Texas

Dee’s Texas Journal
Sunday, May 09, 2004

Happy Mother’s Day!

It’s funny how someone gets married, or has a baby, or gets a dog, and everything changes. Well we’ve now done the married and puppy things and life is really different.

And so is Texas. After we went to Paris (the Texas one) for Jim’s brother John’s surprise birthday party last month we enjoyed the wildflowers everywhere, en route and here in Austin. We have walked among the infamous Texas bluebonnets, black-eyed susans, and others that were on display for all to see.

The most Texan things that come to mind over the past few weeks include music; receiving presents in the form of CD’s of Lyle Lovett and Jerry Jeff Walker. While we love them we are balancing our lives with some Cheryl Crow, Norah Jones and an old Dave Mason. I try to add to Jim’s work CD selection as needed.

We are enjoying time with our new pup, Zoe. She is growing so fast; fifteen weeks old and smart as a whip. She is selectively obedient. Indoors she fetches, sits, lies down and comes when called. Outside, we may as well forget all of it. Like a cattle dog, she lies 1/3 of the way of a Lab’s route to her ball, and chases the dog in. At least she is being socialized with other dogs and people.

This past week Zoe found the glass doors of the fireplace and, looking into them, whined to see the puppy on the other side! After weeks of going out on our patio with the bird feeder in place, she just realized that there are birds out there!

All of this makes one appreciate life. I certainly enjoy my life with Jim, and Zoe, with its inevitable ups and downs.

Next weekend Jim and I are going on a Magical Mystery Date, the first “date” of ours that I’ve engineered. All Jim knows is that we will be within a two-hour drive of Austin, for two nights, and that Zoe is going into a kennel for the first time so that we can be by ourselves. Don’t worry, dog lovers, we went there to check out the kennel and she’ll be outside on a farm for 7-8 hours per day.

Notes from today: Our magical date was a fiasco of epic proportions. It was at a downtown hotel where we ended up with a corporate party room with a Murphy bed, our car broke down en route and we were late for the boat tour and had spent all cash on the car and the boat didn’t accept credit cards, the ATM at the hotel broke, you get the idea. We went on a bat tour to see the 750,000 Mexican freetail bats head out at night for food. We only saw about 3,000. [I’m bat-cursed as we’ve done this again and no bats came out when Jim’s grandmother visited and we took her out on the paddleboat tour.]

The next morning at the hotel I heard the bats come back en masse to the Congress Street Bridge at 5:30 a.m. I didn’t have the heart to awaken Jim. Letting him sleep was the least I could do, as we still had to take a taxi to pick up our fixed car. Cheers, Dee