Albuquerque Trip, Part I

Okay, we're gonna do this quick. We were in New Mexico for about eight and a half days and we captured a lot of our time there on the camera, which means we have quite a few photos to post. We'd been planning this trip for a while, and it was definitely our summer vacation. Our previous trip back was Christmas, and the last day or two of that trip consisted of getting Malory packed up for her move to Dallas. We were really thankful and glad to be able to go back and not only have some down time there with family, but also see a lot of friends and visit some familiar places that are special to us.

SO...here we go!!

Here are the girls at the border of New Mexico and Texas. As you can see, it was windy! The sign has red and green chiles on it, representative of the classic phrase you hear at most New Mexican restaurants: "Red or green?"



Some of the New Mexico countryside on the outskirts of Albuquerque.



On Sunday, Steph's parents joined us for a trip to the zoo with Stephen, Jamie, and the boys. We had a really fun day together there. The Albuquerque Zoo is actually really impressive - the Dallas Zoo isn't anywhere near as cool!



Here's us with Jamie (Stephen's wife) and James, their youngest (of two, with one more on the way!).



Steph's parents: Bob and Diane.



Here is Malory with little James.





My other nephew, Will, just wasn't convinced we were going the right way, so he wanted to see the map. Bob and Will figured it out.



We took the little train for a ride.



James. He's a cute one. And he has ice-cream face.



And here's Steph and me on the train.


More to come...

Nathan

The Austin Trip

Okay, the Austin trip post!! After I finished the second semester of law school, I had about a week off and then started the internship at Legal Aid of NorthWest Texas in downtown Dallas. Stephany and I traveled to Waco for Josh's wedding (see post below) the first weekend after I started the internship. The next weekend, we traveled down to Austin (about three hours south of Dallas) to visit Jed, Emily, and Charlie. These people have been dear friends of mine for years - Jed and I became best friends in third grade. Emily and Charlie run a deli in north Austin, and Jed just finished his first year of teaching tenth-grade biology. He was leaving to head to Germany for about two months later that week to visit his German girlfriend, and we hadn't seen Emily and Charlie in quite a long time, so it was a good time for a visit. Plus, Malory joined us and got to experience Austin for the first time ever!

Unfortunately, we didn't really take a whole lot of pictures on this trip. However, we managed to do some fun stuff: we visited North By Northwest (a great restaurant and brewery in north Austin), Magnolia Cafe and The Omeletry (two local places that serve great breakfasts), the South Congress area and downtown, and the University of Texas (where Jed and I both graduated). We went to the Harry Ransom Center art museum on campus while we were there and saw both an original Gutenburg Bible from the mid 15th century (you can see it here) and the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac's On the Road (take a look - he taped a scroll of paper together so that he could write in crazy multiple-hour increments uninterrupted by the need to feed paper through his typewriter).

Here are pictures we took in front of the Tower on the University of Texas campus.





And here are some pics of us playing poker with Jed, Emily and Charlie (they were married about a month after we were in 2006), and the great Lebanese philosopher/computer programmer/photographer/story-teller Maan (far left). It was a very laid-back evening. When the game was still dragging on in the early morning hours, Malory, Charlie, and Jed finally split the pot.





It was a good trip, albeit a bit short. We're currently finishing up our trip to Albuquerque, which has been really fantastic. I'll get a post up on that soon.

Nathan

Stephany's Birthday!

Stephany turned 26 late last month! Since we had several birthday-related things going on over the course of the week, it was sort of a birthday-week for her! Malory brought dinner over to our apartment one night, which was awesome, and the following week, we got together with our home group friends to celebrate at Chuy's, a really good Mexican food place in Dallas (they have excellent green chile imported from New Mexico!).

The day after Steph's birthday, we went biking on the Katy Trail (see post below) with our friends Don and Molly, both in my class at SMU Law. They were so nice to bring over flowers and dessert (on their bikes, no less!). Later that night, they picked up pizza (in a car this time), and we sang Happy Birthday to Stephany. Don is a big proponent of the high-five - he has highly contested the contemporary school of thought that the high-five has been replaced by the fist-bump (with all the media coverage Barack and Michelle Obama's fist-bump got at his celebratory speech the other night, it's a tough call, but Don's argument in favor of the traditional high-five still has merit).





Here are some pics of the night we went to Chuy's. This one is of Stephany, Malory, and Malory's roommate Kendra (a fellow student of Malory's at Dallas Theological Seminary).



Here are some pics with our home group friends. We had a really fun time that night. We've been getting together with most of these people for the better part of ten months now (since we moved to Dallas and joined a group through The Village Church in Lewisville).











And here is Steph with a fish-shaped sopapilla the restaurant brought her for her birthday!



We're enjoying being back in New Mexico this week, spending time with family and friends, and getting to see a lot of familiar places. We'll post some pictures soon. I still need to get our Austin trip pics up first though!

-Nathan

Waco weekend

Two weekends ago, we made a trip to Waco for the wedding of our friends Josh Cohagen and Robin Northern (now Cohagen!). We had a super fun time. Josh was one of my groomsmen, and I was all too happy to assume the role for him. The guys (some of whom I'd met on previous trips to Waco during the past two years, which was nice) went out Friday night for pool and drinks, while the girls threw a shower for Robin at Josh's sister's house. Saturday morning the guys went out to a swimming hole near Crawford, Texas - we had coffee at the Coffee Station, apparently the place our president stops for coffee when he's in town.

The wedding took place outdoors, and in Waco in late May, it was already in the mid-upper 90's. So it was a bit hot. But once we got into the swing of it, we all had a really great time. The wedding party was great - Josh and Robin have some really quality friends.

Here's a pic of the wedding - I'm the tall one in the background wearing the super-huge plant hat:



And here's a couple of my honey and me enjoying ourselves and the evening:




On a side note, our friends Kevin and Michelle Steele were awesome to put us up for a couple nights while we were in Waco for the wedding. Thanks again so much, you guys - we were so happy to see you, even if it was just for a short while!

-Nathan

The Katy Trail

About midway through the Spring semester, we discovered something that we really enjoy. The Katy Trail is a hiking/biking trail that runs through a good portion of the residential/small business districts just north of downtown Dallas. It runs along a power easement and has pedestrian/biking bridges over all of the cross-streets. We've found that we can access the north end of the trail by riding our bikes from our apartment through the neighborhood near us. Mockingbird Lane, a major thoroughfare between Love Field airport, SMU, and I-75 near downtown has been shut down through our neighborhood for construction, which has been awesome for us. Once on the trail, we can ride down to the Knox/Henderson shopping area and all the way down to the American Airlines Center downtown - all on a bike path! The trail's website is www.katytraildallas.org.

The weekend between my final exams (I'd taken two and still had three to go), we got up early on a Sunday morning and rode down to the Starbucks at Knox, where we sat for a couple hours and read (I studied negligence and proximate causation in Torts, for those of you who are interested). Here are some pics!

Here's us after biking to Starbucks. We enjoyed breakfast and coffee there:





Here are some pics of us on the trail:









Then we biked down to Victory Plaza near the American Airlines Center downtown. It was a Sunday morning, so not much was going on. One of the local news stations broadcasts from there.







And here's Steph momentarily visiting New Mexico from a friendly, local playground:

Finishing up the semester and looking ahead to summer

Hey, everyone. We've been doing well. Most of my time lately has been devoted to wrapping up the semester, getting ready for exams, and getting things together for summer work experience. Once classes end this week, I'll have two weeks of exams and then be done with my first year (!) on May 9. I've gotten involved at school in some things that interest me: I was recently voted as one of four students at school to sit on the law school's Honor Council, which hears cases of violations of the school's honor code. If there aren't any reported violations, then I won't be busy with that, but if there are, the decisions the Council makes can show up on students' official school report when those students apply for bar licensure, so it can be a fairly serious thing. I also applied for and was selected to be a Mentor for new students coming in next year, which I'm excited about. All in all, it's been a really good first year of school.

This summer, I expect to be working at a non-profit agency in Dallas for the first half of the summer. The program is through the school, and I haven't yet heard where I'll working. The second half of the summer, I'll be working downtown at the federal courthouse for a U.S. District Judge, which should be a very good opportunity to be exposed to a lot of different legal issues and the working of the U.S. court system. At some point in there, we're hoping to visit Albuquerque to see family and friends. We'll also try to make some weekend trips to Tyler and Austin. Malory hasn't ever been to Austin, so we need to get her down there!!

Steph has been doing great at work. She's enjoying it and getting along really well with both her co-workers and her customers. It's great that she's able to know so many students from the law school - her Starbucks store is only 2 blocks down, so it's a popular source for caffeine and sitting somewhere other than the library.

More later,
Nathan

Jed & Christine's Visit

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Jed and his girlfriend Christine came up from Austin to visit us. In the two weeks since then, I was spending a lot of time working on an appellate brief, which constitutes my final exam grade for my Legal Research & Writing Advocacy class (the only grade for that class, as we have only one graded test per class in law school). Also, Steph's parents were in town over Easter, which was really great. On a side note, we were all pleasantly surprised to find that Chuy's (a Mexican restaurant in town) has some authentic New Mexico green chili sauces! Woo-hoo for familiar New Mexican food in Dallas! Needless to say, we'll be going back...

We had a great time during Jed & Christine's visit. During the weekend they were here, we drove around downtown and tried out some places new to us, we saw Derek Webb, a favorite musician of ours, perform in Deep Ellum, and we stayed up beyond late playing Phase 10. Malory stayed up late with us too, but sadly, we did not get any photos of the fun craziness of that night. It's great having a weekend like that every now and then, and it was so good seeing our friends.

Here's us enjoying Pioneer Plaza and the bronze longhorns...









My beautiful red-headed beauty with the blossoms.



Jed & Christine playing around on modern art in front of Dallas City Hall.