Martha's Marvellous Munchies

It was cold and drizzly all day Monday and Tuesday, and Tuesday evening the temperature dropped further and the skies started pelting Fort Worth with little pellets of ice. The net result was a 1/4" thick sheet of solid ice covered with a crunchy layer of icy beads. Traffic chaos, but very beautiful when the sun came out on Wednesday morning. 7th St outside our apartment has a slight incline, and many vehicles were struggling to gain traction up the hill. This truck gave up and decided to reverse back down the middle of the road. The pavements were fine, with an effect like walking on fine gravel, but where on the roads, where the cars compressed all the ice, it was very slippery. Everything travelled at about 15 mph. This is a leaf encased in the ice layer on the car park, and this shows the texture of the ice. Once the sun got going it all started melting pretty soon, resulting in semi-frozen rivers down the edge of the road. ...

On Saturday the Firestone Cares team (a couple called Greg and Sheri, who organise social events for the apartment block) put on a "Soup Off" competition, and we decided to enter. We had a flick through some recipe books and decided on carrot and orange soup, a standard cook-veg-and-blend type soup which might come to mind if you thought "home-made soup". We were told to bring a sign to identify it, too, so wrote the name in large capital letters on a sheet of A4, and took it, along with our saucepan of soup wrapped in a towel to keep warm, over to the clubhouse. Well. Pretty much everyone else had these sophisticated slow cookers/crockpots which they'd plugged in to keep the soup hot, and these itty-bitty signs to say what the soup was. And what was in the crockpots? Huge hearty meaty dishes like stews, ranging from chowders to gumbos to straight-out chili con carne. So this is what Texans call soup! We felt Different with a capital D, with our little veg...

San Antonio is towards the south of Texas and feels very much more Mexican than American. The balmy evenings, the colourful Mexican market, the architecture of the buildings, and the number of people speaking Spanish around us all added to the impression. The city, in fact, grew out of a Spanish mission and presidio (fort), built in 1718 as part of Spain's attempt to colonize and secure what was then the northern frontier of the colony of Mexico. Texas was then a buffer zone between Mexico and the French-held Louisiana, and Spain was keen to cement her hold on the area by introducing settlers and converting the natives to Catholicism and loyalty to the Spanish government. The missions in general had no great effect, but the San Antonio area was the exception to the rule, growing into an important city with five missions strung out along the San Antonio river. The first of these, San Antonio de Valero, later became well-known as the Alamo, where 182 Texans died in 1836...

We had a fantastic time seeing family and friends during our time back in the UK. We got to know the in-laws... ...enjoyed some walks in the English countryside... ...opened our Christmas presents... ...attended a couple of weddings, plus our own celebration party... ...and had a brew or two (of both the alcoholic and non-alcoholic variety). For the full photo experience see Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=81036&l=e9124&id=667138898 and if any of you have got photos of our party we'd love to have a copy; please email them to us! For the record, we did not intend to have our first dance to an Abba medley! In fact we didn't intend to have a first dance at all... but then the music started... and Graham asked me to dance... and suddenly there we were. Had we been a little more fore-sighted you may well have been subjected to us dancing LeRoc to "She thinks my tractor's sexy", a classy country and wester...

On Sunday afternoon at 5 pm it was 77°F; I went for a walk wearing shorts, T-shirt and sandals. On Monday morning at 8 am it was 27°F; I went for a walk wearing coat, scarf, hat, gloves, and boots. Living here certainly gives you a new appreciation of warm and cold fronts.

This Saturday we went to see the Ice! exhibition at the Gaylord Texan resort, near Grapevine. Thousands of pounds of real ice carved, coloured and illuminated to form amazing displays. It was a tad expensive but well worth it. As you will see.... Old Man Winter, I presume. Giant baubles. Trying to eat a fairy cake! The big blue coats were standard issue, and I was glad of mine despite having another coat on underneath. The exhibit was kept at 9 degrees F (-13 Celsius). Although Graham, as always, didn't seem to feel the cold at all. Here he is with a rather weird elf. Ice-gingerbread house. Well, I guess an ice exhibition has to include a skating rink! The trees were real trees, I think, coated with ice. The giant angel was beautiful. And the finishing touch - a life-size nativity scene. Finally, the fun part! We both had to have two goes on the slide. Sorry the video is sideways - I couldn't work out how to rotate it.

"Life's too short to live in Dallas" runs the slogan in a local BBQ establishment. But it's nice to visit once in a while. The TRE is only $5 return and is an exciting double-decker train (why don't we have those in the UK?) so we decided to take the trip over on that. Unfortunately we stupidly missed the one we were aiming for, arriving on the platform just in time to see it pulling away. We had to wait over an hour for the next one. However, once we got to Dallas we had a very nice afternoon. We disembarked at Victory Station, next to the American Airlines Center. AA sponsor almost everything around here, it seems; no wonder they're struggling financially! The big outdoor screen was showing, as always, American football, and despite the chilly air several people were standing around watching it. From there it was a short walk over to the Arts District, which hosts a number of museums. Due to our missing the train we were there a b...