In the Fairest of the Seasons

This was such a great day. I love New England in the fall.. the changing leaves are so bright along the highway, at times it appeared as if the trees are ablaze with red, yellow and orange. I proclaimed I needed to squeeze a hike into my crazy schedule to walk amongst them. There was a hard and fast rainfall late in the afternoon, which left us these amazing beauties at the end of our day. There are actually 2 rainbows, if you look closely. I think I am going to announce in this post, being about how beautiful nature is, that two of my dearest friends are expecting children. Hanburger's baby comes in March as does Nemo and Rachel's. I am so thrilled for them and can't wait to meet and hold their bundles of joy in not very much time at all! You guys seem so happy and I love you.

Happy Birthday Hansel!

Look at this little rascal! Hansel is 11 whole years old. I love his giant ears and paws that had yet to be grown into. Pictures from his first year, scanned, thanks to Lacy. I really need one of these handy scanner things. Anyway, thanks mom and dad for taking such good care of Hansel.. give him a burger and a cupcake for me.

Update: Hansel got an ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins, cheeseburgers, toys (wrapped up in paper so he could rip it open of course) a birthday hat, a long walk and even a ride in the car.

My mom: "He got to come to the store with me but, you know he waited in the car because I didn't want him to see the cake".

Me: "Wait, did you just say you didn't want the dog to see the cake you bought?"

My mom: "Well yeah, I mean it's his birthday. I didn't want him to get all excited and then have to wait for it, I wanted it to be a surprise".

Hansel sure is a lucky boy.

The Arm

OMG fun with the arm never gets old. In fact it was such a scream, we were laughing for hours straight. At the end Grant said "man, I need to bring this thing out more often". Stay tuned for adventures at the video store... and I still want to dangle it out of the trunk in my rental car and go through the drive thru at Taco Bell.

Under the Bridge Downtown

We waited for a while for the bats to come out from under the Lake Austin bridge, a nightly occurrence from April through November. Finally it got very dark, and though I couldn't see much more detail than my camera could, it was still really cool to see so many thousands of them, though looking down at the water they were black against black, they were really small too. When there were no cars driving past you could hear them squeaking like crazy.