Me and Steve McQueen

The Barton Creek Greenbelt has been beckoning for a little over a year for Heather and I to come back and take the hike down to Sculpture Falls. We had gone a couple times before with our good friends Amber and Sarah (We’ll be visiting them in South-East Asia this summer if we can wrangle up some duckets).

With the wild outdoors calling and our winter-leaguered & pent up dogs, Moen and Luke, Heather and I decided to use the weekends to walk on dirt instead of treadmills.

Barton Creek Greenbelt and Sculpture Falls.
This is a beautiful hike that can be approached 2 ways. One is from MoPac and 360, and the other from a few miles west off of 360 through a residential area.
Hiking in from MoPac is probably the way to go unless you take supplemental oxygen, as the hike back up to the residential area is about a 10-15% grade for about a quarter of a mile.

The dogs love to cut loose at Sculture Falls. Luke, our Chow/Corgy (Chorgy), goes maniacal! He has two speeds fast and faster, that is until he hits a rock or slips on rocks, for about a second, and then he’s off again.
Moen’s slowed down a bit over the past 2 years, but still enjoys trotting along and getting wet.

We’ve also taken the dogs out to Bull Creek and Lake Georgetown. They were nice in their own right. But Barton Greenbelt such a great hike, and if someone was enterprising enough they could start a Sherpa outfit on the backside of this hike and make a pretty penny!

Here is a great resource for hiking in Austin 

Over a period of three weeks, I have gone through an evolution of thought about the food I put in mine and Heather’s body. Beginning with a most disturbing experience of listening to the Fast Food Nation audiobook and ending with the reading of Kevin Trudeau’s book the Weight Loss Cure. I’ve come to the conclusion that I no longer want to put shit like High Fructose Corn Syrup, refined, bleached and heavily modified foods, and hydrogenated oils (aka trans fats) in my body!

I think it will be hard to do but, I’d really like to switch the majority of our foods to organic. It will definately compound the cost of grocery shopping, but cutting back on our eating out could subsidize that. We currently go out a 2-3 nights per week to Chuy’s or Threadgills, and maybe twice a week we’ll have some kinda of fast food. Although it’s a far cry from when my friends Chris and Tanya would call me McBahia, I’d like to cut that down to nothing right away. Had I heeded their advice a few years back I wouldn’t have to re-lose this 60 lbs.

Stay tuned… I’ll try to speak a bit more about how I plan to lose that 60lbs and how eating organic is hitting the paycheck, and the quality of health. You can also read how McBahia dies.

…A great satirical quote by one of my favorite Actor/Comedians Groucho Marx. Contrary though marriage is great so far!
Yes, we got married on July 15th in a wonderful, small ceremony. It was a great time and here are a couple of photos from the day taken by Heather Van Gaale. The rest of the photos can be viewed at Collages

I saw an interesting article in the Statesman the other day and I realized that I had a much better photo than what they had.

We chose Puerto Rico as our Honeymoon location because it was a cheap airfare and it held a fascination for both of us. The lure of Old San Juan, the Taino culture, the potential for amazing beaches to lay out on, and most definitely food! Oh… and apparently P.R. is the Hawaii of the Atlantic, boasting legendary surf spots (just not while I was there).

Perhaps Heather and I are spoiled from the unique, warm and inviting nature of the people in Thailand. We had a lovely time, but Puerto Rico didn’t quite live up to all we were expecting.

I suppose the trip can be divided into two. The first half was truly amazing. We stayed at the Gallery Inn. The picture to the left is taken there. The Gallery Inn is this old building in San Juan that overlooks the Atlantic Ocean and both of San Juan’s forts. We had an incredible room. We also had an incredible rainstorm that woke us up suddenly when our old shuttered doors were blown open. Earlier that evening we were introduced to one of the worlds most delicious uses of garlic, plantains and butter; Mofongo! I am a huge fan of anything Cuban and Plantains, and this was truly amazing and we both highly recommend it.

The next day we went to one of the forts and explored and played and photographed. Then we headed out of San Juan in the direction of Luquillo on the Northeast tip of P.R. I was quite excited because I heard it had decent surf, and we were going to stay in an apartment in the El Yunque Rainforest.

Some of the highlights were:

• The waterfalls, they were everwhere.
• Sue’s Place. Our apartment, a twenty minute drive up a jungle mountain through small villages and chickens and dogs in the street, when you finally get there you walk on your deck that is surrounded by super dense green jungle and millions of tree frogs, called koqui, that sing to you at night.
• On a whim, Heather and I climbed through the jungle to the very most highest point of Puerto Rico.
• Surfing at La Selva. It was sloppy, mushy and small, but it had been almost two years since I’ve caught a wave. Plus, it was a cool mile long hike through the jungle to get there. (On the hike back I got stung by some kind of flying insect that made my arm swell up and turn red! Cool!)

We stayed in El Yunque for two days and loved it. When we left Luquillo is when our trip turned to the somewhat unpleasant second half. I think it was a combination of wanting to explore a lot of the island in a short time colliding with the slow island life pace of life. The best example was when we went to the Camuy Caves. I was told that it would only take a few hours to do, but it ended up being a four hour wait in line for a 45 minute guided tour. The caves were quite remarkable though, and I’m glad we went.

The restaurant we went to after though was a different story entirely. I won’t say much, other than it took an hour just for us to order.

One thing that shocked both of us is that while the plane flight was somewhat inexpensive, the hotels were at least one hundred dollars. Regardless of where you went, you were looking at dropping a Benjamen.

Our last night, tired from driving, tired from paying exorbitantly for meals, we ended up at a small South Beach style hotel. We figured it was going to be expensive no matter where we went in San Juan so we booked it. Talk about swank! We were offered complimentary room service drinks, and to top off our night we found our way out to the beach deck area the ultra comfy canopy beds in the sand. We cuddled up with each other and looked out to the lights dancing on the San Juan Harbor, drinking our Puerto Rican rum filled drinks and listening to the DJ spin some mellow house tracks and thinking about everything from the past few days and the long plane ride home the next day.

Steve Mcqueen (my X-terra) has not been feeling all that great lately. So one morning after I’ve had a wonderful breakfast of oatmeal-bananna pancakes and organic maple syrup Heather and I took Steve McQueen into the CarMax service center.

We wait… And the morning and the afternoon slowly pass by. And then the call. Shawn Bean from Carmax (yes that is Shawn Bean, not Sean Bean the most awesome supporting bad guy actor ever!) calls and tells me that Steve McQueen is not dead, but Mostly Dead (diagnosed by Miracle Max himself).

The good guys there can restore Steve McQueen. They can make him faster, stronger… But it’ll cost!

Fortunatley I have purchased the extended warranty which ends up saving me $900!!!

Steve McQueen is happy, I’m happy and so’s my wallet.

I usually never get the extended warranty on anything. But i’m starting to think they’re not such a bad idea after this incident…

For many design professionals, home-owners, business-owners, developers and builders it is unfortunate enough that in order to build your project you must go through the rigmarole of the bureaucracy known as COA (City of Austin) more specifically the development department. On top of that there have been many incidents when I have called planners to discuss a project they are managing and I wait for them to return my call. And I wait… And I wait some more… And I leave another message and I rinse and lather again. I have to resort to calling managers to get through to anybody.

Here’s a shocking example… (Read on …)

Austin Architecture is a free for all. The attempts by Architects and designers to create unique, inspiring and evocative designs are full of good intentions, but for the most part entirely Half-baked.

What do I mean? Allow me to take a step back… I used to work with a really great designer named George Campos at Salerno-Livingston in San Diego. He had this term “Potato-Head Architecture”. And what he meant by it was the fascinating (to a child) way in which you could stick the eyes where the legs were to go, or if you thought he should have hands for ears, you could do it at your whim. While critiquing buildings we would use this term to describe Architectural features that plainly did not flow with the themes (if there were any), and stuck-out. Rob Quigley and Eric Owen Moss were a couple Architects we would “pick on”, because their designs were often cacophonous, had little theme and possessed elements that may have been cool at that time in the mind of the designer, but were in the long term rather faddish.
So… in staying with the potato theme that George invented, I set out to pin-down the modern design in Austin. In addition to the elements of “Potato Head Architecture” described above, Austin, I’ve found, is prolific with designs that are just not thought through nor are they fully executed in the building phase. Giving rise to the term Half-Baked which seems to be quite appropriate. (Read on …)

Does any one remember Dean Johnson and Joanne Liebler? Well, as professionals (whether it be Architecture, Construction, etc) I think we can blame just about all the botched and inept jobs on these two people.

If you don’t know the above mentioned names, they were hosts of a the very first “Do It Yourself” or D.I.Y. television program called Home Time. It aired on the TLC or Discovery network. And inspired many homeowners to take out their own hammers and wave them defiantly at those overpriced roofers, tilers and other tradesmen.
Case in point:
I worked with a couple that had decided to be their own General Contractor on an addition to their house. (Read on …)

The Ice Storm of 2007 Shut down the whole city. Here is a picture of Steve McQueen covered in a half an inch of ice!!!