Riding the rails

For an upcoming story for the paper, I took Julian on Austin's new MetroRail commuter train. It was free this first week, so everyone and their mom was riding, too. (Literally. There were way more kids and parents on the train than I expected.)

Julian is obsessed with all things transportation, so he was thrilled to ride the train up to Highland Mall. There are tons of problems with the train (no weekend or midday service, no benches at the stations), which I'll cover in the story, but all-in-all, we had a great time. Plus he got to play with one of these cardboard MetroRails while we had to wait for another train. (The first one of the afternoon leaving downtown was full 15 minutes before it was scheduled to leave the station.)

Taking an artist's date at the Modern Museum of Art in Fort Worth

A few weeks ago, we took a weekend trip to see Ian's brother and his family in Fort Worth.

The 3.5 hour drive up I-35 is enough to keep us from going up there very often, even though there are a ton of fun things to do in the DFW area.

But every time we go up there, I promise I'm going to go to one of Fort Worth's incredible museums, and I've never booked the time to do it until this trip.

So on a rainy Sunday morning, a day after we took both families to the Forth Worth Zoo, I drove my happy little self to the Modern, which is considered to be one of the best modern art museums in the country. I relate to contemporary and modern art far more than traditional art forms, so you can imagine my delight when I showed up to the museum to see signs advertising a Warhol exhibit.

Before I'd even walked in the door, I knew the effort to take an artist's date with myself had paid off.

The Warhol exhibit was fine and dandy, but nothing compared to the museum's permanent collection. The building itself is striking, a design from Japanese architect Tadao Ando that was complete in the early 2000s. The glass-encased building is surrounded by water that during my entire visit was beautifully speckled with rain.

The most memorable piece was a set of 32 photos by Nicholas Nixon called "The Brown Sisters." Each year for the past three decades, Nixon has photographed his wife and her three sisters standing side-by-side, their stoic, determined gazes saying as much as their journal entries from the same period of time.

Here's what I wrote in my own journal while captivated by the images:

Four sisters, from young girls who've just lost their innocence to wrinkled, wise women. They grow determined over the years, holding each other, rarely looking at one other, but always connected together in some way. Their clothes change, but more so, the style that comes to identify them. How one always changes her hair and the wily-haired one doesn't, not even once (However, it does gets more unruly by the year.). You see none of them with child (or at least not visibly), but it's as if you can see the husbands and the children come and go, and through it all — the jobs, the houses, the triumphs, the losses, the once-trendy jackets, blouses and accessories — they have each other.

Here's an image of all the pictures, but I haven't been able to find a gallery where you can flip through them to get the same frame-by-frame journey as seeing the piece in real life. Nixon, by the way, is still photographing the women once a year.

Happy birthday. Have some staples.

So many words, so few I can manage to type here. Sorry, dear readers, for leaving you hanging for so long.

Just a few days after Julian's third birthday, he fell off the couch and gashed his head open. Had to get two staples. The first such minor emergency for us, and I'm happy the first is over. He was a trooper, but it was hard on everyone. He got the staples out and had his yearly well-check, which went well. He's healthy and growing just like he should. We are so blessed.

As usual, he's on fire, telling jokes, coming up with crazy questions and exploring the world of Hot Wheels. (He recently got a Hot Wheels collector book with hundreds and hundreds of car pictures. He's as happy as a pig in slop.)

A few cute things he's said lately:

"I'm a big boy. I can teach anyone anything."

"The snow is so beautiful! It is beautiful to my heart and to life and to earth. Life comes to the earth!"

Today, we made flapjacks with blueberry syrup, which he was just delighted to help with and — surprisingly — eat. (He's your typically picky kid these days.)

I have some pictures on my camera that I'll download and hopefully post soon. Thanks for understanding how nuts life with a young kid and a more than full time job is. Blogging about me and the family has just taken a place on the backburner lately. :/

30 days of cable

It's been more than two years since my family made the decision to kill cable.

It was mostly a financial decision, but one that went hand-in-hand with our overall dismay at what we saw and how it affected our lives. We soaked up such life-enriching shows as "Myth Busters," "Gene Simmons Family Jewels," "Project Runway," "Survivorman" and "Little People, Big World" in the days before we called up Time Warner and told them we were done spending $65 a month on noise that was taking up valuable space in our home and in our heads.

We made it through the (delayed) conversion to digital last year with our $7-post-rebate box, which unlocked the world of Create and KLRUQ, two additional PBS stations that many cable subscribers don't have access to, and if they do, are buried under a mile-high stack of sexier stations.

Ten channels suited us just fine. There was always something interesting on at night, usually "History Detectives" or "American Masters." Julian had "Super Why" and "Dinosaur Train" that kept engaged him over breakfast in the morning.

Sure, we watched "American Idol" and "Seinfeld" reruns, and we even had to *gasp* find something else to do during the commercials besides fast forwarding through them. (We could do without 90 percent of traditional primetime programming, however. You can keep "24" and "The Mentalist" all to yourself.)

But last December, we embarked on a little 30-day vacation to cable land. When setting up my iPhone at the you-know-what store, we found out we could switch our land line and Internet from Time Warner and save the exact same amount that having my iPhone would increase my cell phone bill.

They threw in the all-too-tempting promotions ($400 in all), if we signed up for their cable. Free install and all.

I'm a sucker for a deal.

A week later, a nice guy showed up to hook it up, and a few hours later, he and Ian were making playdate plans for their boys. (Most of you know this, but my husband is what you might call friendly.)

And with the flip of a switch, cable was back.

"Only for 30 days, right?" I asked Ian. "That's it," he replied.

I'd toyed around with the idea of blogging every day of these 30 days, but — if you can believe it — I never found the time. Probably had something to do with the blaring noise and pretty pictures I found my attention glued to.

There's something slightly more sticky about cable television verses the stuff you get over the air. (Insert reference to staring at a car crash here.) There's a psychological reason that sex and celebrity sell, and cable companies will always create the content based on ratings, so I have zero hope that the (de)escalating will ever cease. ("Who are these Kardashians?" Ian asks an equally clueless me. "Are they heirs to a hotel chain?")

I also know that the number of channels will continue to grow. Seriously, who needs 850 of anything, much less cable channels?

Could you imagine if every single night, you ate at an all-you-can-eat restaurant that had 850 dishes of every ethnic and distinct flavor? Some nights, you spend 3 hours just looking over the menu only to end up on an episode of "Man V. Wild" that you're sure you've seen before.

So, we've been feasting on television's Golden Corral for almost a month, and I am quite literally counting the days until we can call The Company and kill this squawk box that's eating up a tranquility — which included a healthy relationship with television — we once enjoyed.

Of course, Julian loved being able to watch "Yo Gabba Gabba" whenever he wanted, and we got a kick out of "Ru Paul's Drag Race." I got to catch up on a bunch of "Project Runway" I missed over the past few years, and Jaime and what's-his-face are still blowing up stuff on "MythBusters." Bear Grylls is still, well, you know exactly what he is, drinking his own piss and all.

But the disquiet is unsettling. Even when the television is off, the pull to turn it on is so much stronger than when you only have 10 channels to choose from. Books, magazines, cooking, playtime, even movies are more attractive when "Desperate Housewives" or "20/20" are the best options on the tube.

It saddens me most is that when we go cable-less again in a few days, we'll be getting back to a "normal" that is foreign to most American households. A normal where NickJr does not exist. A normal where Rachel Maddow is someone you read about on Twitter. A normal where Rick Steves is the Travel Channel, and Christopher Kimball is Alton Brown.

A normal where our emotional energy, our well from which we water each other and ourselves, isn't sucked dry by the massive elephant — whose weight is at least a quarter advertising — that is the world of cable television.

I'm still not going to know who the Kardashians are or what witty observation Tony Bourdain most recently made, but I think I'll survive.

Snapshots from the turn of the decade

Just after Christmas, I took the picture above. My red phone, which would soon be replaced with an iPhone (see below). Second-hand guitar books my dad bought my mom. His reading glasses, my keys, lens cap and sparkling black shoes. Julian's plastic snake.


That day, we went out to Uncle Tom's house for a bonfire, but nothing warms my heart like seeing three of the most important people in my life making music together. My mom, at 55, has become serious about her guitar practice. Every day, like meditation, she plays. She and my dad play well-known songs that marked the early days of their marriage, but when they are with Ian, they just jam. Feeling the song instead of reading it from sheets of paper.

Maybe they should start a band. The Bonfire Bandits?

I love the cedars at Tom's house. Live oaks are generally considered the superior Central Texas tree (I've been hearing about "those invasive cedars" since I was a kid visiting his house.), but the cedars at his house have been thinned so that are now taller and more like trees instead of large bushes. But he still has to thin them out every few years. Last summer, he and Scott did a bunch of work on the yard, leaving beautifully shaped stumps like this behind.

(P.S. I uploaded about 25 more Christmas photos to the holiday gallery. Over on Relish Austin, I posted this blog post about all the food-related fun we had in December, including a New Year's paella party.)

Fast forward to the first few weeks of the new year and the new decade. Now I have this miniature computer — thanks to Ian and his mom — on which I can look up recipes, directions, weather, news, Twitter, Facebook and take and share photos. (I hope to use it in the future to update this blog. My apologies ahead of time for the decreased quality in photography for posts on the run.)

Already 2010 is off to a roaring start. It's going to be a big year in so many ways.

A virtual holiday card from the Knox-Broyles family

God bless technology. I wasn't able to send out Christmas cards this year, but with the help of animoto.com, I made this video, which will give you a pretty good idea of what we've been up to this year.


Hope you all have had a wonderful holiday season!

The merriest of Christmases

We're having a blast with everyone in Austin. GaGa and my sister and her husband are in Missouri, stuck in one of the whitest Christmases in recent memory. It will be their memory, not mine, because on this sunny day, we are headed to Uncle Tom's house, where I'll hoping shoot more photos to add to this Flickr gallery.

In this set of photos, you'll see more of Ian-turned-Santa, the Statesman's Cookie Swap party that I organized, as well as our Hanukkah/Christmas/solstice/birthday party last week, where I fried latkes for everyone and our friend Jodi led a menorah lighting.

Hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season! Enjoy the snow for me, if you have it. It's been far too long since I've been surrounded by a peaceful winter wonderland.

Making gingerbread cookies for Santa with YaYa

Julian and YaYa set out to make a gingerbread house today, but it quickly turned into gingerbread cookies instead (thanks, partially incomplete Whole Paycheck Gingerhaus Chalet directions!).



We put the finishing touch — red, er pink, and green icing piped from plastic bags — tonight after Christmas dinner with my dad's family.






Santa will be getting these gems, which, if you ask me, are elegant enough for a Martha Stewart cookbook.

Too bad Julian ate all that icing! Santa could be stopping by any minute and he's not going to bed any time soon. I guess we'll manage.

Merry Christmas!

Who is this adorable Santa Claus...

...and why do I want to give him a big kiss on the lips?



It's really too bad Ian had to miss LaLa's annual Christmas party for the kids. He would have liked this jolly fellow. :)

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Update: It appears Santa even made a stop by our house earlier this week.

Keeping bees

Beekeeping holds a special place in my heart because my great uncle Lee was a beekeeper. I never got to suit up with him, but last month, I got to don a suit and go with Konrad Bouffard, who runs Round Rock Honey.



I shot the above video and a bunch of cool pictures, which you can flip through in this gallery on Austin360.