Shutterbug: Murals

-Catch of the Day
-Unlikely Duos
-Murals
-Those were the days
-Milestones
-State Parks
-Birds
-At the Fair
-EEK!
-Fall Leaves
-Curious Cats
-Man's Best Friend
-Heroes

Flying

So, as most of my loyal readers (all 2 of you!) knew, I was in Colorado last week for my cousin's wedding. We, of course, flew there because we only drive when we have to take kidney-failure cats with us.

I dislike flying. Not as bad as the Spiteful Chef, but I don't relish it either. The funny part is that I actually somewhat understand airfoils and fluid dynamics thereby keeping the tin can with wings aloft (damn you engineering!). This does not, however, really assuage any of my plummeting fears. Though, as a plus, I'm not scared of flying; I'm scared of falling.

But do you want to know the best part about flying? Skymall. That's right. Skymall. I love paging through the magazine and looking at all the crazy lawn/garden statues that I find absolutely ridiculous. Since I wanted to include some pictures of the statues that are my particular favorites, I actually went to their website this evening. I don't think you can understand how surprised I was that my personal favorite, the Zombie of Montclaire Moors (pictured below), is by far the most popular statue with 36 reviews, most of them rating it at 5 stars.
If you still want to scare the bejeebus out of your friends, postman, and neighborhood cats, you can opt, instead, to get this realistic 4' alligator which is on backorder until the middle of April:

Not recommended for those in Florida as it may instead train your grandchildren and dogs to ignore the actual REAL alligators in your neighborhood.

If, for whatever reason, scaring the crap out of your friends is not your goal, then you can always go the unicorn route.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of good things in the Skymall magazine, and plenty of very helpful things (plus it's beginning to aim more at the business travellers, so there's a bunch more office related stuff), but those things don't really do much to take my mind off of the fact that we're bouncing and jostling, and great scott! we MUST hit 88mph before liftoff! So yes, thank you Skymall for making my flight a little more pleasant every time we take off.

All pictures are from the Skymall website.

Council

The other night the City of Austin Council approved a measure to lengthen the time frame for when people have to feed the parking meters downtown. Specifically the meters are going from 8-5 M-F to 8-midnight M-Sa.

Considering how many people would drive downtown to party on Friday and then take a cab home (doing the responsible thing), it would not surprise me in the least if we see a sudden jump in number of DUIs because people will be driving home on Friday night so that they don't get a parking ticket on Saturday morning.

Of course, if they had changed the rule to be 8-midnight M-F and 6pm-midnight on Saturday, I would be rooting them on and in agreement.

Though, I guess council said that they'd be willing to talk about a parking pass of some sort so you would be able to park downtown at a meter without having to worry about getting a parking ticket if you took a taxi home instead of driving. So that's good, at least.