A New Home!

I drove to Covington, LA two weeks ago to house hunt. I looked at 38 houses in two days and narrowed the list to 7 houses for Jason to see. It was a pretty exhausting process but thankfully it was due to the fact there was a lot of good options. After Jason saw the 7 houses we narrowed it down to three and made an offer on our favorite- which we thought might be a long shot. They countered once and we were able to make a great deal! The next day we had the house inspected and it got a clean bill of health. Evidently after Hurricane Katrina there was a big problem with Chinese drywall so we had to make sure our house didn't have it. So we are currently under contract and set to close on December 8th! We are really excited. Here are some photos:

We are excited to have a fenced yard for Dopler- it will be quite a new experience for him! Though Jason it not too excited to mow a yard. The house needs blinds throughout, the carpets cleaned and a bit of painting but other then that it is in really good condition. It is 3 years old with 4 bedrooms and a bonus room for Jason to use as a home theater room. We are moving out of the apartment in Houston today and spending the long Thanksgiving weekend with Jason's parents. Then we are off to live in a Residence Inn in Covington for 10 days or so until we can move in to the house. Jason's first day of work is December 1st. Dopler will stay with Robert and Judy to avoid too much change for him and his sensitive nature. He is doing better but we don't want to back track at this point. We saw him excited for food for the first time in almost 6 months last week!

Polo

After a morning of Ballooning we went to the Houston Polo Club to enjoy some polo. Neither of us had ever seen polo so we were excited to see what it was all about. It was a lot less posh then we expected though the sponsor ads were for boats, champagne and vacation homes so it was a slightly different demographic then other sporting events. The game is broken down into 6 chukkas (which are 7 minutes long), there are four players per team and each must trade horses after each chukka and a horse can only ride during two chukkas (but not consecutively)- so there are a lot of horses! At half time (after the third chukka) every one is invited onto the playing field to stomp divots and drink free champagne - count me in! The horses were beautiful and so amazing to watch them be controlled so quickly and boy do they run fast! Like hockey you can "check" in polo and throw your horse into someone elses and you can hook the mallets as well but only a certain way to avoid hurting the horses. We learned a lot and it was a really fun afternoon.

The opening of the match- the players were introduced

Notice the horse has no mane and it's tail is either wrapped or braided so it doesn't get caught in the mallet swing

Checking the horses

Horse protective equipment

Stay tuned for exciting news on our recent trip to Louisiana....

Ballooning

On Sunday our good friends, Natalie and Gavin, invited us to go down to NASA to attend a balloon festival. It meant an early start to our day but Natalie made it worth our while with hot chocolate and sweet treats. We arrived at NASA just as the sun was rising and picked out our viewing spot. The balloons took off in a field near NASA and then had to fly in and throw markers into two different locations. The winner was the balloon with both markers closest to the target. It was pretty interesting to see how the balloon navigated. Did you know there are more then one type of hot air balloon? We learned a lot about the "sport" of ballooning and had some amazing views. It was a wonderful morning.

This balloon was set up in front of us to carry the flag for the opening of the competition- we were surprised how quick the set up happened.

This balloon is throwing their marker on the target (see the bean bag with the red tail?) They could get as low as they wanted but couldn't touch down- though some threw the bean bag from very high (and they were really bad at it)