Phil the wonderdog, and his owner Todd.


So, it was a fairly disastrous weekend, with a few redeeming moments that made the trip to Austin just shy of a total waste. So I blogged about Thursday evening, and then took my laptop into the kitchen for some browsing and conversation. I plugged in the laptop so it could charge, and then when I got up I tripped over the cord and knocked it onto the floor, breaking the screen. So, sans laptop, I didn’t blog or process pictures the rest of the weekend.

Steves was there, somewhat improbably.


That afternoon, there was an alley cat and a movie premiere. I got DFL in the alley cat, and saw half the movie, which looked pretty good, and then decided to strike out towards the action. There were free drinks somewhere, I could smell them. Come to think of it, that might have been the empty beer in my hand. Oh well.

The bikes piled up before the alleycat. Yay dfl!


That night, my luck was a little better. We got in to a party with free tequila, but then, standing in a long line waiting for drinks, Sarah decdided to go see Devo, who I don’t care about, and so we all left the party with the free booze and I went and walked sixth street for a couple hours while they were at the show. That’s where I saw the coolest thing of the whole trip.




There was a guy standing between two van de graaff (lightning) generators, all covered in chainmail. The lightning striking him was modulated so that the lightning was a speaker. The lightning noise was the music.

F’ing amazing.


From there, I wandered until my feet hurt, then sat a little, then wandered a little, in a “diminishing returns” situation until I was walking a block and sitting on a curb for five minutes, and then getting up and moving along. Somewhere in there was pizza and a coke. Then Devo was over, and everyone went back to the party with the free drinks, where, after I’d had one beer and one shot of tequila, they ran out of booze.




Back at the house to sleep, only to wake up in the morning to no computer and no internets. Saturday was half-decent DJ’s during the day followed by a rather nice evening hanging with Todd (my host, remember) and his girlfriend Kelli. Fairly interesting people, the both of them. Todd really really needs to show his paintings in a gallery. I know people, professional art people (gallery people), who would kill for paintings like his.

Oh yeah, cmay was there too.


Sunday morning, we woke up and drove back. Contained in that sentence was another highlight of the trip- driving north on I-35, big puffy clouds overhead, radiohead on the stereo, and finally, for a little while, everything was right with the world. Now I’m home.

People at the “Mess with Texas” show right next to the capitol. This was a nice moment when I was sitting on a rock.

Posted by Matt on 2009-03-23T00:00:00Z GMT