Old stuff, new stuff, and crazies on the subway! Kristina and I took the girls to New York to mark a decade since we left after calling it home for three years.

Summer vacay time and it was back to Cancún again, but this time we added a couple extra goodies, including one far off the beaten track and probably the highlight of the trip: Holbox!

A quick spring break trip to Monterrey and Mazatlán in Mexico!

Another summer, another vacation to Cancún in Mexico! We'll go somewhere different next year, maybe.

Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme, get on up, it's Jamaica time!

Beaches, pools, fish, lizards, jungles, cenotes, ruins, wooden weights, arrows, piña coladas, and a lot of vomit. All that and more here in Tulum and Cozumel, Mexico!

It was sunny and warm, it was rainy and cold, and it was full-on snowing in June! A fun week road-tripping in Colorado (in a Tesla) here!

No fender benders on this trip (in our golf cart), but barely a couple weeks after getting back from the Dominican Republic, we were back on a plane and back to Cancún, Mexico.

First vacation following COVID and the first with the kiddos, plus a fender bender in our rental car. Lots of fun in the Dominican Republic here!

Our second gorgeous wee girl turned the big 1 today! While Jade apparently looks kinda like me, Siena is a chip off the old block. She's all smile and giggles, and Daddy's biggest fan. Jade is loving the big sister thing, and reluctantly figuring out how to share. The next child... will probably have four legs and a tail.

Siena Fern Morgan was born at 12:55pm today, 20 days early after Kristina's blood pressure suddenly spiked, similar to last time. This time however, everything else was much smoother sailing, and Kristina was discharged within a few days. The doctors kept us in there an extra day for Siena due to some concern about jaundice and a heart murmur. The jaundice, although borderline, was taken care of with some time spent under blue light (no idea how that works), and the heart murmur was found to be of little concern. Jade hasn't met her little sister yet, but that'll be interesting.

Kristina and I met 10 years ago this month, and she's due to fire out kiddo #2 in less than three months, so a long-awaiting trip away somewhere was in order. We left Jade with her grandparents and headed back down to Mexico, this time to Cabo San Lucas. Nice! Photos here.

"So let me get this straight. 'Big sister' means..."

"Hmmm..."

Kiddo #2 due December 17th (exactly a day before Jade was due as it turns out). December is going to be a busy month for us moving forward!

Our gorgeous wee girl turned the big 1 today! She has Kristina's eyes and nose, my tiny ass, and apparently kinda looks like me. I'm just glad she doesn't look like the mailman. Behind that cheeky little smile is an equally cheeky little personality who loves to laugh at Daddy being a dick and Mommy smothering her with kisses. I guess it's time to start thinking about a sibling for her.

We couldn't find a kid's kiwi costume ;)

My Mum, along with her boyfriend John, finally made it to Texas for the first time to meet not only my in-laws but Mum's first grandchild :) For the 12 days they were here the weather was unseasonably hot for this time of year, so they got a good taste of the Texas heat. We spent an afternoon looking around Austin's downtown and had lunch at a restaurant along Sixth Street. While we were seated at our window table, a homeless man in a wheelchair rolled up to us on the sidewalk and began sketching us. He then stood up out of his wheelchair and walked into the restaurant (hehe), and presented us with this masterpiece haha! We gave him a few bucks in return; he earned it.

The spring spectacle is back again as the state flower of Texas makes its brief annual appearance, only to be squashed by people taking photos amongst them.

Austin has a serial bomber on the loose! On March 2nd, a package placed on somebody's front porch in northeast Austin exploded when the homeowner later picked it up, killing him. At the time, police believed it to be an isolated incident. However, fast forward ten days to March 12th and two more package bombs exploded in east Austin and southeast Austin, killing one more person and critically injuring two. Given the similarities, it was apparent the same person or persons were behind this. Then on March 18th, another bomb went off on the side of a quiet suburban street in an upscale neighborhood in southwest Austin (not far from our own neighborhood), this time triggered by a tripwire set across the sidewalk and putting two young men in the hospital. And now today, a package sent from a FedEx store just a few miles up the road from our house later exploded at the FedEx sorting facility. It was destined for an Austin address that hasn't been released. A second package containing an unexploded bomb was then discovered at a different FedEx sorting facility. Then tonight my phone lit up regarding another reported explosion, this one less than a mile round the corner from our house! It has since emerged that this was not a bomb nor related to the spate of bombings; two artillery simulators that look like some type of military ordnance or memento were donated to a charity shop that initiated when an employee handled them hehe. He was whisked off to hospital but later released. While all that was going on, our neighbor round the corner thought he'd spotted something suspicious and called it in, so next thing we had cops and FBI agents swarming our street hahaha! Scary stuff, but all very exciting!

Update: Just hours after the above took place, the bomber has been found and is dead. Each device was "forensically similar" in that they each used a foreign and "exotic" battery purchased online; not something readily available at the local store. This linked the bombs to the same person. Each device also contained similar parts, which would need to have been purchased in large quantities given the number of bombs being produced. Investigators started trawling through the sales records of all hardware stores in the city, and I guess they found one such record of particular interest. From that they presumably had a credit card from which to get a name. With that name in hand, investigators got a federal warrant to find his Internet service provider and go through his Internet history, which showed "suspicious" Google searches. Security camera footage from the FedEx store I mentioned showed him wearing gloves and a blond wig, which caught the attention of witnesses who subsequently provided details of the car he was driving. Investigators were also able to get his cell phone number, and used this to track him to a hotel north of Austin last night where police found his car parked up. While police waited for tactical teams to arrive, this guy jumped in his car and drove off, leading police on a short chase which ended with this guy parking in a ditch on the side of the road and blowing himself up in his car. He was a 23-year-old living north of Austin with two roommates (who are said to be cooperating with police). He had no criminal record, no military service, and there is no known motive. More info here.

With Kristina's folks on babysitting duties, Kristina and I went to see my first rodeo at the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo. Yeehaw! This is an annual event that comes to town for a couple weeks, and features bucking broncos, bucking bulls...

...calf roping, and plenty of cowboys (and cowgirls). Although good fun to watch, I think I'll stick to riding my bike through rush-hour traffic to get my kicks.

Well, Kristina did most of the work. Jade Paris Morgan was born at 10:21pm tonight, weighing 6lbs 10oz. While the labor itself barely took an hour and was pretty straight forward, Jade's birth wasn't without complications. Throughout her pregnancy, Kristina's blood pressure was spot on, until this week when it shot up. When this was spotted during our weekly visit with her OB on Thursday, they suspected pre-eclampsia and immediately sent us across the road to the hospital for triage. While in triage, her blood pressure elevated further and she was admitted to labor and delivery to be induced. So what was expected to be another boring, routine visit to the OB turned out to be quite the opposite, and while for the last nine months I've had visions rushing Kristina to the hospital in the car when the time came, we ended up merely walking there instead hehe. Anyway, her induction took much longer than expected and there was talk of reverting to a C-section instead, but nature (and the drugs) finally took over and out popped a happy wee Jade, nine days ahead of schedule. Now we need to figure out how she works.

Lantern Fest is a festival held in various US cities throughout the year. There's live music for the adults, face painting and what-not for the kids, and headaches for the fire department. After the sun goes down, the thousands of revelers light and release thousands of lanterns into the night sky, effectively littering but without the fine. Some folk write messages of dreams or prayers on their lantern, but we don't believe in any of that so we just wrote a little note to our unborn daughter instead :) It was a very cool sight indeed, and just as cool to watch the numerous retards who somehow manage to fail completely and set their entire lantern ablaze instead (and then try to stomp it out). As I watched the lanterns drift off, I wondered how far they would actually travel before conking out and descending again. Well I got my answer as we drove away: they made it barely half a mile before landing a pitiful heap all over the road and surrounding trees. I ran over a lot of people's dreams and prayers with my car, hehe.

Hurricane Harvey, the first major hurricane to make landfall in the US in 12 years, has thoroughly drenched and broken the Texas coast and surrounding areas over the past week. Houston got hit especially hard with unprecedented and catastrophic flooding. This is a road by the way, or at least it used to be. The overall impact of this will be severe, and felt for years to come.

Further inland here in Austin, this is about as bad as it got. The hurricane-force winds were much weaker here, and although they pruned a few trees (ours included), overall they were of little concern. We also got drenched but the rain only lasted three days and any flooding was minimal. We got about 10 inches (25cm) of rain in total compared to more than 50 inches in Houston, which I believe is approximately a year's worth of rain for them in just one week.

In better news, kid #1 will be a girl :)

It's been 99 years since a solar eclipse last crossed the United States, and I wanted to go see it! All the fun here from our mini road trip to Tennessee.

It's been a while, so time for some updates. The renovation on our house was still a work in progress the last time I posted at the end of last year, but was finally wrapped up shortly thereafter. Here is the front entrance of the house, complete with some of my photography handy work stuck on the wall...

Kitchen...

Living room...

And fire place, which Kristina was very particular about hehe.

Once we hit spring I turned my attention outdoors. The lawn had a major fungal issue, likely due to the previous homeowners going overboard with the fertilizer while marketing the house. This killed half the lawn which meant we had to lay a lot of new sod (some of which can be seen above - the discolored patch in front of the water fountain which is still establishing itself). Aside from sorting that out, we re-landscaped the gardens, replaced the fence, and added some furniture. Lovely.

Texas has awesome storms during spring, one of which snapped this limb off the neighbor's tree just days after the new fence went up. It landed in our yard but thankfully missed the fence, the house, and pretty much everything else.

In other news, somebody got Kristina pregnant a few months ago (we think it was me), and so kid #1 is due to keep us up at night starting some time in December :)

Oh, and I'm officially American now hehe. I was granted naturalization a couple weeks ago, so I am now a dual-citizen of New Zealand and the United States. If nothing else, it's nice to know Trump can no longer deport me, and I can vote against him in 2020.

That time of year again: wedding anniversary and my birthday - time for another trip away! This year it was Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. All the photos and what-not here.