Jenn Dolari @dolari@driveinsaturday.org

So, my Threadgill's dinner was pretty good. Everythig needed salt, but I'm not sure of that's the recipe, or if that's me. I'm noticing I'm salting things a bit more than usual.

The chicken fried steak was good. The crust on it was still too soft and not crispy at all, but at least it adhered this time.

The mashed potatoes were excellent, but far too liquidy. A little less half-and-half next time, maybe. But honestly, if I'm going to make Mashed potatoes, I'm gonna make the sour cream potatoes I absolutely love.

The cornbread is almost perfect. And it likely would have been perfect if I'd not forgotten to put the butter in. I microwaved it to melt it and promptly forgot about it for almost two days. :) Just a tad bit more sugar, since I like a sweeter cornbread.

The Sweet Corn off the Cob, though. THAT was great and totally something I'd make again. The Threadgill's Vegetable Seasoning gives it a really nice spicy kick.

In all, not bad for making restaurant food at home. :)

I often tell people I'm from Austin. I'm not. I'm from San Antonio. While Austin has been in-and-out of my life since 1979, it wasn't until the mid 90s when I became one of those dreaded transplants the moved there, and again in the 2000s, and finally in the 2010s.

Austin fit me better than San Antonio ever did. But each time I moved back it became less and less of the Austin I remembered. When I moved there in the 2000s, I lived in Hyde Park, specifically 37th Street which had a really cool artsy funky vibe in a very artsy area of Austin. It was also insanely affordable.

I'd drive around Hyde Park, and I'd see hippies playing frisbee in tye dye shirts. Not something dont to play up to an image. Just hippies having fun in their front yard. There were squatters in an abandoned house nearby...but they never caused trouble. And were actually kinda nice. You'd come to a stop light, and if you're window was open, the guy in the lane next to you would often talk with you while you waited for the green.

Austin was cool. Austin IS cool. But it has certainly changed. Hyde Park is now insanely unaffordable. The hippies all moved to Wimberely. The old house was demolished and an office put up. The Triangle is no longer a park, but a block of condos. Everyone who moved to Austin for its culture has helped kill that culture.

Even me. I moved to Austin in 2000 because of the Tech Boom. The same Tech Boom that accelerated the loss of Austin's culture. There's still some culture there, if you know where to look. But each time I go back, it's fewer and farther between.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-astonishing-transformation-of-austin

Back from the Mammogram. For those of you who fear these, rest assured - you're not sending messages with your boobs.

How is Kim Petras thirty?

How am I nearly fifty? How is Shatner 90? How is what what? What how is how? WHAT HOW WHAT!?

Spent the day adulting. Ended up doing my taxes, and applied for a few jobs. Quite a few in fact. Blue Origins is on the list. If the interview is in Renton, I'm hoping that they'll let me take a pic of the Enterprise shooting model in the lobby. :)

I ended up feeling poorly today. Stomacheache, headache. I have a mammogram Monday afternoon. If I'm still feeling poorly when I wake up, I'll take a Covid test. Just in case.

Oh, just a warning about this week's recipes. They come from a recipe book for a restaurant and the recipes are GIGANTIC. The recipe for the cornbread is the full recipe, but I only made 1/4 of the recipe.

I don't want to be alarmist, but it's alarming out there.

https://www.losangelesblade.com/2023/01/20/the-end-comes-soon-drums-drums-in-the-deep/

I owe $475 in taxes this year. It's not the $7000 I owed in 1995 and didn't pay off until 1999, but this I don't need right now.

I kinda want to do a roadtrip drive, but I'm really running into a problem I never had roadtripping in Texas: a mountain range.

In Texas, there were so many places to go. From San Antonio and Asutin, you had a full 360 dregrees to explore. But here, if you want to go west, you had US 2 and I-90 and that's it. Because those are the only two routes through the mountains.

Go north, you can do Highway 9, but you have city on the left, and mountains on the right, and south the same, with the city on the right and mountains on the left.

There are forest roads to explore, but at the same time, with early sundowns and snows, that's not an option for more than half the year. AND I'm running out of roads to explore that are safe with a MAzda.

I'm rather bored with those trips as I've seen most everything. Going beyond the mountains (or the Puget Sound) to explore more areas is WAY more a chore than driving in and through the Texas Hill Country.