The stars at night are big and bright....

If you don't know the rest of that line, go here for a reminder.

Just a warning: this is an unusually long post, and no, there are no funny stories involving airplanes, baggage, escalators or anything of the like.

As Kate mentioned a few days ago, we are now settled into our temporary home here in San Antonio. The trip down took a couple of days but it was pretty easy driving since we took care of 5 hours on our way to Lake Powell. Kate got caught up on her sleep and I got through the latest John Grisham book (audiobook of course.)

We arrived at our apartment complex Wednesday afternoon just in time to give the furniture people permission to enter our apartment and move everything in while we signed about a bazillion papers. When we finally got into our apartment we were pleasantly surprised at what we found. cockaroach? no. dead rat? no. Moldy walls? no. We found a decent, clean, and comfortable apartment. Since we had to arrange for our apartment and furniture rental all by phone without seeing anything, we were preparing ourselves for the worst. As it turns out, the apartment is pretty good and the furniture is much nicer than we expected. It looks brand new. We unpacked the car and had everything put away in a few hours. That fact demonstrates how extremely selective we were with the things we brought with us.

So, on to Texas related things. Our first stop after unpacking was the local HEB. Here Everything's Better is a fairly ubiquitous grocery store in south Texas and is actually pretty good for a virtual monopoly. I got some delicious blue bell ice cream and devoured the entire half gallon in less than a week. Time for another trip to the store.

We went to the San Antonio Temple on Friday and I must say that it is a beautiful, beautiful building. We were there just when the light was perfect I guess because it looked amazing inside. While we were there we ran into a couple of friends from BYU that are also doing an internship at USAA this summer.

On Saturday we checked out the downtown area and did the usual tourist stuff. We went to the Alamo and I had to see the basement first thing. below you will see a picture of the door leading to it, they don't allow pictures of the actual basement.

We went on one of these boat rides down the riverwalk, that was pretty cool.

And we visited a Mexican market where we enjoyed fine Mexican cuisine and shopping.

Other items on our list of things to do include:

-SeaWorld

-See the hill country

-Schlitterbahn

-Find a good Texas BBQ joint

We also got a list of must-see places and must-do activities from our new ward (we really like our ward), so there is a lot to do, and all before baby comes.

Speaking of baby...(I know you grandmas are paying close attention now.) We visited our new doctor on Thursday, he was pretty cool and we both feel comfortable with him. We go on a tour of the hospital next week. Kate is still doing great and not having too many problems at this point.

I started my internship at USAA on Monday and after a long first day of orientation, I have been spending most of the past two days in meetings. I work in the Electronic Funds Transfer and Fraud department and we are always in meetings with project developers and managers going over projects. Most of the time I am just trying to figure out what all the acronyms they use mean. I am told that at some point I will start doing more programming work, but for now, it's pretty much back-to-back meetings. I have been subjected to a few of the obligatory intern jokes, but everyone is pretty cool and I like what I get to do.

Kate has had a chance to catch up on a lot of things this week, but her time off is quickly running out. She will be starting a couple of independent study classes soon, and that will probably take up a lot of her time until the baby comes.