Monthly Archives: February 2006

Hanging out on the Zocalo, late January.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bgzpks/

at this site I’m uploading photos as we go.  so far only a few from Austin

We went to St David’s Rehab Center this morning for evaluation.  They have set up four sessions for Virginia, twice a week, a mix of work on walking, hand development, aquatic work and biofeedback.  Some of their staff have just been introduced to Saeboflex so they are excited to meet someone with six months experience using it.  The OT therapist hopes that the biofeedback will help Virginia improve her posture as well as her gait. 

Last night we saw the first movie we’ve seen in about two months—Woody Allen’s “Match Point.”  Really enjoyed it.  Found it captivating and deftly done.

Here is an Austin couple seen at Malaga tapas bar on February 14th.  Mike Elam, jazz musician, and his friend Sonya Sofia. 

Most of today we spent agog in Whole Foods Market, a huge new food store, less than a year old in this location, twenty some years old as a business in Austin.  Here’s a photo stolen from their website.  I’m sure we are slowly discovering the Seven Wonders of Austin so I’m dubbing this one Number One.  A walmart size store of organic, fresh and whole foods set to dazzle every one of our ten thousand taste buds.  We’ve been having lunches and dinners at a smaller, neighborhood location and they warned us to be prepared to be overwhelmed when we visited the mothership location and we were.  Haven’t seen anything like it since Harrod’s–i.e. food as jewelry.  Also scrumptuous eating.

Cold day, low 40s and windy with mist/rain.  But rest of the country doing much worse. 

Took a look at the Cristo & Jean Marie exhibit at the AMoA.  Lunch at
Whole Foods. 

Used the hotel pool for the first time.  Virginia showed me how she swims with her fins, snorkle and mask and quite well too.

First tv dinner of the trip this evening in the "suite" microwave.  And on the Randalls’ receipt noticed this coincidence—-   tv dinner  $3.49             bandaids  $3.49

what does it mean, oh novel in which we are mere characters in the hands of an ongoing plot, that the price of dinner is the same as the price of a box of waterproof bandaids?

And will we, can we, fall even farther from the golden world, the golden times, of life in Oaxaca?

Peregrine Wooster in DC levels two attacks at poor Jean Beaudrillard—

I agree with the guy from Moscow.  Beau sounds way too French. He sits
in a cafe and thinks up his grand theories because, well, ermpiricism -
actually talking to Arab kids and finding out what they think – is
sooooo anglais, n’est-ce pas?"

Yesterday we went to Austin Medical Clinic North.  A big ten-year old place with two atriums (or atria?).  Dr Fung saw Virginia and agreed to write her orders for more OT and PT and a check-up on her brace.  So next week we go for evaluation at the St David’s hospital Rehab Center.  Virginia is hoping to get back into some aquatic therapy here and St David’s has a big program of that sort. 

Windy and cold here today — down into the low 40s at midday.  We’re going to see if walking is possible.  Our motel is in a sort of woodsy hi-tech office block area so it is pretty pleasant so far as landscape and topography go.  Yesterday too we found another mall to walk in, a big one with lots of light and lots of railings that Virginia likes to use to walk.  New pedometer too.  Lost the other one somewhere over the past two days. 

A few drives through and around University of Texas but so far it looks just huge and not that appealing.  Sure we still have to discover its real charms. 

I tried to counter-argue—

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Just got a phone call from Dave and Cecile.  Have not heard from them for quite a while.  They have been on vacation (French teachers get two weeks off every six weeks).  They flew to Edinburgh for a weekend to visit Cecile’s friend there, had great weather.  Then they got cheap flights to Barcelona and Madrid, three days in each city, great weather in Madrid (where it had been minus 5 C the week before).  Bike riding in Barcelona, bike paths through the center of the city.  In Madrid their friend Laura and her boyfriend took them everywhere from Escorial to favorite Italian restaurants and a jazz club.  They’re under the weather today because they were out dancing until 4 this morning in Paris.  Cecile has to work tomorrow and then they are off to ski in the alps at her parents’ teensy "chalet."

article on the burnings in Paris by Jean Beaudrillard

The following article is from NLR 37 http://www.newleftreview.org/NLR27101.shtml

last paragraph

The superiority of Western culture is sustained only
by the desire of the rest of the world to join it. When there is the
least sign of refusal, the slightest ebbing of that desire, the West
loses its seductive appeal in its own eyes. Today it is precisely the
‘best’ it has to offer—cars, schools, shopping centres—that are torched
and ransacked. Even nursery schools: the very tools through which the
car-burners were to be integrated and mothered. ‘Screw your mother’
might be their organizing slogan. And the more there are attempts to
‘mother’ them, the more they will. Of course, nothing will prevent our
enlightened politicians and intellectuals from considering the autumn
riots as minor incidents on the road to a democratic reconciliation of
all cultures. Everything indicates that on the contrary, they are
successive phases of a revolt whose end is not in sight.