strike that

putting the pieces back together

It’s Saturday night and I am listening to Dutch folk-rock and drinking alone. But, you know, in a good way. Lauren and Marc had plans and I was psyched for a little recovery time from our busy day. So I cooked up a three-ingredient pseudoAsian dish and watched the last twenty minutes of Top Secret - a very funny movie that also embraces one of my new favorite and hopefully temporary hobbies, making fun of French people.

Today was fabulous and exhausting. Once I got my onward ticket two days ago, Austin time seemed suddenly precious and fleeting. So we began working through my Austin ToDo List with renewed vigor.

Last night the three of us met up with Andy and Megan, whom La and Marc are couple-dating, which is apparently a thing married couples do to meet other married couples to be friends with. Margaritas at Polvo’s loosened us up for the Alamo Drafthouse - the coolest moviehouse in the world. They host events like movie-okie, where you get up onstage and recite lines with your favorite movie clips. We were just there for Little Miss Sunshine. But even that involved beer and molten chocolate cake a la mode and a pre-movie screening of a 1950s instructional video on How to Treat a Lady. Which seriously? They should continue distributing.

Despite the late night we woke up early today to hit the farmers market for berry tarts and spaghetti squash and hibiscus lemonade. To combat all the lingering local freshness we then hit Fiesta, the giant discount Mexican supermarket that smells unpleasantly of meat but stocks essential items like Cock Soup and Powerful Indian House Blessing Fast Luck Bath and Floor Wash. Which is bright opaque yellow. And which is not a wash for both your bath and your floor, but which is rather a wash for your floor, and a bath soap.

And THEN, we went to Shepler’s western ware. And took pictures in cowboy hats.

And FINALLY, the moment I’ve been looking forward to for at least five years, I got my first welding lesson. Because Marc is a hot rodder, which means he rebuilds classic cars in new-and-improved ways, and he has a garage half-full of a half-built kickass car and half-full of the tools used in its assembly and alteration. Tools like a MIG welder, which is one of the four kinds of welding, which I learned about right after Marc walked me through How A Car Works. And there are really very few things as cool as understanding something like How A Car Works, when you are surrounded by cars every day of your life but have never understood how they work at all. And now? Now I know what a transmission does, and what V-6 means, and that most cars don’t even have carburetors anymore. Because of fuel injection technology. Can you believe it?

And then Marc cut a piece of steel in half, and I welded it back together. It was Awesome.

posted by tortaluga @ 10:30 PM