Here comes Peter Cottontail...

Hooray three-day weekend! Actually, hooray April! This is shaping up to be a very fun month.

It’s ironic that this – the only three-day weekend I'm gonna have til Memorial Day – is the only quiet weekend I’ll have for awhile. I guess that’s a good thing. It’ll give me time to charge my batteries for the madness that lies just on the other side of Easter. This, of course, is assuming I don't head over to Rice tomorrow for the KTRU outdoor show (with Ted Leo!).

So why is April gonna be so fun? Well, let’s start with last weekend. Last weekend was the Houston Rollergirls crawfish boil at West Alabama Ice House (the pictures in that slideshow really don't do it justice). I love a good crawfish boil. Umm…let me revise that. I love a scenario in which I’m encouraged to drink all day in the sunshine at an icehouse (side note: for those of you not from Houston, an icehouse is just a bar with three walls. Emphasis on the outdoors. Wood walls, wood roof, wood floors.) Anyway, the one this past weekend was good. The weather was perfect, a lot of my friends showed up…a surefire recipe for fun. Also a recipe for a night that should’ve ended about three hours before it did. Needless to say, I overindulged and felt like crap on Sunday (which ended up being a blessing in disguise because my weird hangover cravings allowed me to find an amazing sno-cone stand in the Hispanic part of town). So that was last weekend.

But I'm not here to talk about the past (adjusts glasses, points finger).

Next weekend, the fun begins. My friend Steve is visiting from Dallas. We’ve gotten into a kinda/sorta pattern of having an annual hangout weekend (that conveniently corresponds with his company sending him to whatever city I’m living in at that particular time for some kind of corporate training. It works out nicely). The first time we had a weekend, I lived in Austin. His visit happened to fall on the same weekend as both the gay pride parade and some kind of biker rally. We saw motorcycles. We saw gays. We listened to some rockin’ zydeco…

Anyway, this time around, Steve is coming to Houston. And his visit falls on the same weekend as the Houston International Festival (which they’ve started calling “ifest.”). I’ve been going to the International Festival since I was a kid. My dad used to take me (and Richard) every year. We’d walk around, watch some bands, check out the booths, walk by (but not stop at) the countless variety of food and drink stands, sit in the grass…basically our dad would kill an entire afternoon of having to entertain two kids without actually spending any money. By no small coincidence, we stopped going to the International Festival when they started charging admission. Anyway, flash forward to today. April 2009. I'm a grown-up (technically). I have no problem paying admission. I enjoy patronizing food and drink booths. So I’m excited. AND they have a zydeco stage. So Steve and I can keep that little tradition alive as well.

And if that’s not exciting enough, my friend Traci is also coming to visit! She and I met when I lived in New York. We worked at the same god-awful, soul-sucking PR agency. But! We each got a friend out of it. She just moved back to Texas (Dallas, actually. Yuck) and is again exploring her home state. So that weekend should be a lot of fun. Oh, and so I fulfill my crawfish quota, my friend Emily is having a crawfish boil at her house that weekend too.

The following weekend, there’s another crawfish boil at West Alabama Ice House. This is the real one. Or, at least it’s being thrown by the same people who threw this one. I’m excited. Really excited. I have guests coming in from Austin and Dallas. It’s gonna be huge. Unless, of course, it rains or even threatens to rain. That could potentially ruin everything. But! We're not thinking that way. Maybe Houston will get all the rain out of its system this weekend. Yes. That’s it.

So there should be plenty to report in the next few weeks. (sorry if this blog post feels rushed. I'm trying like hell to get out of here)

A couple small house-cleaning items...

1. The Sydney video is coming soon, I promise. This week was really busy and...well...there are a LOT of pictures to comb through. Please be patient.

2. I'm officially back on the market. After a long winter of back-and-forth, "should I/shouldn't I" nonsense with Sonia, I went underground. Well, I'm done with that. I'm getting back into summer shape and putting myself out there. Just saying that means nothing, of course. But don't be surprised if there are some updates in the next month or two. Hopefully.

3. And finally, apropos of absolutely nothing, I’ve been having the weirdest damn dreams these last three nights. And they’ve all been really vivid. Last night I was a lackey in some terrorist plot and I ended up getting arrested thanks to some very sly negotiating done by my brother (thanks, brother). Headlines were all over the front page of the New York Post (why?). The night before that, I was engaged in a very heated water balloon fight with about 600 little kids. The night before that I was lost in New York, but somehow got caught up in the filming of Star Trek (huh?) before being wrangled into a Rugby Union (not Rugby League, mind you) match. Usually I don’t remember my dreams, but like I said, these have been really vivid. Maybe it’s the new toothpaste I’m using? What I’m having for dinner? I’m confused.