-funded trip was a real treat. It didn’t take long to get the legs back, and we really enjoyed this resort for the sheer size of it, and the fact that many of the slopes were groomed on one side only, leaving the other side to develop excellent mogul fields. This allowed us to ski together more (me on the mogul side, Ed on the smooth). A bonus event was when Ed put a pizza, still in box, in the oven of our condo and started a kitchen fire, then ran outside while I put the fire out.
• 9. Getting my road bike Ed has been riding roadies for years, but I had turned more toward mountain biking. I finally got a good bike, my first since my heavy Schwinn bought in about 1979. We started riding regularly in the countryside near Houston, and had an especially nice ride on rented bikes in the Santa Ynez valley while visiting Steeles. We also did our first race ride, a 55-miler called the Tour de Donut.
• 8. Riding Segways My first time on a Segway made my “Best of” list for 2003, but that was really just a short ride in a mall store. During our summer 2006 trip to Santa Barbara, Ed and I took the Old Santa Barbara Segway tour. I will just say here that riding Segways is really, really fun. We enjoyed it so much that the other day when Linda mentioned that this Segway dealership is for sale, Ed actually read through the details of the offer and was thinking about where he would work while I ran it, and where we would live.
• 7. Ed’s transfer to Dallas While the actual move didn’t take place until 2007, the event was set into motion in 2006 and occupied much of our mental and physical energy for the second half of the year.
• 6. Car chases At Caprock, one of our lunchtime haunts was a Tex-Mex dive which always seemed to be showing car chases on its big screen TV. I think it was Fox News; I don’t usually watch that channel, but they seem to have the car chase thing covered. One Friday afternoon back at the office, my friend John Robert IM’ed me from New York City that he was watching a car chase in Pearland (where our office was) on the screen in Times Square. I found a local news station covering the chase, and before long the entire office (plus John Robert in New York) was watching as a driver in a white pickup pulled stuntman moves past many familiar landmarks (including the aforementioned Tex-Mex dive) with dozens of helicopters and squad cars in tow. He drove through the golf course by the Vietnamese restaurant and headed to the intersection with the tollway that would take him past our building. We all crossed our fingers, but no, he passed through the intersection and headed toward downtown Houston. Somehow sensing his mistake, he drove through the massive median and U-turned back toward Pearland and … would he? would he? YES! he turned east on the tollway right toward Caprock. And the entire workforce ran to the front of the building to watch. Helicopters, motorcycles, cars, all chasing a lone Ford F150. After the show passed, we all went back to our desks and watched as spikes were thrown in the highway and the now tireless truck rode through several more towns, sometimes hopping curbs ON ITS RIMS, near-miss after near-miss, finally plopping into a bayou and sinking. The driver was rescued and miraculously no one was hurt in the whole 2-hour chase. Apparently the reason behind the whole thing was the guy had stopped taking his depression medication and held up a dry cleaner for a pittance. Now, you might think that was the end of the car chase entry for 2006, but no. This car chase ended on our block later in the year.
• 5. Dynamo soccer Houston got a major league soccer team in 2006, and it was wildly successful. Both the fan participation and the team’s performance were stellar. The games were the most fun professional sports games I’ve ever been to, due in part to the insane soccer fans with their drums, streamers, wigs, flags, brass instruments, cowbells and smoke bombs. The team made it to the MLS championship game in Dallas. Ed and I drove up to watch the Houston Dynamo beat the New England Revolution in overtime. And the 2007 update is that this year, the Dynamo beat the Revolution for the championship AGAIN, this time in Washington D.C. Attendance at the games in Houston remains strong and loud. Let’s Go Dynamo!
• 4. Meeting Kyle Chandler I met Ed’s cousin Kyle for the first time when he drove to Houston from Austin, where he was filming a TV show, to join his brothers and cousins for a Buffalo Bills game. What a nice guy! He climbed a grapefruit tree in his brother’s backyard in his socks to make me juice for a cocktail.
• 3. Getting a high-tech crown I did write about this when it happened, but here it is on my top 10 list; it was just that cool. On a sad note, my dentist of seven years who did the crown committed suicide a few months ago.
• 2. Jury Duty Well this is an odd choice for a top 10 list (not that the crown isn’t), and at number 2 no less! But serving on this jury is still one of the most fascinating things I’ve done. The dynamics of deliberations (including watching one woman have a meltdown under the pressure to come to a verdict), the interaction between the jurors (two of whom discovered that they had lived in the same house in different decades) and the case itself were all interesting. Best of all was having the judge, prosecutor and defense attorney visit the jury following the trial to answer questions and discuss evidence and testimony which was not admitted for the trial itself. I hope to get the chance to do this again (but not for traffic court, that is boring).
• 1. Two Gallants show at Walter’s on Washington Being a first-hand witness at the concert in Houston where an HPD officer stormed to the stage and knocked down the guitarist of a band while he was playing tops out my list. First of all, it was national news (well, national music news). I’ve talked to people here in Dallas who know all about it. Second, it definitely changed how I think about law enforcement. I still respect the police, but from the reading I’ve done since and the anecdotal evidence I’ve gathered from friends who are outside of my (somewhat privileged) demographic, I now realize how many problem officers there are. Third, it was a lesson in how the power of the internet. If not for the YouTube videos and the forums and the online coverage, the charges against the band members would not have been dropped. Fourth, I was able to contribute to the effort to see justice done by giving a statement to HPD Internal Affairs and by giving a statement to the bands’ defense lawyers. And finally fifth, because I was interviewed by the local alternative weekly, so I got to show my friends, but they spelled my name wrong, so future employers can’t Google it.

Our weather warmed up considerably today. We did have another freeze overnight, but we’re on a warming trend that should get us to 70 by Friday. I am somewhat disappointed by that. Our old, (just a little) drafty house seems quite familiar to me and so much more homey than an air conditioned house. One thing, though; I need to buy an ice scraper for my car windshield!

Oh, and this week’s project: post some pictures of the house!

Ed and I tried to do a little Christmas shopping earlier, until his (I thought) whining about being cold turned into a very real onslaught of something that turned into shaking chills and nausea. He is in bed now, chills having turned into sweats. Unfortunately, he just got back from Mexico and fears food poisoning from some lettuce he accidentally ate on a tostada. I hope it’s something fleeting, as he hasn’t done any Christmas preparations. I will try to wrap up the Christmas shopping tomorrow assuming he can be left alone. Just as well staying in this afternoon in this weather.