I've been back a week now, after spending a week in Dallas hanging out with my family. I went up on Memorial Day weekend, and stayed until the following Saturday. It was such a nice vacation! I liked not feeling like I had to cram tons of activities into my typical one weekend trip, and I got to catch up with a ton of my extended family too.

First and foremost, my house had been infected with a crazy case of Maverick fever. I've never watched or talked so much basketball in my life! Every morning the Dallas Morning News would have huge, blown up pictures of Dirk Nowitzki (who is, I have to say, a really scary looking man) with dramatic 60-point headlines like "50!" (when they won) and "Never mind" (when they lost). This pride and excitement for a basketball team is a relatively new sensation for longtime Dallasites, a situation underscored at work when a coworker admitted he'd never even heard of a team called the Mavericks. But, for the sake of my dad and brother, I am rooting for them in the playoffs this week. :)

I went down to Dallas with a project already planned - because what is a vacation without a project? I wanted to archive all of my family's old vhs and hi8 videos onto DVD, and I had bought a dvd recorder online in preparation. Things didn't quite go as smoothly as I would like, but, four trips to Best Buy later, we had a decent vhs capturing setup. I spent the whole week dubbing home movies, church musicals, graduation videos, and tapes from our summers at Skyline. It was fun watching home movies, and my inner librarian had a blast sorting and archiving everything.

Another project for the week was spiffing up the courtyard on the east side of our house. On the morning of Memorial Day we all trekked down to the Dallas Farmers Market, where there is a whole street just filled with plants from local growers. I wish I had such a resource here! We filled the Explorer with all sorts of azalea bushes and hanging baskets and flats of annuals, and then spent most of Monday outside planting.

Monday night we had a lovely dinner with the whole big family at Macaroni Grill, minus Alison and Eric and Tatum. But I got my Tatum fix a day later at lunch with my mom, aunt Carol, Alison and Tatum. We ate at local Mexican food restaurant who's claim to fame is that the owner invented the frozen margarita machine. A generation of college students on spring break thanks him.

My grandparents came into town Wednesday, and although Jeff had started his summer semester, and my dad had to go back to work, Mom and I had fun touring the Arboretum and going over my granddad's home movies. We even endured a little "adventure" while eating breakfast at La Madeleine, where we were pooped on - twice - by pigeons. Apparently its good luck when this happens, but I'm reserving judgment. Of course we had to cap a visit from Grandad and Meemaw with a big dinner at Angelo's, which was, as usual, delicious.

Jeff also turned 25 while I was in Dallas. With all of those home videos lying around, we just had to drag out some of our favorites from over the years to torment him. My favorite is from the Christmas where he got a big, red plastic guitar. He spent the whole Christmas day perfecting his rock and roll boogie, and my dad spent his preserving this embarrassment for future generations. I'll have to put that one online for all to enjoy at some point!

Our last bit of excitement came later in the week, when my mom happened to look out the front window one morning and notice 4 Channel 11 News trucks in our front yard. Turns out they'd been broadcasting the news from our front lawn since 5:30 that morning, and none of us had noticed! We tuned in only to see that the one distinguishing feature of house visible in the broadcast was the pile of leaves that hadn't been raked up yet. Oh well. ;)