Bye Texas, Hello Alabama
It was a hard decision to make, leaving family, friends, and home for a promising new job in a city 600+ miles away. The job was exactly the type of work I want to be doing. It’s new, challenging, and cutting-edge. The town is certainly smaller, about twice the size/population of Lubbock. We miss visiting family on a regular basis, our favorite restaurants, and our comfortable home. We moved into an apartment close to where I work and once the house sells we will look into buying a house in Madison. A few of the restaurants we desperately miss are Pot Belly’s, Free Birds, Genghis Grill, and a number of Tex-Mex places. We’ve tried about five Mexican food places and only two of them were good. A few of the things I’ve learned so far are:
1. They don’t serve hot sauce and chips, they serve salsa and chips.
2. Use any available bottled hot sauce to mix into the salsa.
3. Mexican food and Tex-Mex isn’t the same thing (pay attention to what they say they serve).
4. A buffet of Mexican food is just gross.
First Geocache Find
Alexis and I found or first geocache on New Years Day, which was only a half a mile away. The hiding spot was near a park surrounded mostly by trees with a bridge across a babbling brook. The GPS receiver led us to the approximate location near a steep drop off to the brook. There wasn’t much cover from possible onlookers as the leafs had all fallen from the trees, but luckily no one was around. I told Alexis that we should consider passing this one up after I slipped in the leafs and nearly fell on my butt. She decided to take one last look near the edge of the drop off which is when she noticed it on a bit of an incline. It was a pill bottle with rolled up paper which listed the previous people to find it.
The next day we went with Tyler and Max to the Cottonwood Creek trail in Allen where we found five geocaches. Each one was just off the trail in the brush and a couple we returned to after not finding them the first time. It took us roughly an hour and a half to find them.
Alexis is keeping a journal/scrap book and I’m updating the online logs to document our little adventures. We created a team name for ourselves because it seemed appropriate and we needed a user name for the website so that we could claim our finds. We settled on the name “Hat Tricksters”. To keep track of us you can go to the profile page on Geocaching.com by clicking on the link below.
At Home Vacation
This Labor Day I took some vacation time. Alexis and I went to see a couple of movies, caught a couple of fish at lake Lavon, worked a bit on the shower, and went to a FC Dallas soccer game.
The two movies we went to see were Gamer and 9. Gamer was not a good movie at all. The concept of controlling someone remotely in combat as if one were playing a game was interesting, but wasn’t explored completely. There wasn’t much of a friendship between the player and the guy pulling the trigger. 9 was a good movie although it lacked a decent ending and the characters were a bit shallow. I liked the fight sequence with the flying bird-like machine. It involved several of the 9 and put more of them at peril, requiring them all to work together. The best line of the movie was also said at the conclusion of the fight, “You owe me a cape.”
The FC Dallas soccer/futbol game was quite a lot of fun. The game was against DC United. I don’t know who was favored to win, but Dallas seemed to be the better team through out the game. Professional soccer is usually mired in dives, where the player falls to get the ref to call a foul. When a foul is called the team gets a free kick, which is a chance to perform a set play or shot on goal. During this game, it seemed like the ref was biased, calling several fouls on Dallas. One of DC United’s goals came after a free kick and the other was from a penalty kick. The penalty kick was awarded after what appeared to be a dive, but the ref saw it differently. The game ended with a 2-2 tie. It would have been nice to have a shoot out as there wasn’t much closure. The overall experience such as parking, traffic, seating, half-time, and atmosphere were all good. We will definitely go to another game.