Texas Justice (The Return)

This past week Josh and I went to Austin, Texas to visit my sister Abby, her family, and also attend Butt-Numb-a-Thon X. Josh's post about BNAT is forthcoming, but I wanted to post some pictures about our Austin activities (mostly for my parents, on the slim chance they will ever read this, even though I have programmed my blog on their Bookmark taskbars).

We got there on Thursday and I don't really remember what we did. We slept a lot because we hadn't slept the night before. We tried to take my niece Jordan to see "Bolt," but the theater had posted the wrong times, so when we got there it was already halfway over. Instead we went to Sonic and had Blasts.

On Friday we went to the Texas State History Museum because Abby had always wanted to go there but never had the time. We saw the exhibit "Cowboys and Presidents" and also learned about Texas' main export: OIL! and the main import: astronauts.

Museums are best when your kids are armless so that they don't touch anything

Logan thinks this cannon goes well with his complexion

My adopted niece Mia is the most portable baby ever because
she only weighs about 14 pounds, 10 of which is hair

As the only 2 minorities in the Shepard family, Josh and Mia are slowly adding their bi-racial genes to our overwhelmingly white gene pool. In this picture, Josh is reminiscing about his Conquistador ancestors who added their genes to the Americas

Feeling his voice hadn't been heard quite well enough, Josh chose to vote a few more times at the "Cowboys and Presidents" exhibit

Abby and Mia have the headgear to prove their Texanocity

Friday night, Josh and I went to a Butt-Numb-a-Thon before party at Scholz Garten bar where we met Harry Knowles, the founder of aintitcool.com, the website which sponsers BNAT.

Josh made sure to wear the Oregon sweatshirt so that he could REPRESENT!

Josh has a more detailed blog about the movies we saw on Saturday and Sunday, but let me just say that it was awesome. We had all sorts of plans to tour the UT Austin clocktower and then see the lights at Zilker Park, but after 24-hours of movies that was actually more like 26 (4 of which were the ridiculously-lengthed Che), I came back to my sister's house and did this:

This is actually often how I fall asleep-- I've gotten so good at keeping my books open, I can now sleep for a few hours then wake up and keep reading where I left off. Don't you wish you were in grad school too?

On Monday we made plans to hang out with my 11-year-old niece Jordan. She wanted to go to Zilker Park, but we made her go bowling instead.

I couldn't think of a good caption, but just pretend I made some crack about Josh's eyebrows

Josh is what we would call "The Evil Uncle"

Guess who won. Yeah, that's right. ME!

Josh's entire wardrobe is so full of Hoodoo stuff, he unzipped his sweatshirt and it was a continuation of the Hoodoo logo!

Jordan claims we're the coolest aunt and uncle ever. The fact that we filled her with ice cream may or may not have anything to do with that.

So that was our trip. We came back to Oregon to find that it had snowed like crazy, which was confusing. In the past few days we've just been trying to get last-minute Christmas shopping done (although we may not even be able to make it to Hermiston if the snow continues as it is) and I've been using my extra time off school to cook some actual meals.

Blast from the Past-- Texas 2007:

San Antonio, TX temple
This temple was among the most beautiful I have been in, with the most gorgeous stained glass

In front of the Texas State Capitol, married for just 4 1/2 months