A Different Sort of Weekend

This time, Mel's the one who has left for the weekend. She's in Colorado with some friends from high school. I'm the lonely one left at home by myself. We'll see how this goes; it's the first time I've been here without her. Any ideas for thing I could do this weekend? Feel free to share in the comments. I'm thinking I'll do some shopping for a certain someone's birthday next month.

The Scrabble Tides Have Turned

Ladies and gentlemen, it's a red letter day. Jason FINALLY won a game of Scrabble, breaking my streak of 12 consecutive wins. He was greatly assisted by the letters Z, Q, X and J. For those of you unfamiliar with Scrabble, those are the four highest scoring tiles. And Jason drew ALL of them. And got double word scores with them all. So it goes without saying that I still consider myself the superior Scrabble player in this household. Jason just had a lucky night.

Also, my partner wasn't really pulling her weight.

Why Buckeyes, Why?

I don't think I can take much more of this. First Florida, then LSU, now USC. At least it wasn't the national championship game this time, though we might have just lost a shot at it with this loss... I don't suppose the #2 team in the country will lose to Pittsburgh in the last game of the year to let us into the national title game like West Virginia did last year.

Electricity Returns

The electricity just came back on after going out about 2 hours ago. In spite of that, Ike is definitely passing us by without hitting very hard. It's not been much worse here in College Station than a strong summer thunderstorm. I don't see much damage around here besides lots of small branches and leaves strewn around. Galveston, Houston, eastern Texas and Louisiana haven't gotten off so easily.

We survived the night!

But the worst is yet to come. Currently winds are at 30 mph gusting to 50 mph and there's a lot of rain. Now we're just waiting for the eye wall of the storm to hit us. Hopefully we'll fare better than Houston, which is completely without power. I went outside for a bit this morning with Juno and it's not very pleasant weather to be out in!

Jason just informed me that the worst part of the them storm might actually miss us now - it's apparently heading north instead of west. We'll see.

Ike.

I'm sure everyone has heard by now that there's a big storm coming through Texas. A VERY BIG storm. And according to current projections, our town of College Station is smack dab in the middle of the hurricane's path. Sometime in the middle of the night it will get very, very windy and very, very rainy. Right now we're hearing predictions of 50 mph winds gusting up to 80 mph and 5 inches of rain. Our pantry is stocked, we've loaded up on water and our electric lantern is charging at this very moment. We are prepared to, in the words of a local radio station, "hunker down for a few days."


Over the next several days, we'll try to update our situation on this blog as much as we can. Well, at least until the power goes out. For now, we'll leave you with a picture of the sunset tonight, which gave no indication of the impending storm.

Weekend visitor

Our lovely friend Keri came to visit us this past weekend, which was fantastic because we love visitors. And we love Keri. So we had a grand time catching up on what's been happening in our lives since the last time we saw each other over a year ago. We also ate some food, watched a movie or two, played Guitar Hero, and had some fun at a tailgate party on Saturday, which was the night of the first A&M home football game. The whole town of College Station had a collective cry fest later that night...

Anyway, here's some pics from our fun weekend. And there's lots more fun to be had with anyone else who wants to come visit!

Waiting to eat our yummy dinner at Casa Rod's

Hanging out at the tailgate party

Guitar Hero!

Kenwood2005 Reunion

Back in the middle of August, the nine guys who lived together in Kenwood House in Goshen for our senior year of college got together for our first ever official reunion since college (not counting my wedding). We camped in the woodsy hills of eastern Ohio at Chris's house (where he grew up), and it rocked my socks off.

Things that happened include cooking hotdogs over a campfire in the woods, throwing fireworks in that fire and waiting nervously for them to explode, frisbee-ing, going for hikes in the woods, eating delicious organic food from the farm, playing basketball, hillbilly golf, bocce ball, and reminiscing about the good old days at GC. I won't attempt any more description of what happened, just go check out the pictures. Dan and I both bought the Canon XTi this summer, so we made sure everything was photographically documented. Here are the photos.

It was great to see all those guys again and, despite big changes in all our lives, pick up right where we left off. URK forever!