Bathroom Renovation

Almost a year and not a single post. If it wasn’t for Facebook you might have thought we got lost in big old Texas.

The last couple of months really flew by; in April we went to Virgina to visit the family and run a ½ marathon with everyone. Then in May we went to the Dominican Republic to celebrate my birthday with the family; in June Arves had shoulder surgery and was in good enough shape to go on a hiking trip to the Rocky Mountain NP. You can see all these pictures in Facebook.

The weekend of Arves’ surgery we decided to go to Home Depot to “look” at tiles since we’ve been talking about tiling the bathroom upstairs. Before we knew it we had a design and ended up buying all the tile and most of the materials that day. It must have been the drugs from the surgery.

Here is a before picture of the shower. We hated the plastic walls.

Needless to say, Arves only had one arm and I ended up doing all the demolition work. I was really scared at the beginning but got a hang of it pretty quickly. To our surprise there were no walls behind the plastic wall so the project ended up being a bit more involved than we thought.

Our house was very dusty for about a month and overall it took us a month and a half to get most of the work done. After grouting we were so sick of it that we took a month and a half off. This weekend we just finished and it looks amazing!!


The before and after comparison:

Lost Maples

This last week we went to Lost Maples, a state natural area northwest of San Antonio. This park is one of the few places where you can enjoy true fall colors in Texas.
The timing was absolutely perfect; all trees were in their prime time for full color.



The park itself is very small so we got to hike the whole thing within a day but it had a clear water river running through which made it very enjoyable.

Halloween

My favorite thing about Halloween is handing out candy to the little kids. Our neighborhood is so full of little tinies and they all come looking for candy all night long. So fun!

After that was over we went to a friend's house to celebrate! Believe it or not, this Halloween was the very first time I actually dressed up! Some last minute brainstorming and I turned into a pretty butterfly with a tennis player by my side. Look at those sexy socks!

Texas Hidden Wonders

A couple of weekends ago we went for a drive to Inks Lake State Park and to our surprise it was so fun! We got to watch a beautiful sunset and enjoy the pretty scenery all to ourselves.

See if you can find Tica on this picture:


We even got to see a pretty cardinal, a fun treat we get to hear every morning.


After being in Texas for 3 years we finally decided it was time to branch out and enjoy more of the Texas wilderness. Stay tuned for more parks' posts to come.

No Basement in The Alamo

This weekend found us in San Antonio at our Company picnic. We packed everyone from the image below (Jess, Steve, Me, Tica, Ricardo, Sylvia, & Gerardo) into the StolpeMobile at 9:30 in the morning and headed out.

At most companies this would have been a very boring affair, but not with NI. They rented out the entire Six Flags in San Antonio for employees and their friends/family only. The cost was $5 per employee and included the rides, lunch, and all the fountain drinks you could down in an 8 hour period.

To say it was awesome would be a gross understatement – especially when you take into account the longest line I waited in for any ride was 15 minutes and that was only because I insisted on riding in the very front. (I wanted to see the “super drop” on the Superman roller coaster from the front.) Here’s a picture of Tica with the "super drop" in the background.

It was really fun knowing pretty much everyone at the park, drinking way too much PowerAde and Diet Coke while riding 12 roller coasters in less than 6 hours! Though it's sad that I’ll never be able to go to another amusement park again because now I have experienced life without lines and can never go back to the drudgery of waiting.

Finally, no trip to San Antonio would be complete without stopping by The Alamo. We headed there after the park, found there to be no basement, and finished off the evening at a Mexican restaurant on the River Walk.

Just Say No to Hurricanes

So, by now, I'll assume you've heard that hurricane Ike WAS going to hit Austin, but missed us completely. I guess that's OK considering the damage it caused to the other places it hit, but Tica and I were really looking forward to the rain. Plus, if it hit us, that would have been the second time Tica was hit by Ike since she met up with him while she was in the DR last week.

So since there was no hurricane to deal with I decided to work on the side yard a bit more. Last week I rented a bob cat and my friend Steve and I dug up about 40 200 - 300 pound boulders to level out the wash area next to the side of my house. Here's a photo of the work. I'm still planning on putting a little more top soil on the dirt area you see in the picture and planting some grass seed. Tica's still not convinced that the grass seed will work - even after seeing Mom's success with it.

After the yard work, we had some friends over to the house for some arepas - a very delicious Venezuelan dish that one of our friends from work made. They were amazing! I was going to include a photo of them, but they were eaten way too quickly for any photography.

We also took the time to visit the Oasis restaurant on Lake Travis. It's a pretty cool spot that sits up on some cliffs above the lake and provides some amazing views of the sunset. In fact, you could say that it is the #1 restaurant to view sunsets in Austin.

We still had the remenants of Ike hanging around, so we didn't get to see too much of the sunset, but it was still very pretty.

18th Annual Hot Sauce Festival in Austin

Ausin is a city that is well known for it's eccentric nature. In fact, I'd say that the city motto or slogan could be summed up in a phrase that is commonly heard and even found on T-Shirts in Austin: "Keep Austin Weird"

One of the many ways Austin keeps itself weird is through it's many festivals and happenings. From Blues on the Green, a free blues concert every Wednesday in the summer, to the Austin Bat Festival, celebrating the nearly 1 million bats under the Congress Ave bridge.

Today Tica and I volunteered at the Austin Hot Sauce Festival, which includes hot sauce entries from local kitchens, companies, and individuals alike from around Texas. We worked the hot sauce tasting tent where there were hundreds of different types of salsa and sauce. For payment we got to taste all of the salsa without waiting in the sun in the 1.5 hour line. Plus we got some really snazzy T-Shirts to boot. The salsa was awesome, and the bands playing were all pretty cool, which made for a very cool (yet really hot) day.