Jamie’s newest words are:

• “Bello” (for Jello)
• and “e-i-e-i-0″ (very clearly enunciated, super cute)

Doc and I got to go out on an actual date last weekend, thanks to the generous babysitting talents of Kathryn and Brett. We intended to go see “Inception,” since we know someone who worked on the movie (and plus it just looks interesting), but our show was sold out when we arrived. Knowing that we had a limited timeframe to be out on the town, we chose another movie that started around the same time, “Dinner for Schmucks.” Not something we had intended to see in the theatre, but it was funny at times and moderately charming, and at this point I am so starved for movies that it almost doesn’t matter what I go see. It was just nice to be out on a date with my wonderful husband.

Beginning July 30, we had 26 days in a row of heat over 100 degrees. The official recorded temperature was 99 on a couple of those days, but it is always hotter at our house than out at the airport where they record the official numbers. Last weekend was just the worst; the analog thermometer on our back patio registered 108 on both days. Thankfully Jamieson has not seemed to want to go outside as much as usual lately. He’ll look out the windows to the patio and say “HOT.” On Sunday afternoon I filled up his wading pool and let him swim for a while. He also ate a couple of big slices of cold watermelon, perfect for a hot day.

Yesterday the  highest temperature I saw all day was 77 degrees (I was so excited that I checked every hour or so). That’s lower than we’ve had most nights this month.

Anyway, I don’t expect it to last, but it has been a very nice break from living on the face of the sun.

I woke up last Thursday morning around 6:30, as usual, snuggled up next to Jamieson in the bed in his room. After a few minutes, he made it clear that neither he nor I were going back to sleep. So I groped around for my glasses, sat up, and opened the curtains…

… to a snow-covered backyard.

Snow!

2.5 inches of it, to be precise.

The most wonderfully magical part about it was that I had no idea it was supposed to snow. Normally I am very diligent about following the weather forecast. I like to know what’s coming. Parenthood has not exactly taken that interest away, but it’s definitely left me with far less time and energy to check in on the weather every day. So when I opened the curtains to an unexpected field of sparkling white, it was quite a thrill!

We all got up and put on our shoes and coats and headed out to the backyard. Jamie wasn’t quite sure what to make of the snow. Last time he experienced it was on Christmas Eve and it didn’t really seem to register at that point.

He spent a little time mucking about and poking at it with his fingers. I had to leave for work soon, so we went inside and had breakfast.

It continued to snow all day long. My office closed at 3:00 because it didn’t seem to be letting up, and people in Texas freak out when there is any kind of winter precipitation, even in the tiniest amount.

The snow continued all afternoon and into the evening. We took Jamie outside for a while and this time, he was pretty excited about it. He stomped around and laughed and sat down and tasted the snow and generally had a great time.

Later in the evening, the snow was still coming down, and it was a really wet heavy snow. The branches of our crape myrtle trees were bowed down almost to the ground, so we went outside and tried to shake off as much snow as we could with a rake to try to prevent them from breaking. Doc did that several more times throughout the night. I think he saved the trees by doing that. There were so many tree branches down all over town by the next morning.

Work was cancelled for me (although I did a lot of work from home during the day) on Friday. The official snowfall total was 12.5 inches, an all-time record for our area, and making this the second snowiest year on record, to date. I measured 11 inches at our house. We were very lucky that we didn’t lose power and that our neighbor’s live oak tree didn’t drop any branches onto our cars parked underneath. Some of our friends had damage to house and cars from branches, and many more were without power for hours or days.

The amount was astounding. I have never seen this much snow in my life outside of a mountaintop.

You can click on any of the photos below to view a slideshow of the photos and video we took.

The weather today is very un-January-like. Right now it’s about 70 degrees. Jamie and I are out on the patio. He’s eating his dinner and we are both enjoying being outdoors.

Storm clouds rolling by. Taken from my iPhone this morning on the way to work.

Once again, the first cold front of the fall season has come through on (or within a few days of) my birthday! I am so very happy. A break from the oppressive summer heat is the best present I could ask for.

On Saturday we got some rain from Hurricane Ike (for those of you wondering: no, we did not have lots of wind, we did not lose power, we did not lose phone service, and we only got about 2″ of rain over 24 hours) and so it was rather wet and humid near the end of last week.

Yesterday was sunny, dry, and rather pleasant, temperature-wise. Today was absolutely amazing. Again, sunny and dry, and the high temperature reached maybe 78 or so. Right now it’s in the mid-60s and we have all the windows in the house open.

Also, the light changed this weekend. It’s taken on that goldeny fall hue, and the blazingly white summer washout light is gone. Somehow it’s easier to see. Things seem prettier.

I had a really nice birthday weekend. Doc took me out Saturday night to a yummy family-style Italian restaurant, and we met some friends there. No wine with my meal, but only 11 more weeks to go on the moratorium (actually I don’t crave wine anymore so it’s much easier these days). We stuffed ourselves and then came back to our house, where we had coffee and cake, good conversation, and played some “Pain” on the PS3. I had a great time with good friends and good food. Maybe that’s the point of life: good friends and good food.

One of my favorite gifts from Doc is a book called “Hello Cupcake.” When it’s our turn to bake cupcakes for our son’s class, they will be the best damn cupcakes ever!

Maybe a boy child won’t really want these particular cupcakes for class, but I think they’re beautiful:

And probably the cutest cupcakes EVER…

We got a lot of rain today. It rained pretty hard and pretty steadily for most of the day. Northwest Highway flooded where it crosses White Rock Creek, as it always does when we get more than a couple hours of precipitation.

It took me almost an hour to get home because they closed the road and diverted everyone. I pulled over and got a couple of photos. Notice the DART bus tipped over about halfway down the road.

In other news, our next-door neighbor was robbed today in broad daylight. They kicked in her front door. Luckily she was not home. The criminals got away with some cash and jewelry. This is the first instance since we’ve lived here of crime on our street, at least according to the crime reports in the neighborhood newsletter. Doc and I are taking measures to beef up our own security — although I think we’re doing fairly well in that area already. It’s unsettling that it happened while Doc was home today. That part really worries me. What if they’d chosen our house instead and busted in on him? What if they had a gun?

(By the way, this does not make me want to go out and get a gun for the protection of my family, in case you were wondering if I was about to get all NRA on you.)

Twice in one week, it snows in Texas. In March. Crazy.

It’s not much, but it’s more than we’ve had all year! The snow has been falling steadily since about 7:30 p.m. I think that the temperature outside is fluctuating because our deck will accumulate a thin layer of snow like in the photo here, and then 10 minutes later it will have mostly melted. Then the snow comes down a little harder and it stays cold enough to accumulate again.

Two days ago, it was 80 degrees. Ah, the “joys” of living in Texas.

December has been an eventful month but I haven’t been posting much. I extend my apologies to my two readers (who perhaps didn’t even notice that I’ve been MIA, or perhaps were waiting with baited breath for my next genius missive).

In early December Doc and I went to Boston so I could go to the Web Design World conference (which turned out to be about 70% fantastic, which is a great ratio for a conference) and spend a couple of days with my brother Bob. We had a great time, in part because it was so cold and snowy. The city was decked out in twinkly colored Christmas lights that looked so pretty with the snowy scenery.

The first day that we spent with Bob, we’d planned to go to the science museum and aquarium but they both closed early because it was snowing. I thought that northerners could still function in the snow, but apparently not! We spent a long afternoon riding the subway around to our various destinations only to find out that they’d already closed down. Then when we got back to the car at the train stop a mile from Bob’s apartment in Somerville, it took us about 90 minutes to get home due to incredible non-moving traffic. We ate pizza for dinner and Bob and Doc played Rock Band for a while.

Luckily Boston has a great snowplow system, so by the next morning the streets were clear enough that we were able to get ourselves down to the aquarium.

I wish we’d had more time to spend with Bob, but we had to leave the next morning. It was a lot of fun, though.

Over Christmas, we visited Doc’s mom and grandmother and great-aunt and brother and sisters and their families in Derby (near Wichita), Kansas. That was a heck of a lot more people than I’m used to being around, but it was a lot of fun nonetheless. Doc’s grandma Rose and great-aunt Pat are in their late 80s but sharp as tacks and very up-to-date on what’s going on in the world. It was great seeing them again, and we plan to come visit more often now that they’re closer to us than they were in Idaho for all those years. All our nieces and nephews (most of whom are in their teens, and there’s about ten or so of them) got into a snowball fight on Christmas day with some of the moms and dads in the backyard. Doc got some great photography of people in mid-throw or mid-being-hit. He avoided getting into the fight until the very end by claiming “hey, don’t hit the guy with the camera, please”… but then threw a snowball at his sister on the way in. Sigh… brothers!

It snowed throughout the midwest the night before we drove to Kansas so by the time we reached the Kansas border everything was pretty well blanketed with snow. The residential streets in Derby hadn’t been cleared and so the driving was a bit iffy. On the way home on the 26th it had started snowing again but we didn’t have any trouble driving this time. We stopped at a restaurant in Arcadia, Oklahoma, called Pops 66. It has really interesting future-modern architecture and 500+ different types of bottled soda. Neato.

For Christmas Doc and I went a little lighter than normal with the gifts, by choice. He gave me some really nice things though, including some balsamic vinegar, bamboo cooking spoons, and this gorgeous Le Creuset cast-iron skillet. I adore it. I can barely lift it, it’s so heavy!! And the enamel is droolworthy bright beautiful red.

I’ve had the whole week of Christmas off, and I don’t go back to work until January 3. This week I’m taking it easy, trying to get a little exercise in, watching movies, hanging out with Doc. Saturday we went to Six Flags with Brittney and Chris. I could only go on two rollercoasters this year; I just didn’t feel up to going on some of the bigger rides. It was really crowded at the park, much moreso than in previous years. Wait times in line for the rides seemed about as long as they are in the summer. We had a nasty dinner experience too: we waited in line at a little kiosk with the “Papa John’s Pizza” label on it, but I can tell you definitively that the pizza was NOT Papa John’s quality. It was some of the nastiest pizza I have had in recent memory. For $7 per slice I would at least expect the cheese to be completely melted, but it wasn’t. I could only eat half of it. I complained at the guest services desk that they were misleading people by putting a brand name label on disgusting sub-par crappy foodservice pizza.

But, that icky food experience got made up for a little while later. We ran across a kiosk run by some grandmotherly type ladies with crockpots who sold baked potatoes, sweet potatoes, roasted corn, cocoa, hot cider, and OMIGOD cinnamon rolls fresh out of the oven with frosting ladled on out of a crockpot. I loves me a grandma with a crockpot of warm icing!!

Tonight is New Year’s Eve and I am perfectly content that we are staying in tonight and maybe watching some movies and ordering pizza. I’m not sure that any of our friends are having parties this year, and we’re not either. We’ve hosted NYE parties in the past, but after hosting Halloween and Thanksgiving and then being out of town so much in December, we just didn’t feel up to it this year.

Happy 2008 to everyone! It’s going to be an exciting year!

Bob digs out his car from underneath 8 inches of fresh powdery snow.

The parking lot behind Bob’s building.

The blue sky against the snow was gorgeous.

A view looking out over the snowy rooftops of Somerville.

We finally made it to the New England Aquarium; we tried to go the day before but it closed early due to snowstorm.

Doc and I went to Boston for a conference (Web Design World, which was really a fantastic conference) and to visit Bob for a few days. Boston is a beautiful city, especially in winter. It’s been really cold and wet and snowy here, and I love it.

The churches in Boston are so beautiful that they almost make me want to actually GO to church!

We took a self portrait on the street.

This is the Christian Science Church.

The Boston Public Library is one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen. This is part of the main entrance hall and stairs.

The library had an exhibit of intricately detailed dioramas.

I love Johnny Cupcakes!! Especially the cupcake-and-crossbones logo.

Me and Doc next to a subway station.

I love wearing my scarf and coat.

Not the Old North Church, but the Old South Church.

A big pile of icy snow.

Today we ate breakfast at a place down the street from Bob, then hopped on the subway to go to the Aquarium and the Science Museum. By the time we started off to the train station, the snow was coming down pretty heavily.

Bob and I at the Aquarium. It had closed 2 hours before we got there, due to heavy snow.

This is the snowstorm that seemed to be shutting down the whole city.

There’s nothing better than waking up to a cold rainy day. (Except the “having to get out from underneath the warm comforter” and the “going to work” parts)