Things seen (or not) from my window

I'll start last Friday, when I went down to San Marcos airfield to practise some photography techniques at the CAF hangar which is filled with lovely aeroplanes. It's about time I got an aircraft picture into this blog, so here's a shiny T-33 for you:


There's plenty more photos here.

Friday night, we had been invited to Michele and Ferdinand's house for tea. Michele is our relocation contact in Austin and she was instrumental in helping us find a place to live and getting us settled. She called me up the other day and asked if we'd like to come for dinner, nothing fancy, just to have a bite to eat and meet her neighbours who were also coming. So we arrive, and discover that (a) Michele loves Christmas, (b) Michele loves to entertain, and (c) she had prepared the most huge and sumptious holiday meal for us all to span Christmas, New Year and general festivities, with all the trimmings! You know when you see American homes in films, all done up with decorations? Hollywood has a lot to learn from Michele, the house looked like a million dollars, she had done it so nicely. The meal was excellent, she served perfectly cooked roast beef. We had a very nice evening indeed.

On Saturday, we visited Independence Brewery here in town for their monthly brewery tour. Yum! We only found out the night before that they hold these tours. You turn up and they give you three tickets each, and you can exchange a ticket for a pint of their finest ale. They make four fine ales, which it was our duty to sample, naturally. I had an Independence Pale Ale and a Bootlegger Brown. Yum again :-)

This week has been fairly quiet as per usual. The builders have been getting on with their parking lot, which is getting ever bigger:



There is a comet in the sky at the moment, Comet Mcnaught, the brightest one in 30 years. I tried to see it last night but all I got were clouds, clouds, more clouds, tantalising gaps followed by CLOUDS. Damn. It's to rain the next couple of days so I probably won't get to see this comet which is a great shame as the pictures I've seen on the net look fabulous. Here's some.

Here's a not-comet, the closest I got:



Gratuitous sunset picture:



Gratuitous sunset & towers picture with added clouds (can you see a theme here?):



So I gave up after a huge cloud bank moved in, obscuring the exact portion of sky the comet was in and went to the pub. It was a Ginger Man night, followed by pizza, with the guys from Alan's work. Always a good session.

This morning, at breakfast we noticed a big fire a few blocks away. Difficult to judge how far but the amount of sirens howling around and the reflection off the clouds suggests it was a big one. Nobody was hurt, according to the local news. Another news report tells us the fire took 20 fire trucks and 57 firemen to put it out.



I discovered today that the East Anglian Air Ambulance has actually used some of the pictures I gave them last year in their 2007 calendar. While I haven't seen it yet (they're sending me a copy), if you need a calendar and want to support a good cause, go here and buy one.

We're out on Friday, going to see a Pink Floyd and Laser Spectacular event, not quite sure what this is going to entail but it should be entertaining. It's also a holiday weekend, we get Martin Luther King day on Monday so Alan has the day off :-)