A long weekend

In the last post I said the time was up for our apartment. We have now given back the keys, so we are now several dollars a month better off but we've also lost our handy town-centre crash pad. Never mind.

Here's a couple of pictures by way of a farewell.

Remember the parking garage? They're still building around it! All the retail units and more apartments (I'm guessing) are being finished now. It seems to have taken forever to get this stuff built. We do at least have a coffee shop and a sandwich shop open now, in the already-existing retail units. And the farmers' market is there on Wednesday afternoons now which is actually pretty good. Damn shame these things didn't start up a bit sooner but there you go.



One last look at the kitchen. See how lovely and clean it is!

The guy that inspected the apartment was visibly amazed at the fact it was clean and intact. We have heard horror stories of people punching holes in walls and kicking doors down, so when he saw clean carpets and unmarked walls he was ecstatic. Which doesn't say a lot for the rest of the tenants.

Ah well, we're out of there now. Now all I have to do is tidy the mountain of boxes in our new house...


It was a long weekend due to Labor Day so Alan took the Thursday and Tuesday off last week and we had a nice loooong weekend. We were vaguely planning on maybe going somewhere but that didn't happen in the end.

Saturday was good though. I'd heard of a fly-in within driving distance - let's go!

Off we set to La Grange, about an hour and a half's drive east of us. There we found a very friendly airfield with plenty of visiting aircraft, whose pilots had all come for the monthly barbeque lunch. We naturally partook of this and found it to be some of the best Texas barbeque we've had yet; it was really very good. And then Alan won the raffle, so we came home with a huge brisket which will be feeding us for the next week.


(gratuitous aeroplane pic - more from La Grange here)

The weekend continued on with us doing a few things we'd been putting off, like getting our road tax and other boring things.

Then Mark and Jessica had a barbeque to which they invited us and some other friends, so off we went. We spent a very pleasant afternoon. As we arrived at Mark's house, we were greeted by his local deer population:



There's thirteen of them in that picture. Mark is way out in the country and his deer are a lot less scared than the ones by us. They certainly didn't seem bothered by humans too much anyway.

They also have a window-mounted hummingbird feeder, so I was able to grab a few shots of those. This little guy is a ruby-throated hummingbird, only about 3 inches long:



The next day, we went straight round to Lowe's to buy one of these feeders. We have been getting hummingbirds at our other feeder but this kind brings them right close. Expect more photos in due course...