Does this shirt make my bass look fat?
As modeled by kramer…
It was his present I sent him from Kermit.
How cranky do you think he’ll be that I posted this? Who loves you baby?
If you don’t like the weather in Texas
just wait 15 minutes.
I arrived Saturday to 75 degree weather and stopped by to see Kramer’s parents (who fed me the most amazing Mexican food) before I headed up to daddy’s house.
Sunday was lovely as well.
Sunday night we decided to cover the rental car with tarps (folded for padding) to prevent a repeat of what happened to one of my cars in college-serious hail damage. I wasn’t interested in the rental company trying to stick me with a large bill. It was fine, rainy but fine.
The next day (after a long icky night full of snot and tornado warnings – I did get sick – I’m totally sexy right now – honk.) I woke up and put on flip flops and a tshirt and looked at the weather station my dad has and noticed that it was about 40 degrees and dropping steadily. So I put on more than that and we went out to lunch.
That night, we watched the weather on the web show us a monster cold front moving all over the part of North Texas we were in. After letting the dog in we watched as big, fat flakes of snow started to fall.
We got about 3 inches in the few hours before I went to bed. I woke up to the rental covered in about 5 inches of snow and the weather about 68 degrees again.
Gotta love it.
Today I wore my orange flip flops and my new orange and red tie dyed shirt from a local pub while I ran out for Starbucks and breakfast burritos from Taco Cabana (breakfast of champions, baby.)
To date its been a lot of sleeping, knitting, and hooking Pam II on knitting (she isn’t in love with knitting at this point, but its only been about 2 hours for her so far-though I think she wants to love knitting because the yarn is so lovely to play with.) There are cats to snuggle with, a farting dog and lots of mexican food and brisket.
Not too bad.
Off to grama’s tomorrow and then on to Kermit. I’m looking forward to the road trip.
;)
Packing details
So, I used to be able to pack 2 weeks before a trip and just grab my bag and go! Everything was great! I had pants! (and under pants!) but now, not so much.
For some reason I seem to get a little distracted by the right shirt (or 4) and I lose sight of the whole “what to wear over my butt” issue.
Sure, I have what I wear on the plane, but when I go with a purple/black theme on the plane and end up packing a whole khaki/red/orange theme in the suitcase, it looks a little like clown college in a bag.
My new approach is to casually sneak up on the packing and then pounce right before I leave so it doesn’t know what hit it.
I wear my clothes as the weeks pass and then when I wash them and think “Oh this shirt is my BFF!” I fold it and toss it in the suitcase for the pre-leaving sanity check.
This time my packing list deviated from my previous list (and I’ll make a new one if you care), but essentially, I looked at the weather and decided zip off shorts and the new cute jammies as pants would be a good weight. I did put the plaid ones that go with my Monterey sweatshirt in there, but I also lost my tiny little mind over some travel jammies from Nick and Nora at Target last weekend that with just a slight shift in t-shirt color will work with most everything else.
I figure with the weather as it is, I’ll probably end up in shorts the whole time anyway. (cross your fingers nothing crazy happens to the weather, I am leaving my down jacket at home this time).
New Texas packing list:
clothes:
-EBags weekender
-black zip off pants/shorts
-orange long sleeve shirt
-purple long sleeve shirt
-white long sleeve shirt
-purple/grey patterned sweater (the artist formerly known as “new sweater”)
-black vneck merino wool sweater
-*grey short sleeve shirt with silkscreened fishie
-*grey hoodie sweater
-*jeans
-Nick&Nora “ports of call” jammies
-Monterey sweatshirt
-plaid pink/orange jammies
-*10 year old (but still the best damn jacket I own) Eddie Bauer parka**
-socks/undies
-Keen’s
-black flip flops, possibly the red ones, too.orange flip flopsthings:
-Nano/broadcasty/car power
-Solio/cables/charger
-PSP/earphones-microphone/power/cards
-2G Firefly with Portable Apps/external drive
-Treo 650/headset/keyboard
-camera/charger
-eBook***
-knitting
-fold up cooler
*plane wear
** the word parka intimates that it is super warm. It isn’t even insulated. But it is long (comes to mid-thigh on me), I can scotch guard it and walk around in Paris drizzle and stay dry, it has a waist cinch, a hood, sleeve snaps to keep the wind from going up your arms and the best pockets ever. I’ve worn this in weather as low as 20 degrees F and in rain and after it gets really ooky, I wash it, scotch guard it again and wear it for several more trips.
***I wasn’t going to bring this, but then I got into a book and realized I didn’t want to leave it til I got back.
…and oh crap, I think I’m getting sick.
Packing List: Texas crawl (Northeast to Northwest style)
This trip includes a plane trip to Texas (need accompanying amusement), a trip to my dad’s, mini road trip to my grandmother’s, actual road trip across the state to my other grandmother’s (if you do the travel math its easier and cheaper to drive) where I meet up with mom being her own airline and then return trip home.
So there are some things I am taking that I wouldn’t necessarily need for something like the Green Bay excursion or a Kailua-Kona foray.
Clothes:
- eBags Weekender Convertible (+ REI duffle* in case of extra stuff.)
- EBay sweater find (I don’t have a nickname for this sweater yet…though I have been calling it "new sweater" which after the other weekend at Target, it really ain’t)
- purple long sleeve shirt
- white long sleeve shirt
- sage long sleeve shirt
- black vneck merino wool sweater
- black long sleeve shirt
- jeans*
- khaki zip off pants (pants/shorts)
- yoga pants
- layering shirt
- hoodie I got in Monterey last weekend
- pink/orange plaid jammie pants to go with Monterey hoodie
- jammies
- socks and undies
- Keen’s
- Mary Jane Crocs
- scarf
- jacket
- miscellaneous goops and oinkments
Stuff:
- PSP + cards (I use this for Skype and movie watching)
- Nano + radio broadcast-y
- Solio (this covers all of my recharging needs, though I do take my PSP wall charger for convenience.)
- Treo + keyboard + headset
- camera + charger
- collapsible ice cooler (great for hotels and beach trips… or in this case road trips so you don’t feel guilty about buying one and getting rid of it.)
- Various CD’s and DVD’s of computer files and music since I am not taking a computer but will have access to several.
- Granite Gear shopping bag, Method Plastic Bag Rehab
*The REI duffle is what I used to pack my backpack in on the plane ride out for the AT and it is checkable. The EBags weekender I would prefer not to check so if I bring extra stuff home, as I always end up doing when I visit family, I can just put everything into the big REI one and check it without having to worry about it being scuffed or manhandled.
They are pretty militant about 2 carry-on things now and I know myself about having to carry and manoevre things on the plane… I get too crabby to deal with it.
Owen Wilson
So I was re-reading one of my old Texas Monthly mags the other day and I started in on this article about Owen Wilson.
I knew he was another Texas boy, but I didn’t realize that he and I were all over the same places on campus at UT at the same time.
One specific instance was his haunting the on campus theater running all the funky movies. I was there almost every night I wasn’t working or finishing art projects (yes, 12 hours a day in the art building) watching all the Jackie Chan movies I could afford.
I wonder if I ever saw him. I don’t really remember him and frankly, I don’t know that I would have had cause to talk to him in any class as I was arts/french and he was RTF (radio television film-they were a breed apart).
interesting.
kermit, texas
Been there.
(Born there actually.)
Flickr’ing
Don’t know why, but i am posting a whole mess o’ pics at Flickr.
Ancient History and all sorts of weird shite I found in my photo albums.
This photo courtesy of Kramer at JCon 2003 (the one I just went to hang out with him in Austin.)
Fredericksburg, TX
as seen from the front seat mom’s car as they were driving to Texas.
How to move
Part of my patented “How to!” series.
(Kidding. Mostly)
What with all the thoughts of Tumbleweed Tiny homes and trailers and possibly moving to a different neighborhood when things reach ‘Tilt’ here… I have thought a lot about how I move.
I used to bribe a ton of friends to drive over to whatever apartment I was in during college (and I moved all the time in Austin, both my grandmothers gave me my own page in their books.) and load up my packed stuff in their cars/trucks and then drive en masse to my new place. They would unload their car once and then come in to eat pizza that I bought.
I can’t do that anymore since I have actual furniture and frankly, I won’t do that to my friends anymore since I can actually afford to rent a truck and mover monkeys now.
Now, the actual mechanics of moving are out of the way and the strategy of moving is what I consider.
Now, I get into my new place, measure, measure, measure, sum up, measure and then put what I think will be perfect into its spot and then cast a gimlet eye on what won’t fit perfectly (or at all) and give heavy thought toward getting rid of it.
A mutable feast.
I’ve slimmed down some of my stuff, but my house is still somewhat overflowing… and frankly I don’t know that this apartment is any bigger than the tiny house, but the lovely thing about building a tiny house is that I can badger some architect (or uncle of mine) to help me customize the hell out of the house.
Should be fun.
The trailer?
Well, that’s another matter. I think that will be my tiny laptop, several large capacity hard drives, cameras of various sorts, my bedding and favorite clothes.
Viva life on the road!
funny how Kermit on Heroes
has mountains just like the ones in SoCal.
And hee:
“No, not the frog. My hometown. The cheerleader who was saved so that the world could be saved is from Kermit, Texas!
Kermit_city_limits_sign_larger_3_1 It was just too personally freaky to be watching the already freaky NBC show “Heroes” last night and see Claire, the indestructible cheerleader, discover that she was born in my hometown.
It gets better. Her birth mom still lives there. If only my cousin and I had known when we rolled through Kermit last summer!
Apparently, no one in the town knew what was coming. There was no buzz. Everyone in my small West Texas burgh was still basking in the glow of having Kermit the Frog come through on his birthday tour a year earlier.
Yep, Texas, and West Texas in particular, are hot TV properties this viewing season.
I was already cracking up that Claire lived in Odessa. It’s about 45 miles east of Kermit and was the “big city” we used to drive to in order to see first-run movies when I was a kid.
Up until last night, I thought the goofiest thing about part of the series being set in part of my old stomping grounds was the fact that it obviously was not actually shot there. Almost all of the program’s exterior shots of the Permian Basin include hilly terrain. There ain’t no hills in the area, folks, unless you’re talking the sand hills that blow across the road like in this photo.
Even better, in one episode, a body was dumped in a river. Lots of dry draws, but nope, no rivers out there either.
But it was fine. It’s only TV and the hubby and I were getting a kick out of the choice of Odessa as home for one of the key characters. Then Hiro, the hottest Hero, heads to Midland, just the other side of Odessa, and hooks up with a café waitress. And Peter, whom Hiro instructed to save the cheerleader, also headed to West Texas to protect Claire.
And now we’re in Kermit, or at least it looks like we will be next week when Claire presumably will hit the Kermit Highway to meet her real mom. Too, too funny.”
[Kermit: Star of hot new TV show!]
Watch Heroes?
Yeah, Kermit in the limelight again.
And for the record, I don’t know anyone named Gordon there and I don’t remember an apartment building burning down (or even being there for that matter… frankly, I think they have long term motels… but no real apartments.) Its a really small town.
heh.
…and I laugh every time I see those mountains they say are in Odessa. (Can you say “We save a lot of money by filming just outside of LA?”)
There are no hills.
Hell, there are no mounds in Odessa. That beer can in the middle of the road is the high point in town.
PACKING LIST: Fredericksburg, Tx
I was gone for a long weekend, and in Texas you can get a range of weather in a very short time. There’s a saying that “If you don’t like the weather in Texas, wait 15 minutes.”
Well, yeah, it happened.
I stepped out of the airport in San Antonio and started sweating – it was in the 70’s. I shucked off my down jacket and scarf (and pondered if I should have brought shorts in addition to the lightweight yoga pants that do almost as well as shorts.)
Later on that weekend it was in the upper 20’s and they shut down the airport just shortly after I flew out due to ice and freezing rain.
So saying that, I was actually completely comfy just having brought a backpack like this for the whole weekend (but mine cost $14 at Ross. The shoe pockets on the side are very handy since I put a pair of tennies in there and wore my Crocs on the plane).
I really liked this for the plane since the new regulations for the liquids in a ziploc bag rule is making me re-think my packing technique for toiletries. I put the ziploc in the top most zipper pocket so I can hand it to the stern looking security guard and I put my somewhat girly flowered half moon dry goods bag (well, whatever is left that isn’t liquid) in the mesh area previously defined for a basketball. Heh. Fits really well actually.
I also had a Longhorn’s cap in the mesh pocket, but somehow it ended up on Bud’s head instead of mine as I flew back home, so it wasn’t there on the trip back. =)
4 days in the Hill Country:
I know it seems like a lot, but frankly when I visit my mom (even for a 24 hour stretch) I have to have clothes from anything as dressy as dinner at a really posh restaurant down to running around in the mud with the poopers.
I also managed to fit all of this because all of these items by themselves are rather thin. I layer them for warmth when it is cold and leave them single when its warm. It doesn’t hurt that I tend toward the wool stuff from REI. Yes, its an investment, but I find them and snap them up when they are on sale and I wear them non-stop, so I think I am getting my moola’s worth.
The only thing I thought might have been good was one more of the white tshirts (Hanes vnecks) and my khaki yoga pants as well since I live in them.
*These are great because they have about 12 gazillion pockets to put my plane tickets, ID for security. Then later I can put my Mylo and plane toys in the pockets so I don’t have to get into my bag when I’m trapped in my seat by a sleeping, drooling person.
F’burg jail tree
I’m such a texture ho.
