We woke up today to the unusual, if not totally rare, occurrence of snow in Austin. It started with the typical hard icy rain/snow mix and at first we thought that was that. But then after a bit it really did snow. Real snow. Big flakes that actually stuck to the ground, and get this, accumulated. We had about 1.5 inches of accumulation by midday. It continued to snow the rest of the day, but because it had warmed up it didn’t really stick much after lunch. We did what pretty much everyone else in Austin did. We took full advantage.

Because of doctor’s appointments, sick children and other considerations (not least of which is that no one in Texas can drive if they are even predicting snow) I ended up at home rather than at work today. So Wesley and I had a great time. Jillian was pretty sick and though she came out a couple of times she didn’t have nearly as good a time as we did. We started with a good old fashioned snowball fight.

He really, really liked having snowball fights. Look at his face. He was loving it.

We took a break and made a little snowman. This was before we got most of the snow. It could have been bigger, but served its purpose. He later knocked it off the deck with a couple of snowballs.

This was about as much fun as Jillian would have: standing around near the door and looking before getting cold and going inside.  It took us longer to find her boots and mittens than she was actually outside.

After getting hit with a few too many snowballs we did a bit of cardboard sledding (we don’t actually own a sled) and then played some snow baseball.

After the snow fell a bit more heavily Amber and Wesley made a snowman in the front yard. It was really quite nice, complete with carrot nose and rosemary hair.

Like his smaller brother in the backyard, this snowman was not long for the world. His enemy was not global warming, but a charging Wesley.

It is nice that we finally got a “real” snowfall. It was quite a bit a fun. It gave us an excuse to drink hot chocolate and cider and just have a really good time. Wesley would have stayed out until his arms froze off. Even Redmond, who normally refuses to go out in the cold and wet did his share of playing with us.

I ended up doing more yard work in the snow than I’ve done in nice weather of the last few months. I learned that if you snow covered overhead branches you will get a face full of snow and wet when you least expect it. I also learned that said branches, rather than landing gently on the roof and needing a tug to get them off, will come careening down every which way and you’d better be prepared to move.

Since we were so near Corpus Christi (for Texas anyway) and since the kids, especially Wesley, love aquariums, we decided to stop at the Texas State Aquarium on our way back to Austin from Port Aransas. From the website, we got the impression that the aquarium was a bit larger and dare I say nicer than it actually was, but it was plenty big enough for us to fill a few hours before getting back in the car. I wouldn’t make a special trip from Austin just to go to the aquarium, but it was worth stopping by since we were in the area.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Before we got to the aquarium, we took a small ferry across the entry to Corpus Christi Bay. The ferries held about 20 cars each and made the crossing in about 3 minutes. During the crossing we saw some more Dolphins.  As you can see from this image from Google Maps, the ferries are pretty maneuverable (compared to the much larger Washington State ferries) and they’ll just go around obstacles.

In our case the ferry waited a bit and then zipped around a large oil tanker, the Eagle Augusta. It took us about an hour to get the aquarium by car. An hour after we got there we saw it go by us while we were watching the dolphin show at the aquarium.

The aquarium has three dolphins and they put on a pretty good show for about 15 minutes.  Jillian was more interested in climbing up and down the stairs, but Wesley got into it.

During and after lunch Wesley really got into the touch tank. They had a few kinds of ray, which by getting his sleeves really wet, Wesley could get a quick touch.  Too bad the water stank so much.

While there were a few nice exhibits (a couple were closed for repairs), the best part really is the dolphins. We spent a lot of time (more than the kids cared for) watching them under water. We thought they were swimming back and forth looking at us. Turns out the their side of the glass is mirrored. Probably a lesson in that for us somewhere.  On the upside, the aquarium wasn’t busy so we had the whole room to ourselves.

Jillian was still in the midst of being sick and was pretty warn out. Even though we were only at the aquarium a few hours she had had enough. J broke down and we decided it was time to go.

We had another four or so more hours to go in the car. We stopped for dinner at a kind of creepy Mexican restaurant (the food was okay, but not great) and had a very long drive home. It was a very long drive home. A very, very long drive home. But we made it and we’ll never go back, so it is all okay.

We picked my mom up at the airport and drove the four and a half hours more or less straight through to the beach house, stopping only at target (the kids were supposed to be wearing shoes when they got in the car) and the What-A-Burger By The Bay in Corpus Christi for dinner (Wesley likes their fries). Amber got the privilege of sitting in the back seat between Wesley’s booster and Jillian’s car seat.  She is both skinny enough to fit between them and has short enough legs. Lucky her!

The house, by the way is gorgeous. Much nicer than ours frankly. It is fully appointed with TVs, cable, internet access, dishes, silverware, pans, appliances, towels, blankets, sheets, pillows, you name it. It has four official bedrooms, plus a Murphy bed in the living room. So much bigger than our house! The kids enjoyed the jetted tub upstairs in the master bath.

The weather when we first got their was very Northwest only warmer. It was mostly overcast and windy, but still nice enough to walk around in shorts and a sweatshirt. Because of an offshore storm the waves were much bigger than normal. And apparently every surfer in Texas was out as the waves were rather unusual. By the time we left the waves had flattened to just a few inches high, the often driving wind had subsided and the sun was coming out. So we got the full range of weather possibilities (minus the rain, thankfully).

Both kids were in varying states of illness. Jillian, usually opposed to napping when healthy, seemed incapable of staying awake when in earshot of the shore. So we don’t have too many pictures of her awake at the beach. The couple of times we took her she passed out after only a few minutes.

For Jillian it only took about ten minutes for this:

to turn into this:

It happened to her on the pier, at the beach, anywhere she could hear the waves. Apparently Jillian’s Kryptonite is white noise.

A reasonable walk or short drive down the beach from the house is Horace Caldwell Pier. Oddly you have to pay to go on the pier even though it at first appears to be public.

Anway, $2 per person and you’re on. The day we were there the waters were full of surfers and the pier full of people fishing for anything but Hardheads (but not catching anything else apparently). The Hardhead or Sea Catfish is apparently abundant and according to one State of Texas website “it isn’t very tasty and the fish is difficult to clean”. They also have mildly toxic barbed spines that cause swelling and are really hard to pull out. What this means for the fish is that people catch them all the time, they want to throw them back,  but can’t touch them. So they take quite a beating as people fling them around, thump them on railings and yank on them with pliers trying to get their hooks out. It was a little disturbing. One gentleman, who seemed to have enough experience to treat the fish humanely caught a fish and let Wesley reel it in before smoothly removing the hook and dropping him back in the water.

I don’t know if it is typical or if it was because of the storm, but the beach was lined with all sorts of shells, sea stars, hermit crabs, crabs, and jelly fish in varying states of life.  Especially in the morning, before it had been picked clean, we had great luck finding shells and even some very large hermit crabs (bodies 4-5″ long).  Wesley “saved” several sea stars that had washed up on shore and was very proud of himself for doing it.

We found a surprising variety of shells: Lightning Whelks (the state shell of Texas), Olive snails, Sharks Eye snails, sand dollars, sea biscuits, Giant Eastern Murex, limpets, a plethora of clams, cockles and scallops, just to name a few. We also saw some dead cabbage head jellyfish and some moon jellyfish, too.

The shells spread out at home.

Lightning Whelk - Side View

Lightning Whelk - End View

Olive Snails

Great Eastern Murex

Cabbage head Jellyfish (We didn't bring him home)

The outer edge of Mustang Island is open to the ocean the inner edge is open to Corpus Christi Bay and is a much calmer swamp marsh; an ideal habitat for birds. We visited a bird sanctuary and saw pelicans (a couple of species), turtles, ducks, herons and most importantly, though at some distance, Roseate Spoonbills. It was really windy so most of the birds were just hunkering down on the lee side of the reeds. But we still saw quite a few for the few minutes the kids would put up with it.

Roseate Spoonbill

Pointing at Spoonbills.

Though there were many warning signs at the bird sanctuary, this is as close as we came to being eaten by a ‘gator.

Port A is nothing if not a typical tourist town. The population is only a few thousand and it is clear that tourism is the main industry. Here you’ll find everything you’d expect at any small tourist town, plus some things I hadn’t seen before. They had restaurants that would cook your catch for you, candy shops, places to rent these little gas golf cart things (primarily for driving on the beach road I guess), many giant sharks statues, at least two gift/surf shops on every corner and a good number of playgrounds and free piers for fishing. We did most of touristy stuff including taking the obligatory goofy pictures:

Inside a giant walk-through shark. These were all over town.

Giant Seahorses along the road.

Amber did a really good job of finding things for us to do that the kids would enjoy. She really ran the whole trip and kept everyone having a good time. At one pier we were able to see dolphins just swimming in the channel. We weren’t able to get a picture because they came and went so quickly and because the surf was rough due to winds, but it sure made Amber’s day. Wesley had a pretty good time, too.

On the pier where we saw dolphins.

My favorite photo from the whole trip.

Excited to go to the beach. Run!

Perhaps the kids’ favorite part of the house (mine, too) was the widow’s walk. We had to go up at least twice a day. Because the house is about a half block from the beach and because the beach has some pretty hefty dunes that block views of the ocean most of the houses in the neighborhood have some form of widow’s walk.  I imagine it would be great to sit up there  with a cool drink and read a book on a warm day.

Note the spiral staircase up to the widow's walk.

Looking up from the top of the spiral staircase.

On the walk near sunset.

Here is a 360 degree panorama from the widow’s walk near dusk. Click for a much larger view (it will take you to Flickr).

Panorama at dusk

We’ll post a “part two” about the trip to the Texas State Aquarium soon.  If you haven’t gotten enough pictures yet, you can check out our whole “Port Aransas” set on Flickr. But be warned it contains 450+ photos.

Oh, and one more thing… If you go to Port Aransas BEWARE THE ROBOTS. They’ll get you!

Look out!

In 2009 we took 12,988.  The collages are a wonderful way for me to really remember these events and times of the year.

I am looking forward to all the collages that will need to be made in 2010!

Last Christmas I had the idea that Jillian and Wesley needed their own special stockings. We looked at some while Christmas shopping, but didn’t find anything that we fell in love with. So in January I made a note to remind myself in August that I was going to have get to work making them myself. Because I loved the latch hook stocking Grandpa Joe made me (and the other Hunter kids) I wanted Wes and Jillian to have the same kind.

In September I ordered two kits from Shillcraft: A snowman for Wesley and a teddy bear for Jillian. The kits came with almost everything I needed: the pattern, yarn and mesh. I bought a latch-hook tool and set to work. Here is what the snowman kit looked like when I unpacked it.

Once I had it unpacked I realized I didn’t have a clue what to do. So I hopped on YouTube and found a few videos that were rather helpful. One key tip: count out your yarn for each row before you start. Following the pattern on the mesh is asking for mistakes. The actual process is pretty easy and you get much faster at as you go. Which is good, because I was very slow at first. When I calculated how long it was taking me to do each knot and that I had 1700 to do on each stocking, I got a little concerned that I wouldn’t be able to finish. In fact I posted this to Twitter:

“math can suck. at the rate I’m going it may take 22hrs for each stocking. about 1700 knots each. ignorance is bliss.”

I decided to share the process with the kids from the start. This was a very good idea. They were very interested in the whole thing and their enthusiasm kept me motivated. Another way I kept motivated was by tracking my time for each row of the stockings. Yes, I know I’m a geek. But I did it and it helped. I used a great free application called Klok to track my time worked which is how I know it took me 14 hours and 54 minutes to latch hook Wesley’s, but only 12 hours and 43 minutes for Jillian’s. I started onWesley’s first and that 2 hour difference is the learning curve for latch hooking (at least for me).

Being the kind of person I am I also took pictures of each few lines.  This is the time-lapse movie I made.

The only problem with the kit was putting their names on the top. My stocking from Grandpa says “Josh”. Of course mine is twice as big as theirs (and due to its enormous size I realized this year it has probably fetched me thousands of dollars of extra stocking-stuffers over the years. Thanks Grandpa!). And it didn’t take long for me to figure out I could shorten Welsey to Wes, but Jillian was going to be tough to fit on there. Just not enough little squares to make it happen. So after some back and forth I decided on initials. I’m still not thrilled with them, but they are stuck with them now. Sorry kids.

Yes, despite the fact that Jillian will likely get married and change her name someday. She’ll just have to limit her choices to people with last names starting with “H”. It worked for her mom after all.  This limited space is the reason Adrianne as called “Dri” for a bit there. I thought the stocking said Dri because that was her nickname, but no, her nickname was Dri because it fit on the stocking.  Who knew? (Maybe everyone knew this. I’m slow on this kind of stuff.)

Once the pattern and initials were finished I kind of panicked. Now I had to sew. Not a skill I actually possessed (or do now). So I basically did nothing for two weeks. Then panicked some more because I’d wasted two weeks. What to do? Back to the internet of course. I found this page and this page to be really helpful with types of stitches. Then the kids and I bought fabric. Amber said nope and we went back and got some different fabric.

A mere 11 hours and 20 minutes of hand sewing later and Jillian’s stocking was done.  Another 7 hours and 12 minutes and Wesley’s was done. An even steeper learning curve on the sewing. I had to redo multiple parts of Jillian’s as different stitches didn’t work the way I thought they would. In the end I ended up using whipstitches and backstitches for the visible parts and for the inside parts a whole bunch of stuff that I made up that would make people who know how to sew cringe deep down inside.

I am so glad to be done! And I’m done before Christmas! When I was ordering I asked Amber if she wanted me to make her one to match the rest of us and she said “no”. Thank you, thank you, thank you! If I had to do another one I’d probably break down in tears. Which would probably ruin the holiday for all of us, frankly.

I’d hoped to have included a bunch of nifty graphs using Open Flash Chart v2, but sadly there doesn’t seem to be a plugin built to make charts for Wordpress that isn’t really lame. So instead of being able to show you all kinds of nifty data I collected while making these things I just have this one sad chart I made in, embarrassingly, Excel.  The big flat stretch there in October was when we went to my Mom’s wedding and then again in late November early December that is when I was pretending I didn’t have to learn how to sew to complete the project.

We got there right at 6, but Santa was a bit late…

Sitting in Santa's Chair.

The kids were really excited while we waited in line.  But as soon as they got up close to him… that was a different matter.

So I showed them that Santa was nice.

Then Joshua told Wesley that, THIS was his chance to tell Santa what he wants for Christmas.  But he was pretty nervous and a bit terrified.  But he really managed to pull it together an conquer his initial fear and sat with Santa like a champ.

Drying his tears...

This is right before he said he wants a FISH TANK from Santa.

We really wanted to try a picture with Jillian too…

I was really surprised that she even sat with him.

This was after about 10 seconds, she had really calmed down. If only we had 10 more, she may have even smiled.

I promised the kids cookies, to try to get them to cooperate with Santa, so we went over to the rec center and had cookies and hot chocolate.

Enjoying their snack.

Yummy!

He just did not want to smile for me!

Time to go home.  But first, a few more pictures…

It was about 50 out tonight.  It felt pretty good.  But we (When I say we, I mean the kids and Joshua.  Of course I was in a jacket.  I even had a scarf on too.) were the only family without jackets on.  And most kids had on mittens and a hat!

It was a good night.  We are looking forward to walking along the trails tomorrow and looking at the luminaries and the Christmas lights.  The tractor train will be out tomorrow, so I can’t wait to get photos with Joshua and the kids!

This year we got our Christmas tree at Home Depot. Which makes me a little sad because I really enjoy the hours of agonizing over which of a thousand identical trees is the just the right one. Unfortunately the trees in Texas are terrible and Costco wasn’t selling, so we went to the hardware store. On the upside it came with a 90 day return policy which might come in hand if we don’t need a Valentine’s Day tree.

The kids had a great time decorating it just the same. They were almost busting at the seams to get the ornaments out of the boxes.

We let them do nearly all of the decorating.

So we had a little bit of bunching …

To encourage a more even distribution Amber and I got involved.

And of course we needed our traditional tree topper, a large glass snowman.

While Amber was up north we added some chains with the “lick-and-stick” paper that YaYa sent. The kids liked putting them together better than I would have expected and I really like how they look on the tree.  Wesley wanted to send a photo of the tree to YaYa so we took this one (J was asleep).

After the chains we did tinsel. I don’t know what we were thinking. The kids loved it of course. We’ll probably need to buy a new vacuum cleaner after sucking up all the extra from the floor.

And of course the final product:

In the Urgent Care, Avery Ranch, Austin, TX

Medically speaking, the last week has been kind of traumatic for Wesley. We started out last Saturday with Wesley taking a tumble and cracking his head on the door jamb. There was a lot of blood (but we managed to get it out of all the clothes!)  and we just couldn’t get it to stay closed even with butterfly bandages.  We weren’t sure if he’d need them, but we took Wesley to an urgent care and sure enough he ended up with three stitches. Amber was babysitting for a friend so Wesley and I drove out to the nearest place open (about 25 minutes away) and actually had a pretty good time. We talked and goofed off, looked at fish at the Chinese restaurant next door, drove around looking at Christmas lights and of course had ice cream when we got home. He did really well, by which I mean he screamed bloody murder when he was getting the stitches and anesthetic (two shots), but didn’t struggle.

Looking at his stitches the next day.

On top of the stitches we also had Wesley’s four year checkup scheduled. Wesley hates going to the doctor’s office because he hates getting “pokes”. At four years there are a bunch.  In all he ended up getting 5 shots and two flu spray mists up his nose.

Wesley’s checkup went fine. He is growing well and aside there were no concerns.

• Weight: 38.75 lbs (75th centile)
• Height: 41.25 in (75th centile)
• BMI: 16.0 (65th centile)

We were surprised to learn that at 4 they also do urine and blood work.  If you think getting a shot is terrifying, getting blood drawn is much, much worse.  At first Amber tried to hold Wesley in her lap, but he was struggling too much so I had to hold him. He is getting so strong!  I was a little afraid he’d snap a bone the way he was struggling. Imagine the shots for that. Again he screamed like you wouldn’t believe, but once it was started he actually watched the blood being drawn and had lots of good questions.  And it wasn’t all bad. He got to pee in a cup!

We made a "Not at home" rule for peeing in cups.

On Friday we had to go back and get the stitches removed. By this time Wesley was terrified of going to the doctor. He even started begging me to take out his stitches at home, which I probably would have done had Amber been home to help hold him still.  Plus one of his vaccines (DPT we think) had caused his leg to swell up so I wanted to have it looked at. His poor left thigh is about 1.5 inches bigger around than the other. It is stiff and quite warm. The doctor looked at it and said it occurs in about one in thirty vaccinations (though it is getting less frequent since they have changed the composition of the shot). I had the same reaction in my arm to the same shot a few years ago (a booster I got while working at the UW) so I guess it’s genetic.

So for those of you keeping track:

• Shots: 7 (5 vaccines, 2 anesthetic)
• Sprays up the nose: 2 ( 1 per nostril)
• Blood draws: 1
• Stitches: 3 (six pokes in all: in one side, out the other)
• Unusual and painful reaction to a vaccine: 1
• Pees in a cup: 1

I use this little script (generate_mosaic_PyMos.py) to set my configuration choices and actually generate the mosaic. It made it easy to play with the settings and try lots of different combinations, but you could run it from the command line if you chose. Settings:

• input_path: The path to the photo you want to recreate as a mosaic.
• output_path: The path to where you want to save your photo mosaic.
• collection_path: The path of a folder containing all your small photos.
• zoom: How much larger than the “input_path” photo do you want your output. A photo that is 1000 x 500 pixels would end up as a mosaic of 2000 x 1000 pixels if you chose a zoom of 2.
• thumb_size: How large do you want the small photos in the photo mosaic to be. The smaller the size the more “realistic” your overall mosaic will look, but the less detail you’ll get in each individual square. I find 75 works well for me.
• fuzz: The larger the fuzz, the more variation you’ll have in your mosaic. It lets the program pick a less perfect color match so that you don’t end up with swaths of identical photos in areas of the mosaic that are made up of one color.
• new_colormap: If you add or remove any photos in the “collection_path” you’ll need to set this to “True” so a new color map is generated. Otherwise it will fail if it tries to use a photo you’ve deleted or simply ignore any new photos that might be a better match.

The question is, Where do you get all those little square photos? For me the answer is Flickr. When you upload a photo to Flickr they automatically generate a bunch of different sizes of your photo for you automatically. One of those is a 75×75pixel square thumbnail that they use as part of their navigation scheme, but you can download and use however you like.  You could use PIL or some other method to create your own square images, but since all of our photos are tagged on Flickr I figured I could simply query our photos on Flickr for any tag or text I liked.  I searched online for a client to download square photos matching a given tag, but couldn’t find anything pre-built. So I reused some of the code from my Flickr Metadata Downloader and wrote a script to download what I needed [flickr_download_squares.py].  Just download and enter in your Flickr API info. For more details see the Flickr Metadata Downloader post.

Since I started this near Wesley’s birthday he was my first choice of subject. A quick query on Flickr showed more than 18,000 photos tagged “wesley”. That is probably more than I really needed so I decided to grab only every 10th photo. Once they were downloaded which didn’t take as long as I’d thought because they are so small (each 75 pixel square photo is about 5KB)  I reviewed them all to make sure you could really see Wesley and that none of them were too embarrassing and then set to work making the mosaic. I just ran he generate_mosaic_PyMos script I detailed above and after a few minutes got something like this:

Overall Mosaic (click for larger view)

Zoomed in a bit

Individual photos that make up the mosaic

The image files that are created are rather large.  In my practice they have been between 60mb and 120mb.  Too big to be of much use except for making prints. Too big in fact to upload even to Flickr (they have a 20mb limit). I also learned that having variation in color and lighting is important. The more uniform your photo the fewer small photos will be combined to create it. This makes sense as each small photo is converted to an average color. Whichever photo has the closest average color for a given area will get used. If the area is the same color (like the wall above) the same photo is likely to be used over and over and over. To get more variation increase the “fuzz”, which I should have done with the mosaic above.

And another…