We got a Christmas card from our friends the McArthurs that said “looking forward to 2010. . .what? 2010, are we robots?”  Hilarious.  I will say 2010 is already shaping up to be a year from the future.  Crazy stuff has been happening here in Austin.  We made the news with this guy: Joseph Stark.  Yeesh.  Only in the future does a man get so mad at the world that he Blogs about it before hopping on a plane and driving it into a building.  It is so sad.  After that we had the most GORGEOUS Sunday of gardening in t-shirts and the first taste of a tan.  Two days later. . .Snow Day in Austin.  It was really weird, but more so, awesome.  So, no we are not robots. . .yet.

Not that our pictures of Snow day could compete with wrenandjane.  Our props just aren’t cute enough.  But still, here they are.

Hey folks. Thought we’d check in. We had the most delightful Valentines Day. The rainy winter weather broke just enough to create a gorgeous weekend and we took advantage of it on a whim. We went up to Mount Bonell and hiked around Laguna Gloria. Perfectly romantic…

… Then we got sick. Both of us are now pretty ill suffering from 2 completely different sicknesses. Jessie has Ancient Indian immunities that protect her from most sicknesses, but poor girl is being attacked by a virus. Since I work from home and typically don’t leave the premises but for 4 structured hours a week, I fall into the highly-susceptible-to-anything, hermit-me-away-from-small-children category. But by the power of NyQuil, we will get through this.

Maybe this decline in health will lead to a boon in blogging!

It seems everyone has been sick this winter at some point and we’re now just keeping up with the Joneses.

Other than that hrmmm…. I keep trying to convince Jessie to let me have people over so we can hang out in the garage and do stuff. Like a weekly Garage Hangout. A weekly CAR-nival. A BAY of Sunshine. I’ll win her over soon and one day you might find yourself hanging out in my garage.

jessie and i are back with another song that we recorded for her dad. it’s Crying by Roy Orbison. we hit a snafu with our digital recording interface so its not everything we want, but we like it enough to share. our intention was to record more, but alas, our destiny is determined by some outsourced software developer.

Download

We’ve got some Rupe&Conk tunes coming up for you all but first, hot off the press from christmas it’s our lil’ cousin, R-Dawg, bringing you some fresh R&B that you ain’t never heard! This is Hanna Montana meets T-Pain, ya dig?

Download

Well, we’re back and going to attempt blogging again. Hopefully we’ll get you some killer updates soon… in between episodes of Doctor Who, that is. so stay tuned.

Dave spent a big chunk of his Sunday mowing and weeding (I helped, but he did most of it).  This typical homeowners stuff still makes us giddy.  Also, we both decided mowing a lawn gives a great sense of satisfaction.  Talk to us in a couple of years, we might be singing a different tune, but I hope not.

Part of Dave’s yard work was pulling some native, invasive elephant leaves.  The funny thing about these “weeds” is that i like them.  It was hard seeing Dave dig up these huge, prehistoric looking leaves.  The reality is these plants spread when a piece of them fall on the ground.  Yes, a piece!!!!  Can you imagine how they would take over.  Getting rid of them is like surgery!

We also have some pretty flowers popping up as the temperature is dropping:

Our rose bushes are going crazy, so crazy that I have no problems cutting them off and putting them in a vase.  Bountiful!

Dave brought these home the other day.  Not the cat! just the wine and the flowers.  He got me the Texas marigolds because they were orange and funky.  Love that guy.

Dave and I have been taking pictures of my latest kitchen creations.  Sometimes I go crazy!  Fish sandwiches!  yeah!  Kate got me baking my own bread with the artisan bread: 5 minutes a day.  Each one of these recipes use the bread in one form or another.  Pizza crust, croutons and of course sandwich bread.  So here are some pictures.

Pizza Rolls

Fish Sammies

Spinach Soup w/ garlic croutons

GO BREAD!

Ah the joys of home ownership! Jess and I have really been enjoying our house. And so have other friends and guests! It’s actually been crazier than you can imagine. Our dance card has been pretty full and we calculated that we will have had only 4 weekends “free” (with no guests or trips planned) at home from the time we bought the house all the way through Thanksgiving. It’s all a joy, please don’t misinterpret, we’ve just been busy every weekend.

On separate weekends we had the Rices and the Von Kanels come visit with their kids and we forced them to sleep on our pull out sleeper sofa. We even forced a sleeper sofa on Jessie’s own mom! How tragic! No matter how great a couch is, a sleeper sofa still a thin 2″ mattress on a mess of metal.

This extreme guilt led us to make some changes for our future guests. We bought a mattress and after a couple trips to Ikea (our generation’s Sears), our guest room was complete. It now features a firm, but comfortable Queen-size bed and a gigantic, humongous, gargantuan desk.

The Office (aka “Paravel South”)

The room also doubles as my home office. This obviously isn’t ideal, even I know that. But until we have the time and money to build my modular MD100 Manchaca (pronounced “Man-Shack”) with solar panels and a heating/cooling wall A/C… it’ll have to do.

We buttressed together 2 Ikea Vika Byske table tops on some Vika Lerberg trestles. It creates a gigantic workspace that is definitely pleasing to me, and spacious enough when Paravel is in our 3-man formation and needs to meet down South.

There are more photos over on our flickr set.

Coming for a visit?

If you’re planning on visiting us just know that we’ve got a bed waiting for you now instead of a lumpy metal death trap. The door to the room doesn’t quite shut, and there’s no paint on the baseboards… but these are all improvements we’ll make in time. We’ve got to have something to keep you coming back…

And act quickly, because we might get a Japanese foreign exchange student! We hear they pay madd bank! So unless you got the benjis to subsidize our extravagant lifestyle, you just got usurped!

I kiiid, I kiiiiiid!

the other day our friend Kyle sent us this snapshot from his bible (a devotional one, the kind with all the little side stories and lessons).

The moral of the story is… “Don’t be tricked by Satan’s Ruperts”.  We’ll be back with more folks! Stay Tuned!

this post has had more than a few working titles: “life lessons from the kitchen”, “life lessons part 1″, “the contractor, the witch and the kitchen sink”, “uf! that’s smarts!”, and “d’oh: the chronicles of homeownership”.  but i chose this title to appeal to the internet meme audience.  the 1st lesson in this series of 2 lessons is really the only FAIL, the 2nd lesson is just a life lesson about spending money.

Before the floors went in, we scrambled to get 2 rooms of our house fully painted.  Thinking we were doing ourselves a favor by not priming the baseboards and trim.  ”We’re so fast!” we thought as we lied on the floor and sloshed on our semi-gloss ultra white.  Unfortunately, it dried as semi-transparent brush marks and scraped off at the slightest touch.  So instead of “Prime -> Paint”, we’re now now left with a “Paint -> Scrape -> Prime -> Paint” scenario.  Life Lesson #1 : Don’t take shortcuts.  It’s more work in the end.

2 weeks ago we had a neighbor, who is a contractor, and some of his guys come through and work on the house.  Before the contractors showed up, I attempted to follow the previous “amateur” plumber’s lead and added to a Frankenstein plumbing job that was a complete mess, a rat king of pipes and hoses.  Turns out it was leaking. The contractors came in told me my under-sink was pitiful, rearranged it, added new water lines, dropped power lines, and even added in the disposal (pronounced “dispose-all” by our neighbor).  I was extremely impressed by their work.  The underbelly of the sink is now one of my favorite places in the house because it’s so simple, beautiful and “done right”.  Life Lesson #2 : If you want a job done right, bring in the pros.

So those are the lessons so far.  I’ve now got to get back to salvaging a computer.  Wish me luck.