austin
By anders pearson 27 Oct 2003
finally made it down to austin to visit <a href=”http://www.livejournal.com/users/kpilo/“>lani</a> for the weekend.
my primary mission was to spend as much quality time as possible with lani. my secondary mission was to get a little bit of a feel for austin.
primary mission accomplished.
the secondary mission probably required more than a weekend, but we made a valiant attempt. lani’s been busy with classes so much of the exploration was into new territory for her as well.
soon after arriving, we wandered around her neighborhood and found a great vegetarian/vegan restaurant about 3 blocks from her house that she had never been to before. later, we wandered around downtown austin. i have no strong desire to return to the downtown. austin is very much a college town; the streets on a friday night were teeming with drunken idiot UT students and SUVs (occasionally hitting the students, apparently).
saturday we had some pancakes and breakfast tacos and wandered her neighborhood some more. we found possibly the greatest book store i’ve ever been to. it was huge and everything was used or heavily discounted. if i hadn’t been limited by what i could carry home on the plane, i could have bought half the store.
saturday night, we managed to find our way to an <a href=”http://www.asylumstreetspankers.com/“>Asylum Street Spankers</a> show at a little coffee shop, café type place. they were playing outside on the patio with no amplification. they were fantastic. after the show i even got to talk to <a href=”http://www.wammolovesme.com/“>wammo</a>, who is a personal hero of mine, for a few minutes, which totally made my day. (he’s a really nice guy, i’m happy to report). if you ever get the chance, you must go see the Spankers; they are a riot.
other than that, i got to sample plenty of <a href=”http://www.puretexanbeer.com/homepage.htm”>Lone Star beer</a> (“The <em>National</em> Beer of Texas” (emphasis mine)), and play with lani’s house’s 3-legged cat, Gimpy.
and, to add to lani’s <a href=”http://www.livejournal.com/users/kpilo/81654.html”>list of things we didn’t do</a>:
- see an armadillo
- get lani's ibook on the wireless network. i made an attempt but was eventually foiled by my complete lack of knowledge about anything having anything to do with wireless networking (i got it to find the network, put in the WEP key, dhcp seemed to work, giving me a valid looking routing table and filling in DNS info and everything, but it refused to actually connect to anything)
- take very many pictures. dammit, what's the point of having a tiny camera if i can never remember to use it.