It is hot here. I took my long run (19 miles) yesterday at 7:30am, and it was getting warm at the end (75° ), but tolerable. Today Ed and I went out to breakfast and were surprised to find Swiss Avenue blocked for a marathon. I didn’t know there was a marathon this weekend; the major Dallas marathon is the White Rock Marathon in December. Anyway, those poor runners. It was much warmer today, and windy. By the time the runners at my pace finished, if indeed any did, it was about 90°, with winds of 21mph. Ugh. We gave in Friday and used our air conditioner for the first time. Up until now we’ve managed with opening the windows at night when it’s cool. Other years we’ve been able to hold until sometime in May, but not this year. Ninety-five percent of the state is also already in drought.

Driven in part by our next-door-neighbors putting their house on the market, Ed and I have been on a yard improvement binge. We’ve been gardening and adding solar lights and furniture. Everything is looking great just in time for stay-inside-with-the-air-conditioning season. Here is part of the little zen garden I made in the back. It has a stone path through two beds of Lysimachia Nummularia, some rocks, some rusty things, and a Japanese maple.

Now that it is spring and asparagus may be in season where you are, you should try this recipe for Straw and Hay Fettuccine Tangle with Spring Asparagus Puree from the cookbook “Super Natural Cooking”. This asparagus/spinach sauce is really good and refreshing, much lighter than pesto. And, it freezes very well. I freeze it in a muffin tin just like pesto. Another way to use it is in risotto. I make my baked risotto, and then at the end toss in two pucks of this sauce that I’ve let defrost at least somewhat. Then I top it with some shaved cheese and additional roasted nuts. Easy! By the way, I use roasted blanched almonds instead of pine nuts because I like them better and they’re cheaper, and I also sometimes use asiago as the cheese. And note that only part of the nuts actually go into the puree, I sometimes forget that. Try 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 try to fit in as much outdoor activity as I can in the morning (even though it’s still hot), but I have to give up a lot of that time to watering, because did I mention? It stopped raining sometime in May. Yes, we have a full-fledged drought going on. I have been trying to keep everything going, especially our stressed elm tree, but now things are so dry that I am watering non-living things too: the foundation (because of this), the front steps (the bottom one has started to separate),  the deck (because the sewer pipe is buried below it and two years ago it broke during a dry spell and cost a couple of thousand dollars to fix). But we’re still getting cracks in the ground in places that are over an inch wide and who knows how deep.

And to make it worse, yesterday and today there has been rain all around us, taunting us. I suspect it is the heat of the city that diverts storms around us (the same thing happened in Houston). This morning I was riding my bike around the lake and the sky got black to the east, south, north and west, and there was lightning close enough that I high-tailed it home, but … nothing. The sun came out as I pulled into the driveway. And now this afternoon I can hear thunder, but only watch the red stuff on the radar detour around my house.

Record Report
Statement as of 1:47 am CDT on June 14, 2010

… Record high minimum temperature set at Dallas-Fort Worth
International Airport for June 13th…

The low temperature at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on
June 13th was 81 degrees. This breaks the record high minimum
temperature of 79 set in 2008… 1998… and 1963.

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.

Really, Ed and have caught ourselves skipping this weekend, it was so nice.

Halloween was great, we had hundreds of trick-or-treaters as usual. It’s actually pretty nice here, we get extra police coverage, and they (with the historic district’s approval) shut down the trick-or-treating at 9pm, so we don’t get the bored high school kids looking for trouble *.  At that point, we walked down two blocks to a party at a friends’ house.

Today we went for a bike ride, and then rode the motorcycle over to the lake to go sailing. This was our best day sailing yet. Perfect weather, so pretty. Wish everyone was here.

*I have been impressed here that there is never any Halloween vandalism. People put out expensive displays and decorations, and especially pumpkins. I have never seen a smashed pumpkin in Dallas.

The book was (I finished it last night indoors) “The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky” by Ken Dornstein. Great book, recommended. Briefly, it’s a memoir about the author’s brother, who was killed in the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103, aka the Lockerbie bombing. Now sensational as that story could be, it’s not about the bombing, but about the author trying to piece together his older brother from the copious (understatement) notebooks he kept in his quest to become a writer. The video on the book’s website explains this main theme, but the story, as told by the younger brother, is really a very effective tale of siblings, ambitions, expectations and failure, and what people go through when they try to make sense of a sudden death.

Anyway, I had breakfast today with Ray and his kids, and it sounds like the fair was crowded, the line for the fried butter (yes) was long, and the rain came too soon. At least that’s what I tell myself, and I do have another two weeks to fit in a fair visit.

The world outside is quiet; the people (and even the cats) are tucked away in the air conditioning. Well, not exactly quiet. Cicadas chatter all day; they sound like rattlesnakes and desert.The flora looks like desert. The fauna is sleeping. We are sleeping more, too.

Who wants to visit?

I knew Dallas had tornadoes, but it was unnerving to hear tornado sirens going off last night. Luckily we didn’t get a tornado, because I asked my 7-year-old neighbor for advice on what to do if the sirens went off. She said “we usually go into the bathroom, but you have a lot of windows, so you probably won’t make it”.

And we thought that was that. But then this morning the storms started again. The power was flickering, and then suddenly the winds got really strong, the power went out (as it turns out, for over eight hours),  it started to hail, and the street became a river. It was like Tropical Storm Alison. Garbage cans were floating down the street. I tried to go out to take a video, but the wind literally blew me back in. Twice. The wind settled down a bit after about ten minutes. My neighbor’s car was about to flood, but he was able to pull it into our driveway. He and I sat on my front porch for awhile and watched in amazement as our intersection disappeared under water.

After the storm cleared, I drove over to the lake to check on the boat. All of the traffic lights were out (not flashing, completely out). Trees were down all over Skillman. I was worried because the winds had been so high since last night, and I knew the lake would be severely flooded.

The lake was way over its banks, into the road. But because we chose a bright yellow boat cover, I could tell from far away that our boat was okay (fun fact, you can see our boat from an airplane!). I took some pictures and videos, and then, with another boat club member, used the club’s pedal boats (he had hip waders and could access them even though the docks were way under water) to rescue a small board boat that had broken free and washed up onto the road. We then rode the pedal boats right into the clubhouse, which was knee deep in water. I wish I had my camera for that! We stacked chairs and other items onto the tables and secured some of the disheveled smaller boats. It was actually fun, even though I later fell in the lake because I thought I was in the parking lot but was actually standing on the dock. Tomorrow the level will be low enough for me to go and make sure everything drained okay.

Tonight I walked up and down Swiss Avenue. There were so many big trees and limbs down there. I talked to a guy clearing a tree at one house, and he said the limbs displayed the spiral fracture pattern he sees in tornadoes. I don’t think we had a tornado, but it was close.

Tonight we had a beautiful sunset.