12803 Steeple Chase

Hi! We've been gone for a while, haven't we? While there are many reasons like business trips for both of us and plain old winter blahs, the biggest reason we haven't written is that we've been busily preparing to say goodbye to our house. And now here we are ready to announce that it officially went on the market Thursday night. Read our letter to potential buyers that is sitting on our kitchen counter right now and then click on the link to view our first home. Now all we need is the right buyer to walk through that door!

Dear Future Home Owner,

In the spring of 2006, I was searching for my first home. When I happened upon 12803 Steeple Chase, I was immediately impressed by the quiet neighborhood and the great floor plan. I showed it to my new boyfriend, and he liked it, too. By the middle of June I was ready to move in. A year later, I had painted, changed a number of fixtures, and my boyfriend became my husband. Together we took on a number of home improvements, such as renovating all three bathrooms and the kitchen.

We have made a lot of memories in this house. We barbeque often on the patio, hang out with friends in the backyard, and enjoy morning runs to the park that is less than a mile away. The living room is full of light in the mornings, and it’s a great place for fires on winter nights. This house has hosted family dinners, parties, holiday celebrations, and numerous houseguests. Settling in to a new house will be bittersweet, and we are excited about somebody new being able to make their own memories in this house.

We hope you enjoy your visit to our house. There are a number of features that we’d like you to take a few moments to look at, such as the updated hardware and light fixtures and the new blinds in the living area. Our favorite project was the kitchen; it was our most involved project, and we are happy with the way it turned out. We hope you can visualize 12803 Steeple Chase as your home.


Sincerely,

Brandi & Daniel Lauve

Here's the photos of the house.

Remember, Remember the Month of November

Last month we had the pleasure of having the Nunez family in for two weekends.  The first was for the Run for the Water race, where Keller Williams is the main sponsor of a race to help raise money to bring water wells to Burundi.  So my parents, Daniel, and I ran in the 5K. This was my mom's very first race and I have to say, as happy as I am to run with my dad and my hubby, I was jumping for joy as my mom ran across the finish line. She stopped a couple of times to walk but all in all, she ran the longest she ever has and finished 2nd in her age group! Yea Momma! Daniel of course finished first, and my dad finished not too far in front of me. After high-fiving all of my KW friends, we treated my parents to brunch at Moonshine. We had some brunch cocktails to warm us up by the fire on the patio and then enjoyed a delicious spread, although my dad was very sad at the lack of bacon on the display. We promise more pig next time!

The following weekend we had a great time playing The Beatles: Rock Band for Thad Williams's birthday. Our game is getting quite a lot of mileage! Courtney is a really great friend of mine that I met at my first Austin job. She put together quite a great birthday party with some really fun people and we got to catch up with them and play a little (pretend) music, too.

Then in mid November my Mom and my Memaw (my Mom's sister and my Dad's stepmother) came to Austin to attend the Junior League Christmas Bazaar with my friends Anna and Tabriah. We had such a good weekend together. My Memaw is creative and active, she is 80 and just a few years ago began making jewelry, and she never met a project she didn't like. She is light-hearted, she knows how to not take herself too seriously in most any situation, even when it comes to getting older. And she is a believer. She is praying for us as we work to build our marriage, build our family, and live our lives in Christ.

Our visit was wonderful and we finished off the month of family with Thanksgiving. We made our Tour of Texas with a strong start with the Lauves. We played more Rockband, talked politics and ate some great gravy at Daniel's parent's first Thanksgiving in their new home. Then we headed to Jasper where we started our gumbo streak. We also enjoyed a lovely bottle of Pinot Noir that Daniel bought me on our anniversary trip to California wine country. We had Friday and most of Saturday with my parents and my brother.

Then we headed to Angela & Aidan Shori's wedding reception in Fannet, Texas. We knew all along that celebrating their recent nuptials in Fiji would be part of our Thanksgiving plans. We had a great time catching up with some old friends and wishing the Shoris the best in their future adventures, wherever they may be.

Lastly, we went to the Comeauxs on Saturday night and most of Sunday. While Jed and the girls were exhausted from hunting, they were still warm hosts and stayed up to greet us. Amber and I both got up early so we could have our own time to catch up on our lives since we don't get to see each other too often. She always has the best Christian music playing in the background for our talks, and she made yummy breakfast casserole for us before church! We spent the afternoon playing games with Kaylin and Madison and then seeing a reallly good soccer scrimage with Kaylin's playoff-bound team.

We are so thankful for such a wonderful month of friends and family!

A Decade Without Bonfire

Is being against the return of Bonfire as much an act of Aggie heresy as it was ten years ago?

It's entirely possible that socialization is as much of a core competency at Texas A&M as education.  It all starts at Fish Camp, which almost every incoming freshman attends and learns all the Aggie traditions and terminology.  It continues at the solemn remembrances of fallen Aggies at Silver Taps and Muster.  It even includes the numerous extracurricular activities, which are referred to as "The Other Education."  Traditions are so ingrained at A&M that the on-campus bus routes are named after various traditions.  One route is even called "Traditions" (is it a tradition to have traditions?).  The biggest tradition of all, and the event that symbolized better than anything the group identity of the Aggies, was Bonfire.

I didn't ever participate in Bonfire, not that I had a strong opinion about it either way when I was at A&M.  Like everyone, I thought it was just about the coolest thing ever when I was in attendance.  And during the actual cutting and building, well, it wasn't really my thing.  When I was a freshman, I attended cut class, which was the mandatory safety class that everyone who wanted to go out into the woods and cut down trees for Bonfire had to take.  It was ostensibly about safety, but the bulk of the half hour was spent reciting the (unprintable) dorm yells.  I also experienced “wake up” as a freshman.  The cars that went out to the woods for cut left at about six in the morning, so the upperclassmen would go around the hall at around five on Saturday morning and bang on every door as hard as they could, yelling all sorts of things and kicking on the door so hard you thought they were going to kick it in.  As an out of state kid, I didn't come in with a real love of Bonfire, so I didn't really participate in it.

Like everyone, I knew that Bonfire had a reputation for a lot of alcohol on the job and for hostility toward the international students who walked past the Polo Fields on their way home from class.  And yet, for at least a week after Bonfire fell, I was adamant that Bonfire was a crucial part of Texas A&M and absolutely could not be taken away.

I arrived outside the old basketball arena at about 5:00 a.m. on November 18, 1999, and heard the news that Bonfire had fallen.   I was in line to camp out for tickets to the next week's Texas game.  The mood at that point was this odd mix of gloominess and normalcy.  We all knew something was wrong, but we couldn't really go anywhere or follow the story, so poeple were chatting and playing cards.  Later, as I started going to classes and more information started flowing in, it got really, really awful.  The moment that it really hit me was when I went into the library annex to read for a class and a sign on the door said, "Be sure to call your parents and let them know you're OK."

After Bonfire fell, I heard its necessity compared to that of breathing and driving cars.  I didn’t go that far, but I certainly didn’t believe that "they" (whoever they were) had any place telling us what we could do with one of our proudest traditions.  I believed that the twelve who lost their lives were doing something they loved and that the best way to memorialize them was to keep Bonfire going.  Though I hadn't participated in its construction, I thought it was a necessary part of this university that I had come to identify with.

At some point that winter, I changed my tune.  I thought about myself as someone who had been recruited from out of state and had very little previous knowledge of A&M before arriving there.  I thought about how it would be to attract similar candidates in the future if Bonfire stayed around and those candidates knew essentially two things about A&M: 1) they have this thing that killed a bunch of people, and 2) they kept it going despite most of the country calling for it to be ended.  I thought about how silly it was that we had so much of our identity tied up in this stack of logs, and how strange it had been for me to be so supportive of it.

The one moment that really soured me on Bonfire was the next spring, when the investigation into the causes of the collapse was completed.  The findings were announced at the basketball arena, and students were allowed to attend the press conference.  The chairman announced how poorly the operation had been supervised and how little actual engineering knowledge went into the construction.  The findings were focused primarily on the physical reasons for the fall (ground conditions, the integrity of the center pole, etc.) and paid less attention to the social aspects of Bonfire.  During the presentation, a reporter asked why the commission did not address the issue of hazing at the Bonfire site.  The commissioner said that he did not feel it was necessary to discuss something that had nothing to do with the fall of Bonfire.  At that moment, a giant cheer went up from the 3000 or so students in attendance, a cheer like you would hear at a sporting event.  I don't suppose I really know what they were cheering (I guess it was the commissioner's resistance to the media's trying to frame Bonfire as a bunch of drunk kids running around unsupervised), but it really seemed to me like they all missed the point.

And I think they're still missing the point.   It appears that most Aggies, including Governor Perry, are in favor of bringing Bonfire back on campus.  This is despite the fact that it has been deemed uninsurable and another death or serious accident could mean the end of the university.  I've heard several times now that the campus is noticeably different without Bonfire---people are less friendly and the campus doesn't have the unity it once did.  That, in addition to being the most egregious case of Good Old Days Syndrome I've ever heard in my life, is complete and utter garbage.  If the people who support this idea had spent more time in logic class and less time at cut, they might have been introduced to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.  And besides, I just found out that Howdy Ags (http://howdyags.tamu.edu), whose purpose is to reverse the decline of the popular Aggie greeting (no kidding), was formed in 1997, two years before Bonfire fell.

Texas A&M University is better now than it was ten years ago.  That would have been the case had Bonfire never collapsed, too.  Just because that's what one generation of Aggies used to bond with one another doesn't mean that's the only way it can be done.  Neva Hand, the mother of one of the 12 Bonfire victims, said it best: "A&M has to be more than bonfire. It has to be bigger than the tradition itself.  If the students of A&M cannot come up with something better to form camaraderie and strive together to build and work for something really big, then they're not the students that I think A&M students are."

Forget academics, which by any objective measure are improving across the board. Students are as engaged as ever in extracurricular activities that don't involve giant burning piles of wood.  A few years ago I got to visit with some of the student leaders from the Memorial Student Center who had made a trip to Austin, and their love of Aggieland was unaffected by the lack of a 60-foot-tall symbolic fire before Thanksgiving.  My sisters had an experience at A&M that was not that different from mine.  Football games are still football games, and basketball games are, well, now they actually resemble basketball games.  (By the way, where are we on that Jerald Brown statue?)

The institutional memory of Texas A&M is such that many current students are arguing for the necessity of an on-campus Bonfire, even though they were in elementary school when it last burned.  Several successsive A&M administrations have been criticized for saying Bonfire can't return, but I think they're making the right choice.  Bonfire should never come back---the brand has been forever tarnished, it's not financially viable, and it runs counter to the direction the university needs to go.  Bringing it back would mean choosing between a safe version built with little student input or a student-led giant liability waiting to happen, and neither option is worthwhile.

The return of Bonfire is likely to remain a contentious topic, with both sides trying to honor the memory of our twelve fellow Aggies who gave their lives.  Say a prayer for those kids and their families.  So much has happened in my own life in the past ten years that it's hard to believe---I feel so sorry that their lives were cut so short.

Spending a Fall Weekend in Boulder

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I'm still smiling from a weekend with the girlfriends that I fondly refer to as the XHHH group.  Kelly, Liza, Virginia, Liz, Missy and I recently decided to spend a weekend in Boulder. Kelly had it all planned out for us---flights, transportation, restaurants, even sending out weather information the day before we left.

Thursday night four of us arrived in Boulder and went to dinner at Pasta J's. It was so delicious that we ended up going again on our last night so it was the perfect start to our trip. Each morning Kelly had coffee brewing for us. We drank it huddled by the gas log fireplace or on the porch. We would finally get out when we got hungry, usually before we were even dressed & showered, which made us fit right in in Boulder.

We spent the afternoons shopping on Pearl Street, perusing the Farmer's Market, driving through the mountains or sitting around drinking cocktails at the place we lovingly called the cabin. There was lots of talking about our feelings, talking about each other's feelings, and then there was talking about what other people think about the feelings that we think they are thinking. At least that's what Kelly picked up in her oh-so-astute observations!! We had several living room dance parties---I insisted we roll up the living room rug for proper dancing.  There was even a sexy bumblebee that made an appearance.

It started to snow on the last day and even though it was not cold enough to stick on the ground it was the perfect ending to a relaxing and fun weekend.

I had such a great time---thanks to all of my girlfriends for adding so much to my life!

Austin City Limits 2009

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You know, treated sewage is not that bad. I don't even mind the word "sewage." It's just "wage," which is good, with a "se" in front of it. Se-wage. When you consider the other choices, sewage is actually pretty refreshing.

And so it was for the 2009 Austin City Limits Music Festival. For three days, Zilker Park became the ideal place to determine which bands you like, which bands you love, and which bands you would trudge through ankle-deep poo to experience.

Brandi and I arrived at the park at about 6:00 on Friday, thanks to our friends Courtney and Thad, who were nice enough to let us park near their house and then dropped us off by the park. Upon entering the park, we immediately noticed that the money they've spent on a new lawn had really paid off.  It was a perfect shade of green and felt great to walk through, a huge contrast from the brittle, brown grass of years past.

The first act we saw was John Legend, the conspicuously-named son of George and Rita Legend. He started out among the audience doing a very good cover of Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" before gradually making his way up to the stage. He also covered Michael Jackson's "Remember the Time" and the Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" in addition to doing his own songs. After grabbing a burger for dinner, we went to see Kings of Leon. The Beastie Boys unfortunately had to cancel, so we were left with the Kings of Leon and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Neither one of them is a favorite for either of us, but I was definitely more excited to see Kings of Leon, so we started there. They were okay, but I'm still placing them in the category of Bands That I'm Really Supposed to Like But I Just Don't. So we watched them for a little over half an hour before checking out the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs should really consider changing their name to the Huh Huh Huhs. I don't get it. I won't say too much about the music and the enormous response it gets out of a lot of people because I don't want to be like one of those old people who goes to an art museum and says, "My kid could draw that." But it was really cool seeing the singer perform a song with a blanket over her head. (Possibly another Michael Jackson tribute---not too sure either way.)

On Saturday we arrived at the park in mid-afternoon, just about half an hour after a light rain was starting to fall.  We caught the end of Flogging Molly, an Irish punk-folk band that was extremely entertaining.  They were a great example about what makes ACL so amazing: you see a band name that you recognize and think might be interesting, and then you wander over the stage only to get blown away.  Well done.

The grounds were still pretty good, though they were getting wet, and some mud was starting to pop up in heavily-trafficked places.  For instance, the food court, where we went next, was pretty nasty, but the most popular vendors still had lines 40 yards long.  After eating, Brandi went to Mos Def, where she ran into a group of friends, and I went to see Levon Helm Band.  Mr. Helm was on doctor-ordered vocal rest, so I didn't get to hear any of the Band classics that I was hoping to hear.  But it was a very good folk band with a lot of moving parts.

The next band, The Decemberists, was the biggest one for me.  I waited to meet up with Brandi in between the Beatles: Rock Band tent and a tent showing the A&M/Arkansas game.  Being at a music festival and within view of Aggie football and The Beatles: Rock Band is about as ideal a situation as you can get, but it wasn't to be for very long as Brandi found me and we headed to watch The Decemberists.  In terms of viewing the concert, this one was pretty tough.  The rain was still coming down, and there were a lot of umbrellas blocking our view of both the video screen and the stage.  The frustrating part for me was seeing people who were wearing hooded jackets and were still determined to keep their umbrellas up, blocking the views of the group of people behind them.  The Decemberists ended up playing their entire Hazards of Love album, which was very theatrical and interesting.  This was my first time seeing them, so I missed out on seeing a lot of songs that I would have liked them to play, but seeing their latest album performed in toto gave me a much greater appreciation of an album that, up to this point, wasn't my favorite.

The final act of the night was Dave Matthews Band.  We trudged through a lot of mud to find a reasonable seat, and the crowd for this one was pretty ridiculous.  This was my first time seeing Dave Matthews perform---I was definitely a pretty big fan in the 90's, but the set list was definitely skewed toward more recent songs.  That was cool, but I could have done okay with one or two (or ten) fewer 10-minute jam sessions to close each song.

On Sunday we arrived in time to see the B-52s, and the new-look Zilker park.  The mud was a decent amount worse than it was the night before, plus it was much more visible.  And the smell.  We found out that the dirt that was an inch or two deep all across the park was Dillo Dirt, a City of Austin creation made of composted yard clippings and treated sewage.  Which raises an interesting dilemma for the green set that make up the ACL attendance: you push for a carbon-neutral world, but how do you feel when the consequences of that world get dumped on your music festival?  A lot of people were repulsed by the mud, but as soon as I found out where it came from, I actually thought it was pretty cool.

Anyway, the B-52s had a decidedly party feel, as if their lone purpose was to get people to dance around and have fun.  They consist of three vocalists plus a backing band who exude campiness, almost to the point of it being an affectation.  The crowd, for their part, appears to enjoy their brand of happiness and good times packaged in a thinly veiled musical veneer.  In fact, one tune in particular, the one bearing the moniker "Love Shack," appeared to be the exemplar of the band/fan cabal of sunshine.  The band used their mantra of "Love Shack," often appended with a superfluous but nonetheless welcomed "Baby!" to remind the audience of a simpler time, the 1980s, a time when, in fact, the same B-52s band were even then trying to remind their audience of another, though possibly less simple time, the 1960s; the audience gladly stepped into this double time machine for the five minutes plus that it took to get from an oversized Chrysler to a tin roof that, from the sounds of it, seems to be in some state of disrepair.  The party people, as it were, their desire for nostalgia quenched, then dispersed, though methinks many of them would have been delighted to hear the tale of a misapprehended lobster, with which the band regaled a much smaller subset of the human population.*

Next, we grabbed some popcorn and tried to see Brett Dennen.  Unfortunately, Mr. Dennen decided to play his set in a rather muddy section of the park.  I don't want to say he played to the La Brea Tar Pits, but there were a couple wooly mammoths that crawled up to request "Ain't No Reason."  So we watched from a distance.  And then we left the park to have lunch at Chuy's, which was a great idea.  We really enjoyed the good food and clean bathrooms.  Then we headed back to the park to catch Ben Harper.  Ben Harper is an ACL regular who this time around showed up with the Relentless 7, and he was very good.  He definitely knows how to talk up the city we call home.  After Ben Harper, we turned 45 degrees to the right to enjoy Girl Talk.

Despite the video screen entreatments to the contrary, Girl Talk is a DJ.  He does mashups of some very popular songs from the last 40 years, and Brandi was very excited to see him.  She enjoyed dancing all over the place, despite moving gingerly all day to avoid getting muddy feet.  I asked a question that I felt needed to be asked: If these are all pre-mixed songs that are playing on tape, did he even need to show up?  My question was sort of answered when random messages started getting typed on the video screen.  So that made me think that maybe he was actually doing something live.  Then I thought, the only really good way to prove that you are typing it right now is to type up all of today's NFL scores.  Then I thought, I really wish he would type up all of today's NFL scores.

Pearl Jam was the big act of the weekend, and we were very tired at the end of the day, but we wanted to be able to say that we've been to a Pearl Jam concert.  Which we now can.  If you call staying for one song and being half a mile away from the stage being at a Pearl Jam concert.

The 2009 Austin City Limits Music Festival taught us many things, not the least of which was that the B-52s have still got it...if by "it" you mean a very flamboyant leading man who speaks kind of like a three year old telling a story to a nearly-deaf grandparent.  Also, be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it.  Especially if what you ask for is a lush, green lawn and beautiful weather, followed by a two-day slog through a caca/compost combo.

*We've thought that it would be best to put a disclaimer on this paragraph.  Since the B-52s are pretty universally known, I decided to dispense with the trite descriptions and describe them as a truly foreign observer (like someone from a different era or possibly an alien from Mars) would.

I Heard It Through the Great Wine

http://picasaweb.google.com/daniel.lauve/CaliforniaSeptember2009For our second anniversary, we talked briefly about going out to Mandola winery or maybe for a day trip, and somehow that turned into Napa Valley.  Good thing it did, too.

We found some good tickets from Southwest that took us into Sacramento on Friday the 25th and back from San Jose on Tuesday the 29th.  On Friday, our flight to Phoenix was uneventful, but the flight to Sacramento was delayed by almost two hours.  We slept late on Saturday morning before starting the hour-long drive to Napa.  We didn't have any plans for the day, which we started to realize could be an issue as we surveyed the number of wineries that require some kind of appointment.  Thankfully, Del Dotto winery, which received some really good reviews, had some space for us.

Del Dotto has the second oldest wine cave in Napa (built by Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century)---it's several hundred feet long, with a couple turns, lit with candles, and is lined with barrels of wine.  After talking about the barrels they use and letting us sniff an oak barrel, our guide took us through the cave, letting us sample wine straight from the barrels along the way.  The wines were between $60 and $125 a bottle, and they were about the best wines I've ever had.  The first one was a sangiovese that tasted incredibly smooth and was really good (sorry, that's all you're getting from me, still not really a wine critic).  We sampled about eight wines in all---probably the most interesting was a pair of wines that were the same wine (same grapes, same vineyard) from two different barrels.  One was French Oak and one was American Oak, and we all preferred the French Oak.

Our second winery was Luna, which was a vineyard-lined country highway mile from Del Dotto.  We had a tasting of their wines and took photos near the vineyard before heading up the road to Reynolds Family, a great little winery on beautiful grounds.  We had a tasting there but were really keen on getting a tour, since Del Dotto was a great experience but didn't get much into the winemaking process.  An intern was nice enough to take us around, showing us some grapes fermenting, letting us taste some grapes off the vine, and giving us some wine out of a barrel.

Our last stop was at St. Supery, which Brandi immediately recognized.  They were having a party for their wine club members that included an 80's cover band.  The wine club is something that I was previously unaware of.  Very few of the wineries you visit distribute their wines through lots of retail and food service outlets.  They count on selling to the people who come in for tastings, and then they have a wine club that regularly purchases their product.  St. Supery is a bit of an exception, as they can be found in the grocery store, but it's still pretty apparent that they do a lot of business through their club.

For dinner we headed to Sonoma and ate at El Dorado, a restaurant on the city square with a beautiful courtyard.  The food was very good, especially the ice cream sandwiches we had for dessert.  Then we took a nighttime drive into San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge---that thing is massive!  (And it's six bucks to cross, so best to take it all in in one shot.)  Highway 1 quickly turns into Lombard Avenue, so we decided to go down the crookedest block in the world.  The only problem was that in getting to the crooked hill we took ourselves further away from the hotel, and getting back took our poor rental PT Cruiser (the same type of rental car we had in Banff and on our wedding day, by the way) up a lot of tough hills that it really wasn't prepared for.

We stayed at Parc 55, right on Union Square.  The hotel was very nice, we remarked to each other, as we got off the elevator, walked to our room, opened the door, and AAAAAAH!  A high-pitched man squeal, along with said man frightenedly saying, "Someone's in here!" is how we learned that our room was occupied.  We got a new room, thankfully.

On Sunday morning we went for a long run that included Chinatown, the piers, and the hills near Coit Tower.  Then we went to church, which was (surprise!) a Latin Mass (our first).  I enjoyed reliving my misspent year in high school learning impossible conjugations and arcane legal phrases, and Brandi enjoyed having no idea what was going on.  Oh yeah, and we got to bring up the gifts, so that was pretty cool.

[Brandi here...]  For lunch we decided to try Yank Sing, a Chinese restaurant that my doctor recommended. Dr. Schmidt is from the Bay area and he really knows Deem Sum! It was quite an experience; the waitstaff comes by with all menu items displayed on carts such as dumplings of all kinds, meat-stuffed buns, peking duck, various vegetable stir fry, and traditional desserts. We tasted as much as we could but I couldn't quite make it to dessert because I was so full. Daniel thought it was one of the best Chinese meals he'd ever had.

We then decided to go to Fisherman's Wharf and walked through the Ferry Building and then we took a street car the rest of the way there. My favorite thing at the Wharf was watching the sea lions. There were several hundred of them lounging and playing very close to the pier! After walking around Fisherman's Wharf we ended our evening in San Francisco with a nice dinner at the Waterfront Cafe.

We then drove a little under an hour to Half Moon Bay to the Old Thyme Inn, the Bed and Breakfast we were staying at until Tuesday. We got up Monday morning and ran down to the bay. While it was a foggy morning, it was still beautiful and calming. We made it back in time to get ready for the delicious breakfast of Dutch apple pancakes and chicken apple sausage. The pancake was more like eating a sumptuous cake than breakfast. There was also rosemary corn cake (made with fresh rosemary from their garden), fresh fruit and strong delicious coffee. We also had stimulating conversation with the other guests staying at the inn and I was very intrigued by the many different types of visitors.

Once we had our fill, we decided to head south to explore more wineries and enjoy the scenery. The drive was beautiful and calming, except for the first half hour because while I was busy looking at the map I got motion sickness, ugh. The first vineyard we came to was Savannah Chanelle. It was up the side of a mountain and had breathtaking views and a beautiful old house to enjoy our tasting. We kept driving south and visited the Cinnabar tasting room in Saratoga and then to Los Gatos to visit Testarossa---a winery that used to be an old monastery. The used to make church wine there! It was a beautiful old building. We then decided to head to Santa Cruz for a late lunch and possibly make it one last tasting room, Bonny Doon, but we caught them as they were to trying close up so we headed back up Highway 1 to Half Moon Bay. That evening we walked together downtown to our last meal in California at a quaint  Italian restaurant that was downtown. It was perfectly warm and relaxing. We toasted to our lovely wine tour of Northern California!

The Beatles: Rock Band Festivities

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I wouldn't say that buying The Beatles: Rock Band is like buying friends.  Because we already have friends.  I swear.  But it is pretty eerie how all of our friends want to come over at once all of a sudden.

And why shouldn't they?  The video game, in addition to featuring the best music ever made, is incredibly fun to play, especially with a group of people.

On Friday, September 11, we had about a dozen people over to play the game.  I was a little concerned about getting people to play (especially sing), but Kevin, Stacey, Chris, and Kim, four of the first to arrive, picked up instruments and microphones right away.  We went through a lot of the early songs together, and then after the first group left, we had a second band that included Jenny's friend Michael on lead guitar, Keith on drums, and Kelly and Jenny singing back-up. The new group finished out the night with a mix of later songs like Here Comes the Sun and Come Together.  All in all, it was a great evening with some great friends.

Then, a week later, my family came into town for a Beatles: Rock Band weekend.   I had been building this game up for quite a while, but I had no idea how they would actually receive it.  My parents got in on Friday night and my dad and I spent some time listening to a couple of the remastered CDs he had picked up, Rubber Soul and The White Album.  He thought Rubber Soul sounded great but wasn't sold on The White Album (he has always said that it was not a great album fidelity-wise, especially compared to Abbey Road).  I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that he's used to listening to the LPs and not the pretty poor original CDs.

On Saturday morning the seven of us (Brandi, my parents, Alicia, Cristina, Cristina's boyfriend Daniel, and I) went to have a South Austin breakfast at Polvo's, my favorite place for breakfast.  Then we got home and got comfortable with the Story Mode of the game.  We switched around on instruments a little bit, but people pretty much got comfortable with a particular instrument pretty quickly.  My dad liked the bass, Daniel played a lot of guitar, Alicia sat at the drums, and Cristina mostly sang with a little drums.  My mom had declared her intentions to play drums, but she quickly found it to be difficult.

We made it through all of the early live venues as well as most of the Abbey Road studios songs before we stopped for dinner.  I grilled chipotle pork tenderloin on the grill along with corn on the cob and asparagus, and Brandi made a peach salsa, macaroni and cheese, and a great apple caramel cake.  After dinner we tackled a few remaining songs before finishing with the Rooftop Concert.  It ended up being about an eight hour Beatles Rock Band marathon that was a whole, whole lot of fun.

After the family left, I took a little break from The Beatles: Rock Band, to volunteer at church for an evening (with Brandi) and to celebrate a wonderful 2nd anniversary dinner with Brandi at Truluck's.  Before getting out the Hofner bass this evening to play a few songs, I had endured a three-day respite from The Most Important Video Game Ever.  That was my second longest Beatles Rock Band drought ever.  The longest?  June 13, 1978 through September 8, 2009.  Boy, that was a rough one.