My Happy Life

Link: A dazzling success: Franklin woman crafts popular beaded jewelry (link removed)

My little pipsqueak sister just got a nice writeup in her local daily. She has been crafting jewelry and selling it primarily at parties and over the web. She has a particularly cool deal with a local coffeehouse, where a portion of proceeds is donated to the Coffee Kids Organization.

Nov 21 update: Link removed. Newspaper moved it to their pay archive.

Last week, I was disappointed to see that Lost in Translation had left the Alamo Village before I had a chance to see it. I was quite pleased, however, to see that Bubba Ho-tep continues its run.

Bubba Ho-tep explores the musical question, "What would happen if Elvis and JFK were alive today and living in a retirement home haunted by an Egyptian soul-sucking monster?" It's a smart and clever movie. It has, however, been unable to get distribution, so few places outside Austin have been able to see it. The people in Austin who have seen it seem to like it.

While in New Orleans, we saw that Lost in Translation was still playing at the Canal Place Cinema. This is a Landmark Theatre, the art-house chain that also owns the Dobie. After walking the French Quarter a few hours, we thought it might be nice to take a load off and watch a movie.

Lost in Translation was nice and the New Orleans movie audience was staggeringly awful ("Hey Louise! Keep shaking that bag to smear that butter all over the popcorn."), but what I want to tell you about is the trailers. We're watching the screen and suddenly it's Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis up there. Yes, Bubba Ho-tep is on the way.

It's nice more people will be able to see it. I'd like to think the Austin reception helped launch the movie into theaters.

Thanks to an unexpected weather event, the three hour drive from Houston to Austin took over eight. Floodwaters blocked I-10, forcing rush-hour traffic to divert through neighborhoods winding along one-lane roads. Later that night, an incident with a tractor trailer north of the city forced the road closed while they towed it clear.

We missed the brunt of the rains and all of the tornados. The hardest rains stopped soon after we hit the city. The radio kept saying we were in a brief lull before the rains returned--possibly harder than ever. I was afraid we'd be trapped in a low-laying area when it did. If the waters started rising, there would have been no choice but to abandon the car. Fortunately, that never happened.

It's nice to see that Austin isn't the only city that's discovered that wireless freakin' rocks. Even New Orleans has wireless.

I'm currently sitting at PJ's Coffee (screenshot of lame company homepage) outside a mall in Metairie, Louisiana. I don't know which pleases me more, finding wireless or a real cup of coffee without any of the bloody chicory stuff.

In typical fashion, I plan to eat my way through this vacation. Yesterday, I was introduced to charbroiled oysters. Today, it will be roast beef po-boys. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. (Probably crawfish heads and boudin sausage balls.)

I've posted my JournalCon wrap-up elsewhere, as a guest entry on somebody else's journal. If you haven't seen it, would like to and can't figure out where it is, drop me an email and I'll tell you.

It's hard to believe it was almost three months ago I was fretting about registering for JournalCon. It's finally here and a lot has happened during that time. I've been asked to be a panelist on blog and journal technology. I'm running the conference webcam. Oh, and I fell in love with one of the conference organizers.

My only regret is that the IEEE is having a Globalization and Technology conference today. I really wanted to attend that. Globalization will have to wait for another time. Today, I need to go drink many margaritas with the journal writers.

The little red brake light was going blinky, blinky. Last time I saw one of those it involved pads and turned rotors and hundreds of dollars. I was getting the cold sweats over this.

Yesterday afternoon, I lost my best friend. I've written how over the past month he's gone from sad to worse. Unfortunately, we never could get a diagnosis, and he kept slipping further every day.

For the past week, I've been force feeding to keep him alive. Yesterday morning, I think both of us finally had enough of that. It was time for him to go. He was fourteen years old.

The photographs were taken earlier this week.

Things with the kitty have gone from unhappy to worse. I'm trying to avoid negative predictions about the outcomes, but I am steeling myself for the worst.

This is not one of my typical hard-hitting, entertaining (not to mention fair and balanced) blog postings. Instead, it's an article about my sad kitty cat.