Walking Downtown

Off we go on a walk to Stevie.

Walking to Stevie (the wonderful statue of local Blues legend Stevie Ray Vaughn on the south side of Lady Bird Lake) is one of our "standard" walks.

We almost always cross the pedestrian bridge over Shoal Creek at Third Street (see above) and walk through the Seaholm Plaza.

Seaholm Plaza, where a power plant once was.

We continue down the steps in Seaholm Plaza to Second Street.

Down the stairs to Second Street.

Then it's across the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge.

Across the Pfluger.

And over to the trail by Vic Mathias Shores.

Along the trail with the skyline across the lake.

We take an obligatory picture with Stevie.

Stevie.

Sometimes we turn around. But today we briefly went to the lobby of the Hyatt Hotel and then continued to the Congress Bridge.

Steps to Congress Bridge.

Crossing the Congress Bridge is quite a view.

Capitol View.

One has to pass Veracruz All Natural without getting a taco.

Mural by Veracruz.

Today we walked on the south side of César Chavez to Colorado as we headed home.

Walking toward the Buford Tower.

Along the way today we noticed some Elon protest.

Elon.

We also noticed that there is a drag brunch at Jo's. Drag won't be allowed at The University of Texas. So we need more drag everywhere.

Drag Brunch at Jo's. Second Sunday of each month.

And it is spring!

Redbuds are the harbinger of Spring there but all kinds of things are blooming and budding. 

Need to Walk!

The Visible Woman...walks.

I have to get out and walk. It's where I do my best thinking. The exercise is good, too. Seeing things at ground level, exploring change in the neighborhood is never boring but the repetitive one foot, other foot, do it again clears the mind.

We haven't been walking enough lately. FFP felt ill. Then yesterday our walking ambitions were cut short by rain. It was nice later but FFP went to the Ballet Austin "Nutcracker" performance in his back stage "Mother Ginger Wrangler" role and I drove him over and then did various things around the apartment.

The picture above of the quote carved into a rock was taken last week in Butler Park near the Palmer Events Center. We did take a short walk over there to tour around the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar a bit last week. We walked around to the retention pond and we saw all these rocks carved with quotes on the north side of it. We had never seen them. Truth is we rarely go to this part of this park which is kind of lovely. It has a retention pond which reflects the downtown skyline.

But I need to walk today! I need to see what I have failed to notice before. And I need to clear my head. My head is full of news of the evils of the world and the haggard hope people find in the holiday season. I need to focus for a while on what's just right in front of that lead foot.

Ephemeral and Colorful

This morning I was doing my best impression of sleeping in. Which due to tennis some mornings and other duties, like being at the courthouse yesterday, is surprisingly hard for this retired girl to achieve. But FFP woke me to see the contrail tracing up the sky by the Frost Bank. It was pretty dramatic. Fleeting. But dramatic. Dawn and dusk are like that: colorful and dramatic. Just like the drama at the beginnings and endings of everything.

Sometimes I wish things would be static for just a moment. Just hold up and let me catch up. I could get through the newspapers and the bills and the duties if more didn't show up each day. But every bit of life is a fleeting moment, a picture you can never take again. Whenever you stand over a dying person or try to help someone who has just been through surgery or just smile or frown at a stranger on the street? That is that moment and it is complete even as it flees across time like the contrail. It fades but it is that dot on the time line and it's irretrievable.

Knowing how ephemeral life is can give us a calm respect for how time towers over us. Or it can weigh us down as we try to do everything at once as we pursue a static place that doesn't exist. I'm trying to grab the calm this morning. To find some peace with the reality of life. To revel in the fact that this moment and its discomforts are soon gone. That things change and that's the good part.

What I Wish For

I wish I were out taking a walk on a bright, cool day. I took this from the Pfluger Pedestrian bridge last Sunday. I was walking back from Zach Scott theater and I was going to meet FFP at the condo and we were going to a party that promised to be wonderful (and was). The "kids" (my 39-year-old niece and her husband and their three-year-old daughter) were still with my dad so I wasn't worried about him as much. Life felt right.

As I type this I'm sitting at my dad's. Just goofing off on the Internet at the moment. We've been sitting here discussing what help he is going to ultimately need when he finishes recovering from this illness and when/if home health is stopped. There were no big duties when I got here today. I got his paper in and that pleased him. "You get addicted to things," he said. He told the OT evaluator yesterday he didn't read much anymore. He doesn't in the way that I don't read much anymore: he reads papers and magazines but hasn't gotten around to any books lately.

My life hasn't been the way I've wanted it lately. Too much hospital and sick room. Too much worry and unknown stuff with Dad. Heck, with myself as well. Not enough exercise, not enough walks (like the one from the picture), not enough tennis. Not even enough cleaning my own apartment and doing other chores there and computer stuff. (I always long to do that stuff when I don't have the time for it.)

I've gotten away to holiday parties and some adventures with FFP in the evenings and it's been good some nights, great even. Other times I was down a little, feeling sorry for dad, angry at dad, angry at myself, feeling like a failure. Mostly, though, it's been delicious getting away, going to parties and out to eat.

I used to have a little writing exercise I did when I felt my life wasn't going my way. I would write down a perfectly imagined future, what I'd do day in/day out and week in/week out. There would be descriptions of exercise, dining, travel, shopping, creating. Then I would ask myself what parts of the life described I could have in spite of my current situation. In other words, I'd try to find time inside the real life limitations of my existence (work, chores, taking care of others, limited resources like money and time) to do things that I'd do if there were no limitations. This made me really realize how much I enjoyed, say, exercise or playing tennis or even some chores. It made me realize that if limitations were cast aside, I'd still love a fine meal and a glass or two of wine or reading the newspaper with a good cup of coffee.

Digging deeper in your desires will make you realize how much you really have already of your 'perfect' life. And it will make you make a few changes, too, because many times what you want is right there. You just have to do the things you love.

Manhattan

This is the view from our friends' apartment they are letting us use this week. Yeah, the Chrysler Building. Cool.

We haven't really hit our stride yet, but we've eaten at two favorite places and gone to Crawford Doyle Booksellers. I love that little store where everything seems curated so you just see so many things you want to buy (or that you have a copy of at home and think you should read or read again).

There was a huge parade on Fifth Avenue for Puerto Rico day. There were police barricades on Madison where cars had not been allowed to park (or been removed) with the barricades out into the street as if to accommodate large numbers of people. People were going by with flags of Puerto Rico, everything was covered with them.
We ask one of policemen (there were one or more on every corner) if there was going to be a parade here, too. "No, this is for the aftermath," he said. Oh. Large crowds. Aftermaths. We don't do that well. So we decided to rest up a bit before the evening.

One of our reasons for being in NYC is the literary-geeky Bloomsday readings of James Joyce's Ulysses. We have just added to our schedule an afternoon reading that will include a friend reading part of the book. Add this to the evening one at Symphony Space on Tuesday and we will be thoroughly ensconced in Joyce Tuesday. (For the uninformed, Joyce's book takes place in one 24 hour period beginning the morning of June 16, 1904.) Yes, I've 'read' it. And maybe I even understood a little.

So far we've had an easy time getting into the two restaurants we tried (where we only called in the hour before to get a table). We saw lots of empty tables for lunch today on Lex. And we received the sad news that our favorite downtown Austin wine bar, Taste, had closed. Yeah, it's officially a recession. Well we'll be spending some money around NYC and then we will come home and keep supporting the other restaurants and venues and charities we love. But will it be enough?

The Art of the Walk

Today I made a choice. OK, several choices. But one of them was to not go to the gym and really get up a sweat, maybe finishing reading Molly Bloom's soliloquy on the bike, lifting some weights. And instead to go down to the Hike and Bike trail with FFP and breathe in the fresh air and look at the blue sky and see people, running and walking and biking and pushing strollers. People sweating or strolling. Talking to each other. We saw several people we know. We really enjoyed it. Maybe it wasn't the optimum exercise for the body (because we don't run, race walk or even walk fast...we stroll, stop to look, take pictures). But it really feeds me emotionally.

It is fun to see things from new directions, to see people out there enjoying Austin's amenities. We noticed all the adjacent parking lots were crammed. We felt good we didn't have to drive to get there.

Another choice I made this morning was to sit, drink coffee, watch Sunday morning TV and work the crossword. Ah, yes. Sunday. A day of great choices.

The Fire Next Time...

No, not a fire. But this sunrise in the chilled water steam looks more like a fire than the last post, even, huh?

I don't have anything coherent to say today. (My friend Jette said on Facebook that she was 'impressed by her own incoherence.' I thought she said 'imprisoned' which I get. Impressed am I, too, by mine.) I think I'll just dash off a bunch of random stuff. Follow along if you wish. Otherwise, see you later. (I have posted another couple of amusing, well to me, Journal of Unintended Consequences posts if you are looking for alleged coherence.)

So, random things. Not random things about me necessarily which a lot of people are doing twenty-five of lately (but not me, so far I'm resisting or maybe editing my batch in my head). But anyway random stuff.

That chilled water from that plant? Expensive to use it turns out. We thought it would be an efficient cooling option. But it costs $14 a month to have access to the chilled water to cool and it is decidedly expensive to actually divert some across your fan. Ah, well. Maybe it's better for the environment? Don't know. For the last month or more, we haven't turned on either heat or A.C. but we have to pay $14 bucks in case we do. A person can do Netflix for that. Oh, well. Still haven't had to use the heater in this place which is electric so you know that wouldn't be efficient. The bad news is that the place is being heated by computers and TVs and computer peripherals. So yeah. Wasted electricity.

My 98-year-old father-in-law just called me to remind me he gets an extra deduction for being blind. I figured out they didn't owe any income taxes, but he also figured that out. With a magnifying glass no doubt.

Reading list: I finished Bénabou's book as I think I mentioned. I started another small, light book suitable for carrying around when I go somewhere with just FFP and we take books to read while we eat, wait for a performance to start, etc. It is Milan Kundera's Slowness. What do I like about Milan? That he is not afraid to write fiction and he doesn't impose unnecessary rules on himself, it doesn't seem, and just plunges in and if characters or scenes get in the way, to hell with characters and scenes. Which makes me wonder several things. Should I buy (and maybe even read) his book on writing novels. Would it help me with my problematic novel project or would it just become another book I haven't read. Which, if I can be allowed to digress, leads me to another little side project which is how to use technology to present the novel being accidentally and haphazardly written here as a whole. This caused me to do some brief, futile searches of some techie sites. I'm always assaulted with just the information I do not want to read. And I'm reminded that, even for the little HTML I know I constantly forget actual syntax.

But back to reading. I'm falling behind on my newspapers. That's because I've spent too much time working crosswords, trying to get further into the week in The New York Times and working the unsatisfying but still tempting ones in the Austin American-Statesman. This reduces the input I have for The Journal of Unintended Consequences. And I have an outstanding (and in my mind's eye coherent) essay for this space on newspapers to complete as well. One reason I'm behind on the paper's is that I haven't been riding the recumbent bike as much and the couple of times I've done it I have been reading Ulysses. I'm determined to get through to page 933 of the edition I'm working on before I book my trip to New York for Bloomsday this year. I purchased this edition in Dublin in 2004. It was the hundredth anniversary of Bloom's Day but I was there after the fact, in September not June. Anyway, I'm on page 758. Bloom and Stephen are in the livery stand having something like coffee. This will be my first complete trip through any edition. Joyce was not afraid to write a novel either. Stream of consciousness and unconsciousness and all that.

Other books (and magazines) lie neglected, partly finished. A book of conversations with Woody Allen. Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I recently purchased two books from Amazon. Covers are stiff and uncracked. I was well into E.J. Kahn, Jr.'s Year of Change when somehow I put it aside. Really good book. E.J. Kahn in 1994 died after a car accident. (I sometimes wonder when reading a decades-old book what happened to the person who wrote it in the interim. So I looked up his NY Times obit a few weeks ago.) Reading Kahn's book made me wonder if I owned The New Yorker and Me. Which was Kahn's first book about his relationship with that venerable rag. Did I mention that I own The Complete New Yorker and that, recently, I printed out the Salinger story "Hapworth 16, 1924" from the June 19, 1965 edition and read it. FFP was going to read it, too, but I don't think he has. We read an article about Salinger in the NY Times on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday which mentioned the story. Salinger is not dead, but he's a recluse.

So, not doing as much reading as I'd like. We are quicker to recycle papers and magazines these days, but they are still building up too much. And I secreted a large pile in a storage thing by my my chair and I really need to clean those out so I can store other things in there. (These are from, I'm afraid, last summer when we were in the deep throes of moving.)

I've been watching some of the Australian Open. I am especially interested in the Federer/Nadal match that will occur tonight. I may watch it live. Or not. I'm much more interested in that than the Stupid Bowl. Who is playing again?

Did I mention that I hurt my back playing tennis? That I just keep playing anyway. I need to do a good 'core' exercise program when it heals. Assuming it will. I always assume such things. If it's broke, it will heal. With our bodies this isn't always a correct assumption but it's a helpful one.

It's a nice day for a walk. I think I'll take one. We are going to see Austin Lyric Opera's "Rigoletto" tonight. We will walk to the Long Center, too, I think. Did I mention how glorious the weather has been. It has. Although everyone, myself included, seems to have had a cycle of cedar fever.

FFP is listening to opera and making himself vegetarian barbecue for lunch. I think I'll have some. (OK, did that. Had a Chimay with it. So sue me.)

So, yeah, random stuff. Not going much of anywhere. Sort of like my life. Next time, though. The fire.

As Others See Us

When I walked with a friend last week he shot this picture of me shooting a picture. I usually show you me as I see myself, a reflection or shadow. Boy I'm fat. Fortunately I don't see myself as fat. (Well, in the bathroom mirror after a shower, but other than that, no.) What do people see when they see you? (Or, um, me?) Very complex topic.

Austin's skyline is sure changing. You alter views when you build up a high, dense city.

I don't know how other people see me, really. I don't worry about it too much. I just try to be myself, to pay attention to other to gain their perspective and go forward. But I do have a me I see and imagine that I suspect is nothing like what anyone sees.

I think this imagined persona one has is often far from what others see. But this new president seems to be one of those people who knows what people see and who is in control of that. He even seems to really be that person.

Every Day Brings Its Surprise

On the day before Christmas Eve, I went to bed late and didn't sleep well. So Christmas Eve morning at seven I was still slugging the bed (a family term around here for doing pillow time when it's light and other people are up) and FFP said I should look at the sky. It did look a bit strange. I got up and FFP shot some pictures of it with me directing him to some settings on the point and shoot that might help. It was a strange sky indeed. And that day's little surprise. Right now, as I type this sentence the wind whips up and the sky darkens as a new front moves through. The pundits (the weathermen that is) thought it would be here a bit earlier. I wasn't confident I'd get to play tennis but I did as the sky was covered and uncovered with clouds and the wind whipped through then lay back. I enjoyed playing. No suprise there. Although I was playing with a sore toe. Stubbed it last night on something. It's not swollen though, but it's tender. It surprised me when I stubbed it and I almost feel down landing instead in my chair. Yes, I'd had a few drinks. Shut up.

On Christmas Eve, it didn't feel festive. The annual Christmas party at the Headliners Club (our first one), almost picked me up the day before. I wore my decades-old red blazer and red socks. I posed FFP with Christmas decor in the building. I drank two Bloody Marys (the drinks are free at their annual party, no wonder it's so popular). I was going to go out by myself in the evening, but I ended up driving FFP to the Long Center for Mother Ginger wrangling and then I thought I shouldn't drink so I could go pick him up if needed. (He walked home, though.) And I started doing laundry and watching TV and just stayed home. But staying home in my undecorated house was not festive.

We went out with our friends on Christmas Eve. It was a long, fun evening. I met some new people including a young lady about to graduate and go to medical school and a teacher who was trying to teach her dog to skateboard. We had a New Zealand dinner, complete with wines. Someone bought champagne and cheese plates to kick it off. We had crackers (those popping novelties with toys inside that British people like) and tried to play with the toys inside and wore the paper hats, too. Then we all went to a large apartment near our building and had a White Elephant (Yankee Exchange/Chinese Exchange) of wrapped Christmas ornaments. And drank champagne and had more desserts. The place was decorated, but at the end of the evening my festive quotient still was a little low.

Our Christmas was very slow. We took FFP's parents to Threadgill's which was beyond packed. We got there early enough to get a table and got them fed, though, and went back and unwrapped presents with them. They had money in cards for us but had temporarily forgotten where they put them. Finally FFP said "Did you put them in a drawer?" His mother went to the bedroom and found where she'd stashed them. Because my dad didn't feel like getting out we took him his presents and visited with him a short time. I called in a prescription for him to the automated renewal thing. He was feeling better but we didn't stick around long. The outing with FFP's parents wore us out. We went back to the condo and I don't think we left except maybe to go across the hall to the gym. We washed towels and we watched a DVD from Netflix and sports on TV. I liked the movie ("Heights" with Glenn Close but written and directed by this guy Chris Terrio whom I never heard of). I enjoyed sitting around reading the papers and drinking coffee. I worked some crosswords since FFP gave me some puzzle books for Christmas.

We spent a good part of the day after Christmas doing stuff for my dad. He wanted to be driven to church to play games and to a friend's house for leftovers. We picked up his prescription and we took him to do the paperwork and turn in stuff to get a check from his insurance company for his van that got totaled. I wasn't going to burden FFP with it, but he went along with it. We got his car washed and wandered Barnes and Noble and such while Dad was playing games at church. In the evening we had a dinner date but it got canceled, so we went to Taste and had snacks and drinks and then went to the Alamo Ritz and saw "Milk." (Wow. Good movie.) It's been so long since we found time and actually got ourselves off to see a movie that it kind of surprised me that we were doing it. But the canceled dinner date pushed me and I bought the tickets online so as to push myself a bit more. We don't even get that many Netflix watched.

So, here I am, rambling to say something so I'll have another Holidailies entry. I'm cool so far with the count. Why is it that I can resolve to do something like blog every day and actually do it, but when it comes to more important things, no? I am going to make two and only two resolutions for 2009. (More on that later in another entry.)

Do You See What I See?

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Of course not. Beyond the obvious religious implications (only a certain number of people acknowledge the star of Bethlehem, the Christ child and such), we don't see or hear (or for that matter know, as in the third verse of that carol) what others do. We are in a different spot with different sensory tools. Our brains are wired to interpret things in certain ways.

This shop window reflection looks almost bucolic because some growing thing (I'm not sure if it was a tree inside or on the sidewalk) imposes its random pattern. But it was taken on the decidedly industrial turned bar Fourth Street in the Warehouse District. The Christmas Balls (and the sign which says 'Please Present ID on Entry') are at Oil Can Harry's bar, one of the most venerable gay bars around.

I see me, hiding behind a camera and a pink cap. Has it occurred to anyone else that these images of me, reflected in reverse and often obscured remind one of identifying bank robbers in disguises. (I almost said in 'costumes.' Isn't it interesting that costumes and disguises can be the same thing, with different intention?)

Anyway. I digress. This isn't about crimes or even me and my reflection. Except to say that not everyone is seeing, hearing and knowing the same thing.

Living downtown has reminded me over and over of the mathematical reality that a very large building can completely disappear behind a shorter, closer building. This phenomena of disappearing and reappearing makes walking and driving around a city so interesting and, let's face it, a bit disorienting. I can be very close to a forty story building but not be able to see it because of my distance and position from a much shorter building. Yeah, every fifth grader knows this. Still, the fact of it is shocking sometimes.

Another interesting perspective is how two people can sit in the same room and experience completely different things. Of course, if they are reading a book or newspaper, there is that. Worse, if they are both reading and writing on the vast plain of cyberspace, they can be in a different world. FFP reads the Drudge Report and sends pictures of Mother Ginger VIPs to people while I write to you, dear readers, and look up the mathematics of perspective and prowl Holidailies for new thoughts. I've been over here trying to fix little problems in my Windows XP under VMware. I'm surfing a different wave.

We think we have a shared experience. But, depending on where we are standing, it can be very different. It's amazing that media assault can inform a large number of us on Madoff, Caylee and Caroline Kennedy, given that we are all looking in different directions with different obstacles between us and the tall buildings (or the big stories). It's also fairly amazing that so many people, after two thousand years, think they see a 'child shivering in the cold.' Who's to say they are wrong? And it is a nice song.

Odd Effects

Light changes everything. Experience changes everything.

I was working with my computer guru yesterday on installing some new some new software. When I first got my iMacs their pretty faces seduced me. I still like sitting here typing away like now. But the hard drive failure on Forrest's and various little glitches have left me with a less than "I LOVE Apple" impression. Not all of this is rational. I am trying to run Microsoft software on both these machines. (Yeah, I'm not in the I LOVE Microsoft camp either. That ship sailed long ago.) I am trying to run these two HP all-in-one printers wirelessly on the Intranet. I am trying to use VMware and a mishmash of XP programs. I am notorious for changing lots of files on my computer willy-nilly in my ADD fashion and trying to backup everything and, I don't know, maybe demanding more of my environment than other people and not remembering what I did to cause something to crash. I've had some weird problems with the CD/DVD drive on my iMac, too, where the Apple side loses track of the drive and I have to go connect it to the VMware XP, eject it, disconnect it, start over. Once a CD got stuck halfway in, too. Anyway, when I look at my pretty Apple machine now it doesn't elicit pure joy. (OK, maybe everyone doesn't download enough CDs to have 7251 songs in iTunes only one of which was purchased online. Still.) And don't call anything 'genius.' Not people not software. You invite the idiot retort. Would I buy Apple again? Maybe. Would I buy HP printers? (Did I mention that the software for their all-in-ones is a big smelly pile? Yeah. It is.) No, when I see an HP printer now it kind of makes me mad. I'm just saying.

It's funny though how these things that maybe have nothing to do with some object like the software that runs on it or something that attaches to it start to make you think of it in a different light.

Well, things are running OK now. Just OK, however. There are a couple of things not OK. And my guru is going to leave the business for a real job when he graduates. I'm happy for him, but I will miss his help. And talking to him. Interesting kid. Like a son I'd be proud to have. Anyway.

When we were finishing up and banishing a couple of last minute little difficulties, I noticed the light outside. It was amazing with dark clouds in the east and the last of the sun reflected in buildings. The way I perceive an evening is often influenced by how the skyline east of me looks at sunset, assuming I notice it. This view was amazing. See above. (Not that my bad photography captures it.)

It's funny how we react to the things around us. Funny and not all that rational.

How Did That Go?

I know you are out there, fans of the moving/downsizing debacle (not really a debacle but isn't that a great word?). Anyway, yes we had our inspection. And, yeah, we have a long punch list and we are sending our contractors back for some measurements and getting a licensed inspector to inspect it, but generally we are almost giddily happy about the place. Long punch list or not (most are minor things but certainly ones that need fixing) we love the place and while it isn't huge I think we are going to learn to love it immensely and, having discarded our way to a fighting trim that fits in the place, be happy there for years to come. The above view looks across our neighbors' balcony to the Long Center. We have been at the Long Center a fair amount during its triumphant opening and standing on the City Terrace we have been pointing out our balcony so we knew we would be able to see the Long Center from there. Still, it was exciting to take this picture.

This picture is directly across Nueces from our balcony. The cars in the foreground are on top of the State parking garage. The structure in the lower right delivers chilled water for air-conditioning to surrounding buildings and they pointed out our own chilled water in our mechanical closet. I didn't get a picture but if you look northeast you see the Capitol.

We had enough time on our appointment to get a quick tour of the gym, party room and media room. There is still a little construction around the pool but the pool is there and filled. I was thrilled that they have the exact kind of recumbent bike that I like. It has a personal TV like all the machines. I thought putting the 360 logo on the benches and stuff was a bit much but who is to argue???

The people running the inspections and such are using a one bedroom on the ninth floor. We asked if we could step out on the balcony while they made copies and they said sure.

I went back in and ask, "Did you know there is broken glass on the balcony?"

They said a pane of glass broke on the seventeenth floor. Yikes. Hope no one drops a martini while I'm on my balcony.

I'm feeling very urban and I'm in a pretty good mood, but now we really need to get some stuff done. Yikes.

Oh, and about the iMac. My computer guy dropped it off and I received the following e-mail from the Apple Store. Yeah, well, I wonder how long it will take for the Genius to call!

Thanks for making a QuickDrop. You have dropped off the following item:

Your Reference number is: Q01337051
Product: iMac (20-inch Mid 2007)
Date: Monday, May 12, 2008
Time: 10:36AM
Location: Apple Store, The Domain
Reason: pro care tech tools deluxe reported many bad sectors in the hard drive

A Genius will contact you at 5125551555 when they have completed their diagnosis.

Is it just me or is that Genius thing Apple asserts a kind of hubris??

So, yeah, I'm here, I'm cheerful, what else do you want? My in-laws don't want to go out tonight but I think I'll treat my dad anyway. Smiling, here. Because really...great views don't you think? And I'm just going to have to walk across the hall to the exercise room and a few more feet and I'm on my bike looking out over the pool deck and to the west, watching the Spring condominiums rise at Lamar and Bowie.

So, enough blogging. Off to throw something away!