Full House

http://picasaweb.google.com/daniel.lauve/DownstairsBathroom

This past weekend we finished the first of several projects on the house. We started the renovation of the half bath before my parents arrived this weekend, and their visit was timely as we ran into a snag with the installing of the new light fixture. My dad, who I always think knows everything about houses though he begs to differ, really pulled us through the rough spot! Daniel did a super job of patching the hole left by the 80’s boxed-in fluorescent light, which was our first tape and float project. Can you tell I’m really proud? Together we did a great job of priming, texturing, and painting the small room. I must say I never expected to hug one of my toilets sober, but how else do you paint behind them? Not to point fingers, but it certainly isn’t going to be the one of us who is over six foot tall.


We had a fun weekend otherwise with Mom, Dad and Brent (who is still living at the house), but I’m afraid I have no pictures to share, so a picture of a margarita will have to do.  We consumed lots of Mexican martinis and margaritas, which is my Dad’s favorite. We played several games on the Wii, which included a rather one-sided round of me playing the new American Idol game that Daniel bought me. (My family claims that they don’t know where my performance bug came from, although I remember going to family reunions when I was little and my Dad’s mother’s side of the family would play instruments and sing songs all afternoon.) I am not the one of us who has sung karaoke most recently, so Daniel did sing at least one song Friday night. Everyone else joined in on bowling, boxing, and Scattergories.

We did our usual run together on Saturday, and for some reason my Dad had to coax Daniel and me into finishing three miles. Daniel and Dad shared the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, and all of the guys enjoyed a Sunday afternoon of football together while Mom and I snuck out for some shopping and talking. The parents left Monday, and we enjoyed the end of our three-day weekend by finishing the half-bathroom! Next on the house updates list is the upstairs guest bath and the kitchen…

Family Time

http://picasaweb.google.com/daniel.lauve/SanAntonioJanuary2009

On January 3rd this year Daniel and I drove to San Antonio for the day to meet with his mom’s uncle, Evaristo. He lives in Mexico City and just bought a house in San Antonio, so we may get to see him more often. We ate lunch with Daniel’s parents, Evaristo, his daughter’s family, and Evaristo’s sister---Daniel’s grandmother, Sara. At one point during the meal Saralicia, Evaristo’s daughter, made the comment that her dad was one of her favorite people! That definitely hit home with me. They were so kind and warm (lots of hugs and kisses), and I think we were invited to visit them more than once. I hope one day soon we will go to Mexico for a visit. I had a wonderful time getting to know them and enjoyed meeting Daniel’s extended family. Click on the picture above to see more from our visit!

Christmas 2008

http://picasaweb.google.com/daniel.lauve/Christmas2008

This year we left for our Christmas travels on Monday night, December 20th and arrived at Teresa and Roger's house to stay the night with them to break up our trip and get to share a little love with the Salinas family. Although the visit was brief, it is always good to see my cuz and her family!

Our first Christmas of 2008 began with another exciting round of Reindeer Rally.  After last year's scavenger hunt through Katy Mills Mall, we knew we were going to have different teams, and we weren't sure what the format was going to be.  It ended up being another scavenger hunt, this time through the main outdoor shopping section of Sugar Land.  This time around, Brandi was with Diana and I [Daniel] was with my mom.  I was looking forward to getting to be on a team with my mom because she had had a very stressful few days with school ending up, Christmas shopping and wrapping, and with ongoing new house issues.  Also, her last place finish in 2007 meant that she was primed for a huge bounce back.

And what a bounce back it was.  We were out of the gates quickly along with many other teams, and having fewer tasks to complete meant that speed in getting from place to place could mean the difference between first and second.  My mom and I were consistently getting to the stores after Alicia and Cecilia, so for one of the final tasks, going to the cigar store and having your picture taken pretending to smoke a cigar, I decided to cut a little corner.  With Alicia and Cecilia inside the store, I stopped outside the front door, stuck a pen in my mouth and took a picture, retaking a slim lead that we did not relinquish.  Multiple teams complained that I had to leave my mom too far behind (the rules explicitly say that teams need to stay together) to accomplish this, and they may be right.  I did tell my mom that we needed to stay together when she kept telling me to run ahead, but there were times when I did get a little bit past her.  The judges awarded us first, but I guess history will be the ultimate judge.  After Reindeer Rally, we went back to my grandmother's house to open presents to and from the Neelys.

This is Brandi and I won't go into all the things that Daniel did to "help" his mom win because it will make me sound like a sore loser. :-) Anyway, we had a lot of fun just like last time and it really is a great way to spend time with family members you may not always get enough one on one time with. Again we owe all of the creativity and planning to Diana--she did a great job!

Some of my favorite parts of Christmas Eve were our run in the rain that morning, the little child singing at Children's Mass who sang "Happy Bir-day Jesus, I'm so glad it's Cwris-mas" that was almost too cute to bear, visiting Daniel's Grandad and being hit on by Rachel, a woman in her late 70's that is also a patient at the Silverado Home, seeing the beautiful new house Linden and Lisa will living in soon and having dinner with the Lauves as a family.

You might be wondering about Rachel but most importantly she is harmless. I learned my lesson that I must wear pants to visit his grandad, unless I want my "smooth and silky" legs to be felt up again.

Christmas morning we got up and found our presents from Santa!! Daniel got a Wii, which I think he was pretty excited about (he's playing Wii golf as I write this) and I got a scrapbook supplies carousel organizer which I've been wanting for awhile plus lots of stuffers in our stocking. We had a great time visiting with and dressing like the girls in Christmas PJs Lisa bought us all, singing to Mariah Carey's "All I want for Christmas is You", playing Reindeer Rally, and talking about "White Christmas" the movie and the White Christmases the Lauves have had. We also were treated to Daniel doing his annual telling of Twas the Cheesy Animatronic Baby Elephant at Disney's Animal Kingdom.

We left the Lauves house mid morning and headed to my Memaw's for lunch. There were lots of people and it turned out to be a great time to visit with all my extended family. I usually see them all about 4 or 5 times a year. This year we made calendars on Shutterfly for our families as Christmas presents. I think Daniel's side of the family turned out the best--with over 70 important dates on my families it left a lot of room for error. Everyone liked it and I can't wait to do another one for my Memaw next year!

For the remainder of our Christmas we opened presents my parents and brother that night, Daniel got sick with a fever, Dad and I got some good runs in, we enjoyed Mom's good cooking, and we had fun playing games and watching movies. We got some great gifts too, like a Chi iron for me and laptop cooler for Daniel.

To round out our Christmas travels, we ended with a visit to the Comeaux's in Port Neches on Sunday night. We opened presents with Kaylin and Madison, and Amber and Jed cooked for us. Amber's parents, Rodney and Shirley, came over and visited with us too. Their family has always been a part of my Christmas season, and I appreciated Daniel putting up with my travel tour of southeast Texas.

After all of our Christmases, I have to say though one of my very favorite gifts I found in my stocking at Daniel's grandmother's house. You may read the sonnet he wrote me that describes each month in our first 12 months together as husband and wife:

From last September's joyful promise said
A fortnight's bookends: Islands, Broadway plays
The turkey's end to pigskin triumph led
A Reindeer Rally hunt through Katy's maze

A hoop, a cap, a Nunez yule five strong
We raced and raced to close the seventh book
The monuments and blossoms flew along
A guest foretold the hit our pantry took

A mic, guitar and drums kept us awake
The sweetest cake I've had, though peaches lacked
Great lake's and gulf's shores gave us family breaks
The hilly Human Race we both attacked

To ancient boot, the hub of Western life
I long to see more places with my wife.

We hope you had a wonderful holiday season in 2008 and are praying that all of you in internet land have a blessed year in 2009! We look forward to our paths crossing soon in the year to come.

This State Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us

Remarkably, this is first time in three-plus years of blogging that I have ever made a post devoted entirely to Texas A&M football.  And it comes after perhaps the worst loss of my being a Texas Aggie football fan.  Twenty-point losses to the Baylor Bears are a good time to get philosophical about the fortunes of a football team, which is where this post has its genesis.  I started thinking about the likelihood that, after a certifiably abysmal start, Mike Sherman will end up being a good Aggie football coach. I then started thinking about the fact that, according to the Aggie faithful, R. C. Slocum became a bad coach at roughly the same time that Mack Brown started coaching at Texas, or at least at the time when his recruits started playing at Texas.

Which raises an interesting question: which coaching change would most benefit Texas A&M, replacing an underperforming coach in College Station or replacing a legend-in-the-making in Austin? Does Texas being good make it less likely that A&M will be good?

I compiled the yearly winning percentages for A&M and Texas over the last 100 years. The correlation coefficient between those two sets of data is  -0.262.  (First off, a couple caveats. Doing any kind of statistical analysis using only correlation is dubious at best.  Thankfully, none of the two people who read this blog are statisticians.  And all of the correlations mentioned in this post are what scientists call "weak".  The strongest correlation you can have is 1 or -1, and nothing mentioned here gets close to that. Still, I think some of the relationiships I am about to describe are real; it's just that there are far too many factors that affect a team's success, most of them internal.)

This negative correlation means that when Texas has a relatively high winning percentage, Texas A&M is more likely to have a relatively low winning percentage. In other words, it's more likely that Texas is good and A&M is bad (or vice versa) than that both of them are good.  In 2004, when the two teams played the day after Thanksgiving in Austin, it was only something like the fifth time that both had been ranked.  Kind of surprising until you consider that the teams have been good at different times.

But of course there is going to be a not very strong negative correlation between the two teams' success---they play each other once a year, right? So for each team, roughly 8% of its games will be played in a zero-sum environment---only one can win. To test that, I took a couple other teams that A&M has played every year.  A&M and Baylor have a correlation of 0.066. That's a much weaker correlation, and it's not even negative.  The next team I looked at was TCU. (Texas Tech, the only remaining team that has been in both the Southwest Conference and Big 12, started playing football in 1925, so TCU has actually played more against the Aggies in the last century.) TCU's correlation with A&M is -0.058, another near-zero correlation.

What about other rivalries? It would make sense that when one rival starts winning, he would get access to better recruits and more money, fostering an imbalance of power, at least for a little while.  Michigan and Ohio State have a correlation of -0.073, another remarkably weak correlation. Army and Navy have a correlation of positive 0.294. This sort of makes sense. Both were good in the first half of the century and bad in the second half, when superconferences took over from Notre Dame, the Ivy League, and the military academies.

If access to recruits is a factor in the relative fortunes of two rivals, then you would expect in-state rivals to have a stronger inverse relationship than other rivals because there is a bigger overlap in recruiting territory. Auburn and Alabama have a correlation of -0.175, which is getting there. UCLA and Southern Cal, who have met fewer than 90 times, have a correlation of -.104. Now we're getting somewhere, perhaps.

So maybe there is something to the idea that it's tough for rivals to be good at the same time, especially when they are in close proximity. If that's the case, then it's probably the case that the historically dominant school has an upper hand in determining who will be successful. Darrel Royal coached for 20 years, and Texas A&M had a winning record in just 5 of those years (4 of which were his first year and his final three). The Aggies started the Mack Brown era by twice finishing the year in the top 25. Since then--you guessed it, zero times in nine tries (I'm counting us outside the top 25 in 2008, which is not going out on too much of a limb). So as the boosters are passing the hat around to buy out Mike Sherman, they might think they're doing some good. And they might actually be. But it could be that the key to success at A&M lies more than we realize in waiting out the situation in Austin.

Saturday, September 20: From Amerigo to America

[Brandi's comments are featured in italics.]

Our wakeup this morning was jarring, to say the least. The phone rang at 6:00 a.m. from the front desk telling us that our car to Florence’s Amerigo Vespucci Airport was downstairs and ready to go. It was one of those disorienting moments that takes you a few minutes just to believe that you’re not in a bad dream. I had gotten a wake-up call, but I reflexively picked up the phone when it rang and sat it back down. And for some reason my phone alarm that I have used numerous time for all sort of other hotel alarms did not sound. And with staying up late the night before and my smart decision not to pack up all my stuff so it would be easy to get up and go for our early flight, let’s just say this morning was my least favorite moment of the trip! Not to mention I was sad that we were leaving our dream vacation. Daniel had actually gotten his luggage packed before we went to bed, so as the calm one in these situations he threw his clothes on to go downstairs.  He was going to talk to the driver to see if he could wait for us, and then he’d come back to help me with my luggage. I raced around and managed to get dressed and packed in 10 minutes flat, and we were out the door on our way to the airport before sunrise.As we drove away from downtown I welled up a little over the beauty we were leaving behind but was filled with all the memories Daniel and I had created in one week in a different world. It left us with a yearning to see more of the surrounding countries and cultures that we have yet to experience, so there will always be another adventure for us. But for now, I had to say good-bye to our Italy, or better yet, “Ciao Bella!”

Friday, September 19: So apparently there is a difference between the plug adapter and the plug converter.

[Brandi's comments are featured in italics.]

After a morning run taking us back by the Duomo, we had breakfast downstairs and went back up to the room to get ready. I was in the bathroom when Brandi was having trouble getting her hair dryer to work. We have a converter for it to fit into the European plugs, but it tends to operate with very little power for some reason. She was looking for a new place to plug it in to, when POP! There was a loud crack and all of the lights went out. When I went to Radio Shack to pick up a plug converter, the guy there actually sold me two, one adapter that is for appliances that are already at the right voltage, and a converter primarily for heated appliances like the hair dryer. When the converter wasn’t giving her the results she wanted, she decided to give the adapter a try. You see, Brandi has a philosophy that if she doesn’t have enough electricity to dry her hair, then nobody in the hotel should have enough electricity to do anything. It was really just our room that lost power, Daniel is just being double-headed two-horned jackass with a smelly butt.

Each of us had one thing that we had not yet gotten to eat while in Italy, so for our last lunch we decided to seek out a good restaurant for pasta alla carbonara (Daniel) and gnocchi alla Bolognese (Brandi). After some shopping in the rain, we went south of the Arno to Celestino’s, a restaurant recommended by our hotel. It was a perfect last lunch. We arrived right at noon, so we were the only ones there for a little while. I had spaghetti alla carbonara, which has bacon and egg yolks. Alla carbonara and alla matriciana are two pasta preparations you don’t see as often in the states. I think I prefer alla matriciana, but alla carbonara was definitely interesting and worth trying. The restaurant was great and their gnocchi was unbelievable! It was hearty and delicious, well-worth the traipse through the rain to get there.

The one thing Brandi requested for this trip was a wine tour in Tuscany. We spent the whole trip thinking that the tour listed for today (which included Pisa and Lucca and was slated for a full day) was going to have the winery tour. When I called the bus company today to see what the tour included, the lady said that it was just Pisa and Lucca with lunch in between. Not only that, but she told us it was canceled due to lack of interest (punctuated with another “Didn’t you get the fax?”). Luckily, when I mentioned that we’d rather sign up for a Tuscany tour that included a winery, the tour company happened to have exactly what we wanted.

We walked to the bus stop under a light but consistent rain---definitely not the best weather for visiting a winery. The bus took us along a similar route to the one we took to Siena, through windy, hilly roads and around some really tight corners. Once we got within a few kilometers of the winery, all you could see was vineyards on one side of the bus and olive trees on the other.

The winery is housed in a medieval castle that figured prominently in some of the Renaissance tug-of-war between Florence and Siena, and it’s about the most beautiful place we’ve ever seen. It looks very, uh, castle-y, with those little cutouts at the top of the walls (not sure what they’re called), as well as Spanish-style roofs and an amazing view out of the back. As if on cue, the rain cleared up and the clouds went away just as we were leaving so we could enjoy the view in all its glory. We walked inside and got to see the barrels that they use to age the wine, and then we got to see the wine cellar, an amazing collection of the winery’s production that includes bottles going all the way back to 1911.

We got to sample some of their wines (a chianti, a chianti reserva, and a dessert wine), plus some nice cheese and bruschetta. Then it was on to Greve in Chianti, a nice little town where we visited a butcher shop with very, very fresh prosciutto. They had these legs hanging in the window, and I don’t want to get too graphic, but I’ll just say that you could see the hoof. And some little hairs right by the hoof. Daniel is being polite; those legs were everywhere in the shop, so much so that he actually had to duck. I’m not a huge fan of meat on the bone (too graphically carnivorous for me), but I love prosciutto, and it ruined the mystique of not knowing exactly what part of the pig it comes from.

We spent just a few minutes at Pieve di San Leolino, a hillside village that has a 12th century church another spectacular view. We had dinner at Trattoria da Pordo on Via Valigondoli (which seemed like a country house on the side of a solitary mountain that we walked part of the way down to get to dinner) and we sat by Chris and Natalie, a couple from Richmond, Virginia, who were also on their first anniversary trip. We had talked with them throughout the bus rides all afternoon. It was great getting to know them---we haven’t gotten much of a chance to socialize with the people on our tours, and we really enjoyed getting to spend time with a couple our age. Interestingly, another table had a couple that was getting married the following day. The other people at the table gave them a pretty good “rehearsal dinner”---they were laughing the whole time and taking pictures afterward. We ended the evening telling Chris and Natalie good-bye and walking through downtown for our last taste of gelato, which turned out to be a gelato gorge. We went to two different places just to make sure we had all of the flavors that we were so dearly going to miss once we left Italy. My favorite one was the gelato made from nutella and peanut butter….delicious!

Thursday, September 18: “Better than nothing.”

[Brandi's comments are featured in italics.]

Today we slept in until 8:00 and went downstairs for the hotel’s buffet breakfast, which I had heard was very good. It had eggs! Also, there was sausage and pancakes, as well as prosciutto and melon. And they made delicious cappuccinos to order---all in a lovely quaint room on the top floor.

Yesterday, we had a little trouble finding the bus (they are doing construction on the train station/bus terminal), but we figured it was productive since we needed to take a bus tour today. We were in the SITA (Florence’s bus company) bus terminal at 9:45, waiting for our bus, when a woman ran in, screaming to us and one other couple, “Hurry, the bus is across the street!!! It’s about to leave!!! Didn’t you get the fax???” Well, no, do you mean on the fax machine that I carry in my backpack? “You’ve got to hurry to get on the tour today, but if you miss the bus we can get you on the Saturday tour.” That’s good. Apparently SITA’s experience with foreign tourists is that they stay in Florence indefinitely. As we were planning to be going home on Saturday, we decided to run to the bus, leaving the other couple (one of whom was a gentleman who walked with a cane) in our collective dust. I thought we could warn the tour guide ahead that another couple was coming behind us, but Daniel makes it sound like we were in the amazing race!

The tour started at Piazza de Michaelangelo, which is a spot up in the hills overlooking Florence with an amazing view of the entire city, including Fiesole, a neighboring town that figures prominently in Etruscan history. We then drove across much of the rest of the city, stopping and getting off the bus for good near the city center. Except something didn’t get off the bus---Brandi forgot her sweater. She realized it and started getting upset just as the bus was driving off, and we were told there wasn’t a way to recover it.

This whole sequence had me worrying about spending the rest of the day with a very upset wife, until a woman in the back of the crowd started crying, realizing that she had left her camera at Piazza de Michaelangelo. Now, losing a camera is a horrible thing, and I felt really sorry for her, but it did mean that Brandi had to pass the Pout Pipe to her, which made me a little happy. Awful, I know. It was a taupe-colored goes-with-everything cardigan that fit my 5 ft frame perfectly and it was a bargain! He’s right, though, I can sometimes get a little upset with myself when I lose stuff…

We walked through the Piazza della Republica and toward the Duomo, the fourth-largest cathedral in the world. The Baptistry was built a couple centuries before the main church (between 1059 and 1128), and it is where Dante and several members of the Medici family were baptized. Built between the 13th and 16th centuries, the Duomo was conceptualized at a time when Florence had passed Rome as a center of European culture, and it was built to surpass the greatest churches of the time, though the new St. Peter’s Basilica clearly dwarfs it now. One of its best features is the fact that tourists can climb to the top of the dome, but unfortunately our tour did not go inside.

We walked on to the Accademia, which was originally meant to be an academy for the training of young artists. It changed into a museum, chiefly, in 1873, when Michaelangelo’s David was brought there, after previously being kept outside near the Uffizi, which sounds crazy. He was brought in to the Accademia to protect him from the elements, kind of like when my dad would tell me to bring the dog in when it had started raining, though I think it was more involved than that. The museum also houses several of Michaelangelo’s unfinished sculptures as well as a few other notable sculptures and paintings.

Unlike some of our pre-arranged tours in Rome, today’s tour had the feeling of being a little cheap. Our tour guide was pretty knowledgeable, but while most of the museum tours are equipped with little radios that allow you to hear your guide speak quietly, our tour relied completely on the lung capacity of the guide. If I had paid for a tour that included the radios, then I would be a little upset when another tour guide came in and started yelling at everybody, so it wasn’t too remarkable when the other tour guides started getting onto our tour guide. He started yelling back at them and being a little bit of a jerk in the process. He turned back to us and said, “They just don’t know what they’re talking about.” These confrontations repeated a few times throughout our tour, which made us all increasingly more uncomfortable.

Michaelangelo’s David was probably my favorite artifact that we saw in Florence! Just because you have seen it in a book, don’t second guess its perfection. It is truly breathtaking work.

After a quick lunch at a pizza by the slice place (our least memorable meal of the trip), we made our pilgrimage to the Dante Museum, a three-story Dante exhibit built in Dante’s renovated house. It’s definitely not a big tourist destination--there were two people there when we arrived, and the people who showed up after us just wanted to know where the American Express office was. But for a Dante fan, it was a real treat. We learned about Dante’s early life and his exile from Florence, and there were many depictions of his Commedia.

We tried to visit the Uffizi, but the line was about an hour long, so we went to the hotel and came back at about 5:00 p.m., an hour and a half before it closed. We got in right away, but unfortunately we were there after they stopped checking out the audio tours. I was wondering what we were going to listen to but Daniel was clever---before the trip he downloaded some Rick Steves podcasts of notable places in Rome and Florence, and this was one of several places where they came in handy. We saw Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus as well as numerous other Renaissance works, but unfortunately many of the works on the back half of the tour were missing descriptions.

As we were just about finished with the museum, a woman sidled up next to us, asking if the piece in front of us was marble or ivory. Turns out that she was an American who had spent time in Houston. Oh yeah, and she was annoying. She spent some time telling us how bad Houston’s museum scene used to be. (They only had an art museum and an opera, she said, which, last time I checked, is still ahead of Peoria and Siberia and a bunch of other places.) She kept up a 90/10 talking-to-silence ratio, telling us about every member of her family and the fact that she was in Italy for three weeks before asking us how long we were here. When we told her we were on a one-week trip, she said, “Oh, that’s better than nothing.” Thanks, lady.

It’s funny how quickly things can change in a tourist destination. The guidebooks are very helpful, but if you go to the places they recommend, you will find many more Americans than you would have if you happened upon it before it was “discovered.” Our dinner tonight was at Acqua al Due, a restaurant my friend Adam recommended to me. When he found it a few years ago, it was an unknown restaurant where nobody spoke English. When we went, pretty much every customer was an English speaker. So much so that in the middle of our dinner I distinctly heard the words Beaumont and Austin. We both popped up out of our chairs to go and introduce our selves to the two couples because it seemed so odd to run into someone from our own backyard! 

The food was still very good, though. In addition to a bottle of wine, Brandi ordered a salad sampler (three different types of salad), and I got a pasta sampler (five different pastas). For our main course, I got their popular blueberry steak, while Brandi ordered cannelloni with ricotta and spinach. My first four samplers, vodka macaroni, blue cheese gnocchi, eggplant rigatoni, and spicy fusilli, came out before my steak, and they were all very good, as was the steak. I figured the fifth one was on its way, but when it didn’t come after a while I asked the waiter for it. After a couple minutes, he brought out a plate with “cannelloni”---a dollop of ricotta covered in red sauce. Besides being what Brandi ordered, it didn’t actually have any pasta. Brandi asked him about it, and he said, “Yes, it’s pasta with cheese and sauce. It’s very good, do you like it?” We pointed out that there was no pasta. “Oh, yes, that’s right. That’s how it comes.” We’re guessing he didn’t like it pointed out that they had forgotten 20% of the pasta sampler. Although I wasn’t thrilled with the waiter because I really felt like he needed to know that we know what pasta looks like but I still really enjoyed our meal there and our walk back through the cobblestone streets!

After dinner, we grabbed a Bailey’s on ice and went up to the rooftop patio to hang out. It was a great, relaxing end to our evening that mirrored the serenity of Florence. Since we had all sorts of extra battery space left on our camera, we both started taking silly pictures of each other. (Then I forgot to recharge the camera that night. Sorry we don’t have any pictures of the Ponte Vecchio, winery, or Tuscan countryside---but we hope you enjoy the million pictures of us mugging for the camera!)