This is a very typical Illianna face.

          

Since the job market is the worst my generation has ever seen, we are having to resort to other methods to pay the bills:

          

Aunt Natalie gave Illianna a new coat/hat outfit that is just too cute.  Here is a picture, hopefully it warms your holidays like it does ours!

          

My dad has a domain, (http://www.cmmeinzer.com) but uses it almost totally for emails.  I have tried to show him the evils of Wordpress and blogging, but to no avail.

That said, and in the spirit of my constant giving him a hard time, I have highjacked his webpage!  Since it is on my server, I thought, “What the heck, not like he will ever do anything with it.”  So, it is now mine! (Insert evil laugh here).  Maybe he will see what you can do with a spiffy domain, but maybe not.  Either way, it is better than a dumn “Coming Soon” site that will never change.

          

All this talk lately about being “Green” is just crazy.  Why did it have to become trendy in order for everyone to start being at least a little environmentally conscious?  We all live here, there are finite amounts of everything ranging from corn to water to cows.  In fact, the only thing that seems to be fairly infinite is the ability of the human species to breed and take over more resources.

Nature, by definition, lives in balance with itself.  It understands supply and demand better than Wall Street.  If there is a lot of rain, the antelope are abundant, and then there are more lions until the populations stabilize, or another factor comes in like a grass fire that kills off a lot of food for the antelope, then the lions starve and their population dwindles.  It’s a whole Circle of Life type of thing.  There are only two organisms on Earth that do not really follow this law:  humans and viruses.  Both reproduce out of balance with their surroundings and are willing and capable of destroying their very habitat (and eventually themselves).

Jess and I have always been pretty “green”, because, we respect Mother Nature, and so should you:

          

I’m worried it will quit snowing any minute so I probably jumped the gun to take this comparison photo, but just in case we wake up tomorrow morning and it’s all melted.. here it is.

          

More Snow!!! It’s supposed to keep this up for a while.

          

Here’s a picture I took out the back window a couple of hours ago.

While it may not look like much, snow in Texas is rare not to mention in March! About 5 years ago when we first moved into the house it snowed on Valentine’s Day, and we thought that was late in the year for snow. I’m worried we’re going to miss out on a Spring all together and go straight into Summer. I hope not because Illianna has lots of cute little clothes to wear, but I am armed with two different sized swim suits.

          

We went out to III Forks last night ‘thank you Toray’. The service was so/so. Cocktails took forever to arrive. We tried to order a second one, but when 20 minutes went by and it still hadn’t arrived we canceled the order. I was impressed with their bread and butter. I’ve never seen such a thin layer of crisp crust before. The bread was easy on salt, but the butter made up for it… just the way I like it. We started out with scallops which we sent back because while the menu said nothing about any sauce being on them, they arrived with some that tasted like BBQ, not to mention they were very rubbery. The replacement crab cakes were much better and almost gave me confidence to order seafood, which is what I wanted, but I thought it best to stick to steak. Their signature III Forks salad was tired as was a lot of their menu. It was the usual field greens, granny smith apples, and pecans in a vinaigrette. I think Panera does a better job of it with their Fuji Apple Chicken Salad. The steak was under cooked, not because they didn’t know how to cook it, but because the waitress didn’t hear us correctly. It was a good piece of meat and we’d rather have a steak undercooked than over. It makes heating up leftovers easier. The veggies were very good, but a restaurant should know how to cook vegetables. For desert Ryan ordered creme brulee. It wasn’t bad, but we’ve had better. I ordered their bread pudding with their home made cinnamon ice cream. The ice cream, sauce and pecans were the best part. I could have done without the bread pudding. It was overcooked. Their hot flame is great for steaks, but they need to tone it down a bit for other things.

          

Cute Moments Album