Sunday walks in Austin

There will be a Man vs Nature update shortly, but I am making sure that by posting it I will not get my father-in-law in trouble. To be continued...

In other news, we made another little trip to Austin. Somebody other than me had a job interview. We hauled ass up(over) there on Sunday and stayed at a local poet's residence. That evening we ate curry chicken and drank Shiner Bock. It was a refined experience. One of the perks of Texas drinking is the proximity to the old Spoetzl Brewery. For instance, I got to drink their summer brew, Shiner Kolsch. It was quite tasty. We drank into the wee hours of the evening, discussing potential children's names. Options for boys(my last name not included): Dwayne Wade, Kevin Koenig, Royal Vincent, Robert Earl. Girls names: I can't really remember, but I think we agreed that Virginia was a nice name.

Monday was the interview. While that was going on, I dicked around town. I surprised a friend who manages a coffee shop and shot the shit with her. While she did inventory, I settled in with a coffee and muffin and lumbered some through Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. It's a fucking wicked book so far. It gets a little slow sometimes as Cormac likes to get all literary and make these profound statements in ridiculously long sentences. But he is a bad-ass writer no doubt. This title is set in the mid 19th century and was written in 1985. For something more contemporary, check out The Road which won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.

I dined with the interviewee at the Roux in downtown. The place was largely empty, but it had a good feel to it. Food wasn't too bad. The po-boy was remarkably good for not being in Louisiana. We discussed the interview and overall she was guardedly optimistic. To me, being tentatively optimistic is impossible. I've found it to be an all-or-nothing type of thing. If hope does creep into your psyche, it's best to just run with it until it is spent. It's like getting a huge crush on a girl. You can't suddenly pretend that you don't like her and that it doesn't bother you that she's banging someone else.

After that we went on a whirlwind tour of Austin's malls and shopping areas looking for a birthday present for her mother. While she was doing that, I managed to find some new flip-flops. It's safe to say that the new footwear was the highlight of the trip for me. My new Tiva's are awesome. Highly recommended if you are in the search for comfortable leisure footwear.

Yes, of course it was great seeing the Austin people I hadn't seen in awhile. On Monday evening we met up with a Baton Rouge friend and her boyfriend and ate some good bbq at Hill's Cafe. It was fun hanging out with them despite the fact that there was a picture of George W. looking at us the whole time. We ate and drank, but we retired early because everyone had to do this stuff the next morning. I believe they called it work, or something. I don't know.

Anyway, we crashed out and slept as well as we could on the gradually deflating air mattress. It would fool us into comfort for the first hour. By the 4th hour, our asses were touching the floor. And when we were finally awoken at 8:00am by the gas-powered hedge-trimmer across the street, the only things not touching the ground were our heads( I suppose because they were lighter than the rest of our bodies.)

We dropped the poet at school and fueled up at the 7-Eleven. The hippy-looking guy tending the wide array of coffee informed us that he had been up since 4am. We nodded and responded with something. I guess my greasy-hair and beard endeared me to the guy since he only charged us for 1 bagel and coffee. I felt famous or special or something.

The trek back to BR was largely uneventful. Lots of traffic, road construction and horrible drivers. We stopped at a Dairy Queen in Welsh, LA and I witnessed some white-trash-looking woman yelling at her granddaughter and slapping her arm for reaching for crayons and knocking over a drink. In hindsight, I could have threatened to call the cops or something. But that could have slowed us down and put us in danger of hitting BR rush-hour traffic. We hightailed it out of there and didn't speak until we were safely out of Jefferson Davis Parish.

We did miss rush hour traffic. We unpacked the car and were comfortably lazing at the compound by 5:30pm.

The end.