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.

Lake Powell

We went to Lake Powell with my family over Memorial Day weekend. We finally packed up our car for TX on Thursday, but we split up the drive a bit by staying at Lake Powell Fri-Tues.  It was fun seeing them again before we headed off to TX. It was actually pretty cold at LP, but we still had a great time being with the family and were very glad we were able to go to the lake once this summer before the baby comes. We played a lot of games, watched movies and soaked up the sun while it was out. Sadly I don't have too many pictures except from this one boat ride when I actually had the camera.

 

Sadly Zak was on the houseboat this ride, so he wasn't in the picture.  I'm embarrassed to say that Zak and I were wimps and avoided the water... because it was freezing cold. My brothers had wet suits though, so that's why all the pictures are of them and their sweet tricks. :)  The pictures don't do them justice though, it was way cooler watching them do the jumps, flips and tantrums live!!

                               My little brother Spencer

 

                                      Spencer's friend Cason

  

                                My older brother Christian

 

                                The goofs chillin on the boat

   

                                The boys going off a slide

K, I really need to figure out how to do a slide show or a picture collage so the posts aren't so long.  Is it easy, anyone know how?  So after Lake Powell,  on Tuesday morning we continued our drive to Texas (17 more hours- YUCK!!)...pictures from our first few days here will follow shortly.

Almost time

We are super crazy busy right now trying to get everything done before we leave to Texas, so it feels like I don't have time to post, but alas. The most pressing--and depressing--part of the move is trying to figure out what we just can't live without while down there and what we can leave here. We are going to try and stuff everything into my car, so we'll see how that goes...I am guessing it will feel something like the following:

That's actually pretty sweet, I wouldn't mind having a few llamas in our car, just to keep things lively. Speaking of keeping things lively, does anybody know how to do live-blogging with blogspot? I need to get it figured out before the baby comes so you can all have some sweet live footage of the blessed event.

Sleeping habits

We are down in St. George for a few days and on Saturday Sharla, Allie, and Bree came to visit at my parents. Several of us were in the kitchen and Sharla called us all into the family room: "guys, you've gotta come see this." So we all went in to see what the deal was and saw this:

This is totally real and Allie is totally asleep. It looks like she was shot dead and left to hang upside down. It was hilarious.

BTW - For you bloggers out there who happen to use Windows, you should check out Windows Live Writer to help you with your posts. It's pretty slick.

Girl's Weekend

Every year the Muir girls (Zak's mom's side of the family) get together for a girls weekend. Usually we do it in Salt Lake or in St. George, but every once in awhile we do fancy ones like 2 years ago in New York City or this one 2 weeks ago in Las Vegas. We always have lots of fun shopping, visiting, eating and just hanging out, they also threw a baby shower for me while we were there. We stayed in a fancy suite at the new Palazzo hotel and we had a blast! Thanks girls for the fun weekend!!

Shopping at Town Square.

The Palazzo Hotel

Outside the Wynn, just before dinner on our last night.

Regime Change

As you may (or may not) have noticed, there are some changes on the blog. First, and most noticeable is that Kate has posted something. Give yourself 2 points if you thought to yourself: "Hey, this post is before Kate's post, that doesn't make sense!" It's just a little backdating I learned from ol' Stevie J. Second, is that the look of the site has changed. Kate has wanted to change the look for a while. As the primary poster, I exercised executive privilege and vetoed the proposal because she wanted girly stuff. Well, as you may have surmised by now, Kate is taking charge of the blog and will now assume primary poster status. As such, you can hold her accountable for any posting lapses longer than one week.

If for some odd reason you find my style of writing entertaining, informative, or otherwise worthwhile, I can be found at my new site: If for some reason you feel compelled to visit my new corner on the net in the next week or so, please be patient while I get things together. If you are not willing to venture out of your routine blog stalking pattern but enjoy snickering to yourself about my grammatical errors, rest assured that I will periodically post here as well.

Bad Blogger

Thanks to those of you who have offered gentle reminders for us to update our blog, yes we are alive and kicking (3 of us). The past few weeks have been hectic and honestly, I can't think of anything blogworthy to tell you about. Regardless of my lack of content, I will try and scrounge something up.
Some of you may remember me griping about INTEX around December last year. Well it's sequel has come and gone and will never darken my doorstep again. Maybe I will write more on my new website (not yet running.) I will use it to talk about geeky stuff that Kate doesn't want me to write about on our "family blog." That probably means the XKCD comics will be banished from these hallowed halls, unless it's a really good one about raptors or something.
On to topics more interesting to the majority of those who read this stuff. Babies and bellies. Here's a picture I managed to get Kate to pose for a few days ago:
I might have to revoke her administrative privileges on the blog for a little while so she doesn't take it down. She is very shy about showing herself off but I know some of you really want to see her progress. Baby kicks a lot and everything seems to be going perfectly so far. That might change when we go on a quick 24-hour car drive to arrive in the sweltering Texas heat. Kate's been keeping super busy with her classes and work schedule along with trying to plan the details of having the baby in an unfamiliar area. Thankfully we have found some great support from good people living there and we have all the major details ironed out.