Cash price. Not so hardcore tho, they get to take a 10 min leg stretcher every 2-3 hours. Still, gets cold as hell sitting still on one of those pillars. Not to mention the boredom.
Haha! Agree. It is a very cool town. I'll admit I was not a big fan of the weather the times I was in London this past winter, and while I'll never expect the people to be quite as friendly as Austin some did rub me wrong a few times in the winter, but with spring it is like the city is reborn. Even with the weather this past winter I really liked the place and my recent trip this spring the people were great and the weather was great. I can't wait to get back up there. Another part is that I'm not a huge fan of big cities and London is a fucking big ass city. But in Camden I have found a place right in the middle of London and all the action that has many small town qualities and feel to it. That makes me feel much more comfortable in such a big ass city as London. And it is just up the road (4 tube stops) from my office in Soho, and Regent's Park is right outside my flat so it is perfect for me. I can get off work run over to my flat, pick up my daughter, grab some ice cream from the shop below and escape into the park or adventure in the markets and fun thats always happening in Camden. I'm actually going to be up your way pretty soon. I am supposed to spend 4 nights in Manchester at the end of May. It will be all business and I think it is the opposite coast that York is on but can't really remember. But I know it is up north somewhere. Then I'll be going back up there before my Ireland trip at the end of July for one night. I'm taking my daughter off to Ireland for 5 weeks from late July through August. Really excited about it. She is at that age where she can start to enjoy and appreciate cool shit and will be able to remember vacations and such. Anyway here are some pictures that a friend of mine took here in Austin. There is this program that called "Play me I'm yours" that we have going on here in Austin. They put like 15 piano's all over the city. In city parks, on bridges going over the river, where homeless people gather, and other random public places where people gather or there are lots of pedestrians. The idea is that they just put up these pianos and people can just sit and play some music as they happen upon them, or they can paint them however they like and it is pretty much just for people to make art. Here are his photos, plus a few other photos.
On a much sadder note here are pictures of a massive wild fire that raged across the southern part of Austin today just a few miles from my house. A bit of background on what happened. It was a very warm dry and extremely windy day. So not a good mix for a fire like this. 1:30 pm the first report of a fire, the fire fighters showed up at the scene soon after the report but wind had carried the fire well past the house. 2:00 Fire was being spread rapidly by the wind. 2:30 Fire fighters had called in everyone and all the airplanes and helos as well as evacuated 200 people from 80 houses, business, and schools. 4:00 Fire had burned tons of land acres and some homes. And the city shut down one of the busiest highway intersections in S. Austin. 6:00 The fire had been 90% contained and they had found the cause, arson, and arrested the fuckwad who started it. This is after another fire last week destroyed a town in West Texas, burned over 1.5 million acres (2,400 sq miles/6000 sq kms) and has burned over 200 homes. The West Texas fire is still burning. I'll put a wild pic of the University of Texas McDonald Observatory in a second spoiler below to show that fire.
The fires in Texas are still going sadly. They are in every part of Texas with 252 out of the states 254 counties have had fires. To put a size of how much has been burned into perspective the fires have burned so much land you could fit two states of Rhode Island, or even the entire state of Delaware in it. Here are some more photos of the fires and destruction. In West Texas Fires closer to Austin and up by Dallas
Lol, well she is welcome to come to Austin. Anyway, the office has been all talking about that crazy cloud today. Thousands of pictures of it were posted on ours and others facebook sites. The picture of the cloud look kinda cool but really don't do justice of what it really looked like. It was fucking HUGE! So here are a few more wild ones. Also you can't really see it but there is tons of lightning and thunder that came from it.
So this past weekend we had the ROT (Republic of Texas) Bike Rally in Austin. As some of you know I have a couple bikes and ride and the ROT Rally is one of my favorite weekends. Over 250,000 people come to Austin and ride. It is a fucking blast and there are always a fuckload of amazing bikes and tons of smoking hot chicks running around with either nothing on or little to nothing on. Killer bikes and hot babes. Stuff my wet dreams are made of. I didn't take to many pictures and the ones I did fucking sucked so here are some I found that I like. This first two are by them selves because I found them so funny and shows how the times have changed with everyone always fucking with their phones and the other one because of the dude and the little pups. Some bikes.
So time for a new post of pictures in Austin. The first post will be our bats, PETA girls, and people/places. The second post will be some nature photos. We have been going and watching the bats come out from under Congress Bridge a lot recently. Mostly just because we are usually downtown at dusk, and enjoy going over and watching them come out. Austin is home to the largest urban bat colony in the world. There are over 2.5 million bats that live under Congress Bridge downtown. Each night they leave the bridge all at the same time right before sunset and they go out and eat 50,000 lbs of insects each night. So they are our answer to pesticide and mosquito control and they work damn well. Here are the PETA girls doing what they do. Here are some pictures of people around town. The top photo is the UT Tower and some fireworks. The second photo is one of our outside movie showings. They show lots of movies outside. The screen is actually a big blow up thingy that can be moved from place to place. For example we went to the house where the old 1970's original Texas Chainsaw Massacre was filmed and they put up that blow up screen and showed the movie. Lots of movies are made in Austin so they do that sort of stuff a lot. They third is a downtown Farmers Market, next a show, next some dude with a cool bike
These are just some pictures of nature, water, vineyards, a dry creek due to our drought, a sunset and whatever else from in Austin.
Oh, and that sky line is all about to change again. Our current sky line wasn't there 10 years ago. You can't really see the old skyline at all anymore. However we never got effected by the big global recession and our economy has been booming. This year they have already started on and are starting a bunch more of big tall sky scrapers. We also have a big new track for Formula One, MotoGP and lots of other stuff that is being build on the south side of Austin. Here are some designs of some of the new buildings I like. This one is a big hotel that is 50 something stories tall with over 1,000 rooms, lots of retail and convention space. It is my favorite new one. This one is not tall or anything. It is another new hotel they are building that is over 1,000 rooms. It also has a lot of retail, restaurants, and convention space in it. At first I really didn't like the design of this one. Austin is a very laid back town and it really doesn't seem to fit our town very well. But the more I look at it I kinda like the 1940's design. We have a like 5 other projects that I know of that are around 40 to 60 stories tall that I can't seem to find the pictures for. Google is failing me. They are all residential though. One thing we don't have is any tall office buildings. The tallest one we have is the Frost Building which is the batman looking one with the glass pyramid looking thing on the top. And it is not very big and gets hidden behind all the taller residential towers. Here is the video of our new F1 track. http://www.youtube.com/user/CircuitAmericas#p/u/3/HpC1wKiMTNc
Ya, the bats are very cool. Lots of people also put bat and owl houses around their yards and properties to keep the mosquito and mice populations down. I have 2 bat houses hanging under my roof in the back side of the house, 2 houses by my creek, and one out by the pool house. They are real easy to make. You just make a wooden box that opens from the bottom and put in little pieces in the top of the inside they can hang from. I also have two owl houses on my two biggest trees. One in my front yard and one in the back away from the pool. Both had Screech Owl nest and successful hatches last moth. The baby owls are cool as fuck. We also have lots of Great Horned Owls that live around us. They are very cool and fucking huge. Over 2 feet tall. They are kind of a problem though. Between them, the coyotes, and mountain lions any out door cats or small dogs are not long for the world around here. Even though I hate cats I do usually have an outdoor one for the mice. I usually go to the rescue shelters and ask them for feral ones they are thinking about putting down and I bring them to my house and let them live on my back porch and feed them. They are usually very wild cats and avoid people and roam around the house and yard eating mice and such. Only problem is the big ass Great Horned Owls eat my feral cats. One of my neighbors kids saw one take their dog. The poor girl was heartbroken.
