happy cinco de mayo! and happy crazy weather day!

so last night i experienced my first for real central texas late-spring hard-core thunderstorm. and it was no joke. i felt like i was in monsoon season in some tropical asian country or something, that's how crazy it was. i got home from work late-ish and took a leisurely stroll down the street to pick up some dinner (along with hundreds of my closest friends... apparently my neighborhood celebrates "first thursdays" with late hours for all the boutiques, lots of bands, and lots of drinking - pretty cool eh?). the weather was pretty muggy and warm but otherwise nothing out of the ordinary. i get home with my piping hot burrito and enjoy a few episodes of sex and the city on my laptop (b/c i still have no TV, let alone a coffee table on which to rest said laptop - i propped it on a chair, sat on my sofa with my burrito, and was happy as a clam).

next thing i know, though, the floodgates had opened and the sky was doing something fierce (even fiercer than tyra banks). thunder, lightning, crazy winds, TONS of rain, the whole deal. it seemed different from the t'storms back east somehow (for some reason the phrase "back east" sounds very 19th century, circa laura ingalls wilder or something) - apparently austin has occasional tornado issues, and i can now say that i'm not surprised.

this meant, of course, that my electricity went out and i was left with no wireless internet and no power whatsoever. i went to bed with a candle and started writing in my journal... it's interesting how self-absorbed one can get btwn a blog and a journal, and it's also interesting to see what different purposes they serve. the blog is more of a way to keep y'all (hey there texas) posted on what silly things i'm up to... it's also a way for me to tell funny stories and wax poetic about whatever topic happens to be on my brain (like the rumor that britney spears is pregnant again, good lord, someone needs to stop kevin federline from fathering any more children). journals, however, are so much more personal and introspective, the type of shit that you may not tell people you consider to be pretty good friends. or maybe it's just me, and i hold my cards close. i don't know.

i found myself quickly tiring of the introspection, though, and decided to end the night with a refreshing dose of p.g. wodehouse and bertie wooster and jeeves... what ho, jeeves!

oh, last note - today is cinco de mayo and they definitely do it up for real up in hurr. apparently a lot of the facilities/operations folks who work in our building are mexican, and every year they make a big deal out of cinco de mayo... they bring in tons of homemade mexican food (and when i say tons, i mean tons... we have like 600-700 people that work here) and interesting drinks and have a live mariachi band that goes around the building serenading us. good times all around. an excellent way to start the wknd, methinks... should be a good one too. i am hopefully having drinks with the lovely (and soon to be ex-austinite) mary lorraine at the oh-so-cool hotel san jose and then going to pick my mums up at the airport (assuming the weather doesn't start up again).

i'll leave you with a sampling of tunes recently heard on the oh so awesome jammin' 105.9:
destiny's child, say my name
ice ice baby (stop! collaborate and listen)
allure/112, all cried out
warren g, regulate (seriously - that was the icing on the cake)