Zen Weekend

So, I did not do any Captain Capitalism work this weekend. None at all. I do realize that this is pretty off topic, for a supposed cartoon blog. But this past week was pretty stressful, work was busy and we had an illness in my family. This weekend I decided to take a bit of time off to relax.

On Saturday, Mandy and I went to Austin's Dragon Boat Festival. We watched some Chinese and Japanese dancers:

And we also watched teams from Samsung, Motorola, and Freescale race Dragon Boats on Townlake.

Those who have read the blog before, might remember the Praying Mantids that I kept last year. I admittedly have a weird fascination with these animals. Part of this comes from the Seven Star Praying Mantis Kung Fu classes I take, and the other (bigger) part comes from being a giant dork. This year I ordered some Mantis egg cases off of ebay. They are sold as organic pest control. For many weeks I thought the pods were duds...then this morning I saw this:

Look closely. There are two in there, I only highlighted one, in the image below. There is another one on the leaf below the pod in the picture above.

I sat and watched the three mantids for several hours. Long enough to watch a spider kill and eat two, of the three, of them. It was kind of like watching a "Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom" episode in real life, complete with a "and that is nature's way" segment. Feeling sorry for the remaining mantis, (and being like a little kid wanting to keep something as a pet) I put the surviving mantis in a terrarium.

Soon afterwards, the Mantis shed its skin and grew about twice its size. It was amazing that the little creature fit in its skin before it came out. It was rather remarkable.

On Saturday night, around ten, Mandy and I went downtown to go to the opening of Austin's new Blanton Fine Art Museum. But when we got there, we found out we were not the only people who were going to take advantage of the free 24 hour opening of the museum. There were hundreds, if not thousands of people at the opening. The line went completely around the building, twice, and the average time waiting to get into the museum was 2 and a half hours.

All in all, it was a great relaxing weekend. I feel much better. I will get back to working on, and posting about Captain Capitalism next week.