Ella and Francisco

How to even begin this post. I turned 40 this year in March. Despite the significant number, my birthday did not feel radically different from any other one I have had. That changed when I walked into the party that Ella organized for me in downtown Austin at Taste. This birthday was one of my best. Among the many memories I will always hold of this night:

• the beautiful table setting and menu card
• the many birthday cards (one with the naked backsides of elderly cartoon figures sticks out in my mind)
• the seemingly bottomless yet tastefully designed black plastic goblet
• the food and the wine (which seemed to magically appear in the previously mentioned goblet)
• the cupcakes from Sugar Mama’s Bakeshop
• flood of friends that came to share their favorite birthday jokes
• the loud and fervent references to Prostametto, an herbal prostate product that became a chant for one of the party-goers

Thanks to Ella and Kristi from Taste for making my birthday a truly memorable event!

Luckily, our big news was not discovered on this fine evening…

Ella and I traveled up to Michigan to spend Easter with my in-laws. We had a great time visiting with family and friends. We spent some time at Eliza’s condo where she served a great dinner followed by some serious Wii time. After Easter mass we went for brunch at a local hotel. The brunch was held in a ballroom which contained over 50 tables full of happy families. On one of the beautiful evenings, Ella and I took in a local comedy improv show with her friends Mike and Katie. One of Katie and Ella’s friends from high school was a cast member and came to talk to us after the show. Always a good time in Michigan!

While we were in Michigan, we had a chance to share some very big news with Ella’s family…

I have been meaning to post photos from Thanksgiving and Christmas last year. As we get closer to this year’s Thanksgiving and Christmas times, now seems like a good (if not almost too late) time to finally post them. Thanksgiving was here in Austin and Ella and I were joined by my Dad, Luz-Maria, Luis, Andrea, Karl, and their baby. Aimee, Luis’ girlfriend joined us on Friday and we enjoyed meeting her and showing her Austin. Karl and Andrea and baby moved to London from San Antonio, and Aimee went to Azerbaijan for a year. Luis has visited her a couple times, giving new meaning to the term “long-distance relationship”.

Christmas was a lot of fun in 2008. For a couple of years our good friend Negina has organized “the 12 Bars of XMAS”, a custom planned pub crawl through the heart of downtown Austin. This year was attended by many good friends in festive hats and bells. The night ended at Taste, a very fine establishment that caters in fantastic gourmet entrees and wines. The owners, Regan and Kristi, were kind enough to offer us some samples of their incredible food and wine and made us instant fans. A very fun evening that ended with a special gesture.

In September Ella and I traveled to Irving, CA to attend Mason-Julia Chen’s first baptism. Her parents, Gloria and Tony, hosted a great brunch at a local chinese restaurant where we destroyed a multiple course meal. Later that night the parents and friends congregated at Malarkeys, the bar where Gloria and Tony first met. Basic decency and a reluctance to undermine Mason’s image of her parents prevent me from telling the story of their first meeting, but all of us who went back to the bar attempted to recreate the historic atmosphere. We all tried the famous 9-1-1 shot, which appeared to be a mixture of whatever hard liquors were situated closely to the barkeep’s hands.The pictures below are the only ones appropriate for showing here. I intend to save the others for future blackmailing needs.

Last year Ella and I joined some good friends (Nicole, Ryan, Egon) and decided to start a new coed Ultimate team. In doing so we achieved one of the best outcomes of undertaking any type of team-building endeavor; we met all sorts of new players that we enjoy calling friends.

Our team held regular practices, went to a few tournaments in Texas, and competed in Sectionals in Denton, TX and then Regionals in Austin, TX. Sadly, I managed to catch some kind of bug and missed Regionals, but as you can see from the photo below, the team put aside their grief and competed with great spirit.

How did we get the name “Cougars!”. Well, interesting story.  The name was a product of an official naming session in a small (read: cheap) hotel in College Station. We were sun-burned, had a couple beers in us, and everyone was building groups to support their name ideas. One group of college grads was forwarding “Ultraviolet Catastrophe”, a physic concept. Another group wanted “Gravity Storm” in memorium for an old team Ella used to play on called Vortex. And I, of course, thought only the Simpsons could do the name justice, so I was pushing for “Spider-Pig”, Ella’s love went to “King of Kong”.

In the end, the combination of brain-sapping circumstances and the late-night caused a sudden last minute mania for “Cougars!”, a cultural phenomena term lifted from today’s finest periodicals like People, Us, and their global rivals, Hola! Alexa was our shirt logo artist. She knows how to capture the spirit of pouncing predators.