I was standing neck-deep in Barton Springs yesterday, sweating in 64 degree water, if that’s even possible. It’s too hot to even think straight, and I’ve taken to weighing the benefits of drowning myself  in the cold water vs the inevitable heat stroke if I stay above the surface any longer.

Over on the diving board, near the center of the pool, i hear the starts of cheering and shouting, creeping up through the audible spectrum, slowly gaining momentum. Looking over, there’s this speck-of-a-kid perched on the end of the diving board. It’s only a three-foot drop but the poor little dude has locked up. All around him though, hundreds of complete strangers are cheering and shouting encouragement, and it spreads up-and-down the length of the 1/3 mile long pool, until you’ve got a pretty impressive tumult.

The kid jumps, and the roar turns to rock concert applause. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t happen everywhere.

Texans are insane. It’s the heat and the good food. More specifically though, Austin cyclists are really insane. By some lucky quirk of geography and wind patterns, the weather in Austin is dry enough (a little more so than the eastern parts of the state) for us to pretend like we’re in a really hot, less mountainous version of Colorado. With no pine trees. And no snow.

People in this city are active, almost psychotically so. You want  to drive across downtown on saturday morning ? Forget about it, there’s a 5-10-15k going on. Probably most Sundays too. Something wrong with your car and you need to pull off to the side? Chances are peloton of road bikers are going to be asking you if you need a hand.

And all this while it’s 100 degrees out (and god knows how high with the heat index). I like to think it makes us tougher than our neighbors to the north who tend to stay inside or do non-stupid sports (frisbee golf? ) when the weather gets ridiculous. Or maybe we just work to hard - most of my motivation for getting on a bike after work has to do with dispersing some of the rage built up from sitting in an air-conditioned mausoleum all day and having photons unsympathetically shot at my face. An effort to dial the asshole meter back to a more tolerable four or five so my co-workers will be able to deal with me the next day.

I think we instinctively, biologically miss the old days, when working for a living meant physical effort, whether ti be tilling an existence out of the land, or earning a wage via the fabrication of something physical. Although I’m certain my Great-Great-Grandfather, a farmer from southern Oklahoma, would probably think I’m absolutely insane for waking up and riding a bike 25 miles for fun. Different times I guess. He probably wouldn’t get the time-investment involved with this website either (neither do I sometimes).

To cycling specifically, though,  Austin breeds some hard riders. Setting aside that one guy who won the Tour de France a few times, there are hard-core people out on the roads and trails - this dude for example who’s doing an eight day, 530 mile endurance race on the Colorado Trail (A race with camping sounds pretty fun - anybody?). There’s two weekly Crits that go on through out the summer, even when your tires are starting delaminate from the heat coming off the pavement. There’s also a Short Track Mountain bike race in the fall and a rumored Cross Season. There’s even just plain stupid people like us who do dumb shit like ride Lost Creek after work, when the average temperature is 98 degrees.

I was in a meeting recently, with some guys who know what they’re talking about and someone said that I was an average Austin cyclist - In this town, that’s one hell of a compliment.

Tennis ball sized hail, trees down, car windows blown out. good times up in Clarksville last night.

Eeyore’s is many things– mostly an excuse for attendees to smoke a lot of weed (seriously, the farther back in the park you get, the better the contact high), wear costumes and dance in drum circles. Essentially it boils down to a uniquely Austin festival of spring. Pretty spiffy.

More Pics

Last week, Austin finally got a preforming arts center to call our own. It apparently not only rocks, but after 4 years of construction they managed to use a sizable amount of the old building as well:

…65% of the materials in it were recycled from Palmer, including 500 tons of steel, the stage house and foundation, mahogany from the Philippines, marble from an Italian quarry no longer being mined, and those love-’em-or-hate-’em roof tiles.

The idea of revamping the Palmer was conceived in the money-falling-from-the-sky era of the tech boom and went through a typically Austin level of drama as funds dried up, designs were scaled back and board members left the project.  A solid ten years later, the hard work has finally paid off.

The new Town Lake Park features a big hill in the middle that the city built for me to take pictures of downtown from (nice of them to think of me for a change). I guess they need to rename the park now that its officially Lady Bird Lake (which while she was great and all, just doesn’t have the same ring to it).

More pictures from our brief foray into the SXSW madness can be found here.

While picking up stuff for some picnic action on Saturday at Whole foods, I grabbed an extra bread bag so we could split the baguette in half and have it with dinner. It kind of freaked the checker out…

Hippy Checker Girl: Dude something happened to your loaf!

Me: Uh, what ? Oh…no, I jut got an extra bag.

HCG: Oh man that’s a relief. I was like ‘oh no there’s a lost loaf somewhere in the store. Help!’

I love this town.

Enough of the political-horse-race horse-shit. Standing in the crowd at a What Made Milwaukee Famous show, as the speakers shatter the ice in my drink and setup harmonic oscillations in my nostrils (yeah my schnoz is pretty big), while the kids on the front row use smoke signals to let us know that, yes it sounds good up there too–that’s good times. 

Galaxy Cafe on West Lynn has a nice euro-style outdoor seating area where me and the special lady friend were sharing some dinner and a few glasses of wine in what turned out to be a very nice evening.

About halfway through the meal, we were joined on the porch by two older gentleman (a couple I would guess), who rolled up in an older Rolls Royce with their dog (yes, we bring our dogs to eat with us in Austin) that was a mix of poodle, malamute and dust bunny. This thing was walking around with 30 pounds of fur, easily.

We were taking our time with the wine, enjoying some conversation, so they ended up finishing their festivities long before we did. As they were leaving a couple of odd things happened. First, as they are walking toward their car, one of the guys rips an earth-shattering fart. This disturbance of seismic proportions could probably be heard in Houston, caused several homeland security alerts, and temporarily grounded all flights out of the airport. Walls shook, trees snapped from the force of the blast, small children cried. Then he opens the passengers-side door to the Rolls (his partner is already behind the wheel), lets the dust-bunny-slash-dog in, and climbs into the back seat like some freakishly weird version of driving miss daisy, where Morgan Freeman’s part is reprised by Alf.

We took it as a sign to order more wine.

Good for milkshakes and posting stuff. It’s like a real-life version of flickr (if flickr sold milkshakes).