the only place on the web to hang with philip & tasha peeples
Personal News
The Great Outdoors
Oct 25th
…sort of, but not really 
I mean, we are outdoors, in the middle of the big trees in east Texas enjoying the sights and sounds of the outdoors, but at the same time, I am writing this on a wireless internet connection, listening to random tunes on the iPod waiting for the flat screen TV with DirecTV to tune into the Texas vs OSU game
So far we are really enjoying our time here at The Greer Farm. We were welcomed by Sid and Eva, the owners, yesterday and shown our cabin where we found a great little gift basket from my mom (THANKS!). The cabins are exactly as shown on their website. We got settled in and then took a trip to the local Brookshire’s. After that trip, I have determined that all grocery stores in big towns are just a rip off! There were small town values galore there! We came back to the cabin to find Tux, the Greer’s cattle dog waiting for us. He does this funny thing while playing fetch. While walking, he would bring the piece of wood we were playing with and drop it about 10 feet in front of us and then run ahead and wait for us to kick or throw it. This continued for a couple hours while we walked around the lake, sat on the dock, and chilled around the cabin. We cooked some nice ribeyes last night on the grill and watched a couple movies. It was pretty chilly last night so we didn’t hang outside for very long.
Today, we got up, made breakfast with the Greer’s farm fresh eggs and lounged for a bit before getting outside. We went for a fairly long walk, where we were greeted today by Peppie, one of their other dogs. He isn’t one for fetch really, but just a good companion for walking around. We checked out a pretty good portion of the farm, including the main house, chicken and goat pen (where I did a sweet Mark Wahlberg talks to Animals impression…here is the link for reference). I will post the video of that when we get back home. We also saw the blueberry and blackberry fields.
Tonight we are probably going to head into one of the nearby towns for their fall festival. Tomorrow we will likely just chill some more and maybe take a canoe out on the lake.
Hope everyone is doing well and will post more later.
- peeps
So how about an update?
Sep 17th
So, here is what we have been up to the last couple months.
August
We spent a couple days tubing the Guadeloupe River (actually the Comal one day which wasn’t as fun) with some GTO buddies. It was fun to do 2 river days back to back and now that we have tubed the Comal, I can’t say we will ever try it again. The Guadeloupe is just SOOO much better. Natural rapids, less developments around, etc. After a weekend tubing the river, we spent a day or so in San Antonio checking out the Alamo, Natural Bridge Carverns, and the Riverwalk since it had been a while since we were down that way. From San Antonio, we headed towards Galveston (despite tropical storm Edouard hitting the area at the time. We killed some time on the way there at the Spoetzel Brewery where the lovely Shiner beers are brewed. If you have never been, I suggest you take the trip down to Shiner next time you are in the area to check it out. They give you 4 little cups of free beer and the tour is pretty cool too. We spent the rest of the week and weekend in Galveston at BJ and Jim’s beach house on the Bolivar Peninsula soaking up the sun, chilling out, and celebrating with friends. It was great to get away for such a long time and enjoy what would turn out to be probably our last trip to that beach house (thanks alot Ike! We enjoyed that place!!!!) More on that later… Rae and Hugh came back and spent the following weekend with us and we went to a place in Denton and saw a cool old man sing the blues!
During that trip, we “adopted” an addition to our family. With Rae and Hugh heading on a couple month vacation around Central America and then headed to Asia for who knows how long, Rae’s little doggie Darwin (a 7 lb Crested Malt) needed a place to hang while they were out gallivanting all over the world. We of course welcomed him in. So far, he has been a trip! Watching him and Jester play just cracks us up and the way he barks at ANY animal on the TV is always worth a laugh.
Mid-August, I took another trip to Indonesia that I covered while on my way there, so you can read all about that below. Jakarta was quite different than the places I had stayed before in Indonesia, but not different enough… 
Traffic is INSANE there!!!!
At the end of August, our friends Doug and Renee had their 3rd child…Cade Carson! We went up to the hospital to visit the day after he was born (since I was flying back in from Indonesia the day he was born). I’m sure he will grow to be just as fun as his siblings!
September
We spent a weekend in Austin and Burnet a couple weeks ago for Sara’s baby shower and Lisa’s birthday. I got to see Byron, who informed me that he and Christy are expecting! We chilled at Sara’s house for the shower while enjoying good food an good company. For Lisa’s birthday we drove into Kingsland to eat at the Junction House. While we were out that direction we drove out to see the Rybaski lake house…not sure if they still live there, but it still looked nice!
Last weekend was Kai’s 1st birthday party (son of our friends Charity and Greg). He got all sorts of cool toys! Ahh to be a kid again!
This coming weekend we are doing the Texas Motor Speedway Laps for Charity again! It is always fun! Hopefully they give a bit more room to stretch the Goat’s legs this time!
In sad news, Hurricane Ike let loose on the Bolivar Peninsula and wiped out much of the area. After scouring the web, I found the aftermath photos of BJ and Jim’s house. It looked like it was still standing, but likely had lots of roof damage and no telling what else. They will head down there once they are allowed to check things out and gather whatever they can salvage. I guess that is always the chance you take when owning Gulf property, I just wish Ike had chose somewhere else! Good luck to them while getting through this.
I am loving that football season is here now, although I know Tasha isn’t nearly as excited. She pretends to like it to humor me…she is a trooper! That’ why I love her!
Well, that’s all I have for now…Hook ‘em! and Go Cowboys!
- peeps
Inflight Gourmet
Aug 24th
Everyone says airline food is crap. However in my experience, most of it, especially in business class or higher on international flights, it is usually decent. Tonights choice was grilled lamb with cilantro mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus. All-in-all, it was a decent airline meal, but the mashed potatoes made me realize I should try throwing some cilantro into our instant potatoes next time we make them. It was a nice change, I thought. The asparagus left me with my usual question after eating asparagus…
Why does it make your pee smell so damn bad???? I don’t know of any other veggie that does that, but asparagus does it EVERYTIME! It is like taking penicillin. I enjoy a nicely prepared asparagus spear, but my god, why do I have to be reminded that I ate asparagus for at least a day after I ate it everytime I relieve myself????
I get to see how Qantas compares to American here in a couple hours…
Travel Frustration
Aug 23rd
So, today at 7pm I was supposed to be leaving for Indonesia for a week. I wake up this morning with a text message from Cathay Pacific stating that my LAX-HKG flight was canceled due to a typhoon passing through the area. So I spent about 2.5 hours working with the travel agent to get a new flight booked for today at 5pm that still got me to Indonesia on Sunday (while still earning all my FF miles). I finally get all that resolved and then the bomb drops….
Someone messed up somewhere and FedEx, who was supposed to be delivering my passport with my Indonesian business visa by noon, re-delivered it back to our Houston office. Not sure where the screw up came, but needless to say, I won’t be flying today….
I should only miss about a half day of meetings, but I have wasted the whole damn morning on this and I just want to scream! So now I will be heading straight from flying for 23+ hours into meetings….
The cool thing about this whole ordeal is that I will be flying completely around the world now…
DFW-London-Singapore-Jakarta-Hong Kong-LAX-DFW…all in business class!
