Posts filed under 'Places'
I’m fascinated by weather. Wind is weather and so I present you with these numbers from weather.com. It’s exceptionally windy right now.
Benbrook, TX at 4:45 PM
Wind: 35 MPH, gusting to 50 MPH
40% Humidity
94 Degrees
It doesn’t feel like 94 degrees. Must be the wind! 
Windiest Big Cities
We also must debunk the myth that Chicago is the windy city. I present you with average wind speeds from big American cities.
Milwaukee - 11.5 MPH
Dallas-Fort Worth - 10.7 MPH
San Francisco Airport - 10.6 MPH (I don’t think airports should count)
Minneapolis-St Paul - 10.5 MPH
Chicago - 10.3 MPH (hah!)
Detroit - 10.3 MPH
Philadelphia - 9.5 MPH
Miami - 9.2 MPH
Seattle - 8.9 MPH
Houston - 7.7 MPH
Los Angeles - 7.5 MPH
I took this shot of Benbrook Lake from a parking lot atop Longhorn Park which is next to Benbrook Dam. It’s 8:38 PM and 83 degrees right now. We saw a big frog in our yard today. The last two bits of information were random. Yup.
Today is my birthday! My baby love took me to a place he discovered east of Dallas, called The Harbor at Rockwall TX. We ate delicious Italian food at the Valore Restaurant and were served by a real life Italian waiter that took our picture. We got coffee and white cake at The Celebrity Cafe and Bakery. The Harbor is truly a beautiful place! It made us feel right at home by the water. The weather was perfectly warm and breezy. O Happy Day!
A while back I told Steven that I wanted a tennis ball to hang from our garage as a mark for the car to not go further, not because of it’s practical use but because I always thought was a very “american dream” type-a-thing to do. I also told him I wanted the tennis ball to be pink instead of green, which by the way I never knew existed. So this morning I opened this little package and there it was my pink tennis ball.
Little things that say “I love You” are the ones that mean the very most.
This song by Amy Grant says how I feel today:
You can thank the Father
For the things that He has done.
And thank Him for the things He’s yet to do.
And if you find a love that’s tender,
If you find someone who’s true,
Thank the Lord –
He’s been doubly good to you….
Here are some photos from April. We went to Lake Granbury, a Southwestern Seminary picnic, a “Mexico City” restaurant in Plano. There’s also a picture of Sudi operating a power tool (cool, huh Dad?) and some shots of visitors to our backyard.
Spring is here and we have succeeded on our first gardening experience. We started three weeks ago by having Weed-Man come over and remove some old shrubs and other ugly landscaping the previous owner left behind. We wanted to start fresh and do our own thing. We bought all our supplies, plants, soil and flowers at the THE PLANT SHED a local greenhouse. There we met Libby, who tutored us and told us all we needed to know about planting a flower garden. So here it is, 30 bags of top soil, 10 bags of manure, 1 bag of hardwood mulch, 3 Forsinthia bushes and 71 white and purple petunias later, our masterpiece.~
We decided it was time to buy a nice little home of our own, so we did. Our neighborhood is called Hills of Whitestone Ranch and is in Benbrook, TX. We’re about 5 miles southwest of Fort Worth. It’s sort of a rural-suburban area so the street you take to get into our neighborhood doesn’t have a name, just a number: Farm-to-Market 2871. We see horses and a partial view of Lake Benbrook every time we come and go. We’re happy. 
ATTENTION: Pictures of the inside of this house will not be posted. If you want to see, you must come.
We celebrated Lucy’s Birthday by going to P.F. Changs, our favorite restaurant since 2005. The food was succulent and fabulous! It was a beautiful evening. We discovered a very chic and exclusive orange-county-like place called Arlington Highlands. It was a very windy night, which made taking pictures a lot of fun.
In 2006 we got Lucy a Jeep for her Birthday. This year Steven and I decided to be a bit more bold and we got her a silver FJR Yamaha Motorcycle. She loved it!
You haven’t heard from me in a while. I’m busy living my dream. I’m a Full Time student. All thanks to my Baby-Love. One of these days I’m going to write a deep entry about life as a seminarian. One of these days when I don’t have hundreds of pages to read.
True story, I’ve been working like mad to get ahead on my reading, yesterday I finished a 900 page commentary on 1st. Corinthinas. Excellent by the way! I love that class. I finished the last chapter and walked to my computer with a huge sense of accomplishment to check my email and I found the syllabus for an Intensive class I’m taking in Januray. A real breeze!, only 4 books to read and 5 papers to write in the next 35 days. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! So as I was saying, one of these days when I have time, I will write about deep matters and the things I’m learning.
For now something light…
What I MISS The Most About San Diego: (Things that I really miss, it hurts thinking about them)
Our Family -There was something very comforting about having mom and dad 20 minutes away, now it is 20 hours.
Our Church- Best church and pastor in the world, irreplaceable.
En Fuego- Best Fajitas ever… so many great memories.
La Jolla- Our favorite place.
What I LOVE About Living In Texas:
Seminary- Going to Class is the best feeling, like a fish in the water.
Slower Pace-Things are quiet here and life is peaceful.
So many things to be thankful for.
God is Good…All the Time!
Earlier this month we moved to Benbrook, TX (population 22,000, map) which is on the southwest corner of Fort Worth (population 650,000). It connects to Fort Worth by Interstate 20 or the “back way” through a little country road. Fort Worth is about 30 miles from Dallas (Arlington is in between). The whole area is called the DFW Metroplex and has six million people. Fort Worth is the cowboy side of town where life is a bit slower. They say this is where the west begins. Sudi’s school, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, is about 10 minutes from Benbrook.
Gettin’ Here: The Drive
It was a 1,300 mile drive (our route) from Mom and Dad’s in Chula Vista, CA.
The rocky hillsides leaving San Diego County are beautiful (pictures below). Seeing them was worth the crack Sudi noticed our windshield had suffered. We saw Mark and Dan’s Cracker Barrel in Yuma, AZ. In Tucson, we couldn’t find a stinkin’ Subway so we gave up and kept moving until we got to a nice little town called Benson where they had our Subway. Aside from a short drive through some impressive boulders, the rest of the drive through Arizona was like watching a never-ending slide-show of cactus and Dr. Seuss trees. We passed through a huge storm and noticed that apparently nobody lives in New Mexico. That is, until you get to Las Cruces which is set in front of some 8,000 foot mountains where we spent the night and ordered a pizza. Day one was a ten hour journey.
Day two was under eight hours because we floored it. We passed through El Paso on the border and noticed things starting to get green while the mountains started shrinking. I had no idea the area near El Paso was made of lush farmland. We left the I-10 for the I-20 toward Fort Worth and passed through Midland which is where President George W. Bush was raised. Lots of oil pumps around there. It got progressively greener heading toward Abilene then finally on into Fort Worth which greeted us with a wonderful thunderstorm. We spent a couple nights in the seminary’s very nice hotel before moving into our apartment in Benbrook.
What’s Different from San Diego
Here it’s greener, more hamburger-only restaurants, less crowded, friendlier people, more telephone poles, hotter, less health food stores, bigger ants, more trains, triple the rain, most houses are brick, no ocean, many lakes, flatter (but somewhat hilly), more laid back, Target sells groceries, more butterflies, cows and ponies. And old ladies drive trucks. Fort Worth is fairly diverse with a mostly white, black and hispanic population.
Mom and Dad: no worries. We are OKAY. Within an eight mile radius we found Tofurkey, veggie burgers, rice milk, soy ice cream, nutritional yeast flakes, tofu and Nayonaise. Mark, no worries: we live one mile from Cracker Barrel and there’s a steakhouse on every single corner.
Here at Home
Our apartment is the same size but here we have a fireplace, dishwasher, washer, dryer, garden tub and covered parking. We have four windows in the living room which makes it nice and bright. As in La Mesa, we are a mile from a lake and have a little bit of a view from the balcony (not of the lake but of the suburbs and green areas below). Lucy is here visiting and next month Mom and Dad are coming in their motor home. Sudi starts school later this week.
Here are pictures from our drive and of home here in Benbrook. You can see our pictures here: Driving San Diego to Texas and Our Home in Benbrook, TX.
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Today, June 22nd, 2007 the Naturalization Oath Ceremony was officiated by a Judge whose grandfather immigrated to Ellis Island from Italy. 76 countries were represented, 1716 participants became US citizens, 334 requested a name change and 29 are members of the armed forces. A mosaic of nationalities and races coming together with one dream, to become an American Citizen. Among many treasures I received a heart felt letter from President George W Bush with it’s official White House seal. Here are some of the pictures we took of this momentous occasion.
Please leave a comment to memorialize the occasion.
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