27 in San Antone

We spent the weekend in San Antonio-

normally we have a clogging performance in San Antonio every Mother's Day weekend 

(see past posts here and here) 

and we were SUPPOSED to have another performance this year... 

but it was canceled.

But alas, we booked a hotel through Priceline- and HAD to still go.

Darn

:)

AND it coincided nicely with someone turning 27 this past weekend.

3 hour drive to San Antonio

 Blunt bumper sticker on the way.

 

We hung out around the Riverwalk Friday night, saw "Avengers", and ate yummy Mexican food.

PS- the weather was amazing!

Neither hot nor humid.

That never happens.

 

cool cloud...

 Riverwalk by night

We stayed at "The Menger" hotel... 

oldest hotel in San Antonio!

Apparently Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders liked to stay there, too back in the day.

Oh yeah- and rumor has it... it's haunted.

Saturday was someone's birthday and it started off with a lovely birthday breakfast at "Schilo's"- famous for their German cuisine...

We had potato pancakes with homemade applesauce-

dee lish.

The next part of the day wasn't as happy as eating....

our car was broken into.

Lame.

 Here we are...

making the police report.

Lamest part?

(Well besides people being jerks and thinking they can do whatever they want to other people's stuff)

THEY stole our bag of dance shoes...

that was in our trunk.

It wasn't even sitting out in the main part of the car.

In fact nothing was in the main part of the car.

I digress.

A bag of dance shoes...

Really?

I'm positive all those shoes are sitting in a dumpster somewhere in San Antonio because used dance shoes are worthless to someone like jerk-face robber.

BUT they're valuable to people like US!

Each pair of shoes is probably $80-$100, and we had EIGHT pairs of shoes in said bag.

Yep...

you do the math.

It was a blow.

BUT we took care of things and moved on to happier places.

Like SeaWorld!

We had a birthday to celebrate after all!

 We rate it the third happiest place on Earth...

(Harry Potter world #1, and DisneyWorld #2)

We saw dolphins...

 White beluga whales...

(cutest guy ever. I want one.)

Sea lions...

 Mr. Walrus...

 Rode lots of scary rollercoasters!

 And we sat in the Splash Zone to see...

 Shamu!

And wet we DID get!

 Shamu was amazing.

 I want a pet whale, too.

 SeaWorld was the perfect thing to take our minds off our broken car.

That night we went back to the Riverwalk for birthday dinner...

And remembered the Alamo on the way home...

(with our clogging friends)

 Sunday morning we cleaned up the glass in our poor car...

(and probably ruined that car wash's vacuum in the process... whoops)

 Created a ghetto-fabulous makeshift window...

And headed home :)

Hopefully a "car break-in" the morning of my 27th isn't indicative of how this year will turn out!

Happy Birthday to me.

The Week from H-E-double toothpicks

Excuse my language- but it was the week from hell.

No other way to describe it. 

I've never been so frustrated in all my life.

Want to hear about it?

Here we go...

Jon and I BOTH received a jury summons in the mail.

(Random pickings my foot- I knew I never should have registered to vote in Harris county!)

Jon was exempt because he's a full-time student.

I, on the other hand, was not.

It was to be April 30th, the Monday before our school's Spring Show, but I didn't think anything of it BECAUSE everyone and their dog had told me that they'd NEVER been picked for jury duty, and that they'd let you leave around noon, and have the rest of the day off, and it was wonderful, blah-dee, blah-dee, blah.

A-huh.

 It all started with this line.

In come 600 hundred of Harris counties finest all awaiting their fate.

To jury duty? or not to jury duty?

Lucky for me- I was one of the 48 picked out of my room of 200.

We went through hours and hours of them selecting the jury...
 very inefficiently, I may add.

Out of the 48...

12 are selected as jurors.

And I was one.

Thus begins the drama.

My students at school are a mess because I'm not there.

Spring show is in two days and I'm supposed to be holding rehearsals everyday after school.

Because I'm not there- my students are going crazy in classes.

Nothing is getting done.

My subs were lazy and incompetent.

And I'm hearing all of this through frazzled students who now no longer want to be in Spring Show.

I'm running from jury duty (which gets done at 4:30) over to my school (which is a half hour drive away) to have rehearsals with WHATEVER students could stay.

Dress rehearsal I had three girls there.  
Three.

I was a mess.

My students were a mess.

It was not pretty.

Not to mention that my mentor teacher and administration is thinking I'm completely incompetent of  putting together two (measly) dances.

So instead of being at school- I got to spend my mornings fighting traffic....

to be downtown at the courthouse.

I don't know how, but come Thursday and by some merciful act of God- we pulled it off.

Students showed up to perform for the show that night.

They got their costumes and thought they were the prettiest things on Earth.

They danced beautifully- and by closing night we had no almost no mistakes.

 Our theme for the show...
"Dance Hero- Warriors of Dance"
all the music was "Rock and Roll".

One of our girls was M.I.A. Thursday night... so I danced in her spot.
I look like a student, right?

Ok maybe not.

Now I'm on my 8th day of jury duty.
Oh yeah- it's still not over.
We should be done tomorrow....? Maybe?
But I do know one thing.
I never want to see a lawyer EVER again.

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

It's beach season down here-

and we are loving it.

After a VERY stressful week (more on that later) 

the beach was exactly what we needed.

When we got there, we found monstrous amounts of seaweed.
Gross.
We raked it out of the way and were able to make a small place for the kids to play in the sand.

The water was nasty full of seaweed too.

BUT the waves were awesome.

SO once you got past the feeling of something creepy and crawly grabbing at your legs/feet/ankles... the waves MORE than made up for it.

Best boogie boarding ever :)

 
Of course a football game was played...

And don't be deceived by those clouds-
we all got sunburnt.

 And no Cinco de Mayo celebration would be complete without some food-
Monster Nachos to be exact.
Our new favorite heart attack treat.

Viva Mexico!

I Heard the Rains Down in Africa....

Last week Jon returned from a trip to Southern Africa... Swaziland to be exact.

But I'll let him tell the story- since I wasn't there.

*sniff* *sniff*

So the trip to Swaziland was a long one.  We left Houston at 4 pm on a Friday, and arrived at our hotel at 3 pm on a Sunday...  Luckily we had a 10 hour layover in Frankfurt, so my advisor and I went to check out the city:
It was pretty rainy at first, but then it cleared up.

There were a couple cool old cathedrals-This is St. Peter's Cathedral.

Frankfurt had a pretty nice town square-we mostly stuck to the Olde Towne (if you add e's to the end of words they look older, right?)

The one attraction that Frankfurt had was the house where Johann Goethe was born (he was a famous writer, probably best known for writing "Faust")

Most of Frankfurt was leveled during WWII, but the Opera House survived.

Once we arrived at the Johannesburg airport, we got to meet Nelson Mandela

And we could buy a Zebra skin...if we had $2000 for such a thing!

The first day we spent meeting with the government officials and discussing our project.  We met the Minister of Magic Agriculture (it did feel like Harry Potter-we were at the Ministry all day!), who is the nephew of the King... didn't get to meet the king though :(

The next day we went to see the sites where we could potentially implement our technology.  A little about our project:  The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (the UN FDA basically) had a project in which they built small dams to provide year-round water for agriculture in the rural areas of Swaziland:

 But unfortunately the water is really dirty, with lots of human and animal waste, bacteria, etc.

So we are trying to use nanotechnology to help disinfect the water before they use it on their crops, in their homes, in their food, or even just for drinking.

So we met with a bunch of them and learned what we could about the water, how much they use, how often they use it, how it gets from the dams to the fields, and how they felt about the possibility of technology helping to make the water cleaner.  They were very kind, accepting, and interested in our technology.

Research-wise it was a very successful trip-we learned what we needed to learn and have a good idea of how to move forward.  We will go back in November (hopefully WITH Amelia this time!) and present my research on how much my nanotechnology can or can't do for them and they will decide whether they want to fund a test reactor there in Swaziland.

But while we were in Swaziland, we of course had to do some other sight-seeing.  We went to the Hlane wildlife preserve:

Where we saw all kinds of cool animals.  They took us around in these monster Jeeps

And we saw Elephants (this is a baby-don't get between him and his mother!)

There was a rather tense moment in which this fella almost chased us down.  Turns out you aren't supposed to drive towards a bull elephant or he thinks you are challenging him :)

Lions (we were about 30 feet away from this fella-lucky for us he was feeling pretty lazy that afternoon...)

Giraffes

Warthogs (no, he didn't start singing Hakuna Matata.  We were very disappointed.)

And many others (antelope, zebra, wildebeests, springboks, crocodiles, rhinos and lots of cool-looking birds).  I wanted to take home a baby elephant for Amelia's birthday present, but apparently there are laws against such things :(

Another fun part about the trip was the food.  My dad served his mission in South Africa, and when we were growing up he would always make curry.  I got to eat some super-yummy South African curry while I was there, and I must say-my dad did a pretty good version :)

So all in all I had a fun and productive time.  Hopefully when I go back this fall I can take Amelia with me and we can spend some more time exploring some of the beautiful sights of Africa!
-Jon

Jon the Genius

My afternoon phone call to Jon...

 Me- "Hey Jon! How are you? How was your day?"

Jon- "I had a rough afternoon...."

Me- "Really? What happened?"

Jon- "I ran into a tree..."

Me- "A tree? You mean... while on your bike?"

Jon- "No... actually.... I walked into a tree."

Me- "Bahahaha... *ahem* for real?"

Jon- "Yeah I wasn't paying attention, and all of a sudden there was huge tree trunk right in my head. And next thing I knew- I was flat on my back."

Me- "Hahaha you're a physicist for crying out loud- how does that happen?"

Jon- "I dunno...." *whimper whimper*

The damage

And there you have it-

we've always been told that Rice has more trees than students.

Now we know why.