Tag: south padre island

  • The All-updates update

    A sea turtle

    This is what is happening, in bite-sized updates:

    That whole selling our Austin rental house thing

    Sold! We got three offers the first day and one the second day and then no more offers. We were told by our fantastic realtor that this is common in this market and the good news was that two of the first three offers were serious and we got into a little bidding war situation. We came out about 5 percent above asking price and we closed on Friday, so a combination of a scorching hot Austin seller’s market and good timing means we came out pretty well ahead.

    That wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t put a big, scary amount of money into fixing the house up for sale, but the investment and the worry paid off.

    Now I need some margaritas to celebrate.

    Travel!

    Because of kids, we rarely go anywhere, but this year has suddenly been full of travel. We did Disney World and shortly after that, I went to my 20-year reunion in Oklahoma. We ended up going on a shorter second vacation two weeks ago to sunny S. Padre Island which the girls enjoyed almost as much as Disney.

    On that trip, I got to really relax and enjoy myself, eat a lot of seafood and see some rescued sea turtles (above), which I immediately chose as my new spirit animals. As opposed to a cranky crab, which I can be when I’m not at the beach (below).

    Crab, man

    My wife took a just-concluded work trip, so I’ve been juggling taking care of the kids with work, which has left me exhausted. But the kids behaved, which they always seem to do when one of us is away (do they think they’re in trouble or something?), so it went well. My wife will be taking her turn going solo when I go cover SXSW V2V next month in Las Vegas. I like Vegas, but it’s a work trip and it’s no fun going there alone. Hope the conference is exciting and has good energy.

    Novel

    I feel weird saying much about this because like all superstitious writers, I fear the jinx, but the quick status update is that I took a few days away from the material and have since spent the last week and a half just reading back through it without trying to edit as I go. I was expecting to be horrified and to want to rewrite huge swaths, but instead I’ve been surprised by stuff I don’t even remember writing and pleased with a lot of it. Next step will be to give it a hard 2nd-draft edit/revision and to get some feedback from a very tiny group of people I asked to read the first draft. Not sure what’ll happen after that, to be perfectly honest but I’m definitely not going to just put it away. This year for me has been primarily about this project and very little else.

    Things that have brought me joy lately

    This video (which I was very late to seeing), this song, this blog post, this Tumblr, this T-shirt, the photo below.

    Don’t worry, we were able to reclaim her arm from the seaweed virus before she ate Megatokyo.

    Stuff I wrote

    My Digital Savant column last week was a roundup of reviews: the video games The Last of Us (depressing!) and Gunpoint (clever and funny!), as well as the Nikon D5200 SLR camera.

    This week’s column was about the nonprofit Austin Free-Net, which has been around since 1995 and has been doing great work in the Austin community to bring Internet access and computer services to those who wouldn’t otherwise get it.

    I also did some Digital Savant Micro stories about clickjacking and about Google’s just-announced Chromecast dongle.

    One new thing at work is that it looks like I’ll be doing more video stuff soon. More on that as it happens.

    Pacific-Specific

    Monkeys who hump and more

    The Space Monkeys! really liked the movie Pacific Rim(which I still need to see) and this week did a whole lot of sexing in honor of “Hump Day.”

    Give them a Facebook Like, won’t you?

    I made some tacos and they ended up in a book

    Through one of those random Austin things that happens from time to time, a friend of mine found himself working on a book about breakfast tacos and he asked if I’d like to be included. This involved me making some tacos and taking them to a photo shoot and writing up a little bit about my love for and history with the humble breakfast taco.

    The book turned out beautifully and a launch party for it drew a huge crowd.

    Buy a copy. I promise it’s worth your money and time.

    In the taco book

    On Twitter

    Two out-of-the ordinary things that happened on Twitter recently.

    The night of the Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman verdict, I tweeted something I thought was very vague and of course that’s the thing that people latch on to retweet hundreds of times.

    You can’t really see the responses or how some people reposted it anymore, but what was interested was the responses said way more about the person than the original Tweet did about me, I think.  It was a very weird, bad week on multiple fronts and in some ways it just summed up the bummer that was in the air that night.

    The other Tweet was much more recent and came from my daughter. I think it may have had something to do with a dinosaur exhibit she just saw, which must mean she thinks her father is about to become extinct:

    I wish I’d had a good response to that other than, “Damn. You got me. Well done.”

  • Beachy

    We went to the beach and even though I didn’t do a lot of swimming, I could still feel the salt and the cool gulf water cleanse away a lot of the residue that this year has left on me.

    Not that I was in a bad way or needing saving or anything like that, but this has felt like like a very rough 2012 for a lot of people I know and although my year started badly and a few curveballs have been thrown my way, I feel very lucky overall.

    But the trip to New York City and now a trip we just took to south Texas for a wedding and a beach trip to South Padre Island both cleared my head to the point that I could see how foggy things have been in there for months. We hadn’t traveled in a very long while and I hadn’t taken a proper vacation in so long that I was just in a really bad way creatively and feeling completely uninspired in a lot of ways. I didn’t even want to write anymore for a short time; that’s how bad it got.

    But the break from the routine and have a change of scenery both with the girls (beach fun!) and without them (NYC!) really helped. I’m just in a better mood, and a little more inspired and my energy to create stuff, which felt completely sapped for most of the summer, has returned.

    In the week since we got back from South Padre, I wrote 10 new pages of the “Project,” successfully pitched a column idea to CNN (which I’m both nervous and excited to write this week) and got back in the routine of saving time for myself to jot stuff down and have real time to write instead of wasting my night in front of the TV or skimming Twitter and starting up way too late at night to get any real stuff done.

    The beach itself was a very short time — we were only at South Padre Island for a day, but it was the first time Carolina had ever been to the beach and only the third time Lilly had seen it. They loved it, just as we expected. It’s deep in their genes to love that place. My wife and I both grew up near there and spent big chunks of our childhood on that sand, playing in those waves. It was very important for me that the kids gets to visit it this summer, no matter what hassles might be involved in a road trip with two kids who are not the most patient travelers.

    We ate lots of seafood, let the kids run back and forth to the surf until the sun was setting and wished we could stay three or four more days. We’ll be back, I know.

    Even though I was on vacation for a few days the Digital Savant column continued like a mechanism with a ticking clockface. Last week’s column was a back to school tech gift guide where I tried to steer away from the more obvious laptop and tablet choices toward accessories and other must-haves.

    The Digital Savant Micro that week was a definition of “domain names”: what they are and (to some degree) how they work.

    The next column, which runs in the paper on Monday, is an explainer about the South by Southwest Panel Picker. Every year there are lots of misconceptions of how it works (and discussion about if it works), so this was an attempt to demystify it a little and explain why it’s next to impossible to go through all the proposals. (I usually just wait until the actual, finalized programming is announced since I don’t allow myself to vote for or against panels anyway in my role as someone who covers the fest as a journalist.)

    This week’s Micro is a definition of the term “YOLO” as it appears online.

    The CNN column I mentioned, if all goes well, should run at the end of this week. It’s tech-related, but it’s timed to next Sunday’s finale of Breaking Bad. Trust me, if I’m able to make this piece work, it’ll all make sense soon.

    The other big thing happening this week is that Lilly starts kindergarten in the morning. That means I have to go to bed, like, 10 minutes ago. I have to get her to school every day by 7:45 (or earlier), which given my morning crankiness seems like a superhuman feat. Her daycare was much more lax about such things and the girls were only required to arrive anytime before 9:30 a.m.

    7:45 a.m., it sounds like, is much earlier. I don’t really know because I have very little experience with 7:45. It sounds awful, frankly. I don’t know why people put up with such a horrible-sounding time of day. Are there better donuts at that hour? Public nudity? Something I’m not aware of that makes consciousness at that hour more rewarding than an 8:30 wake-up?

    I think I only have to keep doing this, the getting up far earlier than I would like, for something like 10 more years, so… we’ll see how that goes.