Texas for swimming....and Eatin !!

Great time at the University of Texas for Laura and Emily's swim meet.  This is the sectionals

Yes, thats right we were there for swimming, but the food was first in the minds of the gals.  Somehow we ended up at this weird donut shop called Voodoo donuts..Leave it to Laura to find such a place.  Ya see, the tables were all lined with obituaries, how morbid.  I guess everyone raved about how great the donuts were, as you can see they all look a little weird.  I had the banana fritter.  We come from a donut mecca so everything else is a disappointment i suppose.  

     One of the days we ended up doing the touristy thing and taking a horse drawn carriage around the streets of  Austin.  That was really neat.  The downtown in Austin was very nice and we even found a hat store where i could go in and buy myself a nice old cowboy hat.  yeeee haw.  laura and emily both got hats and shirts for themselves and for the little ones at home too.

and then there was some great eating at Stubbs Barbecue restaurant.  Lyn noticed the place because her father used to buy this Barbecue sauce and she said we should give it a look.  It was in a questionable area but my oh my was it some good food.  They had some types of people that you would expect to find in a rowdy Texas bar on a Saturday night but the ribs were finger licking good....yeeee hawww!!!

We went into the hills (well, closest thing to the hills they have) of Austin.  Thats where the upper class lives.  They has some really nice houses up there.

    

     And what is a trip to Texas if you dont go to the In-n-out burger.  I'd never heard of it but i guess its a bucket list kind of place for kids nowadays

Now this place....eeeee doggie was is good.  Rich had told us about going to the Salt Lick Barbecue place and after driving a little off the beaten path, well, quite a bit.. we pulled up into an area that was packed with cars and people.....It was out of the blue and the place had an hour and a half wait.  Alot of people travel quite a distance to get here and it was surely worth it.  I"d be fixing to go back next time i'm in these parts..yeee hawwwas

There is quite a lovely state house i reckon

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Guess where we went today

     Ohhhh, how nice is it that when i ask them if they want to go to Black Gordon they both excitedly jump in the car and say lets go!!!  So we piled up with snow all aroud us and brought the football and thew it around and they happily posed in front of our old friend.

     Jack was trying to be cool with his one handed catch.  Of course he is very cool!!!

    Smiles all around in the Train that doesn't move.  Ring that bell and yell 'fares please'

Meet weekend

 Catherine had her gymnastics meet on Friday in Boston.....I just love watching her compete...she is so confident....and she has so much fun with her teamates!!!

      On Friday, Saturday and Sunday Laura had the New England Age groups in Worcester.  Its so tough on the swimmers because once you qualify for the Age groups(which is no easy task, but more on that later), you race in different events.  If you finish in the top of the event, you then have to come back at night for finals and race all over again in that event.  Laura reached the finals on all three nights......

     After Sunday nights finals she wanted to go to Moe's for some grub.  I've never gone there before so i had to overeat and try it out.....wow, it was good!!!

First Responders night at the Bruins !!!

It was first Responders night at the Garden.  Catherine was supposed to go with me, mostly because she is always complaining that she doesnt get to go to the Bruins.  But she has a gymnastics meet on Friday so she says she needs all the practice she can get so she let Jimmy go in her place.  She also told him that she wants to go to the Red Sox anyway.

 That look on young James' face was on purpose.  The little stinker!!  We got the seats in the balcony and we were high up but the seats were awesome.  We could see the whole ice great.  Jimmy says that he went a couple of weeks ago and had seats in the first couple of rows and he said he couldnt see the whole ice to see what was going on.  I actually prefer to sit way up where we were sitting.
Of course we took the trolley in and the whole commute to and from was actually seamless.  The game was great, the crowd was lively and the food was good also.  The Bruins won in overtime to finish it off....We had a really good time!!!

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February vacation

      What a great vacation for the kids this week.  Its times like these great times are what we were hoping for when we bought this place.  How relaxing it was!!!  Kara brought them up on Wednesday and Lyn and I found our way up there on Friday because Kara had to leave.  Poor Jimmy didn't come up because he had some friend things to do...I bet he missed us.  He got to stay with Ant Jo.  All things considered it was a tremendous success.  We went out to eat almost every night.

 ...Of course we made a trip to the Country Store.  Love the picture of the old man and his son 

       Umple Eddie doesnt like being a passenger so I got him a new grip for the steering wheel when he drives the minivan....Its so fuzzy!!  We stopped in a boot store on the way to the ski slope...They had a great sale so the ump and I both bought a pair of boots and I got a fuzzy steering wheel too....

      The kids made these chairs in the snow during the week for their comfort.  I sat in one of them

     Lyn buckling up the umple for the slopes

      The girls gave me a face mask.  It wasnt the peel away type so it wasnt so easy to take off!!!This screen shot is from my facebook live...It got ugly!!  It was real fun because we got to dance and sing a bit.  Well, it was my version of dancing...If I figure out how to download the video onto a file i'll download it here...

      Homemade chairs in the yard...Alice joined us this week and she was perfect.  She was so much fun to be around.  She handled Jack just like a Blatham!!!  She is such a nice kid and a great friend to Laura.  She had come here this past summer when she helped break into the house using her height to get into the second floor window.

      Umple Eddie got a face mask too...only they gave him the peel away type....it was a set up

      Relax kids, dont get up, I'll get it!!  No, they had a relaxing time this week.  We went snow tubing on Gunstock.  That place was really awesome.  I've never been there but I guarantee that we'll be back again.  It took a little over a half hour to get to and its so easy to move around there..not too congested, especially for a vacation week.

      Waiting in line for the roller coaster...yes, they had a whip around roller coaster at Gunstock.  There was a tubing hill and a roller coaster.  The roller coaster we a miniature version but I still dont like roller coasters.  This one let you control the speed so I got to go wimpy.

A couple of scary monsters!! Betcha their masks were peel away!!!

This is the facebook video url for the face mask.  Just copy and paste it and away you go

https://www.facebook.com/julian.lavares.10/videos/10215939488746503/?t=164

The lake is frozen

Jimmy at the States for track

W0W, did he look fast here.  This is his first year  doing track, but he really loves it.  He likes the kids on the team and the coach.  I don't think he wants to do baseball anymore so he'll just doing spring track.  Thats really cool how he took to it. 

Arcade day with Jackie

      I had promised Jack that we would go to an arcade soon.  He was supposed to go to a party with a schoolmate but they had changed the time so he couldn't go.  I figured this was a perfect time to head out to arcade.  I'm usually not a big arcade guy but this time we had a blast!!!  We moved from one game to another.  As Jack says it, we went and played games that were for fun rather than for tickets.  He was still able to get himself a booty of tickets..

     We started out on the bowling area where Jack was unintentionally slamming the ball to the ground on his way to  getting pins.  This kid just kept trash talking me the whole time.  As time went on we went from the basketball game to driving games to mole power games, where he would smash the mole and get a bunch of tickets based on his strength.  Then there was the Deal or no Deal game.  That was kind of funny because the lady that had played right before us was an adult lady and I think she had played like five or six games in a row before us.  She got a little too excited to win 100 tickets.

Sooooo then we finished after a couple of hours.  It was fun having the alone time with the little buggah.  So we still had to figure out what to do with the tickets. 

     We got up the counter and the kids counted out our tickets to find out what great prizes we could get for the 245 tickets we had amassed.  We were able to get a train whistle, some really hard  candy and yes, a whoopie cushion.sooooooo we get home after playing the train whistle for most of the ride home.  I sit down on the recliner and Jackie says that he had left something on the recliner that i was sitting on.  This was not a rare occurrence so i thought nothing of it.  Totally and completely out of the blue, I fell for it!!  I normally consider myself a little more Jackie savvy than this...but while I was not paying attention he had slipped a full whoopie cushion under me and I fell for it, hook, line and sinker!!!  I found this so funny because i hadn't been caught on the wrong end of a whoppie cushion in years!!  I was quite proud he was able to pull it off.  I couldnt believe it when it happened, that I had fallen for it.....Bravoooo little one!!!

Riding on the Animal Car....you would do it too..admit it!!!

Okay, picture you walking through the mall, maybe with someone else your own age.  You walk by these motorized animals and you see kids riding on them.  The first thing that goes through your mind is "geez, that looks so cool, I wish I could do that...but it would be too embarrassing...I'm too old for that....Well, that is exactly why you bring children with you.  They are, and have been, a walking and talking excuse to act like a child all these years.  These little motorized Teddy Bears spoke to me.  Thank goodness for Catherine. 
We had to go to the mall to get some chocolates at Lindt for work and Jimmy was more than happy to drive me and Catherine came along for the ride.  Catherine is always up for an adventure.  Jimmy went to school with the girl that was working the kiosk so he wouldn't be coerced.  Though I dont think he'd really care now that I think about it.  He was just too mature for this ride....some of us arent!!