it can happen to you!

Our baby dog weighs 60.8 pounds. Watch out - it can happen to you - your little puppy can grow up!

March Madness

Here's what I want to happen - UCLA beats Memphis (so that the team that beat us looks good), Kansas beats UNC. Then Kansas gives UCLA the business to avenge the Aggies' loss and we have a champion from the Big 12.

Matt didn't have to work today, which was awesome. After he had a good sleep-in, we went to Toulouse for brunch, played some Rock Band (our band has over a million fans now), and walked down to attend the open house at the McMansion that was built a few streets down from us. Oh, and he did our taxes (over $900 back to us, yipee!). Now he's at a recruiting dinner for the SMU students interested in KPMG at Maggianos. So I'm here with the animals...I think I'll probably watch some TV or read or something.

ugh

One of the main reasons our lawnmower is people-powered instead of gas is that I hate the noise. So of course, what happens as I'm quietly and meditatively working out front on the lawn just now? Stupid neighbor across the street comes out and powers up HIS gas-guzzling, planet-polluting, NOISE-polluting monstrosity. So I'm taking a break inside.

I found a snake in my compost pile - it was very exciting :)

Carnegie Hall

On February 22, Luke played with his A&M music group at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Now that's pretty cool in and of itself, but check this out - an excerpt from the professional concert review of their performance:

The Texas A&M University Wind Symphony is quite a force. Seventy-plus strong, and with a high degree of balance, accuracy, and ensemble, they may be called excellent even without the qualifying phrase “for a student group;” what’s more, when one considers that these young players are not only not professionals, but not even music majors, their achievement seems simply astounding.

How awesome is that?

"Thin" is really depressing

I watched the HBO documentary "Thin" about eating disorders this afternoon and it was really depressing. I mean, obviously eating disorders aren't exactly happy, but not a single one of the girls they followed got any better after their residential treatment. I knew about the insidiousness of ED, but seriously...it was horrible; the documentary did a really good job of hitting that point home. That said, if you have an interest in that kind of thing (Matt and I are devotees of the TV show "Intervention" on A&E that sometimes deals with people with eating disorders) you would find the movie interesting (I definitely resist using the word "enjoy") - man, it's dark.

Unrelated news, it is raining cats and dogs here. All day. I'm afraid my plants are going to wash away. Our rain gauge was full at 5" by mid-afternoon and it is still pouring.

<3 Library

I didn't realize how awesome it would be to live so close to a branch of the Dallas Library. Within the whole system, they have SO many books to chose from, and I've gotten comfortable with their request system so that I can pick up books from my branch that were originally located elsewhere or where checked out. Yesterday I picked up "Tangled Webs," a brand new book by Anne Bishop that's a part of a series I love, and read it all over the course of the evening. I always forget how great it is to read a new book in a beloved series/fantasy world. Re-reading is great and all, but there's nothing like reading a new story for the first time. And the library has been a source of lots of non-fiction too, which is even better really because most of those books aren't ones I'd be interested in adding to my personal library but are definitely ones I want to read.

I beat Final Fantasy XII this morning (for the second time). I think I played it for the first time in late 2006/early 2007 - I remember I was in the duplex. I really love that game. Now I'm sad because it is over.

St Patrick's Day Parade

I'm too tuckered out to write about it now, but I've put up pictures of my experience marching in the Greenville Ave St Patrick's Day Parade with the Sierra Club [here]. Also here are a couple links with pictures that other Sierra Club members took: Candace and Robert.

Oh, and Nameless had a baby boy (named Boone) this morning. Apparently our bull shoots Y chromosomes.

pictures of my yard work

I've created an album detailing all the work I've done in the front yard this last week. A lot of the plants are blooming now, as are our pear trees. Now I wish I could wave a magic gardening wand and make everything grow into their space!

Season Final: 1 Win, 7 Losses

We had our last game of the flag football season tonight (Thursday...I know I'm posting this rather late at night...that's what happens to me during busy season). We didn't manage to pick up another win, but we did have a solid showing against Miller Time in a 14-6 loss. Keeping it close was particularly heartening considering we only had eight people on our team show up, two guys and six girls. The trooper award goes to Lili, who was injured most of the season, showed up to cheer us on, and got roped into playing an entire game. She was pretty good too! Player of the game definitely goes to Blake, who had like three interceptions and was definitely the reason the score was close. Here are the standings if you're curious (at the time of this post they had not been updated for the final game).

In other news, I've been working in the front yard like a woman possessed this last week and it looks really neat. The inspiration came from two sources - the chainsawing down of the red bud tree that was growing into our foundation and the warmer weather. I will try and take pictures tomorrow. Things have started to bloom and it is looking pretty; I can't wait until the plants grow into their space a little more. Hopefully this spring has plenty of weather than makes them happy. Which reminds me - it was a very different experience playing flag football when it wasn't 30 degrees and pitch-black! I actually got a little warm (playing the whole game probably helped).

Calf Count: 5

JoeBob had her baby this afternoon. Mom and Dad actually got to watch the whole thing. Here's the first picture I've gotten:

this person has definitely owned cats (funny)

And then there's this one, which is amazingly close to what Piper does in the morning when she gets to sleep with us.

snow!

It's snowing. :)

Juno

Turns out I named another calf. Peanut's baby girl is officially "Juno" (I liked it because 1) it is a nice-sounding name, and 2) it reminds us of the time she was born). Dad sent me a couple pictures.

Why I Loved Metroid Prime 3

Well, it has been a few days since I beat Metroid Prime 3 and so I figured it was time to post my review.

One of the reasons I like the Metroid model is that it reminds me of Zelda - you start out with just the basics. Over the course of exploration, you (bounty hunter Samus Aran) encounter enemies and ultimately bosses. The boss fights always require you to do specific things to be successful (like employ a new upgrade or technique), and at the end, you get a shiny new toy. Some examples:

• ice missiles, which can freeze enemies so that a shot will shatter them, or can freeze molten rock to let you jump on it
• plasma beam, an upgrade to your gun that can burn enemies and melt certain rocks and metals, allowing access to new areas
• spider ball - Samus uses her morph ball technique )where she turns into a sphere that can roll around) and can attach to magnetized tracks that can loop around, up walls, across ceilings, etc, allowing access to upgrades and new areas

Also throughout the game you can find missile expansions (each increases the number of missiles you can carry by 5) and energy tanks (each increases your life energy by 100). I like this system because you don't have to find all of them to beat the game, but it is a challenge to find them all. I printed out a checklist from the internet so I could keep track of my progress, because my goal was to find 100% of the power-ups, which I did.

The Wii controls for the game are so much better than when the first two Metroid Prime games were on Gamecube. You use the nunchuk joystick to move forward, backwards, or side to side, while the Wiimote is used to aim, look around, and guide yourself. B jumps, A shoots. You can lock on to targets but still have to aim well enough to score the hits. Basically once you master the controls, you have a lot more freedom to move and shoot than in previous incarnations. There were some fun additions to the control scheme that added a nice touch - a flick of the Wiimote makes the morph ball jump; using the grapple beam to pull something requires you to cast the nunchuk forward and then pull it back.

One criticism of this game was that the boss fights were too easy. Well...I disagree. I didn't mind that I beat some of the bosses on the first try; some fights took up to three attempts, and the final boss took me four. I thought that was fabulous - I don't want to get so frustrated that I have to throw the Wiimote down and turn off the game before an aneurysm strikes. Besides, there are two additional difficulty modes you can play through the game on, so why make the easiest one impossible?

Calf count: 4

Peanut had a little girl tonight. Mom reports she is red with with markings on her face, and both mother and baby are doing well. Nameless and Jo-Bob are soon to follow, they think.

We had our next-to-last flag football game on Thursday. It was at a new location, Fair Oaks Park, which is right next to a new DISD high school. It was really nice there (aside from the grass being more like dirt), great lights and bleachers and everything. I was optimistic about our chances, because we were playing a team that was in the bottom half of the rankings like us and we'd managed to have practice before last week's rained out game. Alas, it was not to be. Although we scored first and initially kept it close, I guess the other team adjusted to us better than we adjusted to them. Also, as the game went on and things got out of hand, we lost our newly gained composure and game plan and certain members of our team (okay, I admit I'm thinking of one specifically) kind of ruined our practiced plans by getting insisting on getting in there without knowing what the hell they were doing (you know, we have this thing called practice and it helps if you come and also try to not suck, ya know?!). So yeah, I was getting a tad frustrated with it all and I don't think I was alone in that. Oh well, I hope next season will be better (assuming I don't get kicked off the team for caring too much =P). After the game, I went with about of my teammates to a bar and looked like quite the poster child for sobriety drinking my water while they all drowned their sorrows in alcohol. It was pretty impressive the way they could knock the drinks back (they are Aggies, after all, with their tolerance well-earned at the Dixie Chicken I suppose). Eventually I had to call it a night because Matt had made his way back from a hard day's work at the office. But really, aside from the losing part, it was a fun night. :)

I just finished reading the Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix. Although it took me quite a while to get into the first book, Sabriel, I ended up really enjoying the series. The second book Lirael and third Abhorsen were very good. One way to tell how much I enjoy a book is by how quickly I read it - I started and finished Abhorsen today =D I took a trip to the library today in anticipation of finishing the series and checked out a lot of gardening books. This warm spell we've had has renewed my interest in working with our yard. Now I just have to spend the next bit researching so I'm ready to plant when we're less likely to have a freeze. I also checked out Stephen Colbert's book I am America (And So Can You!); that should be fun!

This is quite odd, but as I was typing that last sentence, my keyboard layout switched to Dvorak and wouldn't switch back until I restarted. Weird...