End of Silence

Following up on M.J.L. Kellogg’s post, the buzz is building on the city’s 1st First Night this New Year’s Eve. The program starts at 2pm and runs all the way to midnight.

The first three hours are being billed as the “Family Festival” which includes a grand procession that appears to begin at the Austin Museum of Art’s Community Room, where you can make your own art flag for the parade, and ends at City Hall.

There’s too many things going on to list them all here. You can check out all the details by section, discipline or timeline. A map is available as well. Some of the highlights include a glowing dragon on Town Lake, fireworks over Town Lake at midnight, fire dancing by five different area troupes, a Segway Ballet, music from many different local drum acts of varying cultures, a film montage projected to the side of the Radission Hotel complete with building climbers(?), and a performance piece from Salvage Vanguard Theater called ReVERBerations.

Sounds like it’s going to be pretty crazy. Lots going on. At first glance, it looks like they may have overreached on the sheer number of things going on. It’ll be interesting to see if they can pull all of this off. I’m definitely going to check it out.

This was “The Bike Christmas” for my nearly 7-year-old son. We picked up a Haro Z20 a couple of weeks ago at Ozone and stashed it at a friend’s house until Saturday night. It was waiting for him when he came down the stairs Sunday morning. He went out for the inaugural ride later that morning with my father and his two dachshunds. One of the training wheels came off before they got halfway around the block. This particular model of training wheel uses a semi-circular clip to hold on the wheel. Somehow, the clip popped off, never to be seen again.

We brought the bike back to Ozone around noon yesterday to plead our case. John, one of the owners, helped us out. He was apologetic for the failure of the training wheels and clearly felt bad that the Christmas morning surprise had been tainted. He didn’t have any of the training wheel sets that he wanted to use as a replacement in stock, so he told us it’d be at least a day, possibly more before we’d have the bike back. To make up for the wait, he offered The Boy some stickers and gave us a discount on the helmet that we picked out while waiting. We headed home satisfied, but a little disappointed.

John called us back at home around 4pm to tell us that the bike was ready. Apparently, he’d tracked down the training wheels at another local bike store, gotten them and installed them. Ozone went above and beyond to make an unfortunate situation right and they did it without much squawking from me. I highly recommend using Ozone for all of your bike needs. Go give them your money. You’re not going to find that kind of service very many places. They rock.

I’ve waffled on using the Metblog for promoting my own crap and I suppose I’m doing it anyway to a certain extent. We write about stuff we like, right? Isn’t it all promoting our own little worldview? Yes. So, damn it, why not?

For those of you looking for something to do this evening, and, come on, you know if you’re reading this on a Friday afternoon, you’re searching for an excuse to leave your cubicle warren and head out into that bright, well, overcast, world, my band, The Bad Rackets, is playing a happy hour show tonight at Beerland. It all starts at 7pm with Deadly Companions and we’ll go on at 8pm (or thereabouts). The late show starts at 10pm and will feature Ape Shits, Hot Rails and Sparkle Motion.

Come out and say hello.