Autumn is upon us

This week marks the first week with sustained temperatures less than 80 degrees. People are ecstatic about this. For E and me, this week marks the first week we see anyone besides the most dedicated of dog-walkers and joggers out in the evenings. Who are these people? They live on OUR street? *Ehem* Right, I knew that.

Anyway, this week marked a sort of milestone in the household. Because it's getting to be "cold" and people are starting to notice a "chill", I felt like it was time to break out the sweaters. Today I wore a sweater all day long and was totally comfortable. I almost needed an additional pullover.

It's a lot like Colorado in early September. I'd take this weather for months if I could have it.

Five years, oil on canvas

When E and I decided to move back to Texas, it was one of the hardest things we'd ever had to do. Second only perhaps to moving away in the first place. When we moved, we'd been in Colorado for five years, and in that time made some pretty amazing friends. Our family is in Texas, but we'd managed to cultivate a pretty fantastic surrogate family up there too.

When we finally moved back, we were thrilled to be near family again, but there were definitely things about Colorado that we missed. I'm pretty sure the family knew this, because as a housewarming present, my dad and T gave us a piece of art done by T's uncle - Jerry McWilliams (he's great!). This particular painting is of Wolf Creek Pass in the fall. The frame we ordered for it finally came in, and now we can enjoy a little piece of Colorado even here in the Big D.

She only wishes every afternoon looked like this.

Corny dogs and Big Tex

This weekend my dad and stepmom came up for a weekend of the famous State Fair of Texas. Having grown up in Texas, it might be surprising to know that this activity is something that neither E, nor me, nor my dad for that matter had ever participated in. So we went at it with gusto. We arrived at the gate 10 minutes before everything opened, and we started our quest maximize fair time. We wandered through the midway, and then happened to find Big Tex, the larger-than-life cowboy who sounds an awful lot like Johnny Cash when says "Howdy Folks!". Right in front of Big Tex is Fletcher's Corny Dogs, home of the original and first ever corn dog. Nevermind that it was only 10:30 am, we decided to partake anyway. They were delicious. We looked at cars, we saw livestock, we watched some dogs perform an interesting frisbee show. (Let's see my dog do that!) We even looked at the sculpture of Annubis made entirely out of butter. It was a full and productive day. Oh, and we also managed to have plenty more fried food before the whole thing was over. All in all, a great day at the fair.

Today we're resting up and the weather is so beautiful that we've opened up the house. Zoee is loving this, and she's managed to find the small spot of sun in front of the office French doors. I imagine she'll only move enough to stay in the sun for the rest of the day.

The new guy

One of my more recent duties at work was to show "the new guy" around the office. The new guy is straight out of college and is energetic and enthusiastic about things that I can't muster the energy to be excited about anymore. I head down and meet him in his temporary holding pen (where he's been patiently waiting on us for the past two months) and walk him up to the area where we do "actual" work. I say "actual" because that's how he said it - with finger quotes and everything. It was pretty amusing.

The new guy is super pumped to find out where his cubicle is. He's very very excited about his chair and signing up for logins on the computer system. He can't stop raving about the break room. "You get to watch CNN on your breaks? That's AWESOME!" He has a billion questions. He's THRILLED to be involved in this project and can't wait to get started. He's especially excited that we leave early on Fridays. (Okay, I'm still excited about that one too.)

Something about showing this new guy around today made me wonder if I'd lost my gusto. Maybe I'm jaded by all the paper-pushing and cube-sitting and keyboard-typing. I think maybe I had too many meetings today. Regardless, tomorrow I'm going to try to be more excited about my chair.

Desparation

My dog is fiendish when it comes to her walks. She's very particular about them. We need to go promptly between 6 and 7 am (at least we get an hour of leeway there!) and we need to leave EXACTLY when we get home from work so that she can sniff her way around the neighborhood. Today we haven't left promptly upon arriving home from work, and she looks desperate. She packing maniacally - walking from her leash to us and staring at us with rolled back ears and sad eyes.

Why can't we leave? WHY?

We're leaving now... No worries. She'll survive.

Mr. and Mrs. Hefner go to Washington

This past weekend E and I had the exciting adventure of going to Washington DC for the wedding of a friend of ours. In addition to the wedding, this was also our vacation, along with a makeshift reunion of sorts for a bunch of our college and graduate school friends. We were REALLY looking forward to it.

We arrived on Wednesday and spend almost all of Thursday doing the tourist-y activities that DC is known for. We headed down to the mall with a group of our friends and visited the memorials. Just below E and I are standing inside the WWII memorial looking at the Lincoln memorial. You can see the Washington monument from there too, if you're looking the direction we're facing in the picture. After a bit of monument looking, we headed to some of the Smithsonian museums for some edu-tainment. It was great!
On Friday we headed to Georgetown to have breakfast with a friend of a friend, which was really fun and allowed us to see those stairs from the movie the Exorcist. Oh, and Georgetown too. After breakfast we headed out towards Dulles to the Air and Space Museum annex, where we got to see all kinds of amazing things, including this SR-71 Blackbird that J and I are standing in front of. It was HUGE!
Of course, we were there for a wedding, so here are all the guys at the rehearsal dinner. We're really happy for J and B, they seem really thrilled to be together and just a great couple. Words of wisdom offered to J at the rehearsal - Just smile and nod, she'll like you more.
Finally, we made it to the wedding. E was a groomsman, so here he is looking sharp in his tux between the ceremony and the reception. Congrats J and B! You guys looked great and we had a fantastic time too!