The last time I tried to visit my family in Texas, all but a day and a half of it were ruined by a volcano in Alaska, where I was stuck for a week. This past week, the trip worked flawlessly and made it much more enjoyable. My trip for Cathay ended me up in Miami, so I caught a flight from there to DFW, and Laura was at home, so she caught a flight from Columbus, and we met in the middle there in Texas.

My last trip to Texas was cut short a great deal, outlined in all too many details here. I was able to see my family that lives in the Metroplex, including my grandparents, but not much of my parents. This time around, it was my parent’s turn, so Laura and I spent our time two hours away in Tyler.

My dad got a new Mac Mini, so it was nice to spend some time with him helping him figure it all out. Mac’s are very intuitive, but sometimes, especially having worked in the miserable windows environment for so long, the learning curve for a Mac can be quite steep. Why? Because things are so easy and so well laid out and thought out, that the easy thing to do or the easy way around an issue doesn’t present itself. But, once he’s hooked on Mac, he’ll never go back.

I recently heard some people complaining about having to pay the Mac “tax” — the money spent on more expensive Mac’s for the luxury of using an Apple. There are also some windows commercials depicting how cool Mac’s are, but that they are unaffordable. Like Southwest Airlines tries to tell us they are the cheapest (they aren’t), windows is doing the same thing. When I bought my Mac, I priced an equivalent Dell, with the same hard drive space, same ram, built in video camera, and so forth, and the Mac was actually $300 dollars cheaper! This is because Apple is small, so they don’t produce 50 versions of laptops; they have four or five. They don’t sell crappy low end versions like Compaq and HP do. Sure, you can spend $500 dollars on a laptop, but you’ll not have the same features as the Mac will, which isn’t a fair comparison. But, windows is favored by geeks around the world because they can screw with the programming. Those geeks then become managers of IT departments and spread the windows ilk into mainstream business everywhere. Fine with me. With Apple being below the radar of virus writers, that keeps my Mac running great.

Ken Rockwell has a great article about this (Search his site for “windows is bad”) where he makes a convincing argument that companies waste billions each year because they still use windows.

Beyond helping my dad, it was good to see my mom, too. That is, when she wasn’t busy falling into the pool. The other morning, my dad and I were at the breakfast table and my mom was in the other room with a fever. We heard her go into the back yard and then a few seconds later, a loud, blood curdling scream. This was then followed by the sound of a huge swoosh and ker-plunck. We ran out to the yard (not because we were concerned, but so that she would see us running and not walking) to see what all the commotion was about. My dad tugged her out and we found out that she had pulled on a garden hose and it stuck on something, recoiling and pulling her off balance and into the pool. They’ve lived there nearly four years, so I guess it was bound to happen sometime. I didn’t have my camera . . .

We also had my grandma, aunt and uncle, cousins, and friends over for burgers. It was nice to catch up on old stories and see everyone. I don’t get back to Texas often enough to see everyone all the time, so when I do, it really is great. Next time we’re down, it will be my mom’s side of the family’s turn to see us. We’ll be back in a few weeks because we’re going on a cruise that leaves out of Galveston, Texas. We’re really looking forward to that!

Because my mom and dad both work during the week, Laura and I found some things to do to entertain ourselves. We did some shopping for our cruise, bought my parents some late Christmas presents (really late), visited the Tyler Zoo, and Cherokee Trace animal park, where you drive through and feed the exotic animals from your car. Some pictures from the zoo and animal park are here. It was unseasonably cool all week which made both the zoo and animal park much more enjoyable. In the animal park, we got to see a kangaroo, antelope, and even a camel. It was funny because Laura was nervous to have the camel stick his head near her window. As he brought his head down to her closed window, I, from the driver’s side, rolled it down and she freaked. I thought it was funny, but I don’t think she did . . .

I’ll end on this: The better pictures of our trip are found on the previous links, but below are three funnies from our time in the animal park. I was feeding an Emu from the window of our car. The thing about Emu’s is that they have these terribly beady eyes and they always look like they are about to strike with their beak. I was never sure if they were going to eat the food pellets off the ground, or pinch a hunk of skin out of my arm. The following pictures are a sequence of three in a row, shot by Laura, from the safety of the other side of the car. Notice that she had the camera, and left me to the evil and scary Emu! Am I a sissy? Look at these photos and you be the judge.

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