O'Rourke

Well, it's not exactly Telluride, but when you live in the south east Houston area, you take what you can get. It snowed tonight for the first time since Christmas Eve, 2004. And even that is like yesterday, in terms of how often it snows down here.  According to the Weather Research center, it's snowed in Houston 16 times since I was born, and only 4 times since I moved here in 1990.

The best thing about this time is that all the girls are old enough to remember it. They had a great time running around, making snowballs, and catching snow flakes. We even made a small snowman. We felt like major Scrooges, making the girls come in and get ready for bed. I promised the girls we'd save the snowman's head in the freezer. Mike says we should call him Ted Williams. Now I need a very small Red Sox cap.

It's supposed to keep snowing until about 3am. Hope it's still on the ground when we wake up.

 Like before, click on one of the pictures if you want to see some more.

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Updated: with pictures. And click on the picture to the right to check out the rest of the pics.

For the weekend before Thanksgiving, we took off to Garner State Park, out in central Texas. It's about 5-6 hours drive and Cheryl was working Friday, so we left Saturday morning and arrived in plenty of time to set up camp and have a look around. It was pretty overcast and damp enough that it felt like it was going to rain, but we never got anything more than some drizzle on the windshield and no rain once we got there. We brought the bikes on the bike rack, so we took a spin around our section of the park. They have some really nice cabins there. A good option if we try to bring along some of our less out-doorsey friends next time. The first night was a little cold. I think it may have gotten down to the low 40's.We had the girls in 2 layers of PJs and 2 sleeping bags each, complete with hats and socks. Some of those little bodies don't hold heat too well. Cheryl & I stayed up and played cards by the lantern. Sunday, we did some hiking in the morning and drove around the rest of the camp on our way south to Uvalde. The kids & Cheryl got a decent nap on the ride, and we stopped at Wal-Mart to pick up a few things we forgot and headed back to camp. Not much to do in Uvalde.

Sunday night was warmer, but the card-playing was interrupted by a very persistent family of skunks. I guess they either know the end-of-weekend routine,

or sensed a big dropoff in camp activity level and decided the left-over feast was on. The girls were in the tent and we were playing cards at the picnick table and heard something behind us. I shined a flashlight over at the water faucet about 10 feet away and there were 2 skunks digging the the rock basin scrounging for post-dishwashing scraps.

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Been trying to network my Desktop Mac and my T61 Vista machine with no success. The Vista machine can see the Mac, but I can't log in. Finally found out Vista is set to ingnore the security handshake OS X is sending. Not sure if OS X (I'm running 10.4) needs a security update, or if Microsoft is just being finicky, but it sure was a pain trying to get it working.

Here's the fix:

1. Click the Start Orb, type gpedit.msc into the Start Search field, and press Enter

Click the Continue button on the User Account Control prompt.
This will launch the Group Policy Object Editor for the Local Computer Policy.

2. In the Group Policy Object Editor, expand:

-> Computer Configuration

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The Seabrook Sailing club where we kept our boat was a total loss. We had just spent $25,000 on new windows (they weren't even done getting painted yet. The building has been there since 1946. The new windows lasted 10 day.

Fortunately for us, Greg & Tracy had retrieved the boat while we were away this summer and Hurricane Gustav was threatening. I had forgotten to ask them to get the sails, and forgot to get them myself when Ike came, so they were still in the sail locker when Ike hit. Miraculously, they washed up and a guy who lives by the club retrieved them. They're in pretty good shape!  Hopefully tomorrow, I'll have some pictures of my pool as it looked when I got back post Ike and how it looks now.

Ryan turns 4 today, so yesterday, we all met down at the Bay Area Raceway to ride go-carts and play video games. Ryan was the master of this space-race game! 

Forwarded to us via email, and apparently not from Letterman...

10. Decorating the house (with plywood).
9. Dragging out boxes that haven’t been used since last season.
8. Last minute shopping in crowded stores.
7. Regular TV shows pre-empted for ‘Specials’.
6. Family coming to stay with you.
5. Family and friends from out of state calling you.
4. Buying food you don’t normally buy . . . and in large quantities.
3. Days off from work.
2. Candles.

And the Number One reason Hurricane Season is like Christmas: 

At some point you may have a tree in your house!

Well, we did pretty OK through hurricane Ike. Cheryl rode out the storm at Clear Lake Hospital (5 stories high and rated for a Cat 4 hurricane) while I took the girls to San Antoinio to stay at Julie & Dan's bed and breakfast.  Aside from keeping everyone safe, our next biggest fear was flooding from the storm surge. Fortunately the predictions of 18-22 ft storm surge (our house is around 12-17 ft) didn't pan out. Mostly due to a lucky last minute storm jog to the northeast, bringing the eye straight up I-45 instead of just to our south-west.  Also I think the models aren't designed for very wide storms over very shallow water, but that's just the geeky scientist in me talking.

So the worst in-storm experience any of us have to report is that Cheryl was trying to get some sleep during the middle of the night as the storm raged overhead.  And her complaint isn't that she couldn't sleep. She was dead-tired from all the hurricane prep they had been doing, so sleep wasn't a problem. The problem was that the wall started leaking and she and her head nurse had to move to another room. Fortunately for Cheryl, she was actually in a bed. Her boss had drawn the short straw and was sleeping on the floor. Can you say "soggy sleeping bag"? Can you say "bad performance appriasal"? Actually her boss was just thankfull to have the help. 

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From the Washington Post. Also check out the cool time allocation along the bottom.

Obama:

McCain:

Well, everyone had fun at the pool. The girls spent some time talking to some army guys, telling them how their Uncle Dan was an army guy. Allison & Meghan got a good night's sleep, but Cheryl wasn't so lucky between a fire alarm with a battery that decided to die at 1:00 am and Mackenzie tossing & kicking her the rest of the evening. Fortunately she was with it enough to put the fire alarm, and not Mackenzie, in the bushes outside the hotel door.

Took off around 9am, stopped for lunch at McD's but it was raining, so they couldn't get in any leg-stretching time or a zoo trip so everyon elected to press on to Dallas, Ga to visit an old college friend. Yes, Maren I called you old.

Pulled into Maren's around 3:30 or 4:30 depending on if you're on central or easter time. The kids got to spend some time jumping on trampoline and running off the willies. Yay!

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The girls x 4 made it all the way to Hattiesburg, Mississipi. They were only planning on getting as far as Baton Rouge, LA and then stopping to go to the zoo. But when they got there mid-afternoon, the M&Ms (Meghan & Mackenzie) were asleep in the way-back, and it was raining. So Allison & Mom decided to press on through and see how far they could get. They made it to Hattiesburg by dinner time, and found a hotel with a pool and something to eat. Hopefully a dip in the pool will burn off some energy from being pent up in the car all day. The dual-screen DVD player was a big hit.

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