The good news is that all the snow made it so we got to chillax some, and I got some mad cookie skills from Wylie’s mom. (I have been practicing them here at home…excellent skills to have, I must say!)  In between the chilaxing we were very busy! We visited Concord, where I learned that it is REALLY fun to kick snow piles. And we went to Boston twice, and it made me want to go back when it is not 7 degrees with the windchill because everything is so cool! I saw Harvard Square (though not Click and Clack, even though I was looking!), and Boston Common, and Newbury Street and the “T” (not named for me, though I will continue to tell myself that it is), and the North End (where I had some amazing manacotti and a canolli and dined next to some very adorable old men, who in the story I made up in my head about them had something to do with important Italian families…if you know what I mean , and lots of historical things like the place where Paul Revere is buried! It is very cool to see the things I learned in history class.

We also squeezed in a road trip to Pittsburgh to see Wylie’s sister in The Nutcracker. It was really awesome and some pretty incredible stuff that those dancers can do. Along the way I saw the ACTUAL Eerie Canal (and I sang the song, and it made my heart do a little backflip to be right there singing about Sal!). And a trip to the beach at Plum Island. Again, it made me want to go back in the summer, but I was pretty enamored with a snow-covered beach!

It was a jam-packed trip, and I was glad that I had taken an extra day off to rest up before going back to work.  The spring semester looks like it is going to be pretty amazing at the SCS. I will be co-leading a group for first generation college students this semester, and I am super excited. We are also starting to think about looking for jobs for next year (if you know anyone who needs a really incredible, though unlicensed, psychologist, I’m SO your girl!)…which is kind of stressful. And, I am dedicated to finishing my dissertation this semester…in between practicing my cookie skills.

This week was really fun because we were having interviews for the next round of interns, and three awesome kids from my program at Auburn got interviews here, so we had some REALLY fun company!

Today was for relaxing, and I did it like a champ. I finished reading (for the second time) Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris. Can I just say that he is maybe the most funniest man alive. We also went and saw The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. It was very pretty and visually amazing, though I felt that the story left me wanting a little more. That being said, I am sure it’s not that easy to put a movie together when you didn’t get to finish it as planned, so I am overlooking some of that…

OK, one of my resolutions is to write on here more often so it’s not these mini-novels every month or so, and then I can start sharing more funny stories about our neighbors and their eternal quest to get their cat inside at odd hours…

I hope you are all having 2010′s that are off to great starts!

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In the meantime, I have had some good reasons for being absent. In the few weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, things at the Student Counseling Service really kicked in to high gear. I was seeing a ton more clients, and hence, was really wiped by the time I got home. It has been really great to be learning so much about therapy and being a therapist full time, but I will be honest that there is a bit of an adjustment period. Luckily, Wylie is very nice and supportive. In addition to all those students who somehow just realized that they should have been doing their homework all semester, we have been reviewing applications for interns for next year. I am enjoying being on this side of the process, that is for sure. The SCS got about 90 applications this year and we will invite about 30 folks for interviews…it is very interesting to see how it is done.

We have been fortunate enough to squeeze in some R & R on the weekends–today we went and got massages, which was awesome. And the weekend of Nov. 14 we went to Houston to see some friends. (The son of my dad’s BFF from his Air Force days and his wife). I was pleasantly surprised by what Houston had to offer, and it was really fun to see Joe and India and their wonderful pooch, Lennon. We went to a showing of The Big Lebowski in a park downtown, explored the Montrose area vintage shops, and saw the butterflies at the Museum of Natural Science.

It was a really wonderful weekend, and a much needed break…and a nice getaway from Bryan/College Station. We are looking forward to getting back to Houston in the spring for some rodeo action, and some NASA action as well…

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I am happy to report that school has started for the students and I STILL love my internship! We had a full 4 weeks of training before the students came back to school, so I was definitely ready to start seeing some clients and getting busy. My schedule is filling up and I am excited to be doing an assortment of Counseling-Center type things this semester–group, outreach, supervision, learning about the afterhours HelpLine…WOOOOHOOOO!!!

As far as fun stuff goes, I will work backwards since Wylie beat me to it for our weekend in Aggie Land…though I will have a few comments to add there!

TODAY–Sat. Sept. 12: It was very rainy and we were feeling lazy at first, so we caught up on some of our TV watching…that was nice. We thought that the rain would stop us from heading out to Caldwell, TX (about 20 miles) for the Kolache Festival…but we were wrong! We made the trek in the rain and found that at 3pm most of the kolache vendors were ready to get the heck outta that rain, and so we got 1/2 price kolaches! We sampled about 8 different kinds. My favorite was the poppyseed, then the raspberry, and the cinnamon roll (although I don’t think this counts as a kolache). Other than that, they all kind of just tasted like a danish. Some of them were gross and we didn’t even try them. I had a major attack of the sugars by then anyway…I understood why they were also selling giant sausages on a stick…something to cut the sugar! There was a polka band playing fine tunes and some people even dancing in the rain! I wished that the day had been nicer for their sake, but there were still quite a few folks enjoying the festivities.

We then went to Target because Wylie had some gift cards that were burning a hole in his pocket and I needed socks for when I wear dress shoes to work. Now I am writing this and we are relaxing. I still feel a little sugary, and am looking forward to some black bean and corn tacos when I get done here…

YESTERDAY: Fri. Sept. 11: HOORAY! Wylie was born today…well, today, but a couple years back!!! We had a very fun day…I get done with work on Fridays at 12:30 (because I work late other days, not because I am a slacker) so he also took the afternoon off and we went to a fancy-pants place in town with a vegetarian menu for lunch, and then to see Inglourious Basterds. (The movie, I will note, was actually pretty funny. I laughed out loud a few times and didn’t think that the trailer was accurate for the amount of violence–I had been wary of seeing it because it looked like it was going to be non-stop…it wasn’t that bad. I did cringe and hide my eyes a few times, though.) Then we came home for a little birthday celebrating at home–we had 2 kinds of pie (pizza and Dutch Apple, which I found at a local place that makes them from scratch and sells them to you unbaked so that you can feel like you are part of the process. I appreciated that. Except, some of the guts of the pie spilled out during baking and were on the bottom of the oven and made it very smelly and smoky in the house. I did not appreciate that. I think our oven needs to relax. It is an oven. Things will fall to the bottom….)

THURSDAY Sept. 10, 2009–Our first softball game was rained out! BOOOO!! We did, however, have 2 lovely practices before this. There were rainbows at one of them. There are actually a lot of rainbows here because there are tons of tiny little rainstorms that come and go in 10 minutes or less and the sky surrounding them is blue…kind of wonderful, in ym opinion!!! Good for leprechaun hunting, too!

LAST WEEKEND! See Wylie’s post for the details. Parts of it were pretty incredible. The dinner at the General’s house was kind of odd. I managed to insult his wife a little bit on accident…but I didn’t get fired on Monday, so that was good. Apparently the hiring of the general as the VP of student affairs is frought with a bit of political drama that is interesting to hear about, if you like that sort of thing…I usually do. He mainly roamed the lawn with a cigar, and that was awesome. Then we headed to the Dixie Chicken, where we also made friends with two gentlemen from San Francisco who were here on business with the university. It was nice to have some fellow outsiders to share in the awe of midnight yell. I think Midnight Yell was one of my favorite things. There were probably 30,000 people there. At midnight. To Yell. You get to kiss at the end though, which is fun. And whenever the Aggies make a touchdown. The game was cool to go to as well. I am thankful that my training director is generous with her spare tickets and her tailgating spot! Tailgating is one of the best inventions to go along with sports, if you ask me! I liked seeing the differences in the football culture between College Station and Auburn. I will say this: The students at A & M are WAAAAAYYYY more mellow than the students at Auburn, and the scene was more relaxed here. Although, the whole student section yelling in unison is pretty intimidating!!!

Well…that’s about it. I told you I would have a lot to say. I will try not to wait so long next time!

image courtesy layoder.wordpress.com

Teresa and I have been going through the whole Freaks and Geeks series on Netflix. I can’t believe I have not watched this show until now. The complete series is a total of 6 discs, and today our last one came in the mail, so I know what we will be doing tonight. Finishing up the series. Last night we started another series by watching Indiana Jones – Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think it is crazy that Teresa has not seen any of the Indiana Jones movies. I wanted them to be played back to back, night after night, but I think that the Freaks will rule tonight. I should add that we will be watching all four Indiana Jones movies. Teresa will have to make up her own mind on number four.

So in honor of our last Freaks and Geeks disc tonight, I am asking you all a question that you can really only answer if you have seen the series.

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Yesterday Wylie and I both had some work to do, so we spent the early part of the day doing that. Not that exciting, but had to be done. Then we went and saw the movie “Funny People” with Seth Rogan and Adam Sandler. If I was an official type person, I think I would have given it 5 stars. As it is, I am just a regular person and I will give it a thumbs up. I giggled quite a bit, and had a tear in my eye a few times as well…not an easy feat, but I am starting to think that Judd Appatow has my number. The evening was filled with more fun stuff–mostly lounging and a trip to the DQ. We realized that it was nice to spend a Saturday like that, but we will need to start planning day trips and stuff for the weekends if we want to get to everything on our Texas List, since we now have less than a year here!

This morning Wylie made us some from scratch pancakes, which were kind of new to me. I told him about the beer pancakes my dad used to make, and that was new to him. They were pretty tasty and a full belly made me take a nap. We did a few errands this afternoon–I had to get some watch batteries replaced, so we braved the mall for a few minutes, and I remembered that I don’t like the mall that much.

That’s about it. I am going to put up some photos of my new bike, which I love. Wylie took them Friday as I got home from work, it was like 104 degrees out and I was very sweaty. I hope it doesn’t really rain too much this week so that I can ride it.

On Friday evening Teresa and I walked over to downtown Bryan for their First Friday event. They have live music, restaurants have special things going on, and the streets are busy with many local people. We started off the evening by going to the Village Cafe for a drink and to cool off. It was a little loud in there, so we moseyed on over to Los Norteños Cafe for some dinner. We had passed by this place a couple weeks ago and liked the looks of the outside, we liked the inside even better. And with $3.99 breakfast tacos, how can one go wrong? Just a tip, two people can share one, these tacos are huge, and kind of like burritos. After getting stuffed on tacos, we waddled a short distance to the Revolution Cafe (there are a lot of  cafe’s in Bryan it seems) to listen to some bluegrass. I was wondering if the bluegrass in Texas was different than that of the bluegrass in Asheville. The answer is no. They are pretty much the same. We stayed for a little bit, but being stuffed on tacos, and at the tail end of a work week, we were tuckered out so left after only several songs. You can hear one of the songs they played below.

It was good to check out the First Friday and I am sure we will check out some of the others that go on during our year in Texas.

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Then this evening Wylie and I did some spontaneous errands…about which there is a rant coming at the end of this post…and tried Gumby’s Pizza, which was ALSO full to the brim with local color and charm. It was super yummy (don’t tell Mr. G though) and super cheap, and pretty much the definition of “no frills.” It seems like lots of college kids go there and they have a dining room that is a haphazard collection of various kinds of tables and posters that a 15 year old boy would like (i.e. a Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks, a Mullet Guide (hairdos, not fish), a monkey drinking beer, etc…). The tables and posters are unattended, and there are no plates in the whole place. They called my name, gave us the pizza, and we ate it straight from the box. So, it’s kind of like being at home, only in a restaurant. I liked it. It is my new favorite place…the only negative was that they have Pepsi products, but even that was forgivable in such a relaxed atmosphere…Everyone seemed to be eating these little pizza roll things, so we will try those next time.

I have also been busy with dissertation stuff, which is good. I had to buy a subscription to Zoomerang for a year, so it is quite possible that you will start seeing random surveys around 10gallonhat.com because I want to get my money’s worth.

In other news…WARNING, A RANT COMING…I got my Texas vehicle registration yesterday, and it turns out that TX requires front and rear plates, which I do not now nor have I ever had on Atom, and it seems that getting a front license plate mount is more of a hassle than it should be. Here is my opinion: There should be a standardized rule for all 50 states–one plate or two–and cars should come at least with the holes so that you can easily attach a cheap mount. The Scion dealer wants $35 just for the mount, then who knows how much to drill the holes…I am going to try to sweet talk them into putting on my cheap $5 mount from Auto Zone tomorrow…we shall see. For some reason this particular detail of moving has made me more annoyed and upset than it should, and for that, I apologize to Wylie because he has had to deal with it. A couple of naps helped. Also, the memory foam for the bed came yesterday, so sleeping like a baby angel tonight will help too…

Yesterday we tried out the local burrito shop Freebird’s World Burritos. It was pretty tasty…and you can get the hugest burritos that I have ever seen in my life. Wylie got one–but you can get one that is 2x as big as that if you wanted. You can see in the photo that it is really big. Burritos are pretty high on my list of favorite things to eat, so I am happy that there is a place in town creating some for my eating pleasure. Something that I liked about this place was that people made art out of their foil burrito wrappers and put it up all over…and also that even though they have Pepsi products and not Coke, they included Diet Dr. Pepper, so it is not a soda bust, which is something that is important when you are eating burritos.

Then we headed over to Kroger for some grocery shopping…and there was a bird in there. What in the world is going on with all of the birds in TX doing crazy things? Are they just messing with us? It’s very interesting…hmmmm……

Today Wylie is working and I am headed out to get my vehicle inspected so that I can register it in TX. I can’t say that I am thrilled about that, but, as my parents told me yesterday while I was whining, I do like driving on paved, pothole-free roads…so I guess I need to get over it.

The good news: One week untill internship!!!

Friday began our Merlefest adventure. We spent the day avoiding the blaring sun, and listening to some pretty darn good bluegrass. There was plenty of water drinking and lounging in the shade. We also enjoyed some snow cone and funnel cake action. It was my first music festival, and the Blevins sisters first funnel cake and not the Blevins sisters first funnel cake. New things for all me! Friday ended with a performance by Donna the Buffalo, followed by some contra dancing, and then some more Donna the Buffalo at the Donna the Buffalo Dance Party.

Saturday we left for Brevard, NC to visit one of Maria’s old guiding buddies, Tolly. During the drive there was a stop at birdhouse man (unfortunately I did not take photos), some windy roads, some Sonic and some Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me going on, a stop in Asheville at Green Life, some loitering at Ingles in Brevard, and almost some car sickness. Our drive ended in Glenville, NC where we spent the evening with Tolly and Lori. Pizza, cocktails, jam sessions, and campfires by the lake were on the agenda. It was a short visit, but we checked all that off our list before getting back on the road to Asheville on Sunday.

It was a fantastic weekend. It was a good first music festival for me, no sunburn, and no dehydration happened. And it was great meeting Maria, Tolly, and Lori.

Now, enjoy some photos from the weekend.

I’ve been putting together a map of things to do, places to eat and other things of interest in and around College Station/Bryan, Texas. Seems like there is way more to do than I originally thought that there might be.