The first - well underway - is the annual ritual of inviting half the free world to come to Austin for SXSW and then trying to persuade them that no, they really don't want to move here! We can, for the most part, avoid the SXSW mayhem by staying north of 45th Street. Of course, if for some really strange reason we actually needed to go to South Austin, we could always loop around by way of Oklahoma City to Shreveport to Houston and come up that way.
Then there is Daylight Saving Time, that biannual exercise in insanity that I truly love so much. Enough! Not only do you walk around like a zombie for a week or so, you have to go around and change all the clocks. And who remembers how to change the clock on the car radio? Not me.
Changing the family heirloom clock involves advancing the hand a quarter of an hour, waiting for the clock to go through its chime repertoire for that time segment, then advance it another 15 minutes, etc., until you have moved the hands forward an hour. If you don't let it go through all its chimes, it gets confused. Setting it back an hour is worse. The experts say "never turn the hands backward on this clock" so you must stop it for an hour, the restart it and reset the time.
Speaking of, the clock is on probation. It kept stopping every few days and I finally took it back to the repair shop for more than just a cleaning, and they quoted both an outrageous price and a 6-month (at least) wait. I grudgingly left it, but after some research, I found I could send the mechanism to a shop that specializes in that repair for a fraction of the cost and time. So, we retrieved the clock (not without a bit of anxiety - they couldn't find it at the shop!) and when we got home I restarted the clock... and it's behaving very nicely at the moment. Maybe it doesn't want its innards shipped to Illinois. We'll see.
You know how you get those emails from Amazon suggesting things to buy - or buy again? Like the one suggesting that I might want to buy another copy of the TurboTax software for 2014. I admit I sometimes put off paying taxes until the last minute, but 2014? That would mean that those phone calls from the "IRS" that the sheriff is on the way if I don't pay right now might actually be legit.
And here's a photo I have been meaning to post for some time. I took it outside the beach house on Monterey Bay. That's in California, mind you, so that may have a bearing on this strange looking plant that I have been trying to identify. Perhaps it's not a plant at all, but an alien life-form that has taken up residence there. Blow it up and note the other-worldly organisms growing on the ends of those stalks.Any ideas?
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