mornings are cool, clear, dry and beautiful and people go out in their courtyards with their coffee sometimes for entire mornings. days are hot, clear and dry so you have to watch it, you can't stay out there too long, you burn up. but evenings are cool, clear dry and beautiful again, and everyone comes back outside. it's great. if you miss one day, you can catch the next one, and that puts me in a good mood. there is a rare but occasional rain, which people celebrate, and dust storms which they consider a nuisance.

the dogs don't quite know how to handle it, because when we let them out into the courtyard, they can see through the fence, just enough of the street to know that people are walking, running or riding their bicycle right up the walk past the fence. and, there's a cat that kind of luxuriously walks around out there like it owns the place. so, rather than enjoying the fresh, cool mornings, or evenings, they often start barking. it's just not clear to them yet what a courtyard actually is.

my computer, which had a fried wireless card for about three weeks, now fires up ok, and i can get online easily. i don't know why. when it fires up, i can put pictures online (because, actually, i can get online on my phone anyway, and on my wife's computer, but my pictures are here), so i quick get all my pictures from the phone and put up what I want. I say "quick" because I know, if I get back off, I might stay off, i might be off for a while. and this has been what has happened in the past. it adds an element of randomness, and hassle, to my life. there's a possibility of getting a better one, a newer one, that i can use more; we'll see.

it's game day in a college town. in my previous college towns - i've lived in about five - this means a lot of drinking, large police presence, sensitivity about parking, and a certain amount of color awareness. namely, that you can tell who's into it by the colors that they wear. a certain minority of us wear whatever we want, but then are stuck in traffic, or stuck trying to find some parking place, where there's not a prayer of a chance. and then we say, i should have known, it was game day.

i'm using my lubbock site to talk to lubbock about what i see. i'm using the music site to collect music of the texas persuasion, though i'd put some of these elsewhere too. I've come to refer to my own interests as texaphilia (love of texas), texaphonia (speaking texan), texaphobia (fear of texas), etc. don't know if these are real words or not but they sound good. another good word is texish, which is mine entirely, you heard it first here. though of course, i'd be glad to share it, if it works. i'm working on variations that combine texting and texas, such as texas-messaging, for example.

there is a sense that this place, texas, is a world of its own, with enormous cities and wide territory, somewhat self-enclosed and self-absorbed. my own class is maybe 90% texan, or more; i'm always surprised that some kid can find his way out here from, say, new jersey, since i'd hardly heard of the place (lubbock, now, i'm talking about) before we were offered a job here. but it's got a role in the state, an image, and that sustains it as a growing university, since the entire state is growing. austin has grown from 200,000 to 500,000 in ten years and will soon go over a million; i talked to a woman from longview (a town i barely knew), and it had doubled in the time she had been in college. doubled and changed completely, according to her. houston picked up a few hundred grand in katrina and you'd think it would just boil over, or become inhospitable, but no, it just passed up philly, and probably chicago, and probably expanded another hundred miles or so out into the bush. it's how it is, and folks are used to it, i guess. i'll keep you posted.