Back in August, Kris and I went to the Iowa State Fair and we brought my very good friend Tasha and her husband Aaron along.

She has posted pictures on her blog from the trip.
Click on this picture to see more:

<3 Carly

Kris and I had an invitation from our Austin friend Mark to stay at his place for "as long as we want." We ended up staying a week. Well, technically it was Monday night through Friday night.

I don't remember what we did on which days for the most part so I will just give a sweeping summary of the highlights.

-Austin friend Mark took Monday off to show us around Austin which included a trip to the botanical gardens that had a super special dinosaur garden (you know how much Kris and I love dinosaurs!). We had coffee again at the same place we went to last year. The first thing I did was find the Dora the Explorer Memory game that we played last year. I dominated when we played memory last year and even my awful held cold this year didn't take me out of winning at least a handful of rounds.

Austin friend Mark had Mind Trap at his apartment. As it turns out, Kris and I are pretty good at Mind Trap. I found a web site with Mind trap questions if you would like to try it yourself. Any time we were at his apartment we would be asking each other Mind Trap questions.

- We went over to John P. Funk's house (we met John at Maker Faire). He makes movies and he wanted to show us some of the stuff he was working on. Here are a bunch of pictures of the things he has made:







I posted the short horror movie he made on Halloween.

-John invited us to the book release party at the Alamo Drafthouse for the book Shock Festival by Stephen Romano

The book is amazing. It is fake movie posters for B-rated movies.

The Alamo Drafthouse showed the movie StarCrash as party of the book release party. I personally love B-rated sci-fi and horror flicks so I LOVED this movie.

*David Hasselhoff with a LIGHTSABER FTW!!!!!!!!!
*Best line in the movie: "Time for some robot shovenism"

You MUST watch the trailer for StarCrash. It really is as bad as it looks!

Kris and I were very well taken care of that evening - thank you, John and Dan!

-We went to see improv again (Seriously, go watch some of the Parallelogramophonograph videos)

-On Thursday (of the extra week we stayed), Austin friend Mark sent us a text message (while he was at work) that said "You guys wanna go to San Antonio tomorrow? The Alamo is there" How could we say no to seeing the Alamo?

-So Friday we went down to San Antonio. We had lunch on the Riverwalk:

It is so pretty down there and the weather was perfect!

-Then, we went over to the Buckhorn Saloon and Museum. That was an experience. There were taxidermied animals as far as the eye could see. I'm not joking. At first it was sort of uncomfortable, but then it just because humorous.

Guy at the ticket booth: "The giraffe on the wall there died of natural causes. The baby upstairs, not so much." He also encouraged us to drink while we walked through the "museum."

The first thing you came to in the "museum" was a Jack Daniels whiskey display. (seen on the left)


The "museum" has a ghost of Buffalo Bill character that walks around. Kris and I were admiring the display of antique guns when Buffalo Bill walks over to the Jack Daniels display, moves the rope, opens a box in the display, pulls out a cigar, lights it, closes the box, puts the rope back and wanders back to the dining area leaving only the incredibly strong aroma of whiskey behind. I swear that happened. I think the expression on my face during that would best be described as my 'WTF Face.'

Kris and I decided to have some fun with the taxidermied animals. We made it into photographic art.


For the full experience, I suggest you check out Kris's "Glass Eyes Hold No Secrets" post.

This bobcat(?) had a taxidermied dead rabbit under it's foot. I'm not sure why it was looking at a poster for Buffalo Bill though.


Here is that baby giraffe that didn't die of natural causes:


How could you not love that face?


The 'info cards' had more information on how to PREPARE AND EAT the animals on display than characteristics of the animals when they are alive. How very Texas of them.

The sign says: Pompano Dolphins are typically called "school dolphin" because they roam in large schools. The flesh is delicious, but since it is a very bloody fish, it should be cleaned and put on ice immediately to preserve the flavor. The Pompano Dolphin grows to only 3 pounds or so.

You would think they could at least taxidermy the animals with their jaws in the right place:


They had a thing to compare your feet size to animal feet sizes. Here I go!



This picture was taken from the "museum" out into the dining area. The walls were covered with animals. They didn't care if they had multiple animals, they just packed them in. In fact, they even built extra wall space to hang more animals off!


According to that museum, Australia is part of Asia.

Anyway, we went down to the Alamo. See, I have proof!

I must admit, I wasn't that impressed. But at least I can say I've been there!

-Friday night of our trip, we went back to Austin and Kris and I finished our trip the same way we started it - with Locksley! They were playing in Austin at Emo's. We saw them 3 times in 2 weeks (I should also mention they were touring with the super sweet boys of Hymns). Those Locksley boys were an adorable finish to an awesome trip. Too bad we were so tired that night.

We had a pretty awesome view of the show:

I hope their tour schedule always matches our travel schedule because I loved seeing those boys so many times in that short of a time frame.

-The next morning, Austin friend Mark took us to Jim's again for a breakfast of sweet cream waffles.

Last year, I got a sweet cream waffle:


This year, I got a sweet cream waffle with strawberries and whipped cream:

We headed home that afternoon and arrived back home in Iowa Sunday afternoon. On the drive home, Austin friend Mark was texting us Mind Trap questions. How cute is that?

So that's it! I hope next year is as much fun as this year.
xoxo,
Carly

While in Austin we stayed with an awesome friend of ours. His name is Mark, and if you are going to Austin you should hire him as a tour guide. For real. On the last day before we left he determined that we had seen everything good in Austin so he took us to San Antonio (technically for The Alamo, but, as I'm sure Carly will cover, The Alamo is entertaining for a very brief period of time.) In San Antonio Mark took us to The Buckhorn Saloon and Museum. The place is basically a temple of taxidermy but any museum that encourages you to drink has to be good. Early on I took this picture:



Carly determined that the following would be a better picture:



The following is a completely gratuitous series of photos of me with dead animals.

It's a friendly polar bear.  Did you know that polar bear fur is actually transparent, and their skin is black?







After staring deep into their glassy eyes I have come away with no secrets. Please do not touch the displays so that everyone can enjoy them.

The Maker Faire trip ended up being a big adventure! I don't know how to break up the trip so I'm just going to write until I get tired of writing.

Kris and I left Iowa Wednesday afternoon (Oct. 15th) to drive the 1100 miles to Austin, TX for Maker Faire! It just so happened that Locksley was playing that evening in Lawrence, KS. We took at 40 mile detour to Lawrence and caught their show for the second time that week (we saw them two days earlier in Des Moines).

From there we continued driving overnight to Austin. We got into Austin about 1:30 in the afternoon (Oct. 16th). After calling our Austin friend Mark, we found out that our evening was going to involve seeing him perform improv at the ColdTowne Theater. I don't remember the last time I laughed so hard. Even if you aren't familiar with or don't like improv, if you get the opportunity to see the group Parallelogramophonograph perform you really should.

After being up for 38 hours straight, we finally got some sleep! Friday afternoon we headed over to the Travis County Fair Grounds and Expo Center to get set up at Maker Faire!!

I have my bracelet and Maker badge!!

After setting up we took a little time to walk around. The life size mousetrap was back this year! And with a fresh coat of paint.

That evening they catered food for the makers and we got an opportunity to chat with the guys in the booth next to ours about their robots. Last year we had the Icreate robot (like the roomba vacuums) that painted. The guys next to us had robots that communicated with each other using speakers and face recognition cameras. The robots didn't recognize my face or Kris's face so they concluded we weren't human (but that didn't stop them from spending time with us). Here is a picture of a kid playing with the robots the guys next to us brought:

This photo was taken sometime Saturday.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

At the dinner on set up night, we met up with our friend Steve who wrote the article about us in Servo magazine for the project we brought last year. We met the men from the Dallas Robotics Club (that Steve is a part of) and ended up walking around with them a bit that evening. Unfortunately, not that many people had set up on Friday but we did meet a man named John P. Funk who will come into play more later.

Onto Saturday...
Maker Faire was open on Saturday from 10am to 10pm.

We had the most amazing booth neighbors - Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories!!!! They do some amazing projects and they are ridiculously nice people. While the show was going on, our booths were so busy that we didn't get as much time as I would have liked to talk to them. Hopefully we will run into them at another Make Faire and get more time to chat!

Across from us, they were making liquid nitrogen ice cream! Who doesn't love giant tanks of liquid nitrogen??

Those poor boys never stopped the whole weekend. There was always a line at their booth for ice cream. To be fair- they did have a remarkable array of things to add to the ice cream to design your own flavor.

Saturday night, we quit at about 7:30 and took some time to walk around and enjoy the fair. Unfortunately for us, most of the people who had booths had also quit for the night so we didn't get to talk to many people!

I was very excited to catch Arc Attack. It is music made with tesla coils. What is a tesla coil? If you had watched History Hackers, you would know that tesla coils were created in an attempt to have wireless electricity. That didn't work out (on a grand scale) but it does work in close range (if you wave a florescent light bulb near a tesla coil it will light up). Here is the wikipedia entry on tesla coils. Anyway, I took a short video of the tesla coil in action making music.

People upstairs from the tesla coils had to shut down their electrical projects while the tesla coils were on because the wireless electricity was making stuff go crazy.

This sign was on the barricade to ArcAttack:

Signs like this are why I love Maker Faire - if you do something to hurt yourself you are the only one responsible for your actions.

That's the end of Saturday night. I think I will end Part 1 here. Part 2 will come along soon.

xoxo,
Carly