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Well, we're back from our trip to OKC so I thought I'd post some news. First of all thanks to all those who voted in the poll to change/keep the blog title. The majority has spoken and the site will stay Music Snobs. Also, thanks for the new title suggestions. I like several of them, but only one can get the call.

For more on the trip click on over to Sarah's blog, she's already put a post up this morning with some pictures of the trip. While I'm not going to put any of the pictures up (that's Sarah's thing and I don't want to steal her thunder... I think she does a better job of detailing the family's goings on than I do.) I'm not going to let that stop me from saying a few things about the trip.

Firstly, my faith in humanity was restored then dashed again. In Texas, my current state of residence, we have this little thing (note: the picture of highway 183 in Irving, TX runs about a half mile from where I work, hate that thing) that drives me nuts. Frontage roads get my blood boiling like nothing else. I hate them. Now, the hatred is somewhat miss placed and I will freely admit this, but not entirely. I know a large part of the reason I hate them is actually just the fact that Austin is too crowed for its own good. The city and its suburbs have just grown too quickly and infrastructure has not keep pace with the number of people moving here. That is the root of the problem, and frontage roads are a physical manifestation that I can lash out against.

In my defense, and to show I'm not completely crazy about the roads I will explain a little more. The roads in this area suck. They are paved smoothly so all you Michiganders I'm not talking about the jolt to the butt you get every other second when you drive down older sections of I-75. What I mean is none of the roads here seem to go straight for very long they just run in random directions, roads have multiple confusing names, many areas are so new that google and yahoo maps are useless to guide you to new places, and finally the frontage roads. We happen to live on a frontage road, and I work in a building built on one too. Every morning when I leave for work I pull up to the apartment drive way and make a right turn toward the east. Fine. Whatever. The only problem is my work is west of where we live. Because it's a one way frontage road I drive about a quarter of a mile the wrong direction, flip a u-turn underneath the freeway and drive another quarter of a mile where I wave goodbye to my apartment all over again. To cut short all my many complaints of frontage roads I'll just say that I think they encourage people to build about 15 feet off the expressway when they normally wouldn't and they don't help move traffic any faster, but they do require you to pave roads all over the place and make the landscape ugly.

So now that I've made this huge rant you're wondering what this has to do with anything. I'll tell you what it has to do with... we drove to Oklahoma, as in a state that does not use evil torture devices like frontage roads. It was just so awesome to be able to drive the speed limit and think about things in this way "Alright, thirty miles to the next rest area that means we'll be there in twenty-five to thirty minutes" and not "I've got to get on I-35 north at Hester's Crossing (I'd guess about a three mile drive from our place) that should only take about twenty-five minutes." Anyways, faith in humanity restored.

On a more serious note in OKC we visited the Oklahoma City National Memorial. The restoration of my faith was short lived. I don't know how to punish people enough when they do things like that. Repeated buckets of boiling water to the crotch might be a good start. What's especially messed up is that the building had a daycare in it. Blowing those kids up and there parents just trying to make it through another work week, that sure showed the government. I couldn't help but be saddened by the fact that events like this seem so commonplace that we don't remember one tragedy from the next. The pictures from the link are pretty good including a statue called And Jesus Wept, which got me thinking about a Wilco song, now on the SP's.

The trip on the whole was a good one, and it really had me thinking a lot. This was the first trip in the care that was longer than two hours we've taken with Claire since she was six weeks old and the first time ever for Noel. I couldn't help but feel some gratitude for my own parents and how they always worked to give me and my brothers good vacations. I really felt like life comes full circle as I thought about how parents must have felt in a similar situation (not a specific event, just in general) years before. A job that doesn't pay all that well, traveling on a budget, young kids in the back seat, and all the stuff that comes with traveling. Like changing diapers in a strong wind on a picnic table out in the middle of nowhere. It sort of made me feel closer to my own family (even though we weren't visiting them), and it was a good feeling. I guess the old cliche about turning into your parents is, at least in part, true.

Hope you all had a nice holiday weekend (sigh, end of summer), and be prepared for my future posts as the weather here finally cools down again (after I have suffered through another Texas summer) and I rub it in the faces of the readers of the blog who live up north (with its nice mild summer) that winter is nice time to be in Texas.