Nora Evelyn McGowan

We spent 5 days and 4 nights in San Antonio which features an incredibly tempting river (water, ducks, boats, floating shiny things, etc.) and NO RAILINGS OF ANY KIND. None. Zip. Nada. It’s walkway, walkway, walkway, walkway, splash.

How do they keep drunk people from drowning in it? I don’t know. How did we keep Nora from falling into it? I know this even less, but we did and by day 5, her spirit broken, Nora took to waiting in her car seat by the door.

Many thanks to Papa and Baba for the loan of the car seat. It was great.

We took Nora to the roof of our hotel to see the view of the Alamo (which, from above, looks like a cheap quanzit hut holding up an aging stone facade) and she brought her stuffed monkey, Monkey. While leaning over the railing she held Monkey out and yelled “Monkey down!?” to which Jen and I replied in unison, “NO MONKEY DOWN!”

This is her new favorite thing to say. She’ll call out “No Monkey down!” while eating dinner, driving down the road, taking a bath, whatever, and then start giggling.

Here’s a shot of Nora looking from the window of our hotel room down onto the shabby meeting room in a parking garage where our poster sessions took place (across the street from the hotel).

p.s. we’re *almost* done with San Antonio pictures.

Nora visited one of my poster presentations and offered her critique on our findings:

From time to time we like to make Nora stand in a closet for 5 minutes. We tell her it’s elevator practice.

(be sure to click the picture! note: doesn’t work in facebook, only on Nora’s blog)

San Antonio, for Nora, was largely an opportunity to point at things.

By far, Nora’s favorite part of our trip to San Antonio was the boats that travel up and down the river – water taxis, maintenance boats, river tour boats. Every time Nora saw one she would gleefully yell “boat!” Imagine her excitement when we actually rode on a boat:

After the successful presentation of my “Aerodynamic Modeling of Coarticulation for Concatenative Speech Synthesis” poster at the Acoustical Society of America meeting we took advantage of the brief window of gorgeous weather. We took Nora to visit a spot made famous by the filming of “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” way back in 1985 (it’s important to know a little bit about history when traveling).

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Given what we mean when we say “old hat” it’s clear why Nora’s so excited in these pictures. Our friend Nancy works at Yale and recently showered Nora with a sweet haul of “future bulldog” swag like this awesome baseball cap and, I am not making this up, a (bpa free) nalgene sippy bottle.

Incidentally, Nora came over while I was posting this and spent some time kissing herself on my laptop screen and pointing at various objects in the pictures. When she saw the sippy cup full of milk she made Jen go with her to the kitchen and get her some. :)

Believe it or not, we just realized there are some more Boston pictures we meant to post. Adjacent to the “frog pond” on Boston Common is the tadpole playground. It has the weirdly soft playground pavement stuff that makes Nora fall down more than it probably cushions the falls and power-generating plastic slides but is otherwise great; Nora loved it, so we went back a few times.

On this particular day, the rain was really coming down.