It must is fall

The temperature outside is 59/15, and inside I made the year’s first batch of chili.  I used a Wick Fowler’s False Alarm chili kit (nobody around here is a chile-head, so I have to keep the spicing under control); I can make better chili from scratch, but tonight I was feeling lazy, so Wick and the crockpot won out over me and the Dutch oven.

Before the time gets any further away, I want to write down some memories of my weekend with Moon in Fredericksburg.  She arrived on Thursday the sixth, two hours late, courtesy of Amtrak and of Union Pacific (which is doing track work all over the place), and I got to sit around the Austin railroad station, moving back and forth between the outside (where the mosquitoes kept chewing on me) and the indoors (where the AC was set too cold).  When she arrived, she was in good spirits from not having to deal with the highways or the airlines (this is the weekend before 9/11 happened, remember).  We went back to the house so I could have dinner; she’d eaten on the train.  After that we sat and visited with L and M for a while, and then excused ourselves and went over to Motel 6, where Moon had a room booked.

Friday morning we needed to lose some time, since we couldn’t check in at the B&B before two, so we went for a late-ish breakfast at Laura’s Bluebonnet Kitchen.  The food’s not quite so good as it used to be before Laura sold the place, but it’s still acceptable and the Fifties-appliance décor is always a trip.  After all, any restaurant with five Model 12 Mixmasters on display, each in a different pastel color (baby blue, baby-chick yellow, seafoam green, calamine pink, and white, if you must know), has to earn a certain amount of Cool Points!

We kinda piddled around along the way, partly in deference to Moon’s phobias about highway driving (sixty is about as fast as she can stand to go, and that with difficulty) and partly because we still were running too early.  We stopped in Johnson City and prowled through a couple of antique/junque shops, peered in the windows of several others that weren’t yet open, and toured part of the Blanco County courthouse, built in 1916.  The exterior is very nice, but inside they let termites get into the woodwork, and many of the original longleaf-pine door frames are ruined.  Moon stopped and talked with someone from the county clerk’s office about ways to save the original woodwork by using epoxies to fill the damaged areas, but the look of polite incomprehension on the woman’s face was all too evident.  If I know how county commissioners work, they’ll end up hiring some local idiot who will replace the damaged wood with modern gunge, utterly destroying any historical significance the building interior has, even though there is almost certainly grant money they could get through the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Project to do the repairs properly and in a way that’s architecturally appropriate for the building.

And even after doing all that, we still got to Fredericksburg an hour too early to check in.  Fortunately, the B&B owner was around and willing to let us put our bags inside, so we did that and then went off to walk around downtown a bit—easy enough to do, since the B&B was only three blocks from Main Street (or der Hauptstrasse, depending on which of the two local languages you speak).

Downtown has gotten unbeLIEVably touristy since I was last there, fifteen years if it’s been a day.  Still, that’s had some good effects:  limestone storefronts have been preserved, or rescued from behind horrible modern façades that were slapped over them in the ’50s and ’60s; pressed-tin ceilings are carefully repaired instead of being torn out or hidden above “dropped” acoustic tile; tall, wide awnings still shade front windows instead of being sacrificed in the name of “openness.”  Obviously Gillespie County has worked out that tourism pays, but you have preserve the amenities if it is to pay.  The two of us just poked along the street for a couple of hours, behaving exactly like what we were—tourists.  We ate a very late lunch, and on the way back stopped in at the bakery-cum-candy-shop to buy half a pound of fudge for dessert.  By this point my bad ankle was telling me I’d been standing on it too long, even with a cane’s help, and Moon’s lower back was having a thing or two to say, so we went back to the B&B, had a long jacuzzi/bath, poured ourselves drinks, broke out the chocolate, and generally behaved decadently for the rest of the evening.

Saturday morning after breakfast we did more antique-shop prowling (the town is riddled with them, naturally).  I had to pass up a painted glass Aladdin lamp shade I really wanted (and considering I came back to find I had no temp work and no paychecks any more, it’s a good thing I did), we admired a very nice example of a fire-engine kiddie car in one shop, and each bought a copy of an Indian-captive narrative I wasn’t familiar with (the Clint and Jeff Smith abduction in 1876 from down around Leon Springs, for the Texas-history inclined).  We also stopped in at a quilt shop, and I was disappointed to find that almost everything they had was modern made-in-China junk—the coarse quilting stitching gives it away every time—but in one back room they did have half a dozen vintage quilts, with the quality and the price tags I expected to see (i.e., $500 to $800).  I will say that some of the Chinese quilts use nice block patterns, but the crappy quality of quilting ruins ’em as far as I’m concerned.  We also drove around and looked at some of the historic houses in town (and just what else would you expect a pair of certified old-house nuts to do, hmmm?), took pictures of some, had polite disputations about whether a couple of them had been built all of a piece or added on to, and finally stopped in at the Pioneer Memorial Library, which is housed in the restored 1882 Gillespie County courthouse, a wonderful example of Italianate Revival style and of sensitive adaptive re-use.

After lunch, I wanted to go see the National Museum of the Pacific War, which didn’t interest Moon any, so we agreed to split up; I went to the museum, and she went shopping for presents to take back to her family.  I enjoyed seeing the museum, but discovered I really needed three or four hours instead of two to see everything properly.  (And before some Austin Lounge Lizards fan asks, yes, I did sit “in the Chester Nimitz Oriental Garden in Frederickbsurg, Texas” but didn’t sing the song, because I couldn’t remember all the words and they’d probably heard it before anyhow.)  I was running behind, so I had to hurry to meet Moon in time (I didn’t quite make it, but I wasn’t much late), after which we went back to have an afternoon lay-down before dinner.

Dinner Saturday was absolutely fantabulous, and a complete surprise to us both.  On the B&B owner’s advice, we went to the Oak House, a nouvelle-continental restaurant without all the pretentiousness and skimpiness of true nouvelle.  The restaurant’s located in an antebellum limestone ashlar cottage (yet more fodder for our old-house addictions), which made a prime setting for dinner.  Our waiter bore a slight resemblance to John Belushi, which the poor man can’t help, but I never did get rid of the vague feeling he might start shouting “Chee-borger, chee-borger, chee-borger,” or whip out a katana from somewhere about his person and use it to slice the bread.  C ordered one of the day’s specialties, a salmon steak with a pistachio crust and saffron-butter sauce, while I went for the barbecued duck with plum-bourbon sauce.  Both entrees arrived just about to perfection; the only notable distraction from mine was a slightly tough skin on the duck, but that’s an occupational hazard of barbecuing fowl of any kind, and certainly didn’t keep me from devouring the entire thing, along with servings of lightly-sautéed vegetables and herbed mashed potatoes.  Moon was even more complimentary about the salmon, and with reason.  The kitchen had done something that countered the normally assertive fishiness of salmon, and the pistachio crust made an excellent contrast of texture against the fish.  Neither of us were up to an entire dessert alone, but the idea of splitting a chocolate crême brulée was too much to resist, and it was a good thing we didn’t, because again it turned out to be good beyond all our expectations, with a properly crackly caramelized surface and a custard that approached a mousse in texture.  For all that I would have expected to spend more than $100 in Austin, yet our bill came to only $60!  By me that’s very good value for money.  After that, about all we were able to do was to crawl home and into bed . . . so that’s just what we did.

Sunday morning breakfast (and a very good one, too) was served in the main house because of the weather; a cool front had blown through, making things a little damp and cool for al fresco breakfast on the porch as we’d done Saturday.  There were seven of us between the three rooms:  a couple down from Waco, three women up from San Antonio on a girls’ trip, and us.  I felt the conversation was a little stilted for my part (not surprising, considering everyone else there assumed Moon and I were married, and we didn’t disillusion them).  The whole issue of how to answer ordinary questions kept popping up, and we kinda winged it all the way.  Generally, whoever got asked the question grabbed the relevant details from zir own life to answer, and the other went along.

Once breakfast was over, we packed up our things, went downtown to finish settling up the bill (most B&Bs in town run their booking and billing through Gästehaus Schmidt, which serves as a clearinghouse), and set off to take pictures of some of the houses we’d seen the day before.  We were agreed that we absolutely had to take a picture of one remuddle, an 1880s Eastlake-type cross-gable cottage that had been defaced with green asbestos siding, front porch enclosure, and a hideous 1960s-style half-height siding of large river gravel and a chimney of the same.  Just a block down the street, we found a fine example of a similar age and style that had been sensitively treated, so we took a picture of that for comparison.  Both are going to Old House Journal, to enter in their Remuddle page contest.

The trip back to Austin was punctuated by a stop to get a peck of the very last peaches of the season (the stand where we stopped was open for its last weekend of the year) and a second time in Johnson City to buy a couple of specialty Coca-Cola glasses for Moon, who collects Coke memorabilia.  We got back by mid-afternoon, and I dropped Moon off at the Motel 6 for a nap while I ran home to finish a homework assignment for my C++ programming class.  Once that was done with, I ran back over to the motel for our last night together, a long and very pleasant one.

I dropped Moon off at the train station Monday morning at seven, and she ICQd me about three to say she was home safely.  Our weekend would have had a difficult time trying to be better than it was, and I’m looking forward anxiously to the next time we can be together, in November or December.

Lady Bracknell lectures the Yale University Glee Club with Scotch tape.  Fnord.