SXSW at Mellow Johnny’s
One way for an already kickass bike shop to become more so? Hold free concerts. With free beer.
Snow Day
While pretty, this little bit of white stuff (calling it snow is a bit much) has effectively brought the office to a standstill. Fleeee! Your car will not be able to handle the .5 inches of slush on the road!
New Office
View from the new office at sunset.
Water
After an extended leave of absence, Barton Creek has returned. The normal crossings I’ve used all summer have 15′ of water over them.
Festivals Suck
Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky, but the thought of having to suffer through another weekend of Austin City Limits Music festival this weekend is making me cringe. The festival is a good thing, and yeah, live music (I’ll come back to that in a second), blah, blah, bah. But, my god, come Friday the douchebag meter in this town is doing to be pegged for 36-hours straight and I’m not sure I can take it this year.
First there’s the traffic. It’s not like we don’t have that lovely urban-inconvenience on weekdays already, but when Mopac looks like a parking lot at 7am on Sunday, one becomes frustrated. And, should you find yourself needing anything form the 78704, i would suggest walking and don’t forget your skinny jeans! Also, I guess, wherever you people are coming from (dallas?) they don’t have one-way streets? We do. We have sings to keep you from killing yourselves in head-on collisions, but so help me god, if I see one more of you turn the wrong way down sixth street, in your daddy-bought-Escalade with ironically placed environmental bumper stickers, I’m going to run into traffic, jump on your hood and pee on your windshield.
And then there’s the park. I really like this park, I feel like its a cherished part of our city (our city, not yours). So when the city closed it for 90% of the summer to spend $2 million building a pump station, sprinkler system and to re-sod the fields, I waited patiently for it to reopen. And waited, and waited. Until about three weeks before the park would close again for ACL, the city finally let us mere mortals (you know the people who pay for the park) have access to it, only to see it fenced up again a short time later, to adequately prepare for the 65,000 pairs of hipster feet. ACL fest, you’re not winning points with me here.
Reading this you might think me anti-live music, but that’s not the case. I’m anti Festival. I love the live music experience you get in Austin – small venues, or outdoor settings like Blues on the Green, or quirky shows like the one Friday in the old Seaholm Powerplant. Even Fun Fun Fun Fest looks easier to take than the death-march-through-the-park that is ACL where in between your $4 Lonestars, you’ll be treated to 45-minute from a stage anywhere from 100 yards to 6 miles away. The headliner acts play for a bit longer, but you have to have either claimed a close seat now (like seriously go NOW if you want to be in the front for Dave Matthew’s or Pearl Jam), or you’ll end up sitting somewhere near downtown Dripping Springs watching it on a jumbotron, sipping your $6 Heineken (cause you have to upgrade beers for the headliners), wondering why the hell you didn’t just watch the whole thing on Hulu? Even the name, referencing the classic PBS concert show is really a bastardization – the old ACL venue holds about 100 people and has a great production value that and outdoor festival 65,000 people wrecking my park isn’t going to match.
Cranky old man aside, it’s not all bad. The music itself always lead me to new stuff, particularly from the annual Texas Music Matters piece – The List. The after-shows are numerous and generally lower in cost and a helluva lot better than standing in a hot and/or/muddy field 30,000 of your closes friends. And of course there’s the Chicken Cones. But I’m sure by Monday when I drive over the muddy wreckage of Zilker park (which I’m sure will be closed for another 3 months so they can re-re-sod it), i’ll be happy put this one behind us.
Depressingly Hot
I love Austin, but this is just getting out of hand. The only recourse I’ve found is sitting in Barton Springs for 6 hours a day which leaves little time for jobs and such.
Prius Driveby
As Germ said, “Only in Austin…”
It happened early in the afternoon of Friday, May 1st in the 7600 block of Southwest Parkway.
“I could sense that something wasn’t right,” said Brad Urry, a high-tech worker who rides his bicycle at least twice a week. Urry said, two people in a light-blue Prius shot him in the back with a pellet gun and kept going.
The half inch deep wound barely missed his spine.
Memorial Day Bits
We’re going to go ahead and call this weekend a success as I have a nice sunburn, and somehow still smell vaguely of Barton Springs and Margaritas (somebody observed that if I could figure out a way to bottle that smel , that might in fact be a good career move).
One of the reasons I love Memorial Day weekend, aside from the 3.5 days of not working is, it’s as if the cable networks have time-lock safe on all the WWII movies that only opens at the end of May. From Band of Brothers in its entirety, to the History Channel bonanza of Pacific War documentaries – if it hadn’t required being inside all weekend, I could’ve sat on the couch and viewed 72 hours non-stop of the last communal-global-suicide attempt.
Speaking of being outside, after a thunderstorm shut down the springs on Saturday, we made another attempt on Monday, and were greeted with a 20 minute line to get in (really guys, how hard is it to hand someone $3?). The line wasn’t that bad, but more excruciatingly painful was the High School kids behind us talking about how hard their lives are. Remember the days when the hardest thing in your life was when your dad wouldn’t let you get your ear pierced? Yeah, me neither, because I don’t suck at life.
And speaking of douche-bags, the drama continued after we picked out a spot on the hill above springs,as the folks behind us treated us to a litany of how great Greek parties were back when they were in school, including various different chants (complete with re-enactments), nicknames and a couple of really unfortunate anecdotes, involving a slip and slide, KY and a trip to the ER. Like, I really, like feel stupider for having over heard that, and like really fear for the future of our country if this is all we have to offer.
In the good news department, Momma and Poppa Treichler have completed the cleaning of the garage in preparation for the upcoming remodel. I have mad respect for anyone who spends a week cleaning out a garage, but even more so for cleaning garage, that has been steadily piling up up crap for the past 20 years. Construction should get swinging as soon as they can get a crew moving. I’m also looking forward to the fourth of July weekend up there which we will spend building cabinets (yes, this is my idea of fun). Doing 
construction work is always satisfying – doing construction work at 9,000 feet (sans oxygen) even more so. Check the Cabin project page for more updates on that chaos.
And speaking of building stuff, while at the springs, trying to ignore the washed-up greeks up hill from me, I stumbled across an ad in touting the benefits of the new Austonian, which at 56 stories will be the tallest residence in the western half of the country. The guys building this thing, have either been of planet for the past year and didn’t hear about this whole series of small problems we’ve been having with the economy, or they have brass balls the size of a 1974 Buick. I’m guessing the latter. Still this project pisses me off – the name for one thing. Guess what, folks here call them selves Austinites, not Austonians. That particular suffix is claimed by our slightly more humid cousins to the East, in my humble opinion they can have it. And point two, holy crap the size of this thing – the tiny building off to the right in the rendering there is the Frost Bank at 35ish stories. Inferiority complex much?
Finally, while the three-day weekend is great, it is in fact important to remember the nature of the holiday, and those who didn’t make it home.
Laundry Day
Gelato, coffee and a Jazz trio while you do laundry?
Yeah, Austin is alright. (@ La Dolce Vita in Hyde Park across the parking lot from the creatively named Longhorn Laundry).
Secede? No. Divide? Maybe…
538 has put together an interesting take Texas’ unique to divide our state in to 5 separate new states. While I object to some of the suppositions based on, well actually living here, it’s still an interesting read.