6/17/08 Poor Punctuation and Grammar

This sticker was in the SuperShuttle that I took to the airport to leave Texas and head back to Maine. I'm being very careful not to call either of them home right now, though I really feel like they're both home. Anyway, this sticker cracked me up because I doubt seriously that this is "a" law as in one law. This is bound to be two laws. Additionally, the slash mark is generally used between two words or phrases that mean the same thing or can be substituted for each other. "No Smoking" and "Fasten Seat Belt" have nothing to do with each other. We won't even get into the lack of parallel structure.

6/16/08 Seafood in Dallas?

In all the years that Rockfish Restaurant was in my neighborhood, I never went. How goofy is it that I finally went when home on a visit now that I live in Maine, a seafood mecca? But I was glad to go. I went with Melissa, who lives "across the alley and down two" from my house in Richardson. She was the angel who helped me a ton when I was packing up my life (both physically and emotionally) in Texas and moving to Maine last summer. It was great to spend time with her on my last day in Dallas until Christmas.

6/14/08 Dinner with Doc Friends

Some of the ECMP folks (doc students in the Educational Computing program at UNT) couldn't make it to the dinner at El Guapo's but came up with a wonderful alternative instead. Ron and his wife and 2 children hosted a cookout at their home in Midlothian. Jennifer and her husband and 4 sons (including the brand new 6-week old baby boy!) who live in Waxahachie drove over and joined us. We toured Ron's new studio at the high school where he teaches all kinds of video and broadcasting stuff. Fun fun fun fun great food fun fun fun.

6/13/08 UNT friends and BBQ lunch

Becky Sue (lovingly referred to as Dr. B. S.) came to Denton to visit Gerald while I was there visiting Gerald and we had a wonderful day of fun, including Metzler's Barbecue in Denton for a yummy lunch.

6/13/08 Dinner with choir family

Julie invited me to dinner at her house. Whooop! Since Marty and Matthew were out of town, she was already having Frank and Adam over for dinner, so I just got to join the fun along with Ceci. Cliff, Julie, their two boys, Ceci, Frank, Adam and I ate yummy dinner and check out this cool dessert: a cake in the shape of a giant cupcake. Great food, fabulous fellowship, very interesting conversations . . . it was a very special evening with choir family.

6/12/08 Prepping for the City Inspection

Through this entire process (which only took 3 days), we never had to have our water cut off. There was one 10 minute period where we didn't use the water, but that was it. But at 8am on this day, we couldn't use the water until after the city inspected everything. It wasn't an issue because both Mary and I left the house by 8.

Dr. Mari's dad showed me what the bladder looks like that they use for this and explained the whole process to me. It's nice to have multiple dads in your life who are engineers. Here they are filling up the pipe so the city can see if there are any leaks. Here, Rick is doing the work. It's been fun that he was the supervisor on this job because he was the apprentice/rookie on the cleanout replacement job 10 years ago!

Bye-bye 10 year old cleanout. It's actually just fine and didn't need replacing but they wanted to use all clean and new parts on this job which made sense to me.

6/12/08 if you can't visit Rhonda, you can at least visit her mom

Rhonda is in the hospital for bone marrow transfer for her leukemia. Gerald and I stopped at the house to drop off some cards and goodies. Rhonda's mom was there. We got to visit with her. I've shared a family reunion and a Thanksgiving dinner with Rhonda's family, so it was great to visit with my good friend and second mom.

6/12/08 You canNOT get enough Tex-Mex when you only get back twice a year

This was the second of SIX Tex-Mex meals while I was in town. When Dr. Mari picked me up at the airport, we stopped for Taco Cabana on the way home. Here I am at Via Real in Irving with Gerald and Alice. I went to Denton for the day but Gerald needed to go see Alice and Sam at Irving ISD, so I went along for the ride and as it turned out, for the lunch.

Bridget and Dana and I had our traditional get-together at La Hacienda on 635. A bunch of friends from my doctoral program got together at El Guapo in Denton. Julie (another doc friend) and I had a delicious and fun 2-hour lunch at Papasito's. Hmmmm. There was one more. I'll have to check my calendar and get back to you on the last one.

6/11/08 Pipe Replacement at Marilu

All of life's great expressions are on a magnet, right? One of my favorite truisms I learned on a magnet in the gift shop at the Portland, Maine airport: "Maine: You can't get there from here." Oh it is soooo true. No matter where you're going, it will take you all day to get there and you'll have to change planes at least once. So I planned this 25 day trip to take advantage of the fact that I was already going to be out of state and to take advantage of some really good fares on Southwest Airlines (which doesn't charge extra for one-way segments). Since I was going to the 30th Reunion at Hollins, I might as well keep on going and that's how I got to a week in Albuquerque and now a week in Dallas. Bonus: The travel expenses for the week in Dallas are tax-deductible because I'm a landlady checking up on my property.

Little did I know when I planned the trip many months ago that the landlady would really have to invest a lot of time in her work. The sewer pipe on my house finally collapsed. I knew 10 years ago when we did a makeshift (and cheaper) repair, that some day I would have to replace the rest of the pipe. The time was now. Fortunately, Mary the renter, did all the prep work of figuring out there was a problem, calling in folks to determine the problem, and getting bids on fixing the problem. The winning bidder was my favorite plumbing company that's worked on the house for all 25 years that I've owned it.

Here you can see that they've dug the trench down to the collapsed pipe and put all the dirt next to the trench for use after the replacement. The little white pipes perpendicular to the trench are the sprinklers. Though there was no guarantee that the sprinklers wouldn't get damaged in the process, a little luck and a lot of talent from the guys doing the digging resulted in zero damage to my sprinkler system.

This could've been a problem but it wasn't. The old pipe is located under the storage shed. However, there was a 45 degree turn in the old pipe to get it to the city pipe, so we just put in a new turn. There's no need to dig up the old pipe, the real purpose to all this is to put in new pipe.

Here's the collapsed pipe. Looks pretty collapsed, eh? It's a type of pipe made of wood fiber with tar in it called Orangeburg that was very popular in the 1950's. Turns out it was popular since the 1890's! Anyway, that's what I had and that's what I replaced.

Here's a new cleanout going in. This is what I replaced 10 years ago in my "temporary" fix. They told me at the time that inevitably I was going to have to replace the rest of the pipe, that it could be anywhere from 1 to 10 years. Shwew! I got the good end of that deal! And now it's tax deductible as a repair on my investment property. Here's the new pipe going in:

2/21/2008 The Dinner Gang Together Again

The three of us are back together again. This time we're at El Guapo in Denton. Do you recognize the Mexican food theme--December at La Hacienda, February at El Guapo? I have to make up for lost time whenever I'm back in the area so I eat lots of Tex Mex when I visit. The conversation and camaraderie were even better than the food, which was delicious. We closed the restaurant down. It's going to be hard to have to wait until August to see these dear friends again. :-(

12/20/2007 The Denton Trio reunited

L to R: Dana, Bridget, Me. The three of us have gotten together for dinner once a month for at least 2 years. (Romona used to be a part of the group, but she's in Fort Worth now and it's harder for her to get away.) We had our last dinner together just a few nights before I left for the big move and then had to go 4 months without a dinner. Tonight was the night. Dana now lives in Midlothian and Bridget in Denton and I was in Richardson, so we picked La Hacienda in Lewisville to meet in the middle. We had a great time and delicious Mexican food, too.