My mom visits us in November 2007

My mom visited us in Austin in November 2007. She saw E for the first time since E was 4 months old. The two year gap vanished in a day as E befriended her grandma immediately.

Grandma reads a book to E

My mom and I on a swing at the Hudson on the Bend restaurant in Austin

Appetizers at Hudson on the Bend: diamondback rattlesnake cakes. I just had to try them. They sound much more exotic than they taste. While the appetizer was tasty, it was so mostly because of the spices it was made with, and the relish it was served with. The rattlesnake meat, it seems, hardly tastes like meat at all — or at most, a very bland, flavorless kind of meat.

My mom and E on the playground

Mom pushes E on a swing

Since it was close to the holiday season, we went to the lighting of Zilker tree with mom and E. The Zilker tree is not a real, live tree. It’s a tower decorated with strings of lights. From up close, when you can see each individual light, those lights look rather sparse, but from further away they look tightly packed and you can see overall patterns in them. The most interesting view of the lights is from [i]under[/i] the tree. They form a giant spiral with a center at top of the tree. It is possible to fit the whole spiral and a person in a picture, if the photographer lies down on the ground. That’s what I tried to do with E here. Only she is so short, or my camera’s powers so limited, that I can’t fit both her head and the entire spiral in the picture. But I did better when I had my mom hold E in her arms, lifting her higher off the ground.

December 2007.