Happy belated Thanksgiving to all. I am always thankful for the great family and friends I have. And I had a chance to spend some time with many of them these past few days.
Thanksgiving brunch started at 11:AM at the Woodlands country club, which meant leaving the house at 9:45AM. We arrived a bit early, so we took a few pics with the Zappas while waiting for Lina and Joe to arrive:
Lunch was nice and extensive. I have a hard time saying no to desserts, especially when they're on fire:
Afterward, we were gifted with many of Mrs. Zappa's homemade lemon cookies, mini pumpkin cheesecakes, and biscottis:
Later that afternoon, I stopped by June's place to see how her dinner preparations were coming along. In case you were wondering, yes, she really does live in a five story townhome:
June cooks once a year - Thanksgiving - and she goes all out. I believe in addition to the turkey, she was making focaccia bread, salmon mousse, potatoes and misc other side dishes:
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to stay for dinner, but I was there just long enough for one of her two skittish cats to make an appearance. I fed this one treats for a little while before she ran off:
My folks also had turkey and ham waiting at home. After a quick bite, I picked up Jeremy and met Ron at Champps sports bar to watch the UT / A&M game. As in years past, Jeremy and I like to place a friendly wager on the game - the loser picking up the winner's dinner tab. As expected, UT lost again. Jeremy - hope you enjoyed your apple crisp a-la-mode.
And as a departing pic, I've been walking Mylo a bit of late while his owner recovers from surgery. That's one happy dog:
Ron made a quick visit to Austin this weekend. It gave him a chance to catch up with some friends he wouldn't normally get to see. Unfortunately, it also meant I missed the friend's pot luck I was invited to - my apologies, Dustin and EmSue.
Saturday, I got a chance to run the 10 Mile loop around Town Lake before Ron arrived. That night we had dinner and drinks with Kate before going bowling. Ron managed to charm the co-ed waitresses at Maudie's, but it was talking his way into free games with the male attendant at Dart Bowl that was really impressive.
Sunday morning, Ron, Pete and I rode the Spicewood Springs loop in the morning. It was overcast, humid, and windy. Very windy. Painfully windy. But we survived.
Afterward, Pete went home to brew and try out his new smoker, while Ron and I met up with AJ for burgers and a quick home tour.
It was good seeing these 2 together again. I don't think they've seen each other in 10 or 15 years.
Looks like it's going to be an interesting month. Is it a coincidence Ron is coming up from Houston tomorrow?
"Hammered meat." That's what I feel like right now. I've been coughing non-stop for 48 hours. It's a dry cough that sounds horrible, and each one feels like I'm doing a stomach crunch. I am so sore. If I conservatively count 6 coughs a minute (that's a cough every 10 seconds), in the past 48 hours I've coughed 17,280 times. At this rate, I'm going to have six-pack abs by Sunday.
At least I might be able to get some sleep tonight. I've had this buzzing in the upstairs bedroom wall for months. A pest service came out to poke holes in the wall thinking the culprits might be bees or wasps. They didn't find anything, and I was left with a bunch of holes I still haven't patched. The buzzing is quite annoying - it's random, and not predictable - I liken it to water torture stories I've read about.
My workaround for this situation was to sleep downstairs in my guest bedroom. That worked fine until this week when my brother came to stay with me for a while. So back to the upstairs bedroom I went. I think I got about 3 hours of sleep the first night. The second night I started banging harder on the walls, thinking if there were insects in the walls, they would be annoyed by my pounding. All my pounding did nothing for the buzzing and just made my hand sore. Next, I opened the window to try banging from the outside. While beating on my outside siding, I happened to brush against a telephone line running from the telephone pole in front to an anchor point near where I suspected the buzzing to be.
Turns out the telephone line was vibrating. When I grabbed the line, I dampened the vibrations and the buzzing went away. Let go and the buzzing returned. And the wall anchor made things worse because it turned my wall into an amplifier - like when you were a kid and used 2 cups and string to simulate a telephone. Anyway, I called AT&T and had them remove the old line today. The buzzing is gone. Silence has been restored. And there was much rejoicing.
Our current political landscape really reminds me of a circus freak show. So when the opportunity came up for me to attend the Stewart/Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, I jumped. It helped that Pete was already in DC for a couple of meetings and was also looking to go. Throw in some cool fall weather and an Austin friend moving to DC, and you have the makings for a nice long weekend.
I arrived in DC Thursday afternoon just in time to meet Pete's colleagues for dinner and drinks. Dinner was at Tosca - a nice Italian place - I had the raviolis stuffed with roasted veal. Drinks were at Mr. Smith's - a Georgetown piano bar. I think "piano bar" says it all. And their beer list stinks.
Friday morning, I had a chance to explore Georgetown on my own. It was just a short walk across the Key Bridge (linking Arlington, VA and DC):
Their M Street would be analogues to our Sixth Street - restaurants, bars, shops. Apparently, cupcakes have arrived in Georgetown:
But then again, so have steel Colnagos:
Lunch Friday was at Ray's Hell Burgers (a place Obama and Biden made quite a stir at recently). The burgers were good.
Afterward, we played tourist and did a lot of walking. Checked out the Georgetown canal system and walked around Healy Hall on campus:
Heading east, the obligatory White House picture:
Apparently, there are Chinese in DC. And they have a gate:
Saturday, we packed up and headed to Kammi's new place in the Eastern Market area of Capital Hill. Cool place. Julie had just driven up from Austin to DC with Kammi the night before. We dropped off our bags and headed to the rally, which was only a short walk away.
Ummm. The rally was huge. By CBS' professional estimate, there were 215000 attendees (compare that to the 87000 estimated for the Glenn Beck rally). We got there around 10:AM, and the place was already packed (picture below from CBS).
People were everywhere:
And there were a few bears too. This one is a little tired:
12:00 noon kicked off 3 hours of a very eclectic line up: Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters, Sam Waterston, Father Guido Sarducci. The Roots, John Legend, Kid Rock, Sheryl Crow, Mavis Staples, Jeff Tweedy, Tony Bennett, The O'Jays, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And let's not forget Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) and Ozzy Osbourne doing a medley of Peace Train and Crazy train. You can watch the 3 hour video stream on CSPAN.
By the time the rally was over and we had walked back to Capital Hill, we had been on our feet for 8 hours. So naturally we waited in line for another hour to get seated for dinner. After dinner, we explored the Eastern Market area and had a couple more drinks:
Sunday morning's 8:15 flight back to Austin came way too early - the only payoff being we would get back to Austin around 10:30AM. So we got up at 5:00 to catch a 6:AM town car to Dulles. The plane took off without a hitch, but an hour and a half into the flight, the flight crew discovered a vibration they couldn't reconcile, so we returned to Dulles:
We then waited until noon for another plane to become available, and finally made it back to Austin around 3:30PM. It was a long day, but a great trip overall.
Btw, I heard that Eric placed 3rd in the individual TT at Gruene this past weekend, and Weston and Eric placed 2nd in the team TT. Congrats!
