Labor Day Weekend 2011

On Friday night we cooked frozen pizzas, then ate them by the apartment pool. On Saturday we drove to Waco, TX, to visit the Dr. Pepper Museum. As mentioned before Dr. Pepper is big around here. It was fun and informative and talked about other sodas. I was disappointed that there was not much tasting of different varieties of sodas, but at the soda fountain (the workers added syrup and then the seltzer, not together) we got to try a Dr. Pepper float (Kris had that idea last week - apparently other people have had the idea, too). They also had a visiting exhibit about toys at the museum which we enjoyed. My father used to have an Erector set box like the one at the museum. We visited a park near the Brazos River in Waco, too. On the way back to Austin we stopped at the IKEA in Round Rock to pick up some rugs for our apartment. This morning before church, Katie, Kris and I went fossil hunting at Walnut Creek Park. This time Kris found a full ammonite shell the size of her head (it's still down in the ravine until we figure out how to free it from the matrix rock) and Katie found a clam shell. This afternoon we all headed down to the Austin Children's Museum (it is free from 4-5 pm on Sunday - big crowd but nice), and then after supper downtown we attended a free outdoor concert by Grupo Fatasma (Latin funk, it was fun). The weather is slowly cooling. Today was (we hope) the last triple digit high for a while (the 80th one this year). The rain from tropical storm Lee in Lousiana missed us, but a cold front is producing strong winds (but no rain). This makes the fire danger really high, and brush fires have broken out in the region and burned houses, especially in Bastrop County to the east (Austin is in Travis County). See: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/05/us-storm-usa-gulf-texas-idUSTRE78407H20110905. The sizable fire is moving south, and the south-blowing smoke plume is visible on weather radar (interesting to watch in radar loops).