Texas State Fair in Pictures

Our trip to the Texas State Fair in Dallas was really an excuse to see our dear friends from Norway Matt and Kathryn. For those that aren't following along- they are Americans we meet our first year. He was studying at the local university and she taught school with me. They happened to live about 2 minutes away from us so we spent quite bit of time with them (mostly playing cards and eating pizza). They left Norway to return to Minnesota after a year and we have been planning our reunion ever since.

We picked Matt and Kathryn up at noon on Friday. We bummed around and ended up at the Southern Methodist University campus to wander through the beautiful old buildings. Then we showed Matt and Kathryn what real Tex-Mex was at Chuy's - margaritas, chips, queso and delicious food.

SMU campus - learning about it from the smart phone

Our night ended with our tradition of a few rounds of Pinochle

Bright and early Saturday we headed to the Texas State Fair! It was a beautiful sunny day and we were excited to see the sights and eat all the fried foods.

First up on the fried food extravaganza- fried Texas caviar (or black eyed peas)

Us with Big Tex- he talks!

Next we headed to the livestock barns to see some animals- only in Texas are the sheep dressed in camo

Texas Longhorns- fact of the day- female Longhorns have horns too!

Beautiful brown cows were the cows showing this day- I got to pet one

Then it was off to the kids petting zoo- that's a water buffalo with the sweetest face

Next came lunch which started with the original Corny Dog and ended with dessert of fried Oreos and fried Snickers

After wandering the car show and some other areas we headed to try what we heard was the best fried thing at the fair- fried waffle covered chocolate covered strawberries

Do you think we liked them?

No trip to the Fair come complete without a ride on the Texas Star Ferris wheel - the biggest in the US

The picture before it starting moving and Kathryn wanted to throw up

Our day ended with some Fried Frito Pie and a Funnel Cake and a silly picture

We headed back to the hotel for some college football, cards and pizza. Nothing could have been better.

These pictures started nice enough but ended in serious giggles. It was an amazing weekend with some great friends. We look forward to another fun weekend in the future. The Texas State Fair was pretty good too.

The Houston Zoo

Jason and I visited the Houston Zoo two weekend ago on Sunday morning. It was a beautiful day and gave Jason a good opportunity to work with his camera. Here are some images from our trip.

The very rare red panda- there we pretty cute but kinda looked like big raccoons

The 5 month old baby elephant that was trying to copy everything his momma was doing

The star of the show- the 7 day old baby elephant! He still was wobbly on his feet which was so cute.

The verdict is back

And we are moving to......(that was the drum roll)....Covington, Louisiana. It is basically a suburb of New Orleans in the area refereed to as the "north shore".

We are pretty happy with the decision and it was not too much of a surprise. Though we did get a phone call from Jason's boss the day before the decision was to be made and were asked to rank a position in Kuwait on our list. So we did a mad dash to research and ended up ranking it in the middle of the list but Covington won out. The job will be a project engineer working on projects on one or more offshore oil platforms in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. It seems like it will be a good challenge for Jason and we think we can find a nice house in the area. Though it will be a 2.5 hour commute for Jason on days when he get to go out the platforms.

We still haven't heard any specific details since we have to wait for HR to get us an offer letter but it take weeks for that. We think the job will start sometime in December or January. Our sea shipment has arrived in Houston and cleared customs- were hoping that would take longer but at least it is here. Dopler continues to do better. He had his first B-12 injection last week and he seems more lively but still shows a little pickiness with food in the morning. Hopefully that injections will continue to help him.

Stay tuned for more updates on our move and life in Houston. We went to the zoo last week so I will post pictures of that soon and we are going to the Texas State Fair in Dallas with Matt and Kathryn this weekend (so excited to see them!)

Trip to California

Since I am not working and I have yet to see my parent's new home I took a week long trip to California. The weather was nice and I got to see my parent's new home and community which was also really good. We didn't do too much (which was nice) but my mom and I did spend part of the day in Yosemite. They live about an hour or so from the park entrance. The park is as beautiful as I remember but I did find myself slightly taken aback by all the people (and it was low season). I guess the Norwegian in me was not used to share nature so closely with others.

The deer right up near my parent's house

The deer behind the house

The view into Yosemite Valley- unbelievable

Some of the big tress in Yosemite

The American way to hike

After a nice week with my parents I flew down to LA to spend the weekend with Sarah. I got to see her place in Redondo Beach and it reminded why I do like Southern California! We had some nice meals and spent a nice weekend catching up.

Sunset view in Redondo Beach

Sadly during my lovely week in California Jason was stuck in Houston dealing with a sick Dopler. He had to take him to the emergency vet the night I left. Dopler had bad diarrhea and was in pain- when Jason took him in the weighed him and he had lost 6 pounds since Monday. After some tests they determined he has Giardia (an intestinal parasite) which we think he might have chronically. He was given some drugs and a liter of fluid under his skin (Jason said he looked like a camel) and sent home to recoup. Our dear friends Natalie and Gavin played care taker for three days while Jason was at work. Thursday Dopler's bad tummy returned so Jason took him back to the vet for some more tests and Jason's mom came to visit to help. Turns out he has a B12 deficiency as well but nothing else major wrong. He was also continuing to struggle to eat but after some additional experimenting with his food we have found a wet food to mix into his dry food that he loves so he has eaten every meal for a full week. We have our fingers crossed that he will continue to gain weight and improve. There is nothing to stress you out like a sick dog :(

Back to Reality

We have been in the apartment for a little over two weeks and life is returning to normal. Our air shipment arrived on Monday so we now have 6 boxes of stuff to make the apartment feel a little more like "home". According to our relocation website our sea shipment has yet to leave Norway- which is more then fine with us.

Work is going fine for Jason and I am trying to fill my time - Target seems to be a constant draw. I do think I have OD'd on reality TV- particularly House Hunters and anything having to do with weddings. I have an unnatural draw to those shows I think. The company has scheduled us for a repatriation workshop in two weeks but I have to admit there are already things that I notice that are weird for me. Obviously none of them are so strange that I can't deal with it but I do notice them a lot. They include:

• People not wearing helmets on motorcycles or bikes (really you are going 75 mph without a helmet!)
• The lack of ability to recycle- I still find myself folding cardboard and rinsing plastic
• How in the world does the dryer dry things so quickly? I swear I put a load in the other day and it was dry in 10 minutes....
• I continue to leave the oven on- it doesn't make any noise to tell me it's on- our old oven had a loud fan
• The over abundance of plastic bags at the grocery store - I swear the bagger must be instructed to use as many bags as possible on each customer and they seem to be multiplying under my sink
• Radio edit (and TV censoring too) I am still thrown off when the words in the song are different. And I had to laugh at just how conservative the US is - last night on Survivor they were blurring the crotch area of men in full coverage underwear...really?

And now for a Dopler update. The vet ran all kinds of tests and we found out that he is healthy as a horse. Still not interested in food so we got his teeth cleaned (which went really well). And he is still being really fussy so we are now chalking it up to grief. So with our vets guidance we are letting him eat when he wants and see if he can work it out on his own.

For anyone that knew both dogs....Dopler never used to hold his ears straight up....strange

Unfamiliar Views

After spending two days in Beaumont with Jason's parents and Dopler we headed to Houston to check into the new apartment and get settled before Dopler joined us. The apartment is in the Medical Center part of town and is in a really great location - only about 20 minutes from downtown for Jason. The apartment is fully furnished and very nice but it will be an adjustment for us to go from 1900 square feet to 750 square feet. After checking out the apartment we headed down the street to one of my favorite things about the new area:

The next day we headed out to look at homes in Houston with our realtor. We were pleased to see there are some nice options in some decent areas within our price range. We also spent part of Thursday with our realtor and feel pretty good about our options if we stay in Houston. Then we did what I was excited about and dreading at the same time- the grocery store! It was as overwhelming as I expected. So many choices! I had a hard time remembering what we used to eat, plus there are so many new options and of course so many more choices then Norway! At one point I had 5 different boxes of cereal in my hand, trying to read the labels with Jason laughing at me!

On two different evenings we were able to catch up with our good friends Natalie and Gavin and Phil and Crystal (and ate some good food!). On Friday went to Rudy's BBQ which was amazing- we haven't had Texas BBQ for over 2 years. We forgot how good it was and were surprised how good potato salad was! Then Jason's parents arrived with Dopler- he was very excited and he got to ride in the elevator. We had a quiet weekend trying to give Dopler some stability since he has had a lot of change recently. But alas he is not interested in food and struggling to eat so we are off to the vet first thing this morning.

So here are my initial observations about living here again:

• My workout view has changed from the Trondheim fjord to the Astrodome (which is the 8th wonder of the world)
• There are a LOT of obese people (so much more then I remember)
• People talk to you randomly - which kind of scares me each time
• Things are really inexpensive but many things are not as cheap as I remember (like cases of soda!)
• The roads and traffic are slightly overwhelming- 5 lanes in one directions is crazy
• It is SO diverse here- standing in the US Citizen line at immigration in Newark I must have heard 6 different languages
• Many things are exactly as I remember them in Houston but it is taking awhile to remember all the details of places, food and roads. We drive along like tourists!

Ready, Set, Go....

The movers arrived wearing kilts and packed us up quickly. By noon on day two all our worldly possessions (minus 6 checked bags and 4 carry-ons) were on a truck on the way to Oslo. We originally planned to leave on Sunday but since the packing was finished early we moved the flight to Saturday. We sold the car, finished cleaning the house, said some final good-byes then had a nice dinner with our expat friends.

All packed- I would like to note that the curtains are not ours!

Our last night in Trondheim

Then Saturday morning we headed out pretty early and got on the plane. We had nice easy flights with no problems. And we avoided extra baggage fees which was pretty impressive! We were welcomed back to the US by a nice immigration agent in Newark after waiting in a ridiculously long line. Jason's parents picked us up in Houston and after about 75 minutes on the road we were truly greeted home by Dopler. He was pretty excited to see us and we were more then excited to see him. He has stuck pretty close to us - I think he was unsure what was going to happen next. Sunday morning we had homemade french toast and did some shopping. It is strange to think we aren't returning to Norway. We don't need to eat as much good food as possible or buy everything we can't get- we have lots of time....