Sorry about the unannounced break from the blog, especially since the events of the last week included some amazing stories and narratives to blog about. But life got in the way.
Early Thursday evening, my younger brother, his wife and his youngest daughter came into town for a weekend-long visit. Along with another good friend, we all spent the evening at the Zac Brown Band concert at Austin’s newest (and instantly best) concert venue (the 360 Tower Amphitheater, which is located in the middle of the Circuit of the Americas race track).
I wore my favorite O.D. green wool beanie and a black Dickie’s workshirt — which turned out to be the exact same thing Zac Brown wore. And, with my full beard, I ended taking 20-30 pictures with folks who thought that I was Zac Brown.
The next morning (Friday), my two brothers and I headed to Marble Falls, TX for breakfast at the famous (in Marble Falls, anyway) Blue Bonnet Cafe before playing 27 holes of golf. It wasn’t until breakfast that I learned of the shootout between police and the Tsarnaev brothers, resulting in the death of Tamerlan (who, in a spat of poetic justice, was apparently killed when his younger brother drove over him in the SUV they had jacked earlier that day).
When we got home from golf, I only had a short time in which to take a shower and get ready to head out for dinner to celebrate the birthday of one of our close friends and my niece (about 20 of us sharing drinks and great food at Verde’s Parilla, off Hamilton Pool Rd). Just before heading out to dinner, I saw that police had the younger brother pinned down in Watertown.
By the time we got home from dinner, he had already been captured. But I was too tired to try to follow the story, much less write about it.
Saturday morning found me at Quality Seafood Market bright and early to pick up 70 lbs of Lake Charles mudbugs for our big crawfish boil (to celebrate a bunch of birthdays, to include Cash’s first birthday). The rest of Saturday was spent purging crawfish, setting up the tables and chairs, and then finally hosting the crawfish boil, where I spent a few hours boiling bugs for our guests.
Around 8:00 pm after we finished eating, we fired up the fire pit, opened up another bottle of whiskey, and a bunch of us stayed up until just after midnight laughing and telling stories while we sat around the fire.
Sunday morning was spent peeling about 20 lbs of left-over crawfish, so my lovely sister-in-law (a Cajun girl from deep-East Texas) could whip up some of her family-secret-recipe crawfish etoufee. I just finished cleaning up the backyard and putting everything away, and am sitting down at a computer for the first time since Thursday morning.
I apologize to anybody who came here to look for more information (or my predictable opinions) on the huge news that was breaking over the weekend…but something (family) are simply more important than this little blogging hobby.
As Jim Treacher said, sometimes you just need a break.