Last Day of Texas Roadhouse

On our last day in Texas we did a lot of the same stuff we did every other day here, which was perfect with me.

I learned that there is a thing called a dewberry. I think it's similar to a blackberry but not the same thing. I figured the best way to experience this new exotic fruit was in beer form. I wanted to make sure I got all of the nutrients.

I may have pushed a couple bugs onto an ant hill. For science.

Zoe when she realized how bright my future is.

So Lydia was making this cornbread thing with jalapenos in it. And I believe that it involved putting a pan into the oven to bake. Well a classic move is to put a pan in the oven, heat it to the temperature of the sun, pull it out of the oven and set in on the stove, then sometime later forget that it is now lava, and grab the handle with your bare hand. Sizzle sizzle. So while Lydia was experiencing her hand on fire, she must have rubbed her eyes... and now she had jalapeno juice in her eyes. It was a whole thing. There was a lot of crying, milk poured on faces.

Anyway the cornbread was pretty good. So I'd say... Worth it.

We left the next morning to repeat our feat of driving across the country without stopping.

Texan Cow Soccer

Jim, Aunt Paula's husband, took care of the cows on the ranch. I've heard of people buying portions of cows from ranches and now that I had a connection in the biz, I asked Paula if that was something that they did. She gave me a look like I had uttered a blasphemy. "Those cows are his pets!" 

Around this time Lydia and I got the idea that we would move to a country that was less plagued by covid in order to reclaim some semblance of a normal life, and to see some of the world while we were at it. Covid really cut us off from other people and most ways of interacting with our environment, so that really cut us loose. We enjoyed our brief time traveling through Estonia and we noticed that they had a digital nomad visa for people like me who had remote jobs based elsewhere. Lydia did an interview or two at local schools in Tallinn and pretty quickly got a job offer. I served as the speed bump on this one, unfortunately. The situation in the US was so bad that Estonia was not offering the nomad visa to any American, even if they weren't coming from America. I had considered briefly staying in a third country like Turkey or something in order to quarantine outside of the country but no dice. We were stuck in this covid wasteland for the foreseeable future.

I was amused that I could see a cow from bed.

Lydia gettin weird with the last of the Texas sheet cake.

So the routine here is that Jim raises the new calves for some period of time then sells them "to cover the cost of the feed". Seemed reasonable enough.

He gave the pregnant or new mothers a special better food while the others were busy eating their hay.

I wanted to give Paula and Jim a small gift for being such great hosts, so I bought a toy for the cows. It was meant for horses I think but "cow toy" wasn't bringing up a whole lot of hits on Amazon. There was a large inflatable like beach ball type thing that I saw videos of cows loving, but they would for sure pop the ball and be sad. So I got them a smaller, much sturdier ball instead. The calves in particular liked to play with it, and some even pushed it around the grass with their head.

The ball was peppermint scented so everybody had a good time giving it a good sniff.

We celebrated a cow playtime well done later on with the last of the mead.

Luckily we had some other wine on hand when the mead ran out. We were like wine bottle serial killers on this trip.

We liked to go on night walks but you had to be careful: there were some massive spider webs lurking in the darkness.