The Axel Family Plot I was doing some research on my Axel Lane property at the County Clerk's office when I came across a document that described my neighbor's property as formerly being owned by Isiah Axel. Naturally I put two and ten together realized that the street must have been named after him (or someone predating him). I did a little bit of research and located his name (and his wife Iona) on a burial plot diagram of Evergreen Cemetery not far from where the property is located. It took a bit of walking around, but with the help of the parks department I was eventually able to locate their tombs. Mr. Axel, here's to you.

Halloween 2009 This was an all-around pretty bad ass night. After visiting Preston and his little Evie, I headed out to meet up with Klaus at Stephanie Decan's house. She was dressing up as Carrie and I have to give her credit, probably had the most convincing looking version of it I've come across. Meanwhile Klaus and I decided it would be ideal to be a Jew and an Arab, collectively "Peace in the East". After a house party, and a random dance party on the Lamar pedestrian bridge (oddly enough by Aaron Bolding), we wound up going to a HUGE block party on South Lamar just off of Oltorf. There were probably 2,000 people there.

Renaissance Faire Liz and I hadn't seen one another in many years, but I picked her up at her dad's house in Katy so that we could attend the Renaissance Faire with the Galbinceas. We spent the entirety of the day at the festival, all the while drinking beers out of shot glasses. Needless to say that by the end of the day, we were pretty drunk. If you've never been to a Renaissance Festival before, I would highly advise going to one; they're very fun.

Swan Wedding Day The night before the Swan wedding, and leading up to the event itself, the family and I headed down to Beale Street in Downtown Memphis. To Austinites like myself, it's essentially the same as 6th street (albeit a bit dirtier). My dad stayed out with my cousins and I until the wee hours of the morning and eventually wound up getting physically thrown out of the Ugly Coyote bar for trying to dance on the bar top (despite having just donated to their breast cancer fund).

A Snail in my Garden These two little critters were sitting on my front stoop one morning and so I took a good handful of shots of them with the Canon macro setting. I was pretty impressed how such a small pocket camera was able to take such good macro shots. Definitely no SLR, but pretty solid.

Pumpkin Carving 2009 In keeping with the Halloween tradition, the Crocketts once again had a handful of people over to carve pumpkins. Although I'd only been back from Los Angeles for about two months and had been traveling most of that time, I still stopped by to carve a little something. I tried to carve out an image of Dreux from the DreuxBowl logo a few years back, but unfortunately it didn't work quite as well as I'd hoped it would.

Austin City Limits - 2009 This was probably the most fun I've ever had at any ACL festival day. Rymo and Tim came in from Florida and despite the cold weather and various bouts of pouring rain, it couldn't have been more enjoyable. Fortunately I brought a hefty backpack with me that my brother in law had given me and we used it as a mobile cooler. Better still is that because we had to wear the ponchos all day, it was really easy to pee into our empty beer cans in public. Rymo opted against this practice, while TFlo and I became masters of it. After a day in the rain and some Dave Matthews (and our random girl drop off), we retired to Trudy's for some Mexican Martinis.

NASA Scrubbed STS-129 One of many days that DaveG and I made it out to KSC in an effort to see the launch. We got all the way down to the 9 minute holding pattern on the clock before the launch was eventually scrubbed due to inclement weather. It was very disheartening to say the least, especially as we just sat around out there for hour after hour hoping that it wouldn't get scrubbed. Of course, we still made an evening out of everything and met up with Rymo and the boys downtown.

The Spider and the RolyPoly Since I love photographing insects (who knows why), I saw this roly-poly that was in dire straights with a spider. Unfortunately I didn't have enough light to really make the photos count, but this is what came out.

Valentine's Day 2009 Fados was having some sort of promotional Valentine's Day party with a pretty good band all night long. Weitzel came in town and we got some people lined up to hit the bar. ...of course this was followed by a 3am Kerbey Lane outing too =]