Sunday, April 16, 2023

Birthday 2023 - The Anti-Vibe, Very Good B-Day Week




Wednesday was my birthday.  The celebration lasted a full week as we had some neighbors over last Saturday, and this week we went to see Austin FC play Vancouver.  In the middle was the big day.  I'm now 48.  

Holy cats.

Monday, April 03, 2023

20 Years of Blogging, Part 2 - Together, We're a League of Something!





Editor's note:  This is Part 2 of a series.  You can view the first part with just the click of a button.  

also, this is a cross-post with media review site and PodCast, The Signal Watch.

So, yeah.  

By April of 2003, we were blogging.  For a look at the initial form of League of Melbotis on Blogspot/ Blogger, click on over to The Wayback Machine.  

As mentioned in the first post, soon I was emailing and managing comments from friends and strangers.  But, also, some of those pals already had their own blogs or quickly started one.  It was easy, often free, and gave folks a chance to speak their mind.  People were religious about their choice of platform.  Livejournal people developed quite the mythologizing about themselves that arguably continues to this day. WordPress users constantly complained about what they were using but refused to change.  

JimD started his first blog of many.  RHPT joined in.  Soon I was aware of Maxwell (she of the podcast) starting up Cowboy Funk, which detailed her life as a Texas ex-pat in NYC.  I knew her husband before we met via his own web-presence and mentions on the blog.  

20 Years of Blogging. No, really. (Part 1)




So, twenty years ago Jamie and I were living in the wasteland suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona in a town-turned-bedroom community name of Chandler.  We'd moved out to Phoenix in pursuit of a new job for Jamie.  But, also, we figured we were young and didn't have that many roots down in the years after college and marrying fairly early (2000).  Now seemed a good time for trying new places and things.  

It didn't work out.

You can visit Jamie's occasional remembrances of our time in Phoenix, and that's a goodly part of the story.  But, also, between Jamie's health, the fact I was working crazy hours, and a general lack of opportunity to meet people, we just didn't know many folks in town that we could call "pal".  I either managed or was supervised by the people I worked with, and Jamie mostly worked with men - so she wasn't meeting many women she could pal with-  and everyone she worked with seemed to be at a different point in their lives from hanging our with two 20-somethings.  That, and, man, if you asked me what the culture was in Phoenix in 2003, I'd say "strip malls and pretending you're rich".  We just didn't click with many folks.

So, that's where we were at in some ways.

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Jason: Half a Century of Rocking America

I have no recent photos of Jason and Family




March 17th marks my brother's 50th birthday.  

That's a peculiar milestone, because I can remember his birthday parties from elementary school and taking him for a beer while he was just finishing law school and I guess maybe he was turning 25 at the time (we were under the tent at Dog & Duck).  

Jason's birthday was always tricky as it falls on St. Patrick's Day.  In recent years, he's had his own way of keeping his birthday (pizza and beer, essentially) and it's worked well til Covid hit.  Also, he's got kids that went from small and distractable to elementary school age, and I think there's a different gameplan.

Monday, February 06, 2023

Ice Like a Hurricane




We just had a few days of weather here in Austin, Texas.  It's left the city a wreck.  Again.

To understand what happened, my memory of the days as they unfolded went a bit like this:  

Around Saturday January 28th, we knew we were getting a cold front and that the oddly warm weeks of January we'd been experiencing would soon end  (the 28th had a high around 60, but we'd seen the 70's several times during the month).  On Sunday the 29th, suddenly the "it'll be cold and just over freezing, and it will rain" forecast we'd been hearing changed.  Suddenly we were to expect freezing temps, rain and ice.  

I work from home these days, and I didn't think much of it.  It sounded like a pain, but this wasn't the same as the multi-day freeze in the teens and 20's we experienced in February 2021 that took out the city and led to PTSD for almost all of us who sat in the dark, trapped in our houses for days, wondering if we'd die in our own homes.  This would be 24-48 hours of nasty cold and some wet and then we'd be back to normal temps.  We do this every other year or so.

But then on Monday the schools started closing early and planning closings on Tuesday and Wednesday.  

What happened, starting Monday evening and through Wednesday, was that Austin received a tremendous amount of rain, ice, grapple and other precipitation and the temps fell below freezing.  My own measurements tell me we got something like 2.5 inches of moisture.