at Nuno's in Austin...

Went to Austin with Trish last weekend. We left early on Saturday morning and stopped at the art center in Temple to unload my artwork. It's a nice place - my show will be one of 4 going on at the time. The reception this coming Saturday morning will be a champagne brunch. Fancy.

We went on to Austin and hit Book People. Great independent book store. We saw someone being interviewed (with a TV camera and everything) and turns out it was Leslie, the Queen of Austin. Apparenly he ran for mayor recently. We saw him walk by later in his skirt and stockings.

So Austin's still weird.

After Trish spent way too much money on books (all gifts, she swears), we went to the hotel - also a cool place - the Habitat Suites. It's a green hotel. Very nice but not expensive.

We called our Austin friends and left messages with them, trying to hook up for dinner. We decided to get a snack a couple of hours before meeting them, so we headed back toward downtown. We were both starving so we went to the first place we saw - Chili's. We decided that everybody working there that day was stoned and didn't really care about customer service. We eventually got waited on by a really nice, mellow, smiley waiter. He made up for our initial bad impression.

Then we went to Waterloo Records, a cool independent record store. Well, CD and video store, I guess...

We never heard from our friends, so we headed down to the party area on Sixth Street. We walked around a bit and then ducked into the Driskill Hotel. Fancy. We hung out in the lobby bar and did some people watching. We sat right across from the men's room - great location!

The lounge singer music was getting to us, so we headed back down Sixth. We were looking for some live music and settled on a blues club called Nuno's (their website doesn't seem to be working...). The opening band was Jo Hell and the Red Roosters, followed by Sonny Wolf and the somethings... We also enjoyed the people watching in Nuno's. Two shows in one!

We left the bar at midnight and were amazed at the hundreds of people walking around on Sixth. They had the street blocked off and people were walking everywhere. Lots of different kinds of people, too.

The next day we went to the East Side Cafe for a yummy lunch and hooked up with our friends. Kate (aka snake) and Thomas and Brian.

Then we headed off toward home. We stopped in Waco to visit Trish's friend Dave. He used to go by "Crazy Dave," but he seemed pretty normal now. He's married and has a cute little girl.

One stop in West for kolaches and we were off!

You can see Trish's photos here.

Oh, and we had nothing to do with those birds. I swear.

I have to do it all over again this weekend. The reception in Temple is Saturday morning. I think I might drive down early on Saturday and head back after. The reception is a champagne brunch. Fancy!

My work made it to Houston OK and the opening there is this Thursday. I don't think I can swing 3 road trips in a week, so I'm going to have to skip that one.

Hopefully they'll both sell some stuff. That would be a huge bonus. Keep your toes crossed!

I used my birthday money to buy myself a huge splurgy present - an iPod Nano. It's so freakin' pretty. I want to lick it. In fact, Trish's job this weekend was to keep me from licking it. I still might...

My birthday money covered the iPod but I splurged on the car adapter thingie. I'm excited to be able to listen to post-1992 music in my car now (the radio doesn't work and I have to listen to cassette tapes, and the ones I have are mostly from 1989).

Check out these videos from about 1978. Some kids spent quite a lot of time and energy making these movies...
Shark
Elevator
Devil's Babe