Saturday

July 28, 2001

leisure lists

I crawl out of bed at seven, let the dog out and call SuRu. She agrees we should walk. It takes a while to get the urban adventuring team underway. (You will recall that it is urban adventuring if FFP goes and eXtreme dog walking otherwise.) But we are finally off to Soco. (The neighborhood is calling itself this now so I will, too. But it's really just South Congress, you know!) As we get out of the car, some dogs bark anxiously. Lots of dogs in this area. Some scruffy and some cute. No loose ones today. We walk from just south of the San José Motel to Oltorf and back with a stop at Texas French Bread for iced coffee.

There is such a variety of things in this area. A new development of residential and retail (all the retail for lease save a new Starbucks), old ramshackle homes, scruffy apartments, fifties and sixties ranch styles, infill homes, stores (including an old independent hardware store, antiques, a meat packer, toys), restaurants (Mexican, hamburger joint, cafe, Italian place). It's a cool, eclectic neighborhood with a ragged, scary underbelly. What was once a neighborhood movie theater became a porno theater and then a dot com and now the former home of a dead dot com, I guess.

Home from the walk, the heat driving upwards just after nine, I review my to do lists. Various clean up and organization tasks, building a personal calendar for FFP and I, organizing pictures, doing backups, working on the personal budget, learning more about Dreamweaver and lots of other things.

I fiddle with my WEB page for a while. FFP is hungry and wants to use some coupons for Chipolte Mexican Grill that he found while cleaning the top of the dresser. Off we go. It isn't open yet (just shy of 11AM) and so we wander around Book Stop. Did you know there are magazines with titles like Opulence, Tycoon and Flaunt? Who buys 'em? I go around the store, reading bits of books from the middle. This is a surprisingly amusing activity. We don't buy anything.

We have some chicken tacos with a bunch of toppings. For free. Three each. I won't need to eat for a week. We buy some drinks. The guy at the register is very cheerful about honoring these coupons we found. They had no expiration date. I have no idea how long they'd been sitting there. I have heard the place is a chain or franchise operation with some connection to McDonald's. The food is pretty tasty really.

.

We go home and I work on the budget, fight with HTML over some journal stuff, waste away the day. I call Mom because I think she wants me to take her shopping for clothes. She says she has registered for a workshop in miniatures in September and has spent money on that and maybe she shouldn't. I could offer to buy them for her, but I don't. Maybe for her birthday. Also, she says it's hot out and she'd just as soon not get out.

I am relieved that I don't have to do this errand and I go back to wasting time.

We go to Zach forThe World Goes Round which is a revue of Kander and Ebb songs starring Karen Kuykendall. You know the songs, I'll bet. Cabaret; New York, New York; Kiss of the Spider Woman and more. It's pretty good. I stay entertained. The other four singers and the three piece band are excellent and Karen, showing legs for days, hardly looks a grandmother when you look at those fishnets.

We end up in a crowd of people at Four Seasons listening to Rebecca. We haven't eaten since lunch but 'for a week' becomes 'for ten hours' and we share a pizza. The thirty-two-year-old on my right is named Miles and he's in software. We discuss that for a while. Ho-hum. He works for one of the companies that need to make money soon. I bet that he thinks that if they just made money and had an IPO all would be well. But then the company would be expected to grow and grow. Growth over growth, growth compounding growth. Growth, the market's darling. What ever happened to steady profits, incremental growth and returning a few pennies to the shareholders? Of course, if any of these companies do become profitable and go public, then these early guys may not care. They may be set. But it's interesting now. Everyone knows it's a business and that going public without it looking like one isn't too likely.

We are out too late. We see scores of young people rushing across Congress to and fro East Sixth. One young woman is supported by two young men. Another is being carried by a guy.

it passes for art in SoCo

"All of us, whether we know it or not, now measure our lives in the nanseconds of personal computer operating speeds and the microseconds of Internet transmission speeds.."

Rich Karlgaard, Feets of Fire, an article in the Forbes ASAP, November 1998

qwerty? yuiop?