Monday Meanderings on Tuesday - 9.6.2011

What's with the MM on Tuesday, you ask? Well, I was away for the weekend but I had faithfully prepared this MM - and scheduled it for the wrong day! Doh!  Oh well, it gives me a chance to tweak it.
 
Hope you are having had a good Labor Day. On Labor Day, I got my coffee, went down to the patio at the Lake Cabin, got my feet up...and nearly froze!! Below 70 in North Central Texas, sitting out in the breeze in metal chairs, deliciously cold. After so much heat and humidity this was heaven...this was delightful...this was too cold to stay out here! Ahh, up on the portch with a couple of windows open. Now that's more like it.

Yes, this is the Lake Cabin that was lost to wildfires in April, but miraculously survived. And the scars of those fires are all over the area, and within mere feet of the cabin, but it is well on the way to being a far nicer place than pre-fire.

Last week, I told the nurse at the allergist's office that I was allergic to the heat; was there a shot for that? She said, "Yes. A shot of whiskey." Doctors orders?

Our librarian was commenting the other day about the long line of people that would be waiting at the door to get in after an extended Labor Day weekend. Anxious to check out a book? No, anxious to get to the free computers. She said, and I quote, "The drug of choice in the 21st Century is the Internet."

Got a "text to land line" message on the phone the other evening. Some one texted me at the home number, and an automated female voice called and read the text aloud. Come to find out that's a feature for some phone companies. Not mine.

The heat has been hard on the birds, too. About the only ones that are showing up at the feeder are grackles and house wrens. But I have begun to see some finches lately after a long, long absence.

All of UT Nation has been holding their collective breaths to see what the Longhorn football team would be like this year, after last year's debacle. Saturday night's opener was a reasonable effort, and they won by an appropriate margin. Another Shipley, Jaxon, scored a touchdown (two, actually - they said he stepped out of bounds on one of them). But of course all this was against lowly Rice.

And did we get to see this game? Indeed not, because it was on the new Longhorn Network, WHICH NOBODY IN AUSTIN CAN GET! But some enterprising fans found that the game could also be viewed live via an online UStream channel — as long as you had the protected password, which hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, did, after the link and password began showing up in Tweets and on Face Book. Score one for technology and social networking.

So, one more home victory and we will have tied last years record.

We lost Cactus Pryor last week. His was the first face seen when TV was first broadcast in Austin. Humorist, broadcaster, friend to Presidents, Crown Prince of Denmark (one of his many spoofs), legend.

Prior to the Labor Day weekend, there was another wildfire at Possum Kingdom Lake, but at the opposite end from where the Cabin is (it's a BIG lake, 310 miles of shoreline). We kept tabs on it to see if it would interfere with our travel plans by way of closed roads. No problem. But when we returned to Austin, we could see smoke from fires on all sides of the city. As of Monday night, nearly 600 homes lost in multiple thousands of acres afire. It's a very scary time in Texas right now.