This weekend Bay and I visited the UT campus for their annual Open House event. There were lots of kids there, from all over the state. Basically the UT students have activities for the kids to do, based on the students’ specialty. Bay and I had looked over the schedule of events in advance and decided that we should check out the engineering and science areas. The engineering school looked pretty cool, and Bay made a “robotic” hand out of cardboard, rubberbands, and masking tape. He also participated in a fossil dig at the Geo-sciences plaza area.

It was actually the first time for both of us to walk around the UT campus, and it was a lot of fun. The campus is pretty big, and many of the buildings were really cool. Bay seemed to be interested in UT, and of course living in the area, you are constantly seeing the longhorn logo everywhere, so I am thinking that UT will probably be #1 on his list of schools to go to, and that’s fine with me!

For the past few months, I’ve been visiting the Cedar Park Public Library pretty regularly. It’s a relatively small library, but has some excellent materials. The dvd and cd sections are pretty good, and they even have quite a lot of anime, not that I’m really into it. They also have a teen manga section, and an anime/manga club. In fact, I saw a little flyer for a guest speaker, a computer game artist from Bioware Austin, who presented to the club. Check out their events calendar (which is a Google calendar that you can subscribe too) and you can see their upcoming schedule. The kid’s section is really nice as well, and they have lots of computers to work on. And of course, Wi-Fi Internet access is available.

The main stacks have a decent selection. I’ve found a bunch of Neil Gaiman books, and now I am working on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, of which the library has about seven on the shelves. But what I found really cool about the library is their use of technology. They have a self-checkout station where you scan your library card, put your books on a magnetized scanner, and you see the titles appear on the monitor above. When you have scanned all your books/dvd’s/etc, you can either print out a receipt, or have it sent to your email address. This is so cool because I can then just add it to my Google calendar so that I won’t be late returning items. Also, from their website, you can see your library account and even renew books online. You can even browse their catalog online to search for a book. It’s so convenient!

Other cool things at the library that I see on their website are: teen gaming tournaments, Movie Mondays, chess club, Family Gaming Nights, adult knitting club, book clubs, and downloadable audio books. While I love bookstores, libraries are cool too, and free!! If you haven’t been to your library in a while, now’s a great time to visit.

Went down to New Braunfels to meet my uncle and cousin to do a little fishing. We caught only one trout and three perch, but it was lots of fun. Must do it again soon! Fishing is so fun.

Last weekend Mariko and I took a cooking class at Central Market. She has been to a few before, but this was my first one, and it was great! I love oysters, so Mariko signed us up for “The World’s Your Oyster” with Chef Scot Loranc. The class was a hands-on type, as opposed to the others where you just sit and watch (and then eat), and therefore the class size was limited to 16 students. We were separated into four groups and each group had a chance to learn how to shuck oysters. When our group’s turn came, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that our oysters were the Kumamoto variety. They were smaller and actually easier to open than the larger types such as the gulf oysters. One of the other students and I actually sneaked a couple while the chef wasn’t looking. It was just too tempting!

Chef Scot Loranc is a great teacher and everyone enjoyed his style and depth of knowledge. He was funny and nice, and generous with the food too! We had so much to eat, everyone was stuffed! During his shucking instructions, he was handing out oysters on the half-shell with a variety of different sauces. They were all really good, but I actually preferred to have the raw oysters without any sauce. Besides the oysters on a half shell, Chef Loranc showed us how to cook four oyster dishes, including Oysters Rockefeller, which were amazing!! Definitely my favorite of the four. The others were oyster po’boys, deep fried oysters with corn and tomato relish, and smoked oysters with jalapeno cream sauce. It’s funny, but when the oysters went on the smoker, the smell reminded me of a memory that was buried for years. When I was maybe nine years old, my family went camping up the coast of California for a couple weeks. At Drake’s Bay, my dad bought a bunch of oysters and grilled them on the campfire. That smell of oysters cooking at the campsite was the same as the oysters on the smoking rack at class. Back then, I didn’t like oysters, but now I love them. Funny how the sense of smell can evoke memories from long ago.

Anyways, all the different oysters tasted great, and we also got to enjoy some Turbo Dog beer and wine. My favorite oysters were the Kumamoto and also the Blue Point varieties. I definitely recommend the cooking classes at Central Market, and especially Chef Scot Loranc’s classes.

This year we celebrated Chinese New Years at the Hsiang Yun Buddhist Temple. Koa performed with his Kung Fu class, and there was an amazing Lion Dance. In the evening we ate a great vegetarian Chinese dinner, then went to the Lantern Dharma service. It was a long day, but lots of fun!

Looks like some extreme temperatures are going to hit Austin on Sunday… Thanks for the forecast, News8Austin!

A warm day is gonna turn into a chilly evening. From 77°F down to 35°F tonight. Welcome to Texas! Brrrrr.

The waiting room at my kids’ Kumon school has free wi-fi, and many parents bring their laptops to pass the time. Yesterday there were one MacBook, one MacBook Air, three Dell Inspirons with work bar codes on them (lots of Dell employees in Austin, of course), and one Toshiba. I felt a bit old fashioned since I was just reading a book. On a related note, I did see someone reading from her Sony Reader at lunch. It was pretty neat.

I’ve been pretty busy lately, these past two days I have been at the Hyatt downtown taking photos for a User Group for work. On Sunday, however, we went out to Fredericksburg and visited Wild Seed Farms. they have a nice butterfly house, and lots and lots of flowers to take photos of. It’s a great place to try out a new lens! (Unfortunately, I was just using my old lenses) Anyways, here’s a pic, and you can see a few more on my Flickr photostream.