We’ve shifted into high gear with the preparations. We’ve got one more birth class tomorrow night. I put the crib together last night during that horrendous NBA Finals game between the Lakers and the Magic. I dislike both teams and it was a weak end to a lame series. The impending birth is lighting a fire under us to get rid of a lot of stuff and do some much needed deep cleaning around the house. Since we’re having him at home, we have to do some work sterilizing sheets, towels and clothing. We already have the birth kit. We’re using the same midwife this time that we used for our second child.

The City of Austin is back to do tree trimming for the power lines in our neighborhood.  It’s been 7 years since their last visit when we stupidly fought them on removing several of our hackberry trees. Now, of course, we want them to take them all and they’re refusing to take one of them.

This is a big mistake. I was considering buying a copy, but now I’ll wait until a better version can be found. If I have to, I’ll buy a non-region 1 dvd to get the right subtitles. This is just dumb, dumb, dumb.

2008 was a real bitch in a lot of ways. I know I’m not the only one hoping that 2009 is better. Only 12 more days before we’re rid of G.W. Bush. Amazing. He’s been the president for nearly all of my childrens’ lives. The Boy was born under Clinton, but Bush was sworn in before his first birthday. It’s no secret that I’ll be glad to see him go. I’m clearly not alone in that sentiment.

We’ve got some new things to look forward to this year, the most monumental being the arrival of our third child in July. We’ve got six months to prepare and we’ve already got a long list of things that need to be done to the house and the crap that we’ve accumulated in 10 years here. We’re also going to get the kids to help out around the house a lot more to ease things on us once the baby arrives.

I’ve been terrible about budgets in the past, but it’s time to get serious about one this year. I’ve been checking out Mint for the past couple of weeks. It’s not perfect, but I like it better than Quicken.

I’m not sure about my drumming hobby in the context of a third kid. I’ll have to wrestle with that one over the next six months. We didn’t apply for SXSW this year. I think we’ll go for the alternate showcases this year and see how that goes.

We tried out a gym membership at Lifetime for most of last year and failed miserably. I need to come up with an achieveable workout plan. We got a Wii Fit at Christmas and I’ve been dabbling with that, but that’s only a part of the fitness picture.

Kind of a rambling post, but I wanted to get something going to get back into the groove. Let’s see if I can do at least two posts a month here and on the Austin Metblog.

I took last week off for a staycation. We took the kids to Six Flags Fiesta Texas over Labor Day weekend.  You can check out photos on my Flickr page. We bought some “grown up” chairs for the dining room from the Restoration Hardware outlet in San Marcos. We nearly scored a new table as well, but I just couldn’t bring myself to spend that much money on the spot and someone bought it out from under us before we could get back. We saw Tropic Thunder, which I highly recommend.

Ike completely missed Austin after everyone made a huge deal about it, closing schools early and canceling today’s soccer games. We didn’t get a single drop of rain.

The summer rolls on. It’s been a hot one so far without much relief from 90 and 100 degree heat. The electric bill is reflecting that. We hosted a last minute July 4th party at our place. Parties are always a good way to force you to clean up the joint.

We checked out WALL-E and Iron Man in the theater so far this summer. We rented/cabled/on-demanded Batman Begins, Apocalypto, Enchanted,  Hellboy and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. We went to the IMAX theater at Bob Bullock on Saturday. Austin Books & Comics and the museum were having bat-related activites, including the “bat lady” who had several live bats to show the kids. The lines for the movie were long.

I scored an iPhone a week ago. I had to wait 3 hours in line to get it. I’m liking it so far. The Bat Lady shot that I linked is actually my first uploaded iPhone shot. I’ve made a few iPhone related tweaks to this blog including setting the default viewport and adding a home screen image based on the favicon. I downloaded and installed the Wordpress app for iPhone, but haven’t tried it out yet.

After lunch, we headed over to the Witte Museum in Brackenridge Park near the San Antonio Zoo. The Witte is a small natural history and science museum. They have some dinosaur exhibits, a mummy exhibit, some exhibits on Texas wildlife, the HEB Science Treehouse, and some pioneer cabins. The HEB Science Treehouse is very hands-on, much like a children’s museum. We spent roughly two hours there checking everything out. I recommend stopping there if you’ve got school-aged kids. There’s a Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit starting there later this month.

The next stop was the hotel, Hyatt Place, a budget line in the Hyatt hotel chain. It’s a 3-star hotel according to Hotwire, so the accommodations are fairly nice. They’re going for a boutique hotel look. They’ve got nice new 42-inch HD TVs in each room. In general, we were happy with the place, although the pool was closed for construction and there was a nasty wet spot one corner of the room. The gig was at Jiggers, a nearby dive bar. I passed the time before we went on watching MMAs prime time debut on CBS. An old college roommate who recently relocated to SA came to check out the show.

The next morning, we got up and checked out Taco Taco, a taco place that’s gotten kudos from Bon Appetit, Texas Monthly, Food Network and Details. It’s almost literally across the street from Olmo’s Pharmacy, a place we checked out on another trip to San Antonio back in 2004. The breakfast tacos were pretty damn good. The place was packed. We had to wait about 10 minutes to get a table. I had two chilaquiles and one chorizo and egg taco. I’d recommend both. The tortillas were very fresh, something that you find in a lot of places in Austin, but where San Antonio is unmatched.

On the way back to Austin from San Antonio, we stopped at the Snake Farm in New Braunfels. The Boy has decided that he wants to be a herpetologist, so he was in snake heaven. They’ve got quite a large collection of snakes and reptiles and have a small sized petting zoo and other exotic animals out back. The place was featured in an episode of Dirty Jobs this year.

Flickr Set

Today is the 83rd anniversary of the day that John Scopes was arrested in Dayton, TN for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution to his high school biology class. Until roughly 8 years ago, I would’ve told you that we’d made significant progress since that day and that we were still making progress. Now, in 2008, I’d say that we’ve backslid because of a culture of ignorance, a president who shows no intellectual curiosity whatsoever, stories like this. and movies like this. 83 years later, it’s not safe to take a deep breath. We still have to fight against ignorance.

Also in the news today, Mildred Loving has died. She and her husband, Richard, were the couple behind the 1967 Supreme Court case that overturned many state laws banning mixed race marriages. Until then, it would’ve been illegal for my wife and I to get married in Texas and fifteen other states. My parents were married that year and my wife’s parents were married two years later. My parents were not mixed race, while my wife’s were. My in-laws encountered a lot of resistance at the time that they were married though they were in Minnesota, a state that never had any restrictions on interracial marriage. Loving Day is coming up on June 12. It’s amazing that only 40 years have passed since then, only a bit longer than my own lifetime. Thankfully, we haven’t backslid here as far as I can tell, but it’s still important to remember things like this, especially in light of the same-sex marriage debate that rages today.

I suppose it’s not surprising that the same people who want to put science back in 1925 also want to perpetuate the same ignorance with same sex marriages that existed in 1967 for mixed race marriages. Maybe McCain should just promise his constituents a time machine and be done with it.