And in case you wondered, the DVD arrived yesterday
I had so little time for actual work today. Ah well, that's what Friday's for.
Anyway, as I've mentioned, my trip to Austin was pretty much fantastic except for a few noted things. It got off to a rushed start. For once, I didn't have a crack of dawn flight east, so I was running a quick errand Saturday morning when my SuperShuttle driver called, about an hour before he was scheduled to get me, to say he needed to pick me up in twenty minutes. Ack. I rushed back to finish throwing together my stuff, and that's how I came to completely forget my power cable. It's just good that I realized I'd left it behind while at the airport, and not after spending hours in the air watching DVDs. The early pick-up, by the way, was because another van had broken down while dropping people off and we had to go get them. Drama ensued, but I was still very early for my flight. My fellow passengers were all either Texans going home or tech folk heading to South by Southwest.
Nothing exciting to tell about the plane trip except for the part where the pilot accidentally knocked an hour off the remaining flight time estimate. Hah. Much more exciting was my arrival and reunion with my darling sister. Yay! I got the briefest of visual tours on our way to her apartment, which is the cutest little studio in all the land. Frickin' adorable, I tell you. I promptly flopped down on her very comfy couch while she made cookies. At this point, I was feeling the crud that I'd been feeling last week, but it felt like it was improving. Hah.
After frozen pizza, we tooled on over to her friend's apartment for game night, where they made the mistake of playing trivia games. I am absurdly good at such games. It's not just knowing more random crap than will ever be useful, but also being very good at guessing the crap I don't know. Ahem. Of course, they're all grad students and nerdy in their own ways, so my geekiness fit right in. We enjoyed wine and way too much apple pie and ended up staying much later than my 8-5 body clock finds normal. I had a headache when we left but chalked it up to being tired and still recovering from the ick.
I woke up Sunday morning feeling like roadkill. Sunday, however, was not a day for sleeping in - we'd invited our parents to drive up from Houston to enjoy the Austin Chocolate Festival. In a shocking turn of events (for me), the last thing I wanted to do that day was eat anything sugary, but the parents were really excited, so off we went. Roadkill aside, we had a good time. It was a lot smaller than I'd imagined, held in a strip mall dance studio with maybe twenty vendors. But oh, they were good. The first thing we sampled was this amazing gelato which felt wonderful on my throat. I didn't do quite the haul that the rest of them did, but I brought enough home that kept well for later in the week.
Afterwards, we went to Town Lake to walk off the chocolate. The less said about me walking that day, the better. Dad had to get back to Houston for a five o'clock conference call, but we made time for a quick drive through the UT campus and then lunch at the original Kerbey Lane Café. Since all I had in my stomach was chocolate, this was most welcome. The parents dumped us back at the apartment and we both promptly passed out for the afternoon. I felt terrible for being such a spoiler of all things fun, especially considering how much was going on in Austin that week. Sigh.
Oh! On the way back, we saw my new favorite bumper sticker:
GOD WAS MY CO-PILOT
But we crashed in the Andes and I ate him
\m/
We had to rise again for dinner with friends at The Salt Lick. Saying that it's a bar-be-que place doesn't really encompass it. You kind of need to go there. The rain was a bummer, but inside, there were a million heart attacks waiting to be consumed. We took home leftovers - as much as I'd enjoyed the meal, I couldn't touch them. We didn't quite pass out at home, but there was Chicken Little and not much else. Chickens!
On Monday, we really slugged it up, and it was good. I was still having issues focusing on a computer screen, but I was more than happy to sleep in, munch on grapes, and enjoy Doctor, You've Got to be Kidding!, one of the the strangest films pretending to be normal that I've ever seen. Movie was trippin', y0. Somewhere around the middle, C's friend called suggesting that we try to catch an SXSW film. Badge-holders get in first, then pass-purchasers, then the rest of us hoi polloi off the street. Alas, not even the pass people made it into this one. But the rain had stopped, so we went to happy hour instead and I got a walking tour of sixth street and the warehouse district at four o'clock on Monday. There were martinis, and they were tasty. :-D
I...really don't know what we did Monday night. Oh, brain.
Then came Tuesday, Made of Fail. The universe was really out to get us. Our first project of the day was to complete a frame for the giant poster our youngest sister bought C for her birthday last May, and we were thwarted first by Home Depot not "doing that," and then by the DIY method being utterly inadequate. To offset the grumpiness, we went to campus so I could see her office and immediate environs. That part was nice. When we got home, we found the internet and cable to be completely borked up. There were no tubes of any kind, except for Judge Judy on the local Fox affiliate (at least, we thought, we'd have Idol later). Thence followed a frustrating conversation with Time Warner, who told us that they had no idea what could be going on, as we looked out the window at the cable van down the street. Also, did you know that with those new queue holder systems, if you call back even after the predicted return call time, you get dropped back in the queue - and they still try to call you back when your spot comes up? Now you do.
A little time at a coffee shop gave them time to straighten themselves out (silently), at least. The events described in last night's post were ongoing through this, and comprised the rest of the evening. Basically, Tuesday can go drown in a bog. As for Wednesday through the AoT (at last!) viewing, that'll be for the next post.
Luckily for us, I'd found a late flight back to CA, so we had a whole bunch of afternoon to enjoy together. We spent it in glorious slug fashion with Farscape - the commentary for "The Locket," followed by the always fantastic "Out of Their Minds." But all good things, etc., so after that, it was time to hit the airport.
Growly parts aside, I had a really nice visit with my sister and enjoyed my first longer-than-an-hour stay in Austin. Next time, I'll leave the cold of doom behind.
ETA, unrelatedly: If you don't like babies or men holding up babies, don't look at this picture.
Anyway, as I've mentioned, my trip to Austin was pretty much fantastic except for a few noted things. It got off to a rushed start. For once, I didn't have a crack of dawn flight east, so I was running a quick errand Saturday morning when my SuperShuttle driver called, about an hour before he was scheduled to get me, to say he needed to pick me up in twenty minutes. Ack. I rushed back to finish throwing together my stuff, and that's how I came to completely forget my power cable. It's just good that I realized I'd left it behind while at the airport, and not after spending hours in the air watching DVDs. The early pick-up, by the way, was because another van had broken down while dropping people off and we had to go get them. Drama ensued, but I was still very early for my flight. My fellow passengers were all either Texans going home or tech folk heading to South by Southwest.
Nothing exciting to tell about the plane trip except for the part where the pilot accidentally knocked an hour off the remaining flight time estimate. Hah. Much more exciting was my arrival and reunion with my darling sister. Yay! I got the briefest of visual tours on our way to her apartment, which is the cutest little studio in all the land. Frickin' adorable, I tell you. I promptly flopped down on her very comfy couch while she made cookies. At this point, I was feeling the crud that I'd been feeling last week, but it felt like it was improving. Hah.
After frozen pizza, we tooled on over to her friend's apartment for game night, where they made the mistake of playing trivia games. I am absurdly good at such games. It's not just knowing more random crap than will ever be useful, but also being very good at guessing the crap I don't know. Ahem. Of course, they're all grad students and nerdy in their own ways, so my geekiness fit right in. We enjoyed wine and way too much apple pie and ended up staying much later than my 8-5 body clock finds normal. I had a headache when we left but chalked it up to being tired and still recovering from the ick.
I woke up Sunday morning feeling like roadkill. Sunday, however, was not a day for sleeping in - we'd invited our parents to drive up from Houston to enjoy the Austin Chocolate Festival. In a shocking turn of events (for me), the last thing I wanted to do that day was eat anything sugary, but the parents were really excited, so off we went. Roadkill aside, we had a good time. It was a lot smaller than I'd imagined, held in a strip mall dance studio with maybe twenty vendors. But oh, they were good. The first thing we sampled was this amazing gelato which felt wonderful on my throat. I didn't do quite the haul that the rest of them did, but I brought enough home that kept well for later in the week.
Afterwards, we went to Town Lake to walk off the chocolate. The less said about me walking that day, the better. Dad had to get back to Houston for a five o'clock conference call, but we made time for a quick drive through the UT campus and then lunch at the original Kerbey Lane Café. Since all I had in my stomach was chocolate, this was most welcome. The parents dumped us back at the apartment and we both promptly passed out for the afternoon. I felt terrible for being such a spoiler of all things fun, especially considering how much was going on in Austin that week. Sigh.
Oh! On the way back, we saw my new favorite bumper sticker:
GOD WAS MY CO-PILOT
But we crashed in the Andes and I ate him
\m/
We had to rise again for dinner with friends at The Salt Lick. Saying that it's a bar-be-que place doesn't really encompass it. You kind of need to go there. The rain was a bummer, but inside, there were a million heart attacks waiting to be consumed. We took home leftovers - as much as I'd enjoyed the meal, I couldn't touch them. We didn't quite pass out at home, but there was Chicken Little and not much else. Chickens!
On Monday, we really slugged it up, and it was good. I was still having issues focusing on a computer screen, but I was more than happy to sleep in, munch on grapes, and enjoy Doctor, You've Got to be Kidding!, one of the the strangest films pretending to be normal that I've ever seen. Movie was trippin', y0. Somewhere around the middle, C's friend called suggesting that we try to catch an SXSW film. Badge-holders get in first, then pass-purchasers, then the rest of us hoi polloi off the street. Alas, not even the pass people made it into this one. But the rain had stopped, so we went to happy hour instead and I got a walking tour of sixth street and the warehouse district at four o'clock on Monday. There were martinis, and they were tasty. :-D
I...really don't know what we did Monday night. Oh, brain.
Then came Tuesday, Made of Fail. The universe was really out to get us. Our first project of the day was to complete a frame for the giant poster our youngest sister bought C for her birthday last May, and we were thwarted first by Home Depot not "doing that," and then by the DIY method being utterly inadequate. To offset the grumpiness, we went to campus so I could see her office and immediate environs. That part was nice. When we got home, we found the internet and cable to be completely borked up. There were no tubes of any kind, except for Judge Judy on the local Fox affiliate (at least, we thought, we'd have Idol later). Thence followed a frustrating conversation with Time Warner, who told us that they had no idea what could be going on, as we looked out the window at the cable van down the street. Also, did you know that with those new queue holder systems, if you call back even after the predicted return call time, you get dropped back in the queue - and they still try to call you back when your spot comes up? Now you do.
A little time at a coffee shop gave them time to straighten themselves out (silently), at least. The events described in last night's post were ongoing through this, and comprised the rest of the evening. Basically, Tuesday can go drown in a bog. As for Wednesday through the AoT (at last!) viewing, that'll be for the next post.
Luckily for us, I'd found a late flight back to CA, so we had a whole bunch of afternoon to enjoy together. We spent it in glorious slug fashion with Farscape - the commentary for "The Locket," followed by the always fantastic "Out of Their Minds." But all good things, etc., so after that, it was time to hit the airport.
Growly parts aside, I had a really nice visit with my sister and enjoyed my first longer-than-an-hour stay in Austin. Next time, I'll leave the cold of doom behind.
ETA, unrelatedly: If you don't like babies or men holding up babies, don't look at this picture.