I haven’t actually mentioned any of the things I’ve been doing recently. So I guess I will.

My family finally finished all of the work that we had to do in June (primarily hosting two family reunions), and so, we decided to get out of town last weekend. We looked around for pretty cheap day trips we could do, and there were some pretty neat things to do on July 4th weekend.

On Saturday, we went down to Fredericksburg (always a favorite). It had been about three years since I had been down there, and it had changed a lot. All those shops have changed ownership and become a bit more high-dollar (*Aside* Spell check is telling me to put “high-dollarer” instead of “more high-dollar,” and when I make that switch, it tells me that “high-dollarer” isn’t a word. I hate spell check). Since I normally don’t buy anything anyway, that was fine, and I enjoyed seeing all of the overpriced stuff and laughing at it. I found an old couch that needed to be reupholstered and that wasn’t even an antique for $995.00! I’m not even kidding. If I were to sell it in a garage sale, it would have cost lest than ten bucks. It was just a piece of trash they were trying to trick people with (this store had a lot of stuff like that). They also had a lot of absurd Christian stuff for sale everywhere that brought out a few good (though tortured) laughs. You know the like, the inspirational wall-hanging asking “Would you rather be in the smoking or non-smoking section for eternity?” and the “Soak Up the Son” flip-flops. When I see those things, I think I laugh to keep from getting sick or mad, but it’s still a laugh I guess.

The best thing about Fredericksburg on Saturday though was the horse races. We had never gone to them, and we had no money to place actual bets. My expectations weren’t very high, but it ended up being a lot of fun. We betted with each other, and the races were really exciting. They’ve always called horseracing the most exciting minute in sports, and they’re right. In a few weeks, we’re going back (and we’ll place a few actual bets then—small ones).

There was, though, one really scary moment at the races. During the middle of one of the longer races, everyone noticed that there was a riderless horse. That horse was spooked and would stop on the racetrack, and then take off again. Everyone cheered it on, and it ended up winning the race (though it was disqualified). The crowd’s thoughts didn’t turn to the fallen rider until after the race, but since the accident had happened on the other side of the track and there was a tree in the way (I don’t know what one tree was doing in the middle of a race track), we could hardly see anything. Anyway, that was when my family got up to leave, and we were worried for the guy, but we didn’t really know enough about the accident to be really worried. It was only several days later that we found out that the jockey had hit the rail and actually had been scalped by it and had not woken from a coma yet. Looking back, that puts a large damper on the horserace experience. I hadn’t really thought about how dangerous horseracing is.

On Sunday, we had a pretty nice day also. It didn’t start that well. We went to church in San Angelo, and it bothered me because the church we visited was a lot more concerned with worshipping George Bush and America than with worshipping God. I should know better than to go to church on July 4th weekend… Anyway, we then went to an art exhibit over at the new arts museum in San Angelo, and it was excellent. San Angelo had gotten lucky and gotten a really fine exhibit called “Visions of America” when some major museum (I believe in Boston) had to cancel. Anyway, it was free on Sunday, we went, and it was great. We saw some works by N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth (my favorite), Georgia O’Keefe, Winslow Homer, James Whistler, Thomas Cole, Grandma Moses, Christo (sketches), Grant Wood, and of course, a lot of other people whose names I can’t remember at the moment. It wasn’t the quite best exhibit I’ve ever seen (considering I’ve seen Chicago’s famous museum), but was very impressive.

Overall, it was a very nice weekend. Just thought you might want to know.