Not So Subtle

My boss just made a point of showing me his lunch. A South Beach diet boxed meal.

Um.... Yeah. Is he trying to tell me something?

*sigh* I need to get my ass to the gym...

I Couldn't Resist...

Greg is going to kill me, but I just had to share.

Take a look at Greg's Amazing Hair!

I find this next one especially artistic.

Greg's mohawk

This is what my shumma has to deal with every morning when he wakes up. Usually he can shower or at least wet his head to tame the wild beast, but while camping, not so much!

Rock on, babe! Rock ON!

Lost Maples Camping

Greg is 33 years old and has never been on a real camping trip!

No, sleeping in a tent in your school buddy's back yard in the London burbs definitely does not count. (He actually tried arguing this with me.) How is this possible you might ask? Because Greg is a city boy through-and-through.

Well, it was high time to throw him into the deep end. When our friends Mark & Brianna reserved a campsite at Lost Maple State Park and invited us to come along, I jumped at it. Greg didn't seem too excited to commune with nature, but he didn't fight me too much either.

Here's my shumma sporting a loaded pack.


Don't feel too bad for him. He schlepped around all the light stuff - sleeping bags, pillows, dried food. I didn't want to scar him right away. But he looks like a natural, right.

We found a site at the back of the park to pitch our tents. Since it was getting dark, we decided to take it easy, play some cards, talk politics and gossip, all that good stuff until it was time for beerbrauts and s'mores. Camping, in our opinion, is the perfect excuse for consuming mass quantities of crap! And we did!


We snuggled into our fluffy sleeping bags for the night. The next morning, we set off on a 2.5 mile loop hike before taking down the tents and finishing the rest of the West trail.

Me, Mark & Brianna on the trail

Me near an opening at our campsite

Greg and the pond

It seems that my bad camping luck is still haunting me. I was stung by both a bee and a nasty, little ant, which was actually much more painful. Plus, when we finally made it back to the car, we discovered a dead, flat tire. We had to drive all the way back to Austin on a doughnut tire at under 50 miles per hour. Very frustrating for a lead-footed road-rager like me.

But it was a great week-end. And this trip has revitalized my long, lost love of camping, and I hope this will be the first of many trips to come.

Quick Break...

I'm feeling psychotic and overwhelmed again today. The muscles in my neck and back and shoulders are tensing up so tightly that they feel like they may just crack and shatter. Aside from the worse-than-average work stuff that has me freaking out, I'm also stressing about silly stuff that should be fun. Tonight Greg is cooking dinner for me and an old friend & work-mate of his that is in town for some kind of conference. He's a French guy named Christophe who knew both Greg's ex-girlfriend and my ex-boyfriend. For some reason I'm a little nervous about meeting him. Why? I don't know, but I think it has something to do with the fact that he's only known Greg as being with another person. Its silly. I fully realize this but can't help myself.

On top of that, we're going "back country" camping with our friends Mark & Brianna on Saturday at Lost Maple State Park. Its only a 2-mile hike in so I guess really the main concern is that it will be at a primitive site. Greg has slept in a tent before, but that's about the extent of his camping experience. So he's leaving the planning and preparations for this trip completely up to me. Fine. However, I really only have gear for me. I have to somehow scrounge up enough extras for Greg too. And I have less than 3 days to do it. Ahhh!

I need a bubble bath...

Trash Mags in Potterville

Teehee. :) I'd never buy it, but I'm sure I'd sneak a peek in the check-out line...

I'm a Lucky, Lucky Girl

Just one of the many, many reasons why I love my husband...


...that, and the fact that he just told me he'd be totally behind me if I ever decided to run for British prime minister. :)

Double Date Fun

Looking for a unique date idea? Allow me to suggest dinner and a concert inside a natural cave! That's right - in a limestone bedrock cavern. The inspired music lovers at Longhorn Cave State Park have organized various concerts throughout the year. Most of them are vocalists from what I understand, but last night was the first ever piano concert that they've attempted. It took a few enormously beefy men an hour and a half to schlepp a grand piano down the 52 stone steps, through the cavern, and into the big room. I shudder to think how long it took them to get it back out...


We, along with our friends Mark and Brianna, reserved tickets to see Joseph Cordi, an Austin jazz musician, perform some of his own inventions plus a few oldy-but-goody standards. After the regular tour and a fajita dinner, it was a lovely way to wind down the evening. If you have the means, I highly recommend it.

The regular cavern tour helped us build up an appetite too. Thanks for the find, Brianna!

Don't Do Drugs, Kids!

I'm crying again tonight.

But this time for a completely different reason...




***** Ok, so I got some sleep and then watched this clip again in the morning. Apparently in order to find it rolling-on-the-floor hilarious, you need to be a bit sleep-deprived and primed from watching about an hour's worth of other funny YouTube videos. But its still pretty cute...

Compassion and Generosity

I started crying on the bus today.

I was reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, an autobiography about a woman trying to find peace and healing after a messy divorce. My book club chose it, and I'm so glad they did because otherwise I never would have picked it up.

Anyway, back to the part that has me crying on a public bus before I've even had my morning coffee...

Liz, the author, is in Bali and meets and befriends a local medicine woman who has given up everything to escape an abusive husband that sent her to the hospital many times. She fought for 2 years, selling every last posession she could find to pay a lawyer, so she could also rescue her young daughter. In Balinese culture, where everyone lives as a huge, extended family unit and divorces are rare, mother and daughter lead a somewhat lonely, unstable existence. They are constantly moving as rents increase and money runs low. The daughter spends all day drawing pictures of houses and praying for a home. And on top of it all, the mother has also adopted two orphan girls, rescuing them from a life of pan-handling on the streets. The lease is up, and the family will have to move yet again because rent has increased. That's when Liz is inspired.

She goes and emails all her friends and family in the States, asking that, in lieu of a party and presents for her up-coming 35th birthday, everyone please make a small donation to help this family buy a home of their own. She will match all donated funds with her own money.

After the first day, she already had hundreds of dollars. By the second day, her email had been passed along to complete strangers who were donating money to help a family they had never met. A friend's new husband, who Liz had never met, pledged to match the total raised. Friends she knew to be broke even donated. By the end, she had raised over $18,000!

And as I was reading this, I just became overwhelmed by how wonderful people can be. Even in this scary world we live in sometimes, we haven't lost the ability to tap into that humanity.

It reminded me of the day my mom became my hero.

One of my parents' friends was in a devastating car accident and sadly was killed instantly. He left behind a handicapped wife with two boys and a young, new baby. It was my first experience with real-life tragedy, and I remember it being such a horrible shock to realize that someone so central in your life could vanish in a split second.

My mom had lost contact with this family after her divorce and probably hadn't spoken to any of them in years. But when she heard about the accident, she, a single, struggling mother of 3, swiftly took action. We went to the store and loaded our cart with groceries, canned goods, baby food, diapers, shampoos, toothpaste, everything we could think of. Then in the wee hours of the following morning, we drove to their house, unloaded the bags and bags of the basic necessities of life onto their porch and drove off without a word to anyone. No note. No follow-up. In fact, this may be the first time I've ever told that story, but I never forgot how proud I was of my mom at that moment. I wonder when she last thought of that day.

The book's story also reminded me of a time when I was the recipient of that kind of grace. In the two years before moving to Austin, I lived in Boulder, Colorado. And I absolutely loved it! I made some great friends there, but I didn't quite realize just how great they were until just a few months before I moved away.

While on a back-country camping / hiking / mountain-climbing trip with three fantastic, heroic friends, I was hurt in a scary accident (that, honestly, could have turned out so much worse than it did). I was uninsured at the time, and my emergency room visit was a daunting financial stress on my limited income. I don't think I ever mentioned this to anyone, but my friends knew I was uninsured. Two of the guys who had been with me on that trip (and who were probably significantly more scarred by the accident than I was) were roommates. They threw a party at their house a little while after the accident - I still had a limp, a black eye and a cast on my wrist. Unbeknownst to me, during this party they were collecting sneaky donations from anyone who wanted to contribute to the Poor Larisa fund. A few days after the party, Sean sat me down and told me what they had done. I was absolutely stunned. Then once the shock wore off, I was so incredibly touched. All of these lovely people, most of whom were still students, and their inherent generosity... How could I ever repay them?

I couldn't, in fact. Sean flat out refused to tell me anyone's name so I didn't even know who to thank. No amount of begging and pleading would intice him. Instead he insisted that I hand over my bills so he could use that money to take care of them. To this day, I still don't know who my secret benefactors are so I remain grateful to every last one of those people up there.

Every time I think of those two incidents, I get a little choked up. And I just hope that when the opportunities arise, I will have a chance to show the same compassion and generosity to pay it forward.

Seriously??

Remember how I said Dr. James Watson, Nobel prize-winning scientist for the elucidation of DNA structure, has a reputation for being a bit of an ass?

Well, he's just taken it one step further. Today he added 'racist' to his ever-growing list of morally questionable political and social stances.

I can't decide if he's cleverly decided to stir up controversy to coincide with the publication of his new book or if he's just a raving lunatic... Maybe its a bit of both.