Nazgul or tortilla machine?

The big thing in Austin for the past week has been SXSW. Since Melissa is big into music it's been a pretty busy couple of days for her. She decided this year to pony up the money for a wristband, which seemed to have a RFID tag in it BTW, and she got a pretty good amount of use out of it. Hopefully she'll post a comment and let all of you who are interested know who she saw and what she thought. The only portion I saw was the Saturday show at Stubb's from 9 to 12 which included Aimee Man and The Wallflowers. Don't know much Aimee Man so not much to say about that. They didn't have her mike up loud enough and the crowd kinda heckled her so that wasn't the best experience, but she did seem like someone I would enjoy listening to. The Wallflowers put on a good show. They are a band I like listening to but wouldn't obsess about following. And yes old friend of Cullen's whose name I can't remember, they did play "One Headlight."

Friday night while Melissa was out, Jerry and I got some GT4 time in which, as always, was fun. Here are a few observations from the evening. The race car you win from the slipstream battle is fun to smash your opponents with. The Cadillac Cien seems like a car that should hang with the big boys, but for some reason, we can't get the sucker to turn, though we did do the quarter mile in under ten seconds. Making perfect turns and doing a perfect lap are difficult meaning gold is hard to get in the license tests. 4 AM is too late to be doing anything. And in a slight tangent, I like oil paintings.

What else did we do this weekend? Ate at LaMo. Ate at Schlotsky's. Got some painting in at Taylor's. The place is really coming along. Spent some time in the yard getting everything ready for spring. Caught up on TV, so much so that we joined Netflix. Oh and we went to Mozart's with Jerry for a lazy Sunday sunset snack. All weekends should end like that.

1138

On Friday I completed one of my oldest materialistic dreams. I now own a complete set of THX speakers. I then did what any other geek would do in the same situation. I watched Star Wars. OK I actually only watched a few scenes, but still. It was awesome. I had it at 00, which I refer to as reference level; others refer to it as past the threshold of pain. Things rattled in the house that I didn't know could move. The dialogue was crystal clear. The surround sound enveloped me. I'm still in shock from the whole experience.

Later that evening I headed over the Riche's new condo to help them paint. It was a good bit more enjoyable then I thought it would be. They mentioned it was a low effort high reward kind of thing and that is certainly true. Unfortunately, my body still isn't a fan of holding things above my head for any length of time. Those damn exercises appear to have helped only a little. Taylor and I also spent a good bit of time removing a few screws from his closet wall. That took way more engineering than it should have. I just about wanted to tear down the wall. It just seemed easier.

Saturday, after sleeping till after noon, I head down to Lions to get in a round of golf. The downside of it being such a nice day was everyone else seemed to have the same idea. I had to wait one full hour to tee off. While I was waiting I saw the strangest thing I have ever seen of a golf course - lots of women. I'd say it was about 25% female out there. That's so awesome. I hope that continues so I can stop defending the sport. Anyway I played with Lauren, a law student, Scott, an employee of Texas Gas Services, and Greg, an employee of Lake Austin Spa and Resort. Lauren drove pretty well but had a pretty bad short game. Scott and Greg were good but not great. I sucked it up. Shot a 61 on the front nine and stopped after that as it was getting dark. I went back over the round to see what I needed to work on. The list I have includes all the golf shots one can make. Great.

Saturday night I watched the first six episodes of this season of Carnivale. I really enjoyed the show and enjoyed watching them all in a row even more. Turns out my DVR can record in 5.1 which is something I never knew but appreciated for that show. Maybe I'll talk more about the show in a later post.

Sunday I spent the morning doing chores. I can't even lie in text. It was more like the afternoon. I raked, swept, fertilized, watered, mopped, vacuumed, and generally did things around the house that needed to be done. My reward - GT4. I played it all Sunday night and all Monday night. I now seem to be a bit of a car freak. We all know Jerry is happy about that.

trash day

This is possibly the best T-shirt ever.

Anytime I hear the Star Trek: The Next Generation theme song, the feeling of nostalgia is almost overwhelming. Anyone else feel that way about TV show theme songs?

Before you ever forward anything to anyone else, look it up on snopes.com. Please oh please oh please.

Does the mere mention of the possibility of gender differences make someone sexist? I know it's more complicated than that I'm just worried about where we are headed, especially as it relates to academia.

And finally, a quote. "Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." -- George Bernard Shaw

Yo Ho Yo Ho

As the two previous posts likely made clear, LeeAnne came in town for a visit last weekend. Despite the title I am sure she would like me to point out that she sails on a replica of a privateer ship not a pirate ship. Though she did once swim up to another ship with a knife in her teeth. I'm just sayin'.

When I look back on her trip, I realize much of it involved eating. We went to Baby A's, Mangia, Jason's Deli, Kerbey Lane, Rudy's, Waterloo, Cafe Java, and Mozart's. That's a pretty good Austin food experience I think. Top that off with two home cooked meals courtesy of Melissa and I think we ate well.

We did manage to do a few things other than eat. We attended a performance of the IBM Jazz Band of which Jerry is a member, went shopping on South Congress, drank scotch at Opal Divine, watched Napoleon Dynamite, watched Shaun of the Dead, played a little GT4, and LeeAnne went for a ride on the back of Jerry's Harley. All of that despite the rainy weather, which by Sunday night consisted of 100% humidity.

It was great seeing her again and she is welcome back anytime. I now know more about boats and sailing than I ever really thought I could, and it just makes me want to plan that Waveland to Key West trip although maybe we should start with just a New Orleans to Waveland trip first. In the meantime, it'll be fun tracking her progress up the West Coast.

if anyone orders Merlot, I'm leaving

Now I remember why I don't drink a bottle of wine on Thursday night ... Friday morning. Uhhhhh. It did make the reruns of The OC more interesting, and the The Daily Show as well. Thanks again LeeAnne for the wine.

I can see you

This is so cool. I can track LeeAnne's flight. It tells me what time she left, what time she is likely to arrive, what the plane's altitude is, and what it's speed is It even has a graphic with weather radar on it. Awesome. I love the Internet. Go to Frontier, press go under flight status, then enter flight 263. Later it'll be 4218. You can refresh the radar page with F5.

Peter Gibbons

While browsing the web today I came across a website called Spending Wisely. I got to it from a CNN article. From what I have read so far the website contains articles written by this one person on living simply and saving money. Now I've always heard the pay yourself first idea but she comes at it from a different angle. Spend as little as you can and you'll be amazed at how much you save seems to be the basic idea. I know it sounds simple and silly but she writes some interesting articles about it. I especially liked the article on nice stuff versus really nice stuff.

For some reason that site, combined with a strange lack of scheduled things to do this evening, led to an hour of me sitting at my desk, staring at the wall, wondering what I want to do with an hour of free time. And this after all the talk about too many things to do and too many hobbies. The thought I kept coming back to was this. If I came home from work one day and for some reason Melissa wasn't home, the cable was out, and the Internet was out, what would I do? For the most part I never want to pay bills or clean the house so chore like things were off the list. I came up with reading and video games. Golf would be nice but that doesn't work when it's dark. I guess I just didn't like the things I was coming up with. It seems I want to do everything and yet want to do nothing. Weird. Feel free to comment about things you would want to do.

I think I spend way too much time thinking about crap like this.