Oh, my stars and garters!

Los Jaliscienses

You should probably go here. They have a huge, cheap menu of Jalisco and Tex-Mex favorites. Right now I am all about the Mexican flag enchiladas and the combo plate (enchilada, tostada, flauta), but they also have the Super Burrito, which is only like six bucks and is bigger than my forearm, no lie. I am also partial to their tortilla soup.

It is not the best food in the world, but it is inexpensive and plentiful and amazingly satisfying after a day of yardwork or a morning of hangover. The staff is very nice, they serve micheladas and horchata, and their refried beans are just straight-up stupendous, creamy with lard or maybe pork fat.

It's fun to eat there because the building is so freaky. We heard it used to be a Chinese restaurant and is therefore shaped like a lotus flower, but I read somewhere else it was first a coffee shop that was designed in the Googie style, which seems like a slightly more plausible explanation for all those parabolas.

Either way, it stays warm in winter and cool in summer and is the only restaurant close to our house that I never roll my eyes at when Eric suggests it. It's on 290 East, just off I-35, in front of the EconoLodge, and you should go there if you do not hate food. 

Update, 12/1, 12:43 p.m.: Aha! Check it out in its former modernist glory as the restaurant for the Cross Country Inn. And then futz around on the Austin Postcard site, for it is fun to do so.

Very holiday weekend-ish

Just hanging out lately, eating too much, taking pictures, herding a malware infection off my laptop, puttering around in the house and the yard doing little tasks that don't take a lot of time or planning. I turned the compost pile. I mulched the lettuce. I plan on refinishing a coffee table tomorrow or Sunday.

I've had more time since I quit smoking, at least seven more minutes an hour, but I haven't been able to rouse myself to do very much with it. I suppose at some point I should cultivate some interests.

My across-the-street neighbors are having a huge fight in their driveway. I want to look out the window so bad, but that seems incredibly rude. Ok, good, he just slammed the car door and is driving away, so I will no longer be tempted to peek.

Treat

Ok, I took these at the same time with the camera settings as close as I could get them and tried very hard to hold the camera as steady as I could. No Photoshop or anything like that.

 

Canon E1. Fun to use, cute. Looks like a bar of light blue soap. Small enough to take everywhere. Takes great pictures outside at noon.

Canon S90. Compact, black block that fits in my pocket; has a cool ring around the lens to customize settings without wading through back-of-the-camera menus; extremely satisfying to use.

I didn't need a new camera, exactly, but I really, really, really wanted this particular one. My only regret is that the S90 wasn't out in time for me to take one on our trip last month.

I haven't had a cigarette in four weeks.

I got that joy joy joy joy...

On and on and onandonandon

I haven't had a cigarette in three weeks. That's 21 days! 504 hours! 30,240 minutes! One million, eight hundred and fourteen thousand, four hundred seconds! 1.8144e+15 nanoseconds!

Etc.

So that is good. Good for me! Now comes the hard part, when the novelty wears off and is replaced by aimlessness, dysphoria, and occasional free-floating dread. On top of that, I really need to stop cramming in the salty snacks and candy at such an alarming rate; the money I am saving by not buying smokes, while significant, is not nearly enough to fund a new, larger wardrobe. Too bad. The snacking part is extremely fun.

You know, really, as much as this has sucked it hasn't been nearly as awful as I had built it up to be in my mind. I've quit a few times before, though, and the settling-in-for-real part is a special kind of bitch all its own. It doesn't help that it seems like by now the whole thing should be easier, but some things actually get a lot worse for a while.

I'm hoping that if all goes well and I am diligent about getting my shit together, though, pretty soon I will be able to talk about something--god, anything--else, and won't that be exciting?

Hee hee hee

Mameshiba!

The Bean-Dogs are here to teach us all and make everyone sad.

These videos were playing on a loop while I was in a Kiddy Land toy store in Japan. I heard them about a million times while I was browsing, but I never actually bothered to look up and watch them.

That turned out to be a big mistake because I've had the little song at the end stuck in my head for an entire month. I knew I'd heard it in the toy store, but other than that I had no idea what it was for or about, and it's been kind of driving me completely crazy: Blah dee blah shee shee la la la!

But now the mystery is solved, and I feel much better. I hope you feel better too.

Cuz

I forgot (ok, I didn't forget, but I hadn't thought about it in a while) how whip-smart and funny my cousins are. And there are nine of them, so that's a lot of smart funny people to have around.

Also, I have a first cousin, once removed who has had 16 kidney stones. It's a fact!

I recommend reading up on cousins and double cousins and half cousins, because the whole cousin thing can get pretty twisted. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin?wasRedirected=true

Cough

Hi. It's been 11 days and still haven't smoked, although I did almost choke to death on a mouthful of Skittles. I have the broken blood vessel under my eye to prove it.

That doesn't really seem fair, as I had only crammed that many Skittles in my mouth to keep from smoking in the first place. My friend Bryan says if I do end up dying in some ironic non-smoking fashion (choking on compensatory candy, nicotine gum poisoning) he will see to it they play the sad trombone at my funeral.

It's probably about time to stop eating so many Skittles anyway. The rainbow of fruit flavor appears to shoot directly to my ass and stay there. What a pleasant person I am lately! Luckily, I get to spread the joy: tomorrow I leave for Nashville to spend the weekend with my entire extended family. I am actually looking forward to this a great deal, although be warned: the first family member to hint that I'm wasting my life gets it in the neck.

Jive

I haven't had a cigarette in just two hours shy of a week. That's 166 hours of no cigarettes. And I'm not going to lie, even with all the nicotine gum I can chew, it fuckin' sucks. At some point soon I will start to experience all those much-vaunted benefits, like increased lung capacity and not dying of emphysema, and then I will be happier about all this, but for now it's pure downside. All I have to show for my trouble is a week of being clogged, snotty, testy, sleep-deprived, bloated, confused, whiny, pissy, pimply, and weird. Oh, and occasionally emitting gas that smells like a tire fire. Nobody ever mentions the gas, but it is epic.

Most of the advice online is terrible, by the way. If you are quitting, do not ever go online. They employ terms like "your quit" and "Nicodemon" and make a huge deal about getting plenty of rest, which you simply can't do because every system in your body is in absolute riot. On top of that you'll be completely stressed out about not getting enough rest because you read those stupid websites, which causes you to sleep even less. Thanks for the tip, you shitsticks.

(Why, hello! I'm so glad you could make it to my gigantic pity party! Can I get you anything? Gum? Skittles? A brief but intense crying jag?) 

They also tell you to avoid "triggers," like caffeine and alcohol. Listen, I have smoked a pack a day for almost 20 years. Everything is a trigger. Waking up is a trigger. Driving to work is a trigger. Eating is a trigger. Just being outside is a trigger. If you think I'm giving up everything in my life that gives me pleasure, you're out of your damn mind. So coffee and beer remain on the menu. Really, about the only piece of conventional wisdom I have found useful is to eat whatever you want and worry about the weight later. I like that part a lot. 

The hardest part for me is managing time. What the hell do you non-smokers do when you complete a task? What do you look forward to from hour to hour? How do you block out your day? It's like I'm waiting for something, always, that never happens. It's messing me up, and it's also incredibly depressing to be confronted with how much time I spend either smoking or thinking about smoking. Which is why I think it would be awfully nice to stop.