Unemployed no more!

It's been a while since my last post, but I have a pretty good excuse. These past couple weeks I have been getting back in the groove of working full-time and trying to settle into my new position as an Executive Assistant to one of the Assistant City Managers for the City of Austin (Woohoo for having "assistant" in my title twice :).

It's similar work to what I was doing in College Station, but I'm still getting used to the increase in scale. My boss has five departments under his purview so I will primarily be working with Transportation, Public Works, Aviation, Solid Waste, and Code Compliance. I can already tell that this position will be a great learning experience for me as I get to work for a bigger city and interact closely with some large departments.

So the blog posts about new recipes might not happen quite as frequently, but I think we'll trade that for having two incomes again. Below is a picture of my new workplace, a.k.a. Austin City Hall.

More birthdays!

March is starting to become a busy month for birthdays. First mine and then exactly seven days (and many years) later comes my nephew Connor's birthday. Jake almost kept up the seven day difference when he was born last year, but his birthday comes six days after Connor's. So last weekend was a busy one for us when both of the boys had their birthday parties.

Megan asked me to make a birthday cake for Jake to match his owl themed party. Hayden and I made a test cake a few weeks ago to see how it would turn out and more importantly to give us an excuse to eat cake. Friday night we got busy working on his birthday and smash cake. Hayden baked and helped get the cakes ready to go. I got to do the decorating. After a long night the cakes were packed up and ready to go.

The first stop was Connor's six birthday party in the park. He had a Pikachu themed party with all of his friends from school. I can't believe he is getting so old already.

The poor Pikachu pinata didn't last very long once the boys started swinging.Connor opening some of his presents.Getting ready to blow out the candles.

The girls enjoyed their snacks out on the playground.Jake was really concerned about the cupcakes and who would share with him.

After Connor's party we dropped off Jake's cakes and headed to New Braunfels for the night. We decided to stay at a bed and breakfast for the night rather than drive all the way back to Austin for the night and back down the next day.Jake's CakesJake getting ready to dig in.I think this boy might like his cake.He pretty much destroyed it.

Here is Jake's birthday gift. Tim is a huge Cubs fan, so we had to make Jake a Cubs gift.

Happy birthday Morgan!

Today is my beautiful wife's birthday! We began celebrating a little early starting on Friday with a Kyle Park concert at Midnight Rodeo with our friend Casey.


We didn't have too busy of a Saturday, but we did do a little shopping, found a good burger place (with gluten-free hamburger buns!) called Terra Burger and cleaned up the apartment a little.

After Mass Sunday morning, we headed to Trudy's for a surprise birthday lunch with Morgan's family. Morgan says she knew something was up when I wanted to go home and wait a little while before going to lunch, but she was still excited to see her family and lunch was delicious. After lunch we all headed back to our apartment to visit and for them to get a chance to see our place. We got to have some birthday cupcakes and our nieces and nephews played on the apartment playground.

I figured Monday evening was close enough to Morgan's birthday for her to open my gift. I think I may be enabling her craft addiction, and the Silhouette I gave her probably doesn't help. I'm not entirely sure what it does, but she had been wanting one for a while and was excited when she opened it. Happy birthday Morgan!