Potential Freebie Alert

I just added my name to a drawing for a book by Nic Howard called That's Life: Finding Scrapbook Inspiration in the Everyday. She's giving one away. Check it out on her blog to enter!

Well, we went up to Lake Travis yesterday and sure enough, the water was high. The place my parents bought 25 years ago was previously owned by a family who spent weekends up there. Every weekend for a year they added two steps from the top of the hill down to the water. (That's 104 steps for some of us arithmetically impaired people.) When the water is at a normal level you can step from the bottom step onto the dock ramp. When it's down, you have to do a little mountain goating across the rocks to the dock. When we were there at Thanksgiving last year, the water was about 40 feet down from normal. Yesterday, the water was about 1/3 of the way up the steps and you couldn't even see the dock on the other side of the trees. The water is at 701.39 feet above sea level. Normal is 681. Note, in the photo below, the tree tops at water level on the other side of the cove.


I don't believe I've ever seen so much water in the lake. Normally you can only see the water when you're right next to it or on top of a hill. As we drove to the dam to see the water coming out of the gates, we could see the lake much earlier than usual. When we got to the lower side of the dam, under the bridge, there was a line of cars and a huge number of spectators. Normally you wouldn't see but a bit of water running out of the dam as they release it to keep the waters flowing, but you can see from the picture below the three floodgates open as well as one of the regulator gates (the smaller stream). It was very loud and the water was really churning. Quite impressive, really.


We spent the afternoon with one of our former pastors and DS#1's best friend. Her husband and other son had gone to Alabama to visit his mother. It was a nice visit which would have been better if brother and SIL had not had to go somewhere else. And although it rained most of the day, we were able to grill hamburgers under the carport. It was almost like having an indoor picnic because I took all the food and the charcoal with us. We didn't stay to see any fireworks because the next day was a work day and we weren't sure if any were going to go off anyway because of the weather. All in all, it was a fairly good day.