Home Sweet Austin . . . Again! - October

We spent our first week in Austin in a vacation rental while we looked for a house to rent. Mario had been keeping tabs on the rental market since about February, so it only took us a day to find the place we wanted. We’re in a neighborhood fairly close to where we lived last summer, just about two miles from Mario’s office. We love our house and are quite settled now. 



We’re really enjoying being back in Austin. The mosquitoes here are at least as bad as they were in Alaska, which was a bit of a shock since I don’t remember there being many at all last summer. Josh got all these bites in ONE EVENING. One of the reasons we picked this house is it has a huge (relatively for this

Fun with boxes!

neighborhood, anyway) backyard, but we can’t really use it because there are fire ant mounds every few feet and the mosquitos are so bad you can’t be outside for more than a few seconds without them finding you. It has gotten a lot better since the weather cooled down, but man it was bad for a few weeks there!

Mario and I both love concerts and have been to a fair amount by ourselves, but we’d never been to one together. When MCA of the Beastie Boys died earlier this year, I realized the bands who I listened to during my high school years are getting old. And seeing Weezer, who is perhaps my favorite band of all time, was bumped to the top of my bucket list. It just so happened Weezer was going to be at Austin City Limits this year. So of course we simply had to go. 

Austin City Limits is a yearly music event similar to Lallapalooza where there are multiple stages set up in a huge city park, so you can see a dozen bands play in a day. We had all-day passes, so we brought the kids down during the day. Josh had fun in the drum circle. Then we visited the Kiddie Punk Rockers tent. We had some wonderful food and listened to some really great music (the Wombats KILLED IT, just in case you were wondering) and then took the little ones home for naps. 

We left them with a sitter and went back to ACL for the evening. It’s not every day you get to check something off your bucket list. Weezer was perhaps the most satisfying performance I have ever seen, and the list of concerts I’ve been to includes Blink 182, Rage Against the Machine, MC Hammer (yes, you read that right), Mary J. Blige, Boyz II Men, Smashing Pumpkins (on 4 separate occasions), and others I can’t recall at the moment. They were all pretty amazing, but Weezer was the best. Period. Maybe it’s because I love their music so much. 

 







We had some more awesome food (crispy artichoke hearts with spicy aioli, watermelon with goat cheese and pop rocks, and kimchee beef burritos to name a few) and then saw the beginning of the headliners for the evening, the Black Keys. We left after about 10 minutes because they SUCKED. I mean, I enjoy their music on the radio and stuff, but live they sounded really, really horrible so we left. But it was still a huge success. And we already have tickets for next year’s ACL!