End of Silence

Cedar Door adds the garnish of their signature drink to their patio. I think this just happened this week since I didn’t notice it on Monday. I could have just been in an early morning haze though.

SXSW has released wristband information for the music festival. There’s a lot of fine print, but the big news is that they aren’t going to be sold at Waterloo Records this year. They’ll be sold online. Also, it looks like you have to put the wristband on when you buy it and you’ll have to keep it on for the whole festival.

Jette points out that the film passes are a pretty good deal. They went on sale last week and Waterloo Video is still the place to get them assuming that they haven’t sold out.

I rarely if ever travel north of Braker Ln, but this past weekend, I had to trek up to 1431 (no, it wasn’t to go to Ikea). I’d heard about the I-35 closing at Hester’s Crossing (which is happening again this coming weekend, btw), so I decided to avoid that and try out SH 130 for the first time.

SH 130 now extends from 71, just east of the airport all the way to Georgetown. I took it from 71 to 79, just north of 45, since the construction also involved detours at 45. There’s still a lot of construction going on at the 130 and 71 intersection. Many of the direct flyovers aren’t complete and, in fact, westbound traffic on 71 was backed up for as far as I could see due to a detour. Luckily, I just had to sit through a short light and a Travis County Sheriff directing traffic. The section between 290 and 71 is new enough that it doesn’t appear on Google Maps.
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The first Saturday in February is typically the first day to submit transfer requests for the following fall in AISD. Local network news stations just love to cover the spectacle of parents camping out in the cold on Friday night at AISD headquarters. Every year, at least one local news station shows shots of tents and parents sitting in folding chairs, bundled up against the February cold.

I showed up at AISD headquarters around 10:30 yesterday morning to submit a priority transfer for my daughter in the fall. Fox7News grabbed me for an interview and added a portion of it to the end of their story on the transfer campout. AISDs transfer policy is pretty flexible and gives priority to transfers in a number of situations: majority to minority, sibling transfer, and tracking transfers. You can get more information on AISD’s transfer info page.

Men’s Health has ranked Austin as the seventh drunkest city in America.

Seventh? Come on people, we need to drink more.

Here’s how they ranked the cities. We didn’t rank in the top ten on any of the criteria, so it must’ve been a cumulative effect. I suspect that having a large university and being in Texas helps us the most.

At least Texas has 3 cities in the top ten: Austin, San Antonio and Lubbock. San Antonio beat us out of sixth by only one point. Colorado scored two cities in the top three with Denver scoring first and Colorado Springs taking third, another city with a large university.