Sunday

February 4, 2001

An engaging figure holding things up in the neighborhood.

It was my turn to roust SuRu. She said she'd be a few minutes. I was wondering how hard it would be to cross my street to her house when she was ready. But I knew it would be OK.

And it was. Forrest commented that the wheelchairs were going by. Then SuRu called and I gathered my stuff and went out. The elite runners were going by, most separated by scores of feet. Chalow and I easily crossed and we watched a handsome woman stride past mile nine. Some kind of marathon. Marathons like this stretch of street. Bike riders like it. Motorists dodging Mopac during rush hour like it. Pedestrians aren't too fond of it. And we turn the corner on Crestmont.

The mission is the 'other side of Burnet and north of 45th street.' This avoids the race. As we cross Hancock to North Loop, we see a stream of runners, the middle of the bell curve, coming down Hancock.

We walk those streets on the other side of Burnet. Streets with names like Houston and Jeff Davis populated with mediocre apartments, small houses with various degrees of personality and repair and a few modest infills. It's hard to go anywhere in Austin that isn't interesting, at least to the eXtreme dog walking team. The dogs, of course, always smell something of interest. The humans find the sun glinting off an eave-high metal sculpture.

We go down a dead end street because we are always hopeful that, for pedestrians, it allows through traffic. Right again, we step over a string for what will one day be a fence dividing the apartments from the bowling alley parking lot. A dozen or so cars are parked in the far corner of the lot, several with hoods up, and Hispanic men discuss them. A car club for Chevy Nova owners? (Actually, I didn't note the makes, but they weren't Corvettes. This is my neighborhood, remember?) The bowling alley is open. It is Dart Bowl which took over Capitol (or Capital?) I think and 'moved' here from a spot on north Burnet. They had fine homemade rolls and enchiladas and hamburgers in that old location. And I vow to try them again.

We walk through the First Texas Honda lot and head back.

It's a long walk, maybe three miles, maybe more, maybe less. The marathon has passed us and the RunTex people are picking up the Mile Nine timer as I pass by. Perfect timing.

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We make a trip to Eckerd's. I haven't bothered to throw out all the Dimetapp with Phenylpropanolamine. In fact, I've been relying on those four-hour tablets to fly. But FFP has heard about the scare. He's had a cold/allergy and been taking them. He decides to get something formulated without it. Works less well, he later declares.

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Somehow the day disappears. I do little computer tasks. In cleaning up my mail, I find a link to ifilm and watch a few funny shorts.

My parents stop by and visit with the neighbors about the garden. The neighbors are moving a pile of dirt out of the garden and using it to level their yard after the construction. Dad and Mom have a cup of coffee with me.

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We go to Westwood. They are going to close the exercise areas and their locker rooms on February 14. So I clean out the locker I've rented there of spare socks and shoes and stuff. I need to start playing tennis to get my money's worth. Meanwhile, the Cybex machines will be in a tent and there won't be any bikes. But one day we will ride exercise bikes looking at the lake and there will be all kinds of new amenities. The swimming pool is being renovated, too.

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After the club, we decide to stop at Randall's. There is a huge Sunday afternoon rush on the smallish store on 38th Street. So we go to Central Market. If we are going to be in a crowd, might as well be there. We stop in BookStop and don't buy anything. (Cool.) We see several people we know in the produce department of Central Market. It's like a social club there. We have left our car by the bookstore and we walk back with our two sacks of stuff...apples, green onions, chicken breasts, goat cheddar, tortilla chips, hot sauce, a bottle of SuperFood to ward off FFP's illness.

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After a dinner of sausage and onions and spinach salad (and a bit of that delicious goat cheese), we watch 'King of the Hill' where they manage to send up Native Texanitis, the Kennedy Assassination and who knows what else. Ann Richards wil be a guest star next week in case you missed it. Best part was when Bobby found out Hank was born in New York and started bugging him to take him there. I love it when the little effete sophisticate starts coming out in that boy!

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Post Simpsons, I start watching Notorious. FFP wants the Sopranos so I go to my office to fool around with my journal and such. He says he likes having me in THE ROOM watching TV and reading with him. So, OK, I go back in there and he has graciously gone back to Notorious. I realize that I really don't care for The Sopranos. Hmmm. We watch the end and I try to read down the stack of papers. It's good he got me to go back in there. The stack is huge. It's clear I'm not making it through nineteen dailies a week (no WSJ on the weekend) plus the occasional weekly slipped in. I already skip all Classifieds and Sports pages out of hand. I don't read many articles in their entirety. But there are always a couple that stop me from getting that stack reduced. Stopping to work crosswords doesn't help either. I don't touch the New York Times one after Wednesday, however, and usually not after Tuesday.

But nothing gets me down today. Not the stack of newspapers of the stacks of junk in my office. Nope, I'm optimistic, happy, ecstatic. You never know why these things happen. Random brain chemicals. I have nothing to not be happy about, of course. But that usually has nothing to do with it.

Forrest surfs channels just in time to find the start of that documentary about Woody Allen going around with his Dixieland band in Europe (Wild Man Blues). It's really good with European hotel rooms and scenery and Woody quipping away and the band is not band. And I'm not even a Dixieland fan. And it ends with Woody giving all the plaques and things he received to his ninety-something-year-old Dad. The camera pans to the top of a breakfront. There are a couple of Oscars there.

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At 10:30 PM we went to bed. Very early for us. We read books in bed for a few minutes. We don't do that too often.

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