Last weekend

Kira and Abbi were running around the central square at Market Street (shopping center in The Woodlands) last weekend -- perfect background for some great photos!

Bare trees reveal stuff!

Once the leaves are gone (or mostly gone), birds' nests appear. They are surely abandoned by now, but while there were lots of leaves on this tree during spring and summer, I never noticed this. Next spring and summer, I'll have to keep watch!

Fall color

Finally, this year I have a bit of fall color in my back yard. An oak tree whose leaves simply turned brown last fall and hung on all winter now has reddish leaves; an elm that simply dropped all its leaves (all brown, of course) now has yellowish leaves; and some junipers with tiny leaves now also has tiny red berries. Must be the more consistent water they've received over spring and summer. I don't know what else to atribute it all to! But I do love it all.

Fall band photos

Here are the formal photos of the Hildebrandt Honor Band and Austen's solo photo. I think there will be more taken in the spring -- maybe of orchestra, too, by then.

In the whole-band photo, Austen is in the first row of students standing on the bleachers; he's fourth from the left. (The band director is standing to the left of the students, but he's not on the bleachers!)

Austen, of course, hates these clothes -- but then he is 14 and wants to wear shorts and T-shirts all the time! But he sure looks great in these formal threads!!

Recovery!

It's taken all week to get this computer back together. Ken ran the recovery CD which essentially wiped out everything on the hard drive and reinstalled Windows. Then of course, Windows had to update itself umpteen times -- and one nice result is the installation of IE7. I like the tabbed browsing feature best of all!

Then Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday were spent getting all the programs re-installed --the ones I care about, that is. I also was praying that all the data backed up on my Seagate external drive would work -- and it all did. Hooray!

Of course, help from the kitten-cats was expected, and they didn't let me down!



I'm sure happy to have everything back ... and cannot thank Ken enough for his patience and know-how.

Bummer!

On Monday, this computer crashed -- completely. Ken got it all working again by using the recovery CD (the only option since the hard drive was totally unaccessible). So I've spent the past two days putting on programs and restoring data from my back-up drive. I found out today that my last back-up was on October 24. Memo to self: Back up more frequently!!

I lost some cute pictures and one movie that didn't get uploaded to YouTube. So I'll start over today. I got a couple that may be worth posting -- how the kitten-cats were "helping" me while I've been restoring stuff on this computer!! LOL =)

One boy's Halloween haul!

Here's Austen's computer desk with his trick-or-treating haul spread out all over -- the better to pick out exactly the candy he's looking for, you know! I'm hoping all this stuff (and its trash) will disappear in the next day or so.

My re-done back yard

Here's my re-done back yard with almost half of the flagstone gone and with more lawn in its place. Now the flagstone patio is more or less in the middle of the back yard with lawn right and left and plants and trees north and south. I put the table and chairs off-center so that I can eventually get a nice lounge chair plus table and umbrella for the other side.

If you want to see the yard when it was first done, with more than half of the back yard in flagstone patio, click here.

Linehan yard

Anne and Ken's back yard is about 80% done -- the 20% not done is reserved for the future pool, whenever that is.

Meantime, between the grass and the flagstone patio, life in the back yard just improved about 1000%. Now if only all those mosquitoes from our recent rains would just die off!

On Halloween

Here are Austen and some friends just before they left the house for trick-or-treating! They were dressed as "emos" -- the emotional ones! As opposed to goths or socs or geeks or whatever is around intermediate and high schools these days. They had a great time, and they even spent their first hour herding Kira and Parker around, too!! Good kids!