Austin Urban Assault

Last Sunday, Mike teamed up with a coworker (Ken Simpson) to compete in the 2008 Austin Urban Assault. This is a bike race around Austin in which you must reach 8 known checkpoints (Pease Park, Stratford Rowing Dock, Jo's Coffee Shop on S. Congress, etc) and 4 mystery checkpoints. You can do them in any order you want, but you must hit all 12. At each checkpoint, when you complete the challenge, you get a bead. At the finish, you must show all 12 beads to finish.

The first mystery checkpoint was a guy standing in the middle of 43rd street holding a sign saying "The closest bike shop to this:









Well, you have to know that the mural is at 24th and Guadalupe. And that the closest bike shop is Austin Bikes at 21st and Guadalupe. At that checkpoint was a clue that was written in latin with the last sentence of the clue that translated to "reptile fossil" There were 4 letters of the clue highlighted "ASNC" After calling a few friends and Lindsay, we were able to determine it was the Austin Nature and Science Center. That was on our way to the rowing dock, so stopping there we found our last clue. It was a word jumble "SINE RAPUUT" Again we called our friends and Lindsay. Finally Ken and I figured it out to be PURE AUSTIN, a fitness club at 5th and Lamar. If you weren't from Austin, I have no idea how you would figure this out. All we had to do there was pick up the single bead.

The mystery checkpoints were just clues. The other 8 checkpoints were small challenges including scooping up bottlecaps with oven mits, riding mini bikes around cones, doing a human wheelbarrow, etc. You can see a good video of the race here:

http://www.videosomething.com/listing.asp?id=485

We eneded up finishing 127th out of 500+ teams at a time of 3 hours and 18 minutes. Not too shabby. Seems like all the people that finished before us were running red lights and going against the flow of traffic. Bunch o cheaters. We're gonna go at it again next year.

Lots of pictures!

For the past few months Finley has started teething, but has really been chewing on everything the past few weeks. This morning she woke up with her first tooth! She has been a trooper trying to get that tooth through. It's the first of many more to come! Enjoy some new pictures, and a video!

Bryson playing in the sprinkler.
Hanging out watching a show.

Finley going swimming for the first time.


Hanging out in her high chair, just waiting for dinner.

At the park.


Bath time fun!

On The Move

We now have 2 mobile children. For the past 2 weeks Finley has been rolling all over the place. I keep having to catch her at the end of her run and put her back at the start. This video was taken when she first started it a few weeks ago, but now is a whole lot quicker. It's hard to keep up with her!!

6 months old!

Our little girl has reached the halfway point of her first year. Look how much she has grown! She had her 6 month checkup today and she's 15lbs 3oz and 24" long. She finally made it on the chart for her age! She's in the 35% for weight, and 5% for height. She's lost most of that lovely strawberry blonde hair on top, but its slowly coming back in. :) For a while now she's just had a shag around the bottom in the back, like an old man. This picture was taken closer to 4 months when we had some family pictures taken. Happy half birthday, Finley! You've come a long way!

Happy 4th Anniversary!

4 years ago today we stood on a beach in Jamaica and got married in front of our family. Amazing how far we've come since then....and how far Mike's hair has disappeared.

Vegas

Our apologies for taking the whole month of May off. We'll try and do better.

So this past week, Mike was in Las Vegas for a lighting conference. Lindsay was able to leave the kids with Granna and join him for two nights of fun. Mike got lucky with his hotel room at Paris with a decent view of the Bellagio fountains from the 22nd floor. Sorry for the dirty picture.

The first few nights Mike spent watching his beloved Spurs fall to the Lakers while in the presence of 50 Laker fans. His pain was eased a bit by winning some bets on the game such as "Will Tony Parker have more than 23 points + rebounds?" (The answer was Yes!)

We spent the first night searching endlessly for $5 blackjack. We ended up walking from our hotel down to Slots-A-Fun. No tables to be seen. So we decided to ride the Deuce back to the hotel. "What is 'The Deuce'?" you might be asking. Its a double decker bus that runs the length of The Strip every 15 minutes or so. $5 for a 24 hours pass. Well, they are very popular and every 15 mins is just an average. We waited 30 minutes and then there were two back to back. We weren't big fans of The Deuce.

Thursday night we had reservations for "The Top of the World" restaurant at the top of the Stratosphere for an early anniversary dinner. Well, we left 1 hour before our reservation and relied on The Deuce to get us there. Well, it took more than that to get us down there. What a huge deuceappointment. We had to change our reservation to later that night. We ended up Downtown to gamble a little before taking Lindsay's first ever taxi cab ride back to the Stratosphere. Not gonna let The Deuce burn us twice. We had the best steaks / mashed potatoes / asparagus of our life. Plus the view from up here wasn't bad either.


Since we weren't in a hurry, we decided to roll the dice and try The Deuce again. This time it worked like a charm. We were deucestatic. It dropped us off downtown where we got to take in the Fremont Street experience lightshow.
We made our way into The Four Queens casino where Mike made about $100 on Blackjack. He thought he was hot stuff until Lindsay walked over and said, "What have you done in the past 10 minutes? You done THIS well?" She had won $560 on a few pulls of the Megabucks slot machine. She left and not 10 minutes later, she showed up with another $300. She ended up $700 for the whole night. Not too shabby! It was about 1:45AM and we started to feel it. We walked out to The Deuce stop to find 50 other people waiting. And we come to find out they run only once an hour. We got lucky and had an empty bus show up 15 minutes later. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Here was some Fremont Street entertainment that we happened to stumble upon. He thought he was pretty good.



Of course we all know you come here for pictures of the kids and we will get some up really soon. Finley turns 6 months old this Thursday, so we'll have some up by then.