Nuts about Austin

The small acorns are from the live oak trees that are so common around here; the large acorns are from small burr oak planted nearby. There have been occasional rain showers in the area. Nothing enough to push the dust around too much on the cars here, but there is a severe thunderstorm watch a couple counties to the north. You can see the mammatus clouds over our new car in one of the pictures. It's been sort of a low-key weekend. Friday night our apartment air-conditioner went down, but was fixed Saturday afternoon. In fossil-hunting news I stopped by the oyster bed that Katie and I found previously - I like picking up fossils that are not in the rock matrix. We also found out that an object I found a couple weeks ago was a tooth from an large, unusual shark (Ptychodus) that had rounded teeth for crushing mollusk shells - my first vertebrate fossil ever. The picture of the plastic plant is a solar powered dancing plant. I first saw these on dashboards of cars in China in early 2010 - now I found one at a local dollar store. This afternoon we all rode the bud for the first time to an unusual toy store north of the UT campus (Toy Joy). It was not cheap, but it was fun and odd - kind of like Archie McPhees in the Seattle area. Karen and I were both impressed by how tasteful the store was - it was not perfect, but a store full of novelty toys could easily go for crude and shocking. Katie is cuddling with a stuffed squid toy. When she put on the knight's outfit she told Karen it was a knight gown! After supper, the bus ride home in the evening was a bit crowded - I think we got caught up in crowds leaving the Austin City Limits music festival.