Home from the range

Home at last, and for good! Well, for two weeks at any rate. The rest of my trip to Texas was a combination of productive (Austin, Dallas meetings and conference) and a good opportunity to catch up with friends and family (Austin, Fort Worth). I did get to have dinner with my hurricane evacuee cousins in Austin (at a tasty seafood place), and they were certainly handling things in stride. Hopefully in the next few days (if not already) they can head back home, where another cousin who stayed reported there was thankfully minimal damage. The rest of my conference went really well too; one of the highlights was an event called 'Iron Composer Texas', featuring 3 competitors who were trying to produce just-in-time sound effects and music for a video game played live by two volunteers from the audience, and who were then judged by 3 'American Idol'-style judges. (The contestants had been allowed to prepare a musical keyboard full of sounds, and were given a 'secret ingredient' at the event that they had to incorporate into the performance. The secret ingredient was of course cowbell.)

After the conference, I drove back up to Fort Worth for another meeting as well as further catch-up time with friends M and K. I met M at his university, where I got the full tour of the school. Their football stadium was completely open, so we even got to walk out onto the field and speculate as to whether one could touch a goalpost (answer: not with our combination of height and jumping skills). I also picked up a Horned Frogs (their mascot) little t-shirt for lil man, though they had a pitiful 18-month selection, so he got his very first "2T" shirt. Hopefully it'll fit him, or will at least by winter time (aka today, but more on that in a bit).

Thursday night we met up with several other friends (one of whom I'd known since elementary school) for a tasty dinner at an all-vegan restaurant. I was astounded by the selection; it's so much easier when there are only 1-2 things on the menu that I can eat. Oh, and they had hilarious names for their faux meats and dairy: bacun, san'iches, cheez, and i-scream. We actually passed on the desserts to enjoy them at another restaurant next door. It was great to see everyone, enjoy a good dinner together, and get a little bit caught up on the news.

Friday, M and I went to breakfast at the Paris Coffee House. The name is perhaps a bit misleading, this is the epitome of a great southern diner. And I think this place is the antithesis to the vegan restaurant; when I ordered eggs and biscuits, the waitress quizzically looked at me and asked suspiciously, "No meat?" Same response when M bypassed their bacon, pork sausage, and other beefy entrees. But the biscuits were excellent.

Random musings on the Lone Star state:

• They've got a serious love of concrete there - the number of freeways alone is pretty impressive (even the major north/south freeway I-35 breaks into I-35 W and I-35 E branches hitting both Dallas and Fort Worth, leading to interesting directions like 'take I-35 east north'), and I lived in LA. Now overlay multiple freeway labels (at one point the road I was on seriously had five freeway names, including interstate, business loop, Texas state route, turnpike, etc.), extensive service drives ('frontage roads'), giant ramps, and cloverleaf entrance/exits, and you've got a recipe for 79,000 miles of public roads. Yikes.


• "News" stations get pretty scary between Austin and Waco. I was trying to find some news, and heard this unbelievably biased and racist story criticizing employees who had gone on strike at their company for not letting them move their break to sunset during a religious observance. Here's a somewhat less biased version (less biased from FOX news?), but the radio version talked about the workers not being or becoming 'American,' and stayed about a half step from suggesting these workers were militant extremists.


• There's apparently a large and tourist-promoting Czech community in the town of West, Texas. (Yes, that's right, not West something -- just West, which is actually in northeastern Texas.) I don't think I've ever seen highway signage before for a Shell gas station telling you to stop and try their kolaches. T and P, take note for the next time you're in Texas. :) I asked friend K, and her history of Texas class paid off -- she had good detailed info on why Czech and German communities moved to the middle of rural Texas in the mid 1800s.


• Overheard on the radio: "It's going to be unseasonably cool today: 83 to 87 degrees." By contrast, Seattle is 55 degrees today. And rainy.

A huge thanks to M and K for hosting me; I had such a nice time visiting some of their haunts and getting to know their city a bit!