Exploring Austin

Today I drove up near our apartment to attend St. Albert the Great Catholic Church - it has a very racially diverse population of parishioners. It looks likely to be our parish during our stay here. After that I took the bus from the apartment to UT to learn some of the ins and outs of the route. I poked around part of the UT campus area including the famous clock tower. When I got back to the apartment I got access to look around - it looks fine to me. After this I stopped by Walnut Creek Metropolitan Park (nearby) to look around - and found some shell fossils. There is a lot of bedrock pretty close to the surface around here. I can see the "hill country" in the distance but have not driven that far west. On the way back to the hotel I stopped at a Goodwill store to see what they had for bicycles (not much) and I found that they have set up a computer museum. It's cute (and free). The display shown is of old Mac computers - looks like they have been plaguing the world for a while! During the drives I have had the opportunity to practice driving the frontage roads. All the major highways have frontage roads that run parallel to them very closely and have a number of access points to the highway. That is not surprising, but what is tricky is that the frontage roads are one way (running the same direction as the lanes they parallel). Additionally, the signage is confusing me - a sign that indicates highway access (and I think "on-ramp") also indicates the frontage road. It's like driving in circles somtimes - or rather, really long ovals. I promised myself I would try not to whine about the heat - after all, I brought this move to Austin upon myself. I am surprised to find, however, that this is a not quite a "business as usual" drought down here. There are a lot of these black birds around here - they look like a cross between a crow and a road runner and they look like they have been suffering a bit. I stopped at a nearby mall because my hotel room had not yet been cleaned. I was amused at how the cars crowded under the shade of the trees. There is such a low percentage of stores open in that Highland Mall. I walked to supper tonight. It was still about 100 F out, but it is drier heat than Peoria at this point so it was not so bad, though I set the AC pretty low in my hotel room. Not much left to report, except to break some misconceptions: I have detected very few deep South accents so far (quite a few Hispanic ones, though) and I have seen very few cowboy hats. Tomorrow is my first day at UT and I move into the apartment.

Dean to Austin

Today was my turn to travel to Austin. Unfortunately I had to saw goodbye to Karen and the girls for now. I flew to Chicago, then to Austin. The trip was fairly uneventful, though we hit some turbulence crossing through the cloud deck as we approached Austin. Tropical Storm Don passed way to the south and was a non-issue; in fact, some people really wanted the rain in Austin with something like over 40 days in the triple digits and a ten-inch rain deficit. I have posted pix from the flights, including those of the air guard base and the Alpha Park area in Bartonville, the Abraham Lincoln Bridge where I-39 crosses the Illinois River, Fermilab, and the Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport. In Austin, I am driving a little Chevy Aveo for the next couple days. On Monday I will move into our apartment, but I took a look at the outside (ground floor) this evening as I explored the area. Found lots of useful stores and restaurants. Gas is about $3.57/gallon. The way the roads are laid out and labeled will take some getting used to. Big Texas Longhorns following here - picture Green Bay or any big college town, only the team color is sort of a burnt orange. I drove downtown this evening to see the area and to try to see the bats at the Congress Avenue Bridge, but I got there too late. Ah well, there should be other opportunities.

Sugar Grove Nature Center

This past week has been pretty crazy getting ready for the move, but the car has been sold and the house has been re-rented. Packing continues. Vacation Bible School went well. Today we went to the Sugar Grove Nature Center with a couple other families. We poked around in the creek there and saw animals like butterflies and the tiniest snake we have ever seen.

The last weekend in Illinois for me...

...was fun and busy. Our friends the Kaeders came to visit on Friday and Saturday. We went swimming and watched the Prairie Air Show. We saw a B-1 bomber (very cool, but did not get any pix), F-16s, a T-33 (not shown), L-39s and other planes. On Sunday, we drove to Beloit to visit my parents for lunch - it was good to see them. In the evenings from Sunday through this coming Thursday, St. Anthony's Church has Vacation Bible School. There a panda bear theme this year. Katie is an attendee, Kris is a group helper, Karen is a popcorn maker, and I occasionally show up to help up. In between all of this the packing continues. I wound up moving my rock collection to the shed, but at least I got it a little more sorted that way. We sold our car today - I was a little sad to see it go.

Katie's procedure (again)

Katie again needed ear tubes (they just keep plugging up). She was pretty unhappy coming out of anaesthesia, but otherwise things went OK. The butterfly bench was in a waiting area at the hospital. The hospitals around here often use wagons to move kids before surgeries. Our car is fixed; we still hope to sell it. Heat continues. This thermometer is not necessarily super accurate, but it does illustrate how hot our blacktop driveway got this afternoon in the sun.

Warm weather

We have a bit of a heat wave in the area with highs in the 90s and heat indices in the 110s this week. We did not see the funnel clouds near Washington, IL, but we had a colorful sunset last night. Today I drove to the University of Illinois with an undergraduate student to do some experiments - somewhat positive results were obtained with our polymer-embedded nanoparticles. The Smarties we left in the car got yucky in the heat and humidity. Our power has flickered out a few times at home today and in other placed in Peoria.

Balloon Festival

Kris and I attended the annual hot air balloon festival Saturday night and enjoyed the beauty, shot lots of pics, and collected a fair number of balloon cards. The man in the banana suit was filling the monkey balloon - he said the suit was hot. Karen and Kris saw the last Harry Potter movie this afternoon and also had fun.

The Ides of July

It's the middle of July already! It is interesting to see how this wet-starting summer compares to other summers, at least from an insect perspective. We have heard very few cicadas this year - usually by now they have been buzzing a lot. I think I have already commented that the fireflies were about a month later than last year. Also, we are now beginning to see more signs of Japanese beetle problems. Last summer's huge outbreak was in full swing by the 4th of July. In our yard, our strawberry and black raspberry "crops" were a bit scant. The lettuce was fine and I think has run its course with the dry, warm weather. We have lots of pumpkin blossoms (we have lots of vines) and at least one baby pumpkin. We are still prepping for our move to Austin, TX, at the end of the month. I am happy to report that we have a renter for the house and we have lined up a place to live in Austin. I am less happy to report that our lawnmower is still very erratic despite a trip to a repair shop.

Our car is now in the shop. In the last couple days the electrical system was acting erratic, so we thought it might be the battery connections or the alternator. Last light I cleaned one of the battery terminals (no small chore - the battery is buried under the air intake and I had to go in through an access panel in a wheel well; I could not even see the other terminal). After jump starting the car I drove around to try to charge the battery. I stopped at McDonalds for a small french fries and the car died in the very-busy drive through. I called Karen as well as Wayne Bosma for help, then pushed the car out of the way while I waited. Someone called while I was figuring out what to do and asked if I had a car for sale (interesting timing). I asked yes and asked them to call back in an hour. They proceeded to chew me out for selling a broken car (turns out they were somewhere behind me in line and saw the "for sale" signs on the car). I informed the caller that I was going to get the car fixed first and thanks a lot for calling me names. Anyway, when we tried to jump start the car again it went sort of crazy. The fan would keep turning on by itself, then the wipers, then the car alarm! And it would not hold a charge (which is how we turned off the alarm). So we got the car towed to a shop and we went home. The fate of the car is totally up in the air right now - all we know is that the battery is completely shot. I'm guessing that maybe the car was upset about being put up for sale - or it had something to do with the full moon.

In other news we have had some nice weather this week - good for biking. Lots of flowers are in bloom. Kickapoo Creek is quieting down and I can actully see partway into the water. We went to a library-sponsored event for supper yesterday at Alpha Park and had fun.