Mediterranean Festival 2008

We attended the 76th annaul Mediterranean Festival in downtown Austin on Friday night. Highlights of the night included a creepy man with an eyepatch that followed Peter around. Jonathan ordered the Romanian Plate which had 2 large links of sausage and 2 skinless sausages. We all ate a lot of food and Peter enjoyed Peroni beer, while Jodi sucked down several Mojitos.

The crowd seemed smaller than it was the past few years, but they also had more tables out than normal. A volunteer at the fesitval told us that the City of Austin will not allow them to block off the one city block next year even though it's the cities longest running festival.

Pretend It's Monday, May 28 - But Really It's Not

I'm in the process of uploading all the blog entries as we didn't have a good connection and yeah there's that procrastination thing.

But I wanted to interject this into the blog to show off something that happened before May even. God, does this blog even make any sense.

Jodi, Dawn, Amy, and myself travelled to Big Bend for Spring Break and we shot quite a bit of video on our trip. I've shot video before on trips, but never to the extent of this trip. My goal for all of those videos has always been to produce a vacation video that is actually worth watching - something interesting and artistic.

Videos, computers, lack of good software and computing power, a little bit of procrastination, intimidation have prevented me from doing this in the past. But, I think I've finally conquered that goal.

I have managed to turn our vacation into several short films and have authored an entire DVD that includes the short films, pictures, a scrapbook and other special features. The trailer for one of the sets of short films is below for your enjoyment. You can look forward to viewing this great work in August when we return.







I hope you enjoy.

Packing and Eating

It's Sunday one day to go before we leave. Morrissey plays in Houston Monday night.

Today we met Patrick and Melissa for a light lunch at the amazing http://www.elchilito.com/ . You can't beat a $4 16 oz sangria. And it is delicious. Also, try the Charlie's Special taco - eggs, chorizo, potato, tomato, onion, and serrano. It's damn good. So don't, walk or run, drive as fast as you can to El Chilito if you haven't been there yet. We tried this place a week ago and so we went there twice before we are leaving - and we will miss it.

Patrick and Melissa gave us a wonderful road trip basket, full of great snacks, mad libs, ass wipes, and many more great things. It was a real treat.

Later this evening we met my brother Mark for late dinner at that great Thai restaurant off Guadalupe. It was way better than I remember. So, yet another place we will have to visit as soon as we get back from Jersey.

Still having mixed feelings about Houston. Part of me just wants to get to Jersey.

Morrissey in Austin

Battling with the idea of getting to the Morrissey concert at the crack of dawn, getting there later in the afternoon won out. I was completely satisfied with the Dallas concert. The only thing better would have been to shake his hand from the front row.

We arrived at the new, strange, surreal Backyard at about 3:30. I say strange because it was such a beautiful venue before with all the trees and now many of you know, it is a very odd feature of a parking lot surrounded by shops.

A line of about 40 people were in front of us, with some looking as if they had been there a great part of the day. We sat down on the sidewalk and waited around until 6:30 when they finally opened the gates. Amy was a trooper and I think she was pretty excited about seeing the Moz.

As the gates opened people were running to the front row up against the barrier. We managed to get behind a few people and were with in an arms reach of the barrier. I was really excited about being so close and thought for sure this was finally my chance to shake Morrissey's hand and make eye contact.

It was really a nice evening and not too hot. A nice breeze was blowing and everyone around us was waiting patiently for the show to start.

Kristeen Young came on at about 8 PM and the energy was starting to percolate. I really enjoyed listening to her and Amy liked some of her songs. She has a real interesting sound that reminds me of very early Roxy Music. If you are interested in what she sounds like scroll down to the bottom of the blog and click on one of her you tube videos. They aren't really good quality, but it may give you some idea.

She finished playing and we waited for the man. So everyone is hanging out and things seem fine, when some dickhead comes flying through the crowd, towards the front crashing into Amy. Amy pushed him back and we weren't about to move for this dick. He tried to start something with us and neither of us backed down, but after some of the things he said to both of us and the way he acted, and the fact that he wouldn't leave it alone, we realized that he was completely mental and although he looked 28-30 he was acting like a 15 year old. It was completely strange, he was relentless and attacking us verbally so bad that I had to get security. Security wouldn't do anything about it and I really thought he was going to hurt one or both of us. Then I started picturing him following out of the concert. So we decided to leave.

If you want all the details I can forward you the very long and detailed complaint I filed with The Backyard. I really don't want to rehash the awful experience.

We drove home and decided to eat at one of our most favorite places before we left for Jersey. Galaxy Cafe. We had a nice late dinner and went home.

Morrissey Live in Dallas

The story starts here for reasons that will appear soon. I originally purchased tickets for Morrissey before Amy knew that she would be interning at Princeton. As always I purchased tickets for Dallas, Houston, and Austin and would travel to each show. I hadn't successfully made all three since his tour in 1992 for Your Arsenal. He wouldn't return to Texas until 2001 and he played El Paso. Amy and I drove to El Paso and saw that fine show. In 2002 he did a proper tour and was scheduled to play Ft. Worth, Houston, and Austin. He ended up canceling Houston and Austin. But I did get to see him in Ft. Worth and it was great.

Different events would occur that forced a similar experience here in 2007.

Friday, May 25th was the last day of school for teachers and I had to have my classroom clean and packed. It was a stressful day. Amy's mother came up and I met them for lunch and then rushed back over to my classroom to finish about an hours worth of last minute packing and cleaning.

I was in turmoil, because I desperately wanted to be in Dallas at the crack of dawn to be on the front row, and finally after all these years get to shake the Mozzer's hand. I also was under a tremendous amount of guilt for purchasing all the tickets and traveling to Dallas all while we were trying to leave for Princeton Monday, May 28. And I was on the eve of my 35th birthday and grown men aren't supposed to chase their heroes all over Texas. I questioned it myself, am I crazy. I still can't come up with the answer to that one. I mean, you only live once and if it puts a smile on your face, why not, right? It could be worse, like smoking crack or running a meth lab.

I considered skipping Dallas, because the Austin show was Saturday night, but I insisted to myself that I better go. Finishing up at school took longer than I thought and I didn't get out of the school building until 3 PM. Austin traffic heading to Dallas was worse than hell on Earth and it must have been 4:00 or 4:30 by the time I got to Georgetown. The traffic never really improved and I finally got into Dallas at roughly 7:30 PM. The doors were opening at that time and Kristeen Young was scheduled to come out at 8 PM. She is Morrissey's opening act.

Well, I miss the highway for the venue and get way off track and then turned around completely, it was a nightmare and before I finally arrive at the show Kristeen Young is playing her last song and I incredibly walk up to about 12-15 rows back. People were hanging out and everyone was very calmly standing around and laid back. It was nice. Morrissey has a weird collection of vintage videos playing on a large backdrop and then a recorded song called the Hated List comes on and you know Morrissey will come onto the stage as soon as the song is over.

The air crackles with electricity and he walks out and the crowd goes absolutely crazy. He opens with the Queen is Dead and I have a great view. It was a great concert and probably the best I had been to.

I left Dallas at about 12 with such a high and stopped for gas about an hour away and ran into two different groups of people who were driving to Austin for the next show. That was kind of funny.

Officially Unofficial - The Armstrong Blog

Greetings. You won't find any El Capitan stories here. This is all Amy and Michael stuff. We are mainly creating this to keep an account of our adventures in the North East this summer, but we decided to let our friends and family peek in, if they feel so inclined.

As I have said elsewhere, people do ask us how and what we've been doing and as many of you know we are both terrible on the phone. We don't have great cell phone coverage, where we are, due to tall trees and lack of towers, but even if we did it doesn't erase the fact that we aren't big fans of talking on the phone. Here's our phone numbers if you want to call us - only kidding.

We visited NYC for the first time since we've been here and while we are excited to share our adventures in the Big Apple, I don't want to start with current stuff and then backtrack. That might confuse some of our readers, if we have any. We desperately want to start with the beginning of our adventure so that we can explain things chronologically. I think I can alter the dates so that it could still be read chronologically, but that sounds like a great big pain in the butt.

So our first post will actually start with a few days before we left for Princeton, while we were still back in Austin.

For those of you interested in El Capitan you can get to that blog from the links section. And you will find it under City of Mercury 33.

This will be dated May 25th but it is actually July 1st.