St. Albert 25th Anniversary

St. Albert the Great parish in Austin celebrated its 25th anniversary today (Mass and lunch). Our pastor, Fr. Isidore, is to the right of the bishop in the pictures.

LBJ Parks

Lyndon Baines Johnson, and to a lesser extent Lady Bird Johnson, loom large over central Texas as Abraham Lincoln does over central Illinois. Today we drove along the Pedernales River in the hill country west of Austin visiting a variety of home, ranches, and parks associated with LBJ. It was kind of amusing...when we visited the older places I saw things like a hand pump that reminded me of my grandparents' old cabin in northern Wisconsin. Even further, when we visited the "Texas White House" on the LBJ ranch (restored to 1968 time), Karen and I were both reminded of decor from the 1960s/1970s that we saw as children (and sometimes later). The torch is being passed: Kris is too old to get the Junior Ranger badges, but she helped Katie get hers. I'm proud of Karen, Kris, and Katie for their involvement in this National Park program over the years. After that we drove to nearby tiny Luckenbach (the one made famous by the country song, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvZeYDBY4fw), but they were having a blues fest and it looked a little crowded. We drove on to Fredericksburg for supper. We were surprised at the number of little boutique shops and restaurants in the downtown near the Nimitz and WWII Pacific Theatre museums - we were reminded of Door County, WI, Galena, IL, Leavenworth and Poulsbo, WA, etc. etc.

500th Post

This morning Karen, Kris, and I joined 23 other judges at a science fair at Katie's elementary school for grades 3-5 (and a few earlier grade posters). Some of the posters were in Spanish (of which I know a little), but the students spoke English and they had lots of pictures, so that was fun. Some posters appeared to have students editing their starting prediction to fit their conclusion. After that we ate lunch with Katie in her Kindergarten class. This evening Karen and Kris enjoyed a free opera (Lucia di Lammermoor - a Romeo and Juliet type story) and Katie and I walked to the nearby Sonic and ate outside (weather has returned to mild and dry).

I don't have any pictures of all this, but I wanted to show you a couple of fossil pictures for this story. Back in the early fall I found a fossil in a cliff wall (like the Police song that goes "There's a fossil that's trapped in a high cliff wall...") that looked a lot like bone material. I brought it to the Texas Memorial Museum, and it was identified (by a student?) as a clam-like creature called a rudist. Reasonable, but for some reason I did not quite buy that and went back and extracted a larger piece of the fossil. I brought that to a couple of rock shows in the fall and people there thought it was bone, so I made contact with someone else at the museum. She tentatively identified it as a reptile bone (and gently reminded me that vertebrate fossils found on public land in Texas belong to the state) and recommended that I contact the University of Texas-Vertebrate Paleontology Lab. So in December, Karen, Kris, and I visited the VPL to show the piece and get a tour of the facility - it was pretty cool. Our contact there tentatively identified it as a mosasaur bone and visited the location with Kris and I to see the rest of the bone in the wall. I gave him most of the big fragments and kept the open information policy because 1) that is the legal thing to do, 2) I really do not feel I could easily extract the remaining bone piece (it's in not-soft matrix in a vertical wall), and 3) him having the bone might help provide an ID. He emailed me a couple days ago, he thinks that it is a mosasaur tail vertebra. There are no immediate plans to go after the rest of it, but he plans to keep an eye on it (we are keeping the location secret) to see if further erosion yields anything. This is probably where the story will end. It was a thrill to find even a small piece of a vertebrate reptile fossil from the Cretaceous (and I have been driving my family a little nuts about it). Since people have named some of their finds (like "Sue" the T-rex in Chicago) I'm calling this one "Kristine", since she was the one that first started exploring that particular spot. By the way, in case you are wondering, the mosasaurs were technically not dinosaurs, but these reptiles were one of the top ocean predators of the late Cretaceous and could get pretty huge. Imagine something like the basilisk in Harry Potter 2 with flippers. Mosasaurs also played a significant role in the history of the science of paleontology itself (I learned that from the IMAX movie I saw in Houston last month called "Sea Rex: Journey to a Prehistoric World"). Finding big sea reptile fossils in the Austin area is not common, but not unheard of. In one of the pictures I am standing next to the Onion Creek mosasaur (discovered in the 1930s) at the Texas Memorial Museum (the museum also has the Shoal Creek plesiosaur). This particular location has been good in other ways, too. We have found part of a sizable ammonite (like an octopus with a curly shell), a Ptychodus (extinct shellfish-eating shark) tooth, and a 13-inch Inoceramus (large clam) fragment all within ten feet of the bone.

Very Rainy Morning

Austin got 3-ish inches of much-needed rain this morning (mostly between 2:30 and 7 a.m.). The airport (south of town) got 5.7 in. A weak tornado (rare for January) touched down at about 3 a.m. damaged some buildings about 6-7 miles to the southeast of here but did not hurt anybody. It also passed about a block to the east of Pioneer Farms (see a previous post). Noteworthy lightning visible from Katie's and my bus stops this morning, and my tough old Bradley University umbrella inverted. Walnut Creek was still high late this afternoon, but it must have been higher - most of the green grass in the creek picture is flattened. There was more rain to the east than west, so the big reservoirs to the west like Lake Travis (see a previous post) did not get as much refilling rain, and the fire-damaged areas to the east such as Bastrop State Park (see a previous post) got a lot of erosion damage.

Happy Chinese New Year!

This is the year of the dragon. Karen made a yummy stir-fry supper.

Austin January Weekend

Yesterday Kristine and Karen drove south of Austin for Kris to participate in the Texas Music Educators Assocation Regional Choir auditions, and I am happy to say that she made the choir! Meanwhile, Katie did a good job biking (and I walked) to a local grocery store. This afternoon was Fossil ID Day at the Texas Memorial Museum. I bought in stuff I could not easily identify and found out there was not much worthwhile to ID! :*) Later in the afternoon we went to the Future Scientists Jamboree located southwest of Austin. It was all right (though the emperor scorpion trying to get out of its tub made us nervous), and we enjoyed the outdoor activities in T-shirt weather. We had dinner on the patio of a Taco Cabana tonight.

Wizard of Oz

Kristine's big birthday present from us is seeing "Wicked" when it comes to Austin in a couple weeks. Neither Kris nor Katie had seen "The Wizard of Oz" so we got a copy from the library and they saw it tonight. The pic of the day is from 2003, when one of the Munchkins from the movie (the one that gives Dorothy the lollipop) was the guest of honor in that year's Pekin Marigold Festival.

Let's go buy a kite...

Low 70s and windy today - great for trying to fly homemade delta-wing kites! Fortunately, the dollar store was selling 2-packs of idiot-proof diamond-shaped kites.

Bastrop State Park

Katie and I visited Bastrop State Park today (the park that got nearly completely ravaged by a wildfire last September - see my posts from early September, 2011, as well as: http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/spdest/findadest/parks/bastrop/fire/). By all accounts I have heard it is a shadow of its former self, and much of the park is still closed. The patchwork nature of the burn was interesting, some of the areas were much more burnt that others. Many areas had a litter of pine needles that fell off heat-damaged trees, but some areas were burnt so hard there were only standing black trees over gray ground. I have read that after the Peshitgo Fire in Wisconsin so many years ago that even tree roots burned - I think I might have seen that. We were confused by some hairy material on the ground until I realized that it was the reinforcing material (fiberglass?) leftover from burned composite signposts (Katie is next to an intact one in one of the pix). In one of the pix you can see Katie crossing a little stream - you can see the foundations of a missing footbridge nearby. It was a little chilling how the overall terrain morphology resembled areas around Peoria (e.g. Jubilee College State Park). There was also cause for inspiration. We saw a few green plants and there were some sprouts at the base of some of the the oak trees. The reservoir seems to have acted as a firebreak. Katie and I had lunch and played in a playground at some of the surviving cabins. When I realized how close the fire had gotten to those buildings, I realized that I was really looking at sort of a battlefield - where the firefighters won. One of the last places we stopped in the park was an overlook. The nice wood roof of the gazebo there was almost completely burned, but there are plans to rebuild. The weather is still dry, but there has been enough rain lately to allow campfires in the campsites.

Gotcha Day Anniversary

We are getting a bit of cold weather here, as noted by this sign at a nearby apartment complex. Today is the second anniversary of the day Katie came into our lives. We celebrated by getting Chinese take-out tonight. Compare the picture of Katie and me with the similar picture from the 1-12-10 post. Coincidentally, today I did a science presentation to the Kindergarten at Katie's school, Pillow Elementary. I spent a half hour telling over 100 Kindergarteners about rocks and fossils and snuck in some chem demos along the way. It was chaotic but fun. Kris likes to cuddle with our bunny.

Kristine 13

Kristine turned 13 yesterday (and this week also has a Friday the 13th). She joined a couple of her Austin friends for a lunch at a Chuy's restaurant. Meanwhile, some of her Peoria friends decorated a locker for her at Peoria Christian Middle School.

Boar's Head Pageant

We are in a warm, dry spell, with temps sometimes breaking into the 70s. This afternoon I hung out at a nearby park with Kris and Katie. Kris was getting water for our minnows and accidentally caught a little crayfish as well. We saw a number of turtles sunning themselves on a bank of Walnut Creek. Tonight our family participated at the Boar's Head Pageant at St. Albert the Great Catholic Church. It is mix of a medieval festival with elaborate period costumes (Part 1) and the Navity (Part 2) complete with beautiful music provided by a live orchestra and choir. The cast is well over 100 people. Karen was a palace worker and got to carry a kettle of "wine" and the girls and I were a few of many sheperds. We had a few rehearsals this week, which wore us down a little, but at least we did not have any speaking or singing parts. I thought tonight went well and we all thought it was a net positive experience. What I personally liked most about it was dressing up in a costume - we even had makeup dirt smudges. Kris and I tried to do our interpretation of "Bethlehem Gothic" afterward. If we were to be here next year we would probably do it again.

Nice Weather

It reached 71 F today. When I walked around at lunch today I smelled and saw fresh cut (green) grass. I also stopped by the turtle pond by the UT tower. Here is a cool mural of Texas near campus.