Great thoughts of Fleeting substance

So the reason we were down on 6th street was to go the Alamo Draft house, the coolest theatre in the world.  They show vintage trailers before the movies and you can order dinner during the movie.  It has a definite sense of style.  We went to see a Master Pancake Theatre presentation of 'Planet of the Apes', it's like MST3K, but live, for those of you that know what that means.  There were some guys down on the bottom that had a script making fun of the movie, Charlton Heston, in particular.  "Even when I swim, i'm acting 'so hard'."  "Don't make me use my white-man Karate on you."  "Unnecesary zooooom!"  Hilarious.

Then we went home and slept until noon.  

We lent Andy the car because he was going to do some tours of the city and it was storming up a...well...a storm.  We just stayed home and rested.  Then we went out to Salt Lick, the best BBQ in the world, for dinner and had a heck of a lot of beef brisket.  Then we came home and walked around a bookstore for a while and then got some Amy's Ice Cream, the best Ice Cream in the world, for dessert.  

Like I said, a busy weekend.  I'll keep you all appraised during the week.  GTA 4 comes out.  I'm so excited!  

-N

It's been a busy weekend.  We had one of our friends from LA, Andy, come to visit.  His work takes him all over. We picked him up late, LATE, on friday night.  His flight was supposed to get in at midnight, but between being late (of course) and picking up luggage, we didn't pick him up until 1 in the morning.  Jess wasn't feeling good and rather than accept my advice and stay home and let me pick up Andy, she insisted on coming along becuase she didn't want me to have to go in her stead alone.  She ended up with a horrible headache the entire time, and nearly threw up in the car because her head hurt so bad.  So that certainly didn't make me feel better.  I wish she'd be nicer to my fiance.  

Saturday, her headache was finally back down to managable levels and so we were able to get out to the wildflower center with Andy.  Very pretty, the flowers sort or rotate in and out of bloom, and the 'Indian Painbrushes' and a whole host of other plants were in bloom.  It was amazingly pretty, and taught us a lot about growing with local plants, so I'm hoping to do my yard in 'Bufallo Grass', which is the local grass, therefore requiring less watering and better ecological ballance.  Yay for environmental education!

After that, we came back then went out to see bats!  There's a bridge across a lake near downtown Austin that has some spaces 2 inches wide and 20 inches deep along the underside, perfect for bats!  It wasn't planned that way, but several years later, there's 750,000 pregnant female bats there, eating up all the bugs and raising their young before they head south to polinate agave plants in mexico during the winter.  We went out on a boat and cruised on the lake for a while, then went the sun went down, the bats started coming out like crazy.  Just and endless stream of them.  What an effective insect cure!

After that, we went down to 6th street, which is the local college pub crawl street.  They block it off for all pedestrian traffic during saturday nights.  Definitely a sight to see, I'll have to come back and just people-watch for a while.  

....part 2 in a second...

Well it's been two weeks at work so far, and there hasn't really been much happening.  Mostly...a lot of not excitement.  Bleh, really.  Ugh, if you want to get right down to it.  

Today, that changed.  

Next week, I am *travelling*.  For work!  It wasn't introduced in the most compelling way.  A guy I'd never met walked into my office and said: "So, hey, travel?"  "What?"  Turns out I missed the e-mail.  They need someone to fly out California (not the interesting part) next week to train on how to do...something, I'm not sure what yet, but it's for supporting a test.  On the ground, I think, not in the air.  I haven't been fed a lot of details yet.  But it sounds like I'll be flying out wednesday, training on thursday, supporting the test on friday, and then returning saturday.  And they want me to come out again the next week!  

I turned them down for the 'next week' bit, because there's something exciting happening at Ticom.  It's the 10 year anniversary party for Ticom, and they're taking us all out to a hotel for dinner, then we get to spend the night, and then we get to do some activities in the morning.  So cool!  We're pumped about that, and wouldn't you know it, we just confirmed we'd be there the day before, so shucks.  It sounds like I might still be going out the next two weeks, though.  

Yay, finally interesting work!

-N

Just got back from hitting the exercise room with Jess, and my legs are really sore from running on the eliptical at full resistance and probably from doing the splits.  I'm tired, maybe I'll write more later.  

-N

Well we went to Wing Tsun today, and it all went pretty well, a lot of training and a lot of fun had by all.  We did self defence drills against chokes and arm grabs and the occasional bear hug.  The bear hug was Jessie's favorite to train with me, mostly because I got to run up and hug her.  

The one thing that does irk me, though, about this class, and to be fair, it's pretty much the *only* thing, is that the teacher feels compelled to 'sell' his martial art over others.  I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until everyone listens.  The best martial art for any given person is the one they like, because they'll keep taking it.  Given that there's not some other reason for you to take a given martial art (like knife fighting in a place where everyone carries a knife) that is the *only criteria that matters*.  I've been learning a lot of different sort of 'styles' of self defence that are based on wing tsun moves, which is totally fine, because in a few years, those will be the moves I'm used to throwing, but I kind of resent the idea that other defensive styles are 'invalid'.  They're not.  They're totally valid for people who are used to a different martial art.  

If you want to really learn to defend yourself, learn to grapple.  They did the experiment, they called it the UFC, and the grapplers won every time.  Other than that, just take the martial art that you enjoy.  It's no good taking grappling for 4 months and then quitting because you hate it.  Find any goofy martial art and take it for 20 years, that's the best one for you.  

-N

Well so fare I'm enjoying my little blogger app.  It lends itself, it seems, to much less well-thought-out entries; spur-of-the-moment stuff, rather than the biting invective you've come to expect from my little corner of the web.  

Still, though, it's an interesting little paradigm shift: is it more worthwhile to spend less time writing better entries, or have more entries with less polish.  Well considering that the alternative here is zero entries at all, I think I'll let this little blogging experiment run for a while.  

On the actual content front, things are going well.  Wing Tsun is a heck of a lot of fun, and as we get more and more into the class, Jess and I seem to be enjoying the same things about it.  We often stay extra long; there's an advanced class after the beginner class that we're in, and if no one advanced shows up for it, our class pretty much just keeps going; long, meandering stories from the Sifu (cantonese [?] for teacher) and all.  It's fun stuff.

Work continues to be work. I'll be working on stome different stuff than last week, thank heaven, but it still doesn't sound optimal.  I'll ride it out, though, and see how I fit.  

We went shopping at the HUGE outlet mall for the past two weekends.  Jess got some nice clothes, some replacements for stuff that has holes in it and a DRESS.  I got some more formal clothes (I don't need to dress up for work, but I want to, just to see how I like it).  The outlets are HUGE, though, there's two of them, right next to each other, and if you had a lot of energy, you might be able to see all the stores in one of them during a single day, even skipping the ones that sold clothes for the oposite sex.  I joked that all the place would need would be a 'Gold Toe' (really good socks) outlet to make it perfect.  Then we went around the corner and I saw that it actually had a Gold Toe Outlet. 

So...I have a lot of new socks now.  :)

Other than that, not much to report.  We're still feeling our way around, but Austin continues to impress.  More news as it happens!  

-N

Wow!  

Well, I guess I'm a mac user now.  I just got myself a shiny new MacBook pro, and I'm learning all new sorts of things about how this thing works.  I'm playing around with widgets on my dashboard now, and I just discovered that there's a blogger entry, which means I can do quick little blog entries on the fly.  

So we'll see how this works.  I don't think I'm quite connected enough that I feel the need to blog about every little thing, but perhaps I'll throw up a few extra things here and there now that it's so easy for me to do so.  

Macs, yay!  

-N

Hay! Who wants to see our new apartment?

So we've moved in, and have, in fact, been moved in for a while, so I thought I'd take a few pictures to show off how everything fits together and give everyone a quick walkthrough of the apartment. Whaddyasay?



Here's the living room, first. The front door is on the right, there, and we got this cute little shelf on which we can throw our stuff when we first come in. That thing on the top is a *ribbon dispenser* that has a power strip inside. All the things that we need to charge up come out from the ribbon dispenser holes and that way we can charge everything in one place. We got the idea from the internet, somewhere.

There in the middle is the big tv. I'm happy with it. Hi-def is awesome. All the console and everything are all hooked up and all the wireless controllers are down in the basket beneath. The Ikea chair is there, even if it is hard to see underneath the *adorableness* of Tigger.



Next, looking the other way from the living room. We got a 'sofa table' and put a bunch of pictures on it, which is neat. You can see where the Rock Band drum set has taken up temporary residence next to the couch and back there is the dining and kitchen areas. That glass door leads off to the patio and our forest view, but I forgot to take a picture of it.



He's the desk/dining area. We mostly eat just wherever we feel like eating, so the table hasn't gotten much use, but the computer has, both because we do all of our Austin research from the computer, and because Jess has become addicted to watching The Office on NetFlix.



The kitchen definitely feels smaller than our previous one, but we do have that little pantry off to the left there, and the electric oven is a lot faster than I remember electric ovens being...could be because I grew up with a really, really old electric oven. Check out that window view, too! Nothing but trees back there.



Coming back, here's the bookshelf (we tossed away tons of books and still fill that thing to the brim) and the hallway to the bedrooms.



Here's our bedroom...looking pretty much the same now as it did back in El Segundo...



And the other bedroom, a little disorganized still because it isn't being used for anything. My computer died (well, really just the graphics card, I think) and I threw away my big corner desk in El Segundo, too. The drums are still there, but not much happens in here.

Especially now that I'm about to become a MAC USER! I just ordered myself a MacBook Pro. It's a combination of a few things, but mostly just that I like the idea of a Laptop, Macs have a lot of Audio software and hardware available to them, I didn't feel like jumping in with Vista, and I don't use my computer for gaming anymore. So that'll be here in a week or so. I seem to spend a lot more money when I'm unemployed than when I'm working. (Don't worry, I've got savings).

So, that's most of the apartment. There's a patio and a bathroom too, but I guess if you want to see them, you'll have to come out and visit. Of course, we'll hopefully get a house too, and then we'll have so much room you'll *have* to come and visit us.

So, from our new base in Austin, bye for now!

-N