Day two in Austin. Information hasn’t yet started bleeding out of my ears, but any day now. Halfway through this intensive training course and I feel like I’ve learned at least a handful of extremely useful things, along with the odd assortment of very useful things and a bunch of other stuff.
It’s very warm here. Yesterday set a record for the date at 85°. They always say that Houston is especially warm because of the humidity–I’m not sure of what the humidity is like here, but it’s plenty warm. Of course, I’m not getting to see much of the day since I’m sitting in a classroom, and I’m so zonked after I get out of the day’s session that I don’t feel like doing much but eating and vegging.
I had my mandatory green drink for today–a margarita at an “interior Mexican” restaurant. The food was quite a bit different in general than the Tex-Mex from the Houston area. Same basic shapes and ingredients, but different execution, all the way from the salsa to the rice. I remember especially liking the Mexican food in New Mexico, where the focus is on red and green chiles, moreso than around here, anyway. The salsa was prepared to the desired strength at tableside tonight. I’ve never been able to buy a salsa that is anything at all like what we get in the restaurants. I love restaurant salsa. Bottled, not so much.
My iPod cratered on me on the drive over from Houston a couple of days ago. I thought it was a goner. It seized up in the middle of Bohemian Rhapsody, of all songs. Frozen like a popsicle. It wouldn’t even recognize the “lock” slide at the top. When I pushed it into protect position, no little lock showed up on the display. When I plugged it into my laptop, it didn’t show up as a device and iTunes couldn’t find it. It wouldn’t do a hard reboot. I didn’t even know there was such a thing until I looked it up online. However, patience is a virtue, as they say. I let the battery run dead and when I plugged it into the computer tonight, it started back up again and I was able to delete the presumably corrupt mp3 file. That means I have tunes for the drive back to Houston! One of these days I’m going to have to figure out how to back up my iPod. It’s got about 30 GB of music on it at the moment and it would be a royal pain to have to recreate its directory structure should it ever decide to die for good.
I posted my essay “Of Course I Will” to Storytellers Unplugged today. Check it out if you have a second. Feedback is always appreciated!
Episode Two of Castle continues to give me faith in the series. The plot was sufficiently convulted and had enough red herrings to keep a mystery fan guessing, and the cop was as good as Castle was–or better–at sussing out the details. Now that I know that the actress who plays the cop is Canadian, I keep hearing her poorly disguised accent. Fillion is Canadian, too. We’re taking over the world, one TV show at a time. As they used to say: “Lorne Green, Green card. Coincidence? I think not.”
