Brianna's Bachelorette Party

I hadn't been bar-hopping in Austin in a looooong time so a few things took me by surprise.

1. Scantily-clad girls paid to dance on bar platforms seem to be all the rage in Austin right now. Pangaea, a ponce-y bar where the old downtown Alamo used to be, had a few with everyone awkwardly trying not to stare even though they really, really wanted to.
2. Every party girl in Austin owns some variation of this trapeze dress:
3. When traveling in a bachelorette party, its ridiculously easy to get free drinks. This wasn't so much a surprise, but it never ceases to amaze me...

First we met at Manuel's for dinner.


Then we hit the town.

Free champagne - awesome!

With the Bachelor at his new bar. Ladies, I'm sorry but he is not that tall. :(

The bride with another cocktail to add to the deadly mix

Subjects in photo are not as drunk as they appear - one of them anyway...

Fun night!

Good Times with Old Friends

Hi. Its me again. No, I'm not dead. Still playing catch up on the blog...

SO! The week after the going away party below, two of our friends blew into town to stay with us for a while. One of my favorite people in the whole, wide world - Ms. Shelley! (In my head, that sounds like Mizzzz Shell-laaaaay all sassy-like...) We had two days of girl time before she had to head back to L.A., and boy did we take advantage...

Squishing into Chuy's photo booth - it wasn't working so we made our own

The other was Gunther! We hadn't seen him since his wedding in Spain last year. He was in the U.S. for a conference in Vegas and made a side trip down to Austin for several days. Our time with Gunther is always... ... unique. :)

Click on the photo to see all the shots and action.

We miss you guys!!!

Wedding Reunions

I love the feel of freshly cleaned and polished teeth, don't you? I almost hate to ruin all of my dentist's hard work from this morning, but it must be done.

Mark & Brianna's wedding is quickly approaching, and friends & family have already started to trickling into town. We went tubing with Brianna's parents down from Michigan, and Mark's sister over from Australia at the week-end. Karl is here from Mississippi, soon to be joined by Terri on Friday. Fred & Kristie fly in from England tonight. So do Jacque & Ian. Everyone else will be arriving over the next few days. Yay!

Tonight while all the boys are hitting 6th street for the bachelor party (or 'stag do' if speaking the Queen's English), the girls are indulging in half-price appetizers and martinis at 219 West. The 'hen night' was last week-end so this is just a chance for us all to re-group and get into party mode. The next few days promise to be action-packed with boat parties, rehearsal dinners, poker games, Barton Springs time, and much too much alcohol. Can't wait for it all, but as for now, I must go make myself downtown-presentable.

I'll try to update the blog regularly but as we'll have 3 house guests, I'm making no promises.

Sensitivity Training

By the way, Greg has jokingly named the little kitten Travis.


Travis...

...as in my little brother's name...

...because he's the "unexpected third child".

And when he calls to the kitten, it makes him chuckle Every. Time.

Butthole.

Ta Da!

It was time...

Time to kiss goodbye my darling dinosaur of a 19" inch television, a gift I got way back in high school - that's 13 years ago if you're counting - and upgrade to, oh, I don't know, something that we could actually see.

I know, I know... This should have been done decently any number of years ago, but you see, Greg and I, we don't go in for the fancy new technology until it's downright embarrassing not to have it. That's just how we roll. Plus, seeing Greg resort to sitting on the coffee table in order to watch the European Championships was just downright sad. So I caved.

Now we, and by we I mean Greg, can enjoy soccer games on a brand spanking new 37" Samsung LCD television. Welcome to the 21st century, family K.


It's good to be here.


But what I'm also super excited about is our new media armoire! We've been looking for something that would fit in the relatively small bit of wall space next to the front door so we were limited by the width. We also needed something that had doors that could either be folded back or slid into the armoire - otherwise, it would get whacked any time someone walked in the front door while we were watching TV.

We looked all over. I can't even begin to tell you how many furniture stores we visited. And we found a few things that were okay, but nothing that really cried out to us. Until we found this:

In case you're wondering, that's James Bond being chased by Jaws...
...in mid-air, of course

When the doors are closed, you get a sense of just how stunningly beautiful this thing really is.


I wish I had a better camera that could capture the details but this will have to do. Click on any of the pictures for bigger versions.


I love it! No, I mean I reeeeeally looooovvvve it... Its definitely the focal point for the entire room now.

In case you're wondering, we found this little gem at Paisley Home, a furniture store we stumbled upon completely by accident. Last week-end we made a stop to check it out. And may I just say, it was AWESOME! Well, not the store - its just a big no-frills warehouse that's kinda hard to get to - but the furniture in the store was to. die. for!

If you like Four Hands furniture - and you know we do - you should definitely go check out this place. The furniture is somewhat in the same style, being from India with a rustic kind of elegance. Its all solid wood with lots of character, and the prices are shockingly decent. As in, it was half the price of some of the other pieces we were considering but weren't loving half as much. They have loads of lovely stuff - all wood furniture and some decor pieces. If we hadn't already bought our dining table, I'm sure we would have gotten one here. In fact, I want to go back just to spend a little more time staring at the stuff. Its that beautiful.

Go check it out! Really.

Animal Kingdom

Our house has become overrun with wildlife this week-end.

First a sweet, little stray kitten followed my sister to our front door on Friday night. After crying outside our door (for approximately 0.3 minutes), I caved and brought him inside. I mean, come on. There are coyotes and cars out there!

He was such a sweetie, purring the entire time, and keeping me company while I played on the computer.


Instead of being annoyed at yet another furry critter taking up residence in our home, when Greg got home he melted too. Sucka!

The little fella has no chip implant so we've posted flyers around the neighborhood. Hopefully someone will claim him soon. He's obviously been loved on by more than us.

In the meantime, he can be our snuggle bug...



And in other wildlife news...

The cats were going crazy at the door leading to our washer and dryer. I kept hearing sporadic scrambling noises and was convinced that we had either a mouse or, heaven forbid, a rat freaking out in there. I called in the reinforcements, but Greg was too chicken to take a look. I left it too because there was simply no way in hell I was going to investigate either. The next thing I know Greg is screaming from upstairs saying there was a bird in the house!


I ran up and found the poor thing desperately ramming itself against the window trying to fly out. I was yelling at Greg to get the kitchen gloves and grab it when he gave me this shocked, wide-eyed look and then informed me I'm not touching that thing... Excuse me? Isn't that in your contract or something?

Since he was useless (that's right, Greg, I said useless), I donned the gloves and used a bucket to trap the terrified beast against the window. Greg swooped in to cover the lid with cardboard - my hero... And then I ran downstairs and out the front door to free it.

Apparently, it had climbed in through the dryer vent and then pecked it's way out of the tubing to get in. Ew. But that's not all! Before the day was over, we had two more come in the same way! One died -no idea how- and the other we were able to steer out through the back patio doors. We went outside trying to find the route in, but couldn't see anything. Aren't those things supposed to be covered with a screen or something? I have no idea. But I'm hoping that will be the last of our interlopers for a while.

The Fun Part of Good-bye

The week-end before they packed up their car and left for San Diego, we threw a little going away party for Claus and Morgan.

Me with Katie & Derek, the soon-to-be mom & dad

Caroline, holding her own with the boys, Brian, Lance, Mark & Chris



Danish boys

More Danes



Kim sporting her pig tails with Brianna

Lance & Caroline, keepers of wine... and Coke?

I covet Dilek's dress

Karl & Julie saying good bye

Beth and Glenn amazingly vertical -
this was their third party that night!

I only hope I will look so adorable at 8 months pregnant...

Chatting into the wee hours with Mark & Brianna

And Lance & Caroline

And with that, Greg wishes you adieu!


Bon voyage, guys!

Fourth of July

We spent the fourth of July at Janice & Dave's place. They live just outside of Travis county, which means Janice can't check out books from the Austin public library (bummer!) but she can set off fireworks in her cul-de-sac. Bonus!

And an extra bonus is that her neighbors are complete fourth of July freaks who every year light up a small fortune worth of fireworks for us all to ooh and ahh over.

Janice channeling a bit of Martha Stewart

Her patriotic cake

My lovely husband and I

For some reason, Greg was bound and determined
to ruin every photo with weird faces or inappropriate advances.

I think Glenn was enjoying that last one...

Bird Watching

Our kitties are indoor kitties. Since they were rescued over a year and a half ago, they haven't set foot outside. Well... ok... except for that one time when Greg was drunk as a skunk after a party. As is his usual weird habit, he was cleaning up the mess (while highly inebriated - am I the only who thinks it can wait until morning?) at some ungodly hour of the morning and had opened the garage door without realizing the kids were camping out in there. And then closed the door again after Gomez had ventured out. It didn't take me long to figure out what had happened and rally for the frenzied search. Don't worry. We found him crying in the bushes just outside the door a few minutes later, freaked out but otherwise unscathed. Poor baby.

So other than THAT, they don't ever go outside.

All of their nature adventures are experienced in the comforts of air conditioning and behind the protection of glass.



I don't know if you can tell, but there's a cardinal in those bushes just outside the window, and it is having lots of fun teasing the trapped beasts of prey.


By the time I turned the video on, they'd already been concentrating so hard on that bird for about half an hour, willing it to drop dead by the sheer force of their combined contempt and frustration.

Soufflé - FAIL

A few weeks ago, Joyce posted a link to the fail blog. That site cracks me up! And it also reminded me to post about a recent FAIL of my own.

Perhaps I was high from my recent tres leches cake triumph. Perhaps I was suffering from delusions of culinary grandeur. Whatever it was, my apricot soufflés were a massive blow to the ego.

Observe: beautiful, fluffy, perky soufflés

Then, ten minutes later: sad, deflated shells of their former glory

The original straight-out-of-the-oven creations were actually much fuller than the first picture captures. They had already started sinking so quickly I grabbed the camera to document their slow demise... At least I had no guests to witness my shame. (But then I'm now posting it on my public blog so... Whatever.)

If any of you cooking whiz kids knows the secret behind non-deflating soufflés, I'm all ears...