Patriotism A Week or Two Later

Over the July 4th weekend, we attended our neighborhood Independence Day parade. It was a feast for the eyes. We'll do our best to describe them here. For starters, there's this guy:

I mean... Check out this shirt off, giant styrofoam dog head, bicycle riding guy. Yeah. Also, did you know that Houston is the (self-proclaimed?) Art Car capital of the world? There were art cars.

Check out this cat-illac.

The slogan of this car was "Make out, not war." Oh yeah.

Also, there was this tiny clown.

Now, this guy rides through the neighborhood occasionally when it's not parade time. Check out that super-tall ride.

The highlight, though, was this crew of breakdancers at the very end of the parade.

Kinda makes you feel patriotic, doesn't it?

Read More

TSFB Got Moves

I am participating in a technology course at work where we were asked to edit together some of our video content and share it on a blog. Please enjoy this awesome video (and fast before Eddy sees it and makes me take it down!)

Read More

We Never Miss a Good Aquarium

It's true. If there is an aquarium, zoo or animal exhibit of any kind within 100 miles of where we are traveling, we go. New Orleans was no exception. This time it was the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas. We saw tons of cool stuff.

And posted stupidly in front of other cool stuff.

It's our way. We have a super-mega-cool-crazy Fourth of July weekend planned, so stay tuned!

Read More

Un-Touristy Tourism

So the nice thing about staying with locals was that we got to do lots of New Orleans things, only some of which were touristy. We of course did Cafe du Monde.

Jackson Square and the French Quarter.

That's right, Eddy is nerding up the FQ. But we also had some amazing parade experiences! Laura and Kijai took us to Pride and to an amazing second line!

In second lines, parade goers march alongside the parade and dance along to the brass band. It was great fun, but also really freakin' hot.

To keep parade goers happy, there were plenty of mobile coolers and also truck bars.

If ever you have the opportunity to see a second line in NOLA, do it. And bring ice water.

Read More

Improvised High School Reunion

I recently missed my 10 year HS reunion (for the second time-ish). I couldn't attend, because of conference travel in NOLA. The good news (other than the fact that we went to New Orleans) is that my BFF from HS lives in NOLA!

When I wasn't at ALA, Laura and Kijai showed us the town!

We even got friendly with their sweet little rescue Chicory.

More on what we did to come!

Read More

Let There Be Light Fixtures

And the Lord sayeth to them, "We're having company and our dining room has no light fixtures." So we decided to whip some up from scratch. We got some string and wrapped it around some balloons.

Then Eddy did some wiring.

And voila! Light fixtures extraordinaire.

They are not quite finished yet, but they were finished enough to garner the admiration of Rebecca and Alan last weekend.

Eddy also wired some lovely bedroom lights--pictures to come!

Read More

The Accidental Electrician Weekend

...that extended beyond the weekend into a full week's worth of work. That's what happened to us last weekend. Fresh of a plane from Hawaii, we decided it would be a good idea to tackle our dining room light fixture project. We're having Rebecca and Alan over for dinner this weekend, so it's time to get some light in that room. Well, we got a little ambitious at Lowe's and we purchased light fixture supplies for the bedroom AND for the dining room. We divvied up the work--Eddy started wiring the light fixtures in the bedroom and I started creating dining room light fixtures from scratch.

We started strong.

Look how excited Eddy is to put holes in our walls.

But then it somehow became 2 AM and we were going a little less strong.

There were mistakes, there were tragedies, there was some crying and a whole lot of laughing. Long story short, it took us the weekend and all of the next week (and then some) to get both light fixtures somewhat in place for our company. We'll snap some shots on Saturday to share on the blog.

Read More