Ready for a Home

I found my future residence this evening. It is a gorgeous mixed use neighborhood with a bookstore and cute little grocery in easy walking distance, seafood and Italian restaurants also in walking distance, fountains and statues, and the coolest outdoor fireplace with chimney and actual fire. And the apartments start at only $900 a month.

Hmm. So maybe I won't be moving in any time soon. Either way, I was stuck waiting around in Austin after school let out because it was the preferable alternative to driving an extra hour and a half to spend an entire one hour at home. And I discovered what is possibly my favorite area in all of Austin, as it was more similar to some places in Europe than anything else I've encountered since.. well.. Europe. I wandered around in awe for forty minutes, and didn't even have time to enter the bookstore. I did make my way through the cool (and unfortunately expensive) grocery, examining all the shelves and eating my way through their samples (all of which sufficiently impressed me so that I'd consider buying something if I was rich.... and oh my gosh do they have a nice selection of cheese!), and admiring their wines and desserts (I tried a small coconut pineapple rum cake; mmmmm).

I also discovered that it is, despite my general strong opinions to the contrary, possible to eat by yourself in a restaurant and actually enjoy it. The key is bringing a good book along so that you have somewhere to look while eating and some enjoyable alternative to conversation. It helps if you go to a very fancy seafood restaurant where all you can afford is an appetizer and soup, and proceed to enjoy the best coconut shrimp you've ever tasted with an amazing relish to dip them in and a surprisingly tasty seafood corn chowder. (It also helps if the book is Orson Scott Card's newest book. However, it doesn't help if you're squeamish and trying to read a particularly squeamy medical chapter while eating.) I also now, after a year, have discovered my first favorite restaurant in Texas. All my others are back in MI.

So, I probably really can't move here any time soon, but I may go back and explore again, even just to sit down on their fun benches, admire the fountains, or find a spot near the fireplace when it gets cooler, and read or write. I mean, all that was really missing from the near-Europe picture were travel companions.. (Hey, Domenic, if you read this post, come back to Austin! Our birthday is on a Friday, we've got the weekend to celebrate... ;-) ).

The place, by the way, is The Domain in Austin, and the restaurant therein is called McCormicks.

Apples and Eggs

So, I would have posted the Pledge or something yesterday, but my computer refused to connect to the internet.

I would have posted about the Sunday Gospel reading on Monday, but my computer refused to connect to the internet, and I didn't want to keep the computer I stole for any longer than necessary.

I just realized there is a Texas pledge. I'm not sure how I feel about having to pledge allegiance to TX. I mean, I've come to like the place, and I assume I'm staying (God rarely lets me know what I'm doing more than a few months in advance; generally it's more on the level of number of days), but I haven't been here long enough to consider myself a Texan. Of course, at the moment it looks likely that I won't actually be in the classroom long enough to have to worry about it. Such is the life of a TA.

We received students today. Hand delivered, at that. I think fifth grade will be fun, and I'm somewhat disappointed that I won't be able to do any actual teaching or working with most of the students. I'm not disappointed that we won't have to wear the school shirt to work every day.

Actually, that's a funny story. So, see, the school got us shirts. They have our school name on them, and a little picture, and everything. I got a medium. Most people got mediums. Most people working at the school are women. The shirts don't seem to understand this, and presented themselves to us in the form of overly large men's shirts. By overly large, I mean that the men's medium, which normally should be somewhere in the vicinity of a useful length if a bit wide, came almost down to my knees. Luckily the shirt was 100% cotton, so I decided I could successfully shrink it and set about this endeavour. Unluckily (okay, so there might have been something more than just luck involved), I did not get home until around 10pm. Now keep in mind that I had to get up at 6am today.. 6:30 at the latest. Sometime after 10pm, I throw the shirt into the hottest wash possible and let it run. Sometime around 11pm, I empty out the dryer and throw the shirt into the hottest drying cycle possible, then see that the dryer thinks this cycle will take over an hour. Being used to washing shirts that don't wrinkle badly, and wanting to give this particular shirt every possible second in which to shrink, I leave it in the dryer and head off to bed.

Then morning arrives. A very early morning. Yes, I slept in until 6:30am. The drive to school, in little traffic, takes half an hour, and I have to be at work by 7:30am. Somewhere after 6:30 I wander downstairs in a sleepy haze to find my shirt sitting faithfully in the dryer, a completely solid ball of mushed up wrinkles. After untangling it, I discover that it is, however, successfully shrunken; it only comes about halfway down to my knees now. I spend five minutes wandering through the house in order to discover an ironing board and no iron, which is probably a good thing, as the most likely outcome would have been a beautiful unwrinkled shirt with an equally beautiful blackened burn in the middle. Naturally, my burn would have been beautiful, but probably not in the acceptable-business-wear sense of the word. (I didn't realize until too late that I do have access to a hair dryer, which does get hot, and which had I strategically wrapped a cloth around it... It's probably a good thing I didn't realize this, as it either wouldn't have worked, or still would have burnt the shirt.) The running-hot-water-in-a-shower thing has never worked real well for me, and takes way too long anyway. Option number three? Soak the thing and dry it again. At this point, it's somewhere between 6:40 and 6:45, about the time I ought to be leaving in case there are other people awake (and therefore traffic) at such an insane hour of the day. Ten minutes later, the shirt is warm and still undeniably wet - but wrinkle-free! I've got at least a half hour drive and TX isn't exactly cold, so I figure the remaining water will evaporate by the time I get to school. In another minute I discover that I may have too successfully shrunk the shirt, as I can't get one of the buttons undone, and others are also proving difficult. By the time I get the shirt on, it's wet and cold, which may be nice later on in the day but isn't at not-yet-7am. Given that it's overly large, I can't feel most of the shirt anyway and this doesn't make too big a difference.

Naturally, there is traffic, but only a little bit. During the drive I turn the heat on full blast to help the evaporation process. This lasts until I get off the highway and am almost at the school, at which point the heat is making me too sick to continue and I'm forced to turn it completely off. Around 3/4 of the shirt has dried at this point, I'm at the school only ten minutes late, and since we have extra staff on hand for the first day, all is well. Later on, I discover that somehow the washing/drying process left yellow stains on the front of the shirt, which no one else seems to notice or care about. I also discover that some people were much smarter than I, and wore the shirt over another, better fitting one, so they wouldn't have to worry about buttoning it and trying to make it look normal. Also, that one of my teachers didn't even wear the shirt.. and no one seemed to care.

And I think that's the only "first day" story I'm willing to share online. But a brilliant illustration of just how insane...err, resourceful... I can regularly be.

Author Madeleine L'Engle Dies at 88

A brief article about her and her books.

Not my favorite author, but there are elements of her work that I like. I read A Wrinkle in Time and some of the following books, and I'm thinking I should at least try out one or two books aside from that series. She had some good ideas.

Finished Product

I Found the Cliffs of Insanity...

...while driving in stop and go traffic in a stick shift while only half awake.

I fell over the edge on the way back, when it started raining so hard I could barely see.

Anyone know how to do lesson plans for P.E. class?

NaNoWriMo 2007

No, it doesn't start for two months, but since I've mentioned it already: here are the two main characters, both pictures "drawn" about a week ago. They both look rather serious and/or depressed, but that's not a constant factor.. just the particular scenes I happened to be thinking of when creating them.

As usual, both were created using Candybar Doll Maker 3 at eLouai.com (the link is also on my sidebar; and they've added some new things, including an RPG room maker, in case that catches anyone's interest. I use the site too often.)