myTexas Hill Country

Hill Country Blog

There are as many experiences as there are people living here. This is our story, about our special places, activities and taking life day by day. See more stories to the right in our Blog Listing.

Happy New Year 2008

It was a fabulous holiday in the Hill Country.  Loads of sunshine and mild weather.  Yesterday it hit 72 degrees.  You cannot beat that in January, unless you’re trying to get some snow under your skis. 

We do miss the ability to get to snow within 3 hours.  That just isn’t possible from Austin.  During Thanksgiving, we headed over to Ruidoso, New Mexico where my parents have a town house. It was a 9 ½ hour straight drive, along some pretty monotonous highways, but there weren’t many cars competing for the road, so it was an easy drive.  It snowed our second day there– the kids were ecstatic, but it quickly became mushy, slushy and left our white car splattered with mud.  Beautiful mountains and tall evergreen trees were a welcome change, but I missed my sweater-weather back home in Austin.  We were bundled up in layers of sweaters and jackets whenever we ventured out in Ruidoso.

A funny thing did happen while I was in New Mexico. My hair was fabulously shiny and silky and manageable and after the third day I was beginning to suspect that it wasn't all to be attributed to the Pert Plus I was using in my parents' shower. It was the water. The water here in the hill country is incredibly caustic if you are fed by a well and we are. We have an expensive chlorinator and salt system that attempts to clean up the water before it hits the house, but we still have a reverse osmosis system for drinkable water in the house. For our showers, we don't have that final step. So, when we got home, I lavishly squandered a bottle of drinking water to do the final rinse on my water and Voila! it's the water. Now I'm searching for a shampoo that can counteract the water quality because using bottled water made me feel like Marie Antoinette and I'm back to frizzy, unmanageable and ugly.

When we got back home, I immediately tottered outside in a light jacket to flip through the dozens of catalogs that had piled up during our absence. Calvin volunteered to BBQ dinner on the grill, forgetting that the nighttime temperatures were still dipping down into the 40s.  Under the stars, wrapped in his heavy coat, drinking a frosty beer, he grilled up the burgers.