Hot Sauce and Aspirin

If you follow me on Facebook, you know I promised an entry today. The stipulation was that I would blog as long as I was not too hungover. I am not, and so here we all are!

Living in Austin is not without its hardships. Our property taxes are those of a city with much better amenities and infrastructure. Our traffic is terrible. Our houses are bizarrely expensive. Our people are entitled. But, for all of that, we have ACL, SXSW, The Congress Street Bridge, Dazed and Confused, and live music everywhere, all the time. We also still have the fastest growing population in the country, even though we have repeatedly asked you all to please stop moving here! For that, I place the blame squarely on South By Southwest. The weather ends up being annoyingly gorgeous, everyone is out in their quirky artistic glory, clothing is fabulous, celebrities are out on display. Austin appears as a glittering beacon of hope for all artistic types to earn salvation, or at least a living wage. What they don’t know is that for the rest of the year, our wages are low, rents are high, and everyone has a college degree and 7 jobs. But I digress! The point of this was not to paint a realistic portrait of life in this gorgeous city, it was just to tell you what I was up to last week. It just escalated so quickly.

Anyway, SX happens for 10 days during March, and it brings with it parties, free drinks, and a full social calendar. My husband and I never take time off for it, but we always dedicate at least 1 full weekend to finding some new bands and wandering around people watching. We also always sneak in an hour to hit the bar at the Four Season’s. It’s an excellent place to see the most random people while catching some mellow cover band. This year, we decided to go crazy and hit the town Thursday-Sunday. Normally I check my emails and rsvp to a few parties, but this year we decided just to wing it. No badge, no RSVP, no wristband, just 2 people wandering around to see what an average person could find without preparing or spending a ton of money. While there were a lot of events we were platinum badge only, there was still a ton of unofficial or low key things to do. On Thursday we decided to completely bypass all SXSW madness and hit a brewery. We went to Independence Brewing, andenjoyed a couple of their tasty offerings. Thursday also appeared to be trivia night, which drew a decent little crowd. We were too late to play, we walked in on round 3. But the quizmaster did a great job and had an diverse soundtrack for between rounds. If you are a trivia person, I would head to their Website and check that out! Let me know if you need an extra member for your trivia team, I’m always down for fun when I’m in town. That was it for Thursday, Brian had work early on Friday, and we still had a whole weekend waiting for us! But this post is already so long, and you all have lives to live. So come back tomorrow for the exciting conclusion where we actually hit up the SXSW events!