New Rule

Never have I taken seriously love advice from a women's fashion magazine, but my November issue of Glamour had a nugget of sound guidance on men:

"He has to know who Toni Morrison is. If I tell a guy she's my favorite author and he asks, 'Who's he?' he'll never hear from me again."

Thank you for the tip, Andrea from Baltimore.

This week's adventures

Littlefield Home, University of Texas

WTF is that doing on campus? Read about it here.

I'm pretty tired right now, so I probably won't write much, but I wanted to share some pictures.

Elizabet Ney musuem

Got a chance to visit with some fellow ISchoolers and it was as beautiful as it looks. Our guide was a bit of a Chatty Cathy, so in order to actually look at the museum, we had to sneak away in the middle of his talk. But he did have a lot of interesting things to say. One of the most memorable being that Ney's house has a door that goes out onto a flat roof because she liked to sleep outside in a tent every night. You have to go up a skinny little spiral staircase to get to the bedroom and the door looks like a bookcase.

The Vaselines at Emo's

OMG! I got to see The Vaselines again! Here is my flashless photo (which I think looks pretty cool here). They were amazing, no need to say more there.
One of the openers, Jeffrey Lewis and the Junkyard put on a good show, complete with short films. Although, their sound check was RIDICULOUS. They are obviously perfectionists because the audience was audibly groaning at hearing "can I get some more _____ in this monitor?" for the thirtieth time. There was a bit of residual annoyance when they finally started playing, but they won me over in the end, especially with the song Don't Get Upset, which was awkwardly relatable.

Ingrid Betancourt at the Texas Book Festival

I spent Saturday volunteering for the Book Festival and went on Sunday. I'm really excited to read Betancourt's book once I get my hands on it. She only spoke for 45 minutes and it was difficult to keep a dry eye.

The Austin Film Festival starts on Thursday and I bought a pass (no, I couldn't really afford it, but oh well), so I'll fill you in on that when it's over. Blue Valentine is playing on Friday, so I don't have to wait until December to see if it's worth the NC-17 rating.

October Update

First day of October at the Counter Cafe

I don't mean to rub it in any faces, but I'm finally experiencing my kind of weather!

And since I just finished my 5-week Intro class, Friday was the perfect day to spend some quality time with Heather in a canoe.

Turtles! I was surprised at all the fauna of the Colorado River.

But, life hasn't been all play. My lab class put up an exhibit on preserving collections.

And I learned how to dry-clean paper. Not as exciting as it sounds, but look at these results!

The lab instructor has a friend who does these drawings and then she dirties them up for us. When I walked into class last week, she was sitting at a table with her dirt and her paper. Apparently for one she had to go outside and rub it on a rusty pipe.

I think I can say I feel adjusted. Now that papers are coming back graded and I'm not completely failing everything, the grad school jitters have gone away. But I definitely prefer the boring days to the newsworthy ones.

I was also able to finish a couple of projects this week.

More deets on the craft blog, of course.
I guess that's it. Later!