Monday Meandering - 5.27.2013

Hope this Memorial Day is going well for you. I love four-day weekends. Oh, wait...

Well, the tee shirts that say "Welcome to Austin - Please Don't Move Here" are not working, people! The Census Bureau says that Austin is now the 11th largest city in the US, skipping over Indianapolis and Jacksonville. We are also 5th in population growth, only 5 people behind San Antonio in that category, so watch out #10 San Jose. The Bureau says 70 people a day are moving to town! Not surprisingly, last week another group confirmed what those of us who live here already knew - we also rank in the top 3 for traffic congestion. Sigh.

Interesting things you find in the Family Tree:

• A cousin that played professional baseball.  Lloyd Wallis, son of my father's sister, was a pitcher in the minor leagues in the '50s and early '60s. As far as I can tell, he never got called up to the Show, but he played for teams like the Durham Bulls in the Carolina League, Oklahoma City in the American Association and Salt Lake City in the Pacific Coast League.
• I found a relative - a 3 great grandfather, actually - with five(!) wives. Life was hard on the frontier.
• Even more interesting, I found a relative of a relative with 14 wives! Does it surprise you that he lived in Salt Lake City in the late 1700s? Actually there is quite a little cluster of Mormons in the Tree; most have multiple wives, and there are a lot of names like Ebinezer, Hezikiah, Shadrach and Joseph. None of them are in the direct family line, for what that's worth.

If you don't read this blog from the homepage - in other words, use a reader program to aggregate your blogs - you may have missed the links to the blogs of my daughter, Julie and that of son-in-law Jason.  I had an old link to Julie's blog for a long time, so be sure and  check out Teaching the Little People for some delightful experiences in the world of small-person education. And Jason has recently posted an intriguing series on the decline of the church. His target area has been the West Coast, but the articles have a lot of significance for churches everywhere. Check 'em out.

Texas Monthly has released it's quinquennial list of the best BBQ joints in Texas, only this year they have scratched in Texas and replaced it with "in the world." This has, predictably, drawn some reaction from places like North Carolina, Memphis, Kansas City and (get a rope) New York. This in addition to the normal grousing in the form of  "How could you possibly omit..." and "You have got to be kidding..." The reaction has been so vehement they are calling it World War Q (or popularly, #WWQ). 

Looking over the list, I see that our family has taken advantage of a number of the top-ranking purveyors, in keeping with the family motto, "Life is too short to eat bad BBQ." We have not, however, eaten at the number one spot, Franklin Barbecue, even though it is right here in Austin, a scant 9 miles from the house. The reason? I need some company, because eating at Franklin's requires arriving about 10AM and standing in line for an hour or two, hoping the meat is not gone by the time you get to the counter. Well, it used to require standing in line for a couple of hours; now that the place has been honored so, the wait has grown to as much as 4 hours, especially on the weekends! Of late, the line has been so long they have put up the "Out of Meat" sign before officially opening!

You see, Barb is less interested in BBQ than I am, and standing in line for a couple of hours for food is simply not something she considers the best use of her time. And since Franklin's is only open for lunch, from 11am till he's out of meat (often shortly after 12), if you aren't willing to queue up for 'que, you don't get to eat at Franklin's.

So who's up for a little wait? Or a long wait, unless we let the buzz die down some. Texas Monthly, and a whole bunch of fans, like Bon Appetite Magazine and the Wall Street Journal say it's worth it. 

Here's a sample: