Lonelilly
Doin' it my way.
Two days of sunny bliss this weekend, and one more today!
Sorry for the awful camera phone pic, but I just had to do it. It’s snowing today. Snow on all the mountains and foothills around our house and snow falling, just not sticking.
Spring where are you????????
A very long while! We’ve been busy bees since the holidays, so I thought I should post some pics from our recent trip to Texas. We visited Kelsey and AJ and mom and dad in Waco, then cruised down to Austin to visit friends and check out the city. (We’re thinking of moving there this summer.) It didn’t disappoint! Far from it, in fact. Great weather, awesome city full of young people and live music, great Mexican food and BBQ, and super nice people. And a steady, growing economy. I take back almost every bad thing I’ve ever said about Texas. Most of it, at least. There’s still some awfully scary things happening there.
Some pics from the trip: (all of which were taken from our new Google Nexus One smartphone. I love technology. Beats lugging around our huge Nikon.)
With the fam at a Christian cult eating lunch outside Waco. Very good! Everything fresh, homemade, and organic!
Cline workout hour at Kels and AJs. It was a trip.
Got to see Mer and Elizabeth and meet her beau at a truck stop in Hillsboro! 
Funniest get-together ever.
Gorgeous nursery in Austin.
We rented a HUGE red Dodge truck while in Austin. When in Rome, I figured…. It was super rad, a great change from our itty-bitty low-rider.
Looking like badasses. 
View of downtown Austin from South Congress (home of the famous Guero’s restaurant–best taco shop in all of Austin!!! We ate there twice in the 5 days we were there.)
Better view of downtown. Reminds me a lot of Portland.
Oh man….. the wall of cheese at Whole Foods’ flagship store.
I love cheese.
And more delectable goodies.
Working on a Monday afternoon in Mer and Byro’s backyard. (This is why I love my job!)
This is what we came home to after a week and a half of sun…
We also came home to this guy. I missed him dearly. Not sure if he missed us quite as much…. he got to go to a kennel-free puppy daycare/boarder and play with a whole pack of dogs while we were gone. He seems to have learned a thing or two from those pups–I swear, he’s never been so well-behaved!
Happy weekend!
All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.
What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it
that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me
something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.
Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out
of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.
Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend! We spent Thanksgiving week in Kansas visiting my family and pheasant hunting near Russell. We had a great time! While I didn’t hunt, I went along for the ride and played photographer.
West Kansas, as you can see, is wheat country. Black gold hides under the surface, and the land is dotted with oil wells. It’s a barren, rough landscape. Strangely romantic.
This road leads to Bunker Hill, population 100.
While hunting, we came across a flock of turkeys. Unfortunately, wild turkey was not on the Thanksgiving dinner menu that day–they were on someone else’s wheat field.
Pheasant hunting is truly a sporting event. You tromp through dense thickets to scare up the birds (we call the thickets “boo patches”). When a bird emerges, you distinguish whether it’s a rooster or a hen. If it’s a rooster, you hike up your gun and take aim–as it’s flying away from you. If you are lucky, some of the bird shot hits it and you release the dogs, who will fetch the bird. Mostly though, it’s a lot of trudging through fields.
If you have enough people, you can encircle a field and close in on the birds.
Here’s Grandpa and Stealth, his lab, who’s an incredible retriever.
I made Grandpa stop the truck anytime I saw a photo opp.
Along the way, we stopped to check wells and do some grunt work. (Not me, of course.)
And took a pit stop at Stan and Penny’s farm, some of our cousins. Gramp and Stan talked guns in his shop.
And I photographed cows. They didn’t like it very much.
Then we loaded up for one last round of hunting.
And as we closed out the last day of hunting, Evan got himself a bird!
It’s in our freezer waiting to be cooked into a pheasant pot pie.
We had Thanksgiving at Grandma Marguerite’s house. The kitchen, inevitably, is where we congregate. This is a pretty typical scene.
And at the end of the week, we drove back to Lawrence and did city stuff again. You can’t ride a scooter in the country!
All in all, it was a great trip. Thanks for the fun guys!
(And Grandpa, I’ll send you pictures on a CD sometime this week.)