A (pre) Christmas Miracle!

Hiya, toots!

This summer in central Texas has so far been seasonal from the before-times of the late 2010s. It is just now consistently getting into the 100s during the day, whereas last year that started in May. We were saved from like 10 weeks of the blistering heat of the recent past, and I appreciate it!

We've had enough rain in the general are that the lake is 8 feet up (though it's still just under 40 feet low) in the past 2 weeks. 

Mal and I have been taking advantage of our PogoPass, glad that we paid for those before James got laid off. 

Last Sunday, Mal's friend was out of town so instead of meeting him like we always do, we went to Typhoon Texas. It was raining when we arrived, and there weren't a lot of people there. We were able to have the place practically to ourselves!

 

I got to use my awesome new shrug to protect my scar from sun exposure!

Then later in the week, we went to the LBJ Library. That one wasn't on the PogoPass last time we had it, so this was the first time Mal's visited. He loved it as much as I expected he would. Given his Five Nights at Freddy's obsession, the LBJ animatronic was one of his favorite parts.

We've gone to Indigo Play, Inflatable Wonderland, The Thinkery, James took Mal to Pump It Up Round Rock... we still need to get down to Wonder World to take the cave tour, and to San Antonio for the Witte and Zoo. Did I mention that I only paid $50 per pass? Just going to the water park and kids museum paid for it!

One down side to the great weather is that the mild temps and rain have super-charged the grass. I mowed on a Tuesday, and needed to do it again by Saturday. Then I made it until yesterday (Friday) and mowed a third time in under 2 weeks! I was thinking, "That's it! It's all going to go dormant now!" because we're heading into 100s every day and no rain in sight. But then this afternoon, it poured rain out of nowhere for an hour. Good. And bad. But mostly good. And also, I should be grateful for an upper body workout; pushing a giant battery up the hills of our back yard is not a joke (and, yes, it could be self-propelled but that drains the battery faster).

Mal's homeschool gymnastics class starts back at the end of next week, and his classes start back in just over 4 weeks. He's ready to get back into his schedule and so am I.

Of course, he'll miss a couple of weeks of everything when we go on his 10th birthday trip. Please send us your good vacation mojo because our travel is exactly as far out right now as it was in 2020 when we realized that Covid was going to cancel everything. And, yes, I got travel insurance this time! We were lucky to get back every single penny we'd paid 4 years ago, but I don't anticipate businesses doing that again. (Also, the CrowdStrike outage freaked me out about flight stuff; fortunately, for this trip, we're on Southwest.)