Longhorn in Paradise

This is the front view of our house...well, actually, an angled view, but it is the front of our house. Notice the basketball goal that fits well with the driveway on a 45 degree angle. This is the backyard as taken from the patio. As you can see, there is a bit of a frog problem in Tulsa, but they seem to be harmless. Croaking is unbearable though. Lots of professional landscaping back here that Kat and I plan on killing shortly unless we can get some professional consulting. When are the Browns coming out again???

So, this is taken from a lying down position on the chair and a half that sits in the corner of the living room. You can see the kitchen, the stairs, the arched entryways. Hard to get a good picture of this room. I will post another one...

In all honesty, I must be doing something wrong, because this is a real pain in the ass putting these pictures in and putting captions on. I have to drag them down from the top each time it uploads a new pic. Sheesh. Anyway, this pic gives a little bit better view..you can see the little breakfast area...unfortunately, my mom and daughter are in the pic, but I don't have photoshop to get rid of them. Just imagine this pic without them and you can see what the room looks like. ;-)

We didn't take any pics of the other rooms because it is really none of your damn business what our private rooms look like. Get your minds out of the gutters! Front, back and family room is all you need to get a feel for what the house is like. Hope you enjoyed. Now, read on to see pics of the kids over the holiday weekend living it up with Grandma Kate!

Much love to all!! jak

Hagen heading off to work. He is tired of being home with Liska all the time and decided it was time to start a career.

So, how do I even begin to describe the events of Wednesday, May 23, 2007? A group of coworkers and I decided that we needed to branch out a little bit. Work, workout, eat, drink, sleep was getting us into a bit of a rut. Not an awful rut, but a rut nonetheless. We are all fairly big music fans, so we decided a couple weeks ago to start looking into what bands were passing through the D.C. area in the near future. We saw that Keane was coming through, but it was sold out...Deftones...same thing. John Mayer and Ben Folds are coming in July, but we didn't want to wait that long. There were many other bands that we had not heard of before, but we were retiscent to go to one of those shows and be disappointed. So, the search went on....

Last week, as I often do, I picked up a copy of the Onion. Until this gig in Washington, I had only read the Onion online, but in D.C. they have the actual print version in boxes around the city. I was looking through it on the flight back from D.C. and I noticed that they had a listing of live shows over the next week. Kind of like LA Weekly or Austin Chronicle or Houston Press would. One of the shows was on Wednesday at a venue called the 9:30 Club. The name of the venue was interesting/funny because our team has a "9:30 Club" in that we meet in the hotel bar at 9:30 to have a few drinks, work on the daily crossword and have Sudoku races between myself and another of my colleagues (note that she has two grad degrees from MIT and I have won more than I have lost). :-) Yes, we are a fairly nerdy group, but it is a good way to wind down the evening. Anywho, so, the show on Wednesday was a group called the John Butler Trio (JBT). It sounded fairly familiar, but I had not heard any of their songs. The description said "For listeners of Dave Matthews and Ben Harper looking to modernize their musical selections, Butler's instrumentally diverse pop should provoke the same fanatical following". Sounded good to me! I sent a note out to the team and all agreed we should check it out.

So, after a dinner of Mei Wah goodness (the chinese restaurant across from our hotel), we hopped in a cab and headed to the 9:30 Club on the other side of town. GREAT venue. It was definitely made for one purpose...live music. A warehouse feel with a balcony, great stage, bars around the entire perimeter. Very cool. The opening act was Kaki King. A one woman show...she played a mean guitar and also played the drums...both with a supporting cast of pre-recorded music. As my coworker Brian said "now all she needs is a couple friends". One of a few classic lines uttered that night.

About 10ish (we are still wondering why they call it the 9:30 club), JBT took the stage. They opened with a song called Daniela. Cool harmonica-filled open, heavy drums and guitar, fast paced lyrics to get the crowd bumpin. We knew at that point that we were in for a treat. Each successive song led to more mouth gaping stares...our entire group was awe struck. The drummer, all 7 feet of him, was ridiculous. Butler was a master on guitar and the bassist went from bass guitar to strumming a stand up bass to using a bow on the stand up. It was one of those moments, one of those life experiences that you knew would stay with you for a long time. To a person, each one of us talked about how lucky we felt to have witnessed this show. How we were quite certain that the days of playing small venues was nearly over for this talented trio. This would be something we bragged about 10 years from now when JBT was a household name. I am going to attach a link to my next post so you can see a snippet of what we saw. But, I can't imagine I could find anything on YouTube or elsewhere that would do them justice. I will try though.

OK. My mom has arrived for the memorial day weekend...so, I am cutting this short. Hope you enjoyed it. Have a fun and SAFE weekend!

Much love to all!

jak

does anyone remember that hit song from last year "These are the sounds of the barnyard animals" ? If anyone has any video or audio of that song, I will post it here for all to enjoy.

After Hagen's party on Saturday, I was vacuuming up the remnants of chips, etc from the ground and the entire time, Hagen was giving me this "Hey! I was going to eat that!" look. Pretty funny.

You know those "EASY" buttons from Staples? I got an idea that I could use one of those to entice Liska to be a first time listener both to us and to her body...she does something good and she can go hit the button and hear the dude say "that was easy"...I told her about the idea and there has been some improvement...but everytime she does something good, she says "where's the button?"...I guess I should actually follow through on it. Yes, I know, it is genius.

I was wondering the other day if it would be appropriate to refer to a woman who is proud of her chestal region as "jugular vain"?

I need to get a recording of Liska singing "I'm sitting to the left..Hagen's sitting to the right" up on this blog because it would be a crime not to share the cuteness of it with the world.

Hagen has been going around with his new Cars camera saying "Chee" for the past two days...not sure if he is trying to say cheese or if he is calling our attention to the natural energy of the universe. Either way, it is cute.

We have now had two neighbors introduce themselves. I am counting down the number of days it takes 6 families to introduce themselves to us...it took about 2 hours in Valencia.

OK...thought I would do a Larry King style blog tonight...gotta get some Zs...big day tomorrow. Heading back to D.C. for a couple of long weeks.

Peace out and much love to all.