Just Horsin' Around - Thoughts on Central Texas Real Estate and More

For months, IKEA enthusiasts have been watching the construction at the intersection of IH35 and FM 1435 in Round Rock.  First, the Outlet Mall opened, to rave reviews.  But we had to wait for the real treat. 

Now, as a Texan, I really have no problem driving 150 miles one way to Houston from Austin for an afternoon of lunch and shopping at IKEA and Penzeys.  But it does take a whole day there and back and can only rarely be done on the spur of the moment.  And the catalogue just isn't the same . . . really, it isn't. 

But last week, finally, to great fanfare and LOTS of traffic, with the roads leading to it still under construction, IKEA finally opened.  I passed on the first day, but my husband and I couldn't resist going a couple of days later for dinner (Swedish meatballs with lingonberry sauce! MMMMMM!) and to look around.  We only bought a couple of little things, and only one piece of furniture, a stepstool for height-challenged me, but I spied many things that I'll be going back to pick up for a pittance to use in staging. 

My husband went back, on Black Friday of all days (while I went to less crowded venues such as Office Depot, the grocery store - practically empty the day after Thanksgiving, but I had to get some items for my Saturday After Thanksgiving Gumbo - and the feed store) and came home with more treasures. 

Now, if we could just get a Penzey's to open up in the area, life would be relatively complete. 

So, you're in Texas, you've got a horse, and you want to get out and DO something with your best buddy.  Or you don't have a horse, but you'd love to go trail riding on one.  But where to go? 

Here's just a few suggestions. 

For trailing riding, there are quite a few State Parks that provide equestrian accommodations (Texas having kept most of our lands when we became a state, our parks tend to be state parks rather than federal), some for bringing your own horse, others where you ride theirs. 

Or, you can hook up with TETRA (Texas Equestrian Trail Riders Association), a statewide group that both lobbies to get more trails opened/maintained in state parks and helps private landowners in opening their property for trail riding, and has trail rides/trail maintenance weekends on a regular basis.  Lots of good folks to go riding with. 

For other kinds of events, you can consult the Event Calendar at Horse Gazette (headquartered in San Antonio but serving the entire State and country) or their Directory of Texas Clubs where you can find clubs listed by type of discipline or breed. 

You can also check out Southwest Horse Trader's listing of Upcoming Events. 

In Texas, there's something to meet the needs of just about any horse enthusiast. 

As real estate agents, part of our job is finding a home for our clients.  Thing is, we may think we know what "home" means, but the fact is, it can mean different things to different people.  We may have definite ideas about shape, color, orientation, and think that that's "right" - but people are, if anything, individual (planned communities with strict restrictions notwithstanding), and sometimes they'll have a vastly different idea of what constitutes "home" and what "home" should look like than you or I. 

As an example, here's a website with examples of many of the different ways that people with the nerve and drive to do so will picture home.  Just click on a book title, click on the sample pages, and on some of them, you can click on each picture in a collage and see a larger version of just that picture.  Some of these are beautiful; some I, personally, would be scared to go into; some you really need to be on drugs to appreciate, I suspect; but all of them, to someone, are "home".  Doesn't hurt to be reminded that our job is to find "home" for someone else, not ourselves, and that while our clients may not have the extreme ideas found here, it's always best to assume nothing.

Every family has their own Thanksgiving traditions, grown carefully,bit by bit, over time, a combination of a blending of traditions that people bring from their families of origin and those that they develop themselves.  I find these interesting. 

For example:  we have a "traditional" Thanksgiving dinner, that includes turkey, smoked or roasted depending on who's cooking it this year, sweet potatoes in some fashion, and "Pink Stuff" (you really don't want to know what's in it, just eat and enjoy!).  But the Big Deal of the Thanksgiving holiday, for us, comes on the Saturday after Thanksgiving - that's when I serve my Saturday-After-Thanksgiving-Turkey-And-Andouille Gumbo that's been known to draw total strangers in off the street by its aroma, wondering if we're having a party and can they come?  Gumbo, football, Nouveau Beaujolais - and the latest addition to the menu, Chipotle Turkey Enchiladas (this is, after all, Texas!) -  shared by friends and family - it's what Thanksgiving is all about for us. 

What's your tradition? 

We're always thinking we have so little time, always rush, rush, rushing to get everything we think we MUST pack into our lives done, that we very often forget the reason we're doing all this in the first place - theoretically, the enjoyment of life. (Because why do it if you're not going to enjoy your life? Do something else instead!)

This is not a new problem - thus, phrases so old as to be cliche, such as, "Stop and take time to smell the roses." This is something that is not only important to our enjoyment of life, but, it turns out, to our overall productivity - seems you need to slow down in order to get there faster. Those who do take the time to slow down and enjoy the people and things around them often end up, because of that very relaxation, much more productive in the time they do spend working.

One way in which some people are approaching this concept is the Slow Food movement (this is where the sensuality comes in - well, one place, anyway!). The Slow Food movement began in Italy, and has moved to the United States, the Capitol of Rushing Around Like A Chicken With Your Head Cut Off. Basically, the idea is to buy food that has been locally produced, shop carefully for your ingredients, enjoy the sensuality not only of eating your food leisurely and tasting every bite, enjoying the sight and the smell and the taste and the texture, but also of preparing the food, the feel of the knife cutting through the ingredients, the sight and smell of the steam curling up above a pot of simmering stew, the aroma of fresh-cooked bread. This is something that I, being a chef and all about the food, can really get into. And, if you're someone who networks, for business or for pleasure, there's nothing better to network around than food - everyone, after all, has to eat sometime!  There is even now a growing interest in dinner parties where the guests help prepare the food as part of the evening's entertainment.  Now, that's networking, far more than sitting at long tables eating rubber chicken - you really get to know and trust each other when you prepare a meal together.

More information about the Slow Food movement can be found at Slow Food International and at Slow Food USA. There are also several books out now on the topic  - slow down, pull up a chair, read one of them, then go out and give it a try.  I plan to join the Central Texas convivium (don't you just love that name - so much more evocative than "chapter") as soon as possible. 

This is a great time of year to take advantage of one of Georgetown, Texas', beautiful outdoor amenities - the Goodwater Trail, 26 recently completed and connected miles of varied beauty (see photos at the linked site) winding its way around Lake Georgetown.  Not too not, not too cold - it's just right if you're someone who likes to stretch out and walk a few hours.  And the Goodwater Trail offers enough variety of walking experience that you'll never be bored!  I sent my husband off to hike it a couple of weekends ago - I had things to do and he needed to (well, let's be honest, I needed him to) get out and commune with nature and walk off some grumpiness.  It happened to be drizzling that day, and he came back soaked, and happy as a clam.  I highly recommend it for anyone visiting, relocating to, or already living in Georgetown. 

I love chickens. I thought they were sort of pretty before moving to the country (probably genetic heritage from my grandmother, who raised them for egg money). But after moving to the country, and getting some, I learned how very valuable they are.

Everyone thinks of chickens as providing eggs, of course, and sometimes meat. But they serve many more purposes on the country homestead.

The first spring and summer we were here (pre-chickens), what with the horses and the cows and the neighbors' horses and cows, flies were a real problem. I had fly strips, fly traps, wasp predators, you name it, if it said it got rid of flies, we had it! The next year, we had chickens who were large enough to run around free-range (makes for much better eggs). And that year we had 3 flies, in barn and house. That's right - 3. The chickens get to them before they actually turn into flies.

Then there's the matter of this black gumbo clay that we have here in our part of Central Texas, north of Austin. Beautiful, but almost impossible to garden with because it's so sticky. One year after we'd had chickens for about a year, in the fall, my husband turned over a garden-sized plot, just turning the sod a bit. We pulled it back, put the contents of the cleaned out chicken coop (we bed with wood shavings) in the trenches, covered them with newsprint, watered it all down, then put the sod back on top. In the spring, the soil could be turned easily with my bare hands - and the plants grew phenomenally.

Recycling's a little bit different in the country, as well. Kitchen scraps that don't go to the dog or cats go directly to the chickens. Preconceptions aside, chickens are NOT vegetarians. (I have a running joke with the guys at the meat department at our local Whole Foods. The reason that "vegetarian free range chickens" are more expensive than regular chicken is because they have to pay people to follow the chickens around to take the bugs and other small protein-providing critters out of their beaks to keep them vegetarian. Suffice to say, once you've had free range chickens, you'll realize that "vegetarian" and "free range" are two contradictory terms!) Anyway, the chickens take all those kitchen scraps and recycle them into big, delicious, orange-yolked, healthy eggs. (We had our eggs tested once - they came in at half the cholesterol of the commercial eggs tested by the same facility.)

In addition, if you're at all into crafting, you can get some absolutely beautiful feathers just for the picking up, if your flock is as varied as ours is - we have red chickens (Production Reds, produce eggs almost year round), Silver-Laced Wyandottes, Americaunas (lay blue and green eggs - natural Easter eggs!), Buff Orpingtons, and, over the years, many others. Just don't get any Dark Cornish (black chickens that look sort of like the dinosaurs of the chicken world - think the critters in Jurasic Park). We had five Dark Cornish roosters out of our first batch of straight run chicks. We called them the Jets - they strutted around the barnyard looking like they were swaggering in their black leather jackets. So chickens provide entertainment, as well. (Whoever says life is boring in the country has never lived there - there's always something going on!)

So, if you're thinking of relocating from city to country, among the other things you should think about is getting a flock of chickens - the all purpose country animal.

One of my favorite mortgage advisors, Shira Zippe (who just joined ActiveRain - Hi, Shira!  Jump on in, the water's fine!), shared the following with me and, given discussions we've been having here and how applicable it is, she gave me permission to share. Drop by and see her listing - she's one of those mortgage magicians who's great at pulling rabbits out of her hat, all the while making it look soooo easy!

Hot Dogs and Depression

An old man lived by the side of the road and sold hot dogs…….

He was hard of hearing so he had no radio.

He had trouble with his eyes so he read no newspapers.

But he sold hot dogs

He put up a sign on the highway telling how good they were. And his sales increased.

He stood by they side of the road and cried, "Buy a hot dog!"

And people bought.

He increased his meat and roll orders.  He bought a larger stove to take care of the increased business.

He got his son home from college to help him with the increased business.

His son said, "Dad, haven't you been listening to the radio?  If money stays tight, we are bound to have bad business.  There may be a depression coming.  And the papers show ads of another hot dog stand down the street.  Did you know that you had competition, Father?  You had better prepare for poor trade."

Whereupon the Father thought, "Well, my son has been to college.  He reads the papers and listens to the radio and he ought to know."

So the Father cut down on his meat and roll orders.

And he no longer stood by the side of the highway and asked people to buy.

He quit telling how good his hot dogs were.

And his hot dog sales dropped almost overnight.

"You're right, Son, "the Father said to the boy.  "We certainly are headed for a depression."

It's all too easy to believe what you hear in the media and make it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

This morning, before coming into the office for desk duty, my husband, daughter, her SO, and I went to the Louisiana Longhorn in Round Rock for breakfast.  They've only been serving breakfast (and that only on weekends) for a little while now, and I was so excited to discover this fact when we went there for my birthday dinner recently.  Their food and service, as usual, met and exceeded all my expectations. And it got me to thinking how, as much as I love to cook, I've collected quite a collection of favorite restaurants in the Central Texas area, in Austin as well as in little towns such as Georgetown, Driftwood, Llano, Walburg, and so on, and how that collection has served me as a real estate agent who is often on the road from dawn till dusk or later.  So, I started making a list.  It's a work in progress, but I thought I'd share with those who are new to our area or planning to relocaqte here, those who are visiting, and those other agents who are out on the road and want someplace new to try.

The list can be found on the "In the Kitchen With Mama J" section of my regular blog.  Any suggestions for restaurants I haven't tried in Central Texas are more than welcome, they are eagerly solicited.