Adventures in driving

I have started teaching Rachael to drive. We had to do 6 hours of classroom portion, then she was able to get her learners permit. She got that on Thursday. Now, we are doing the driving part, and the rest of the classroom part together. On Friday, she drove for the first time. She was having a little bit of trouble getting used to the feel of the gas and the brake. She was putting too much pressure of them and would forget which was which. She also kept trying to use her left foot for the brake. The other thing she was having trouble getting use to was the steering. She would over turn as she went around the corners. I had her go around our little block a few times. There was no other cars driving on our street as she drove around the block. We were on our 6th and last time around. She seemed like she was starting to get the hang of it. I was wrong. She turned the corner from our street onto Elderberry. She turned a little too sharp and then hit the gas. She went up over the curb and I yelled "hit the brake". She took her foot off the gas, but couldn't think of how to hit the brake. She took our our neighbors mail box and almost ran into a bush. It scared the living daylights out of me. Stan and Rachael spent a few hours on Saturday fixing the mailbox for the neighbor. We are going to have the second driving lesson in just a little while. We are going to a big, empty parking lot where she can't hit anything-I hope! I'll let you know how it goes

As you all know, hurricane Ike went through Texas over the weekend. On Wednesday, they predicted that Ike would go right through Austin. The whole city was preparing for rain and high winds. We have this tree in our backyard that has been dead for quite a while. It is very sad. We used to have 2 huge maple trees right behind our house that provided lots of shade from the blazing afternoon sun. Bore beetles decided to make those trees their home until they killed them. By the time we knew they were there, the trees were dead. When the weather people were predicting 70 mph winds were coming, Stan decided the tree needed to come down. The last thing we wanted was for the gust of wind to blow it over into our house. Wednesday night, Stan called Justin, Ben and Jacob over and they moved the trampoline. On Thursday, Stan went and bought a chain saw the cut the tree down. It fell very easily. I am amazed it hadn't blown over already when I saw how dried out the wood was. There are huge cracks that go up the entire length of the tree. Stan is going to cut it up and use the wood for smoking meat. Maple makes really good wood for smoking chicken and pork. We will also use it to take to Cub Scout camp outs. We don't have a fire place, not that anyone needs one in Austin. Stan is going to spend the next week or so getting the tree cut up. Here is the tree laying across our backyard. After all of that perparation, all we got was 15 minutes of rain late Saturday night. UT postoned the football game, schools let out early on Friday and lots of people got ready for bad weather. It never happened. It was so hot over the weekend. I kept wishing it would rain to cool things off. It did cool off today. The temperature is very nice today. I like this kind of weather.