Janice Williams Loves Austin

It is an aggravating thing to go to a blog you like and find the same post that was there the day before (and the day before). I know, I’m a blog reader, too. But, man, doesn’t a little bit of work get in the way of my webposting? I am doing some part-time work and it has kept me busy and will, I hope, continue to keep me busy, but with some time for blogging, too.

I did have three new experiences yesterday that I wanted to write about and I want to post pictures, but I’m too pooped to get the camera and upload them. So, for now, just a little of the story. I had a new food, a new venue, and TWO new bands yesterday.

First, the food. Yes, I will add a food category to the blog. It keeps coming up! My friend Marsha made me a sandwich like I have never had before. She said that the local drugstore lunch counter made it when she was a kid and it was their specialty. Get this:  Nut Olive Sandwich. And by “nut” she meant peanut butter. It was bread spread with peanut butter and covered in olives and then grilled in a pan with butter. She added some mayonnaise to it when it was done. Good? Yes, it was good. I don’t think it is something that I will seek out or try to make myself, but it wasn’t bad. The warmed peanut butter was very good and almost “cheesy” in its creaminess. And I love olives just about anywhere, so they were good.

On to the new venue. I went to the Scoot Inn on the east side of town to see a friend play. Jennifer Leonhardt is relatively new in town and I met her and her college-aged daughter on Christmas Eve at the club Mark plays at. Very nice people. She sings and writes and had a show at the Scoot Inn so I checked it out. Cute little place, it reminded me of an old-fashioned living room with flocked wallpaper walls, old chandeliers and lamps with red bulbs, and old-fashioned frames and photographs on the walls. Neat old wooden bar, too. Nice place and nice people, though very few of them on a Monday night. I think the second band watched the first band play and the first band watched the second and there were a few employees, a girlfriend or two, and me.

And the new music:  Jennifer was the headliner and she played with a four-piece band. She has a beautiful voice. I would use the word ethereal except that sounds quiet or weak. Her voice was very strong. The style of music was something that I enjoy live, but don’t know that I would like it on a recording as much. It has been interesting (and a bit of a challenge) to see music now that I am out of radio. No longer do I have to judge or critique (in my head) for the job and if it would fit there, now I can just appreciate music as it is and decide if I like it. It has been harder than I would have expected to make that transition. I’m learning.

The band that opened for Jennifer was Blue Squeezebox. I hope a picture I took came out. They are a three piece band with, of course, an accordion! The lead guy (and I didn’t even get his name) plays a beautiful blue accordion with, well, black “white” keys and white “black” keys. You know what I mean.  I love his approach to the accordion. No, this wasn’t polkas or conjunto, this was more the French style of accordion, which was the type that affected me most just before I got mine. Very melancholy, melodic. He was very strong in his control of the accordion, which I am not, and he had a great way with the buttons. I see lots and lots of accordion players with bands that are truly keyboard players so they only play the keyboard or play the buttons intermittently. And I really don’t mean that as a criticism. If you see me play at the Broken Spoke (or anywhere) I’m only going to play the keys because I am too inexperienced to control both at the same time. This guy was great and had an amazing style of singing, too. If you like Tom Waits and Jon Dee Graham and other artists that growl and bark their songs, this was like that!

So new food, new places, new music, and new friends in the process. It was a great Monday. Apparently it wore me out, though, and I’ve been dragging through work today and even through American Idol tonight, if you can imagine. I did finish up my website class at ACC, though, and you’ll be proud I have passed. Whoo-hoo. I’d post my final website project, but it is boring boring, but it is my first website created entirely by hand with html, so that was a big learning process.

I had all sorts of things I wanted to write about tonight, but I forced myself to do “a little bit” on my project for my web class at ACC before I did anything fun. Lord, that “little bit” turned into about three hours of mind-numbing html coding. I THINK I’m just about ready to turn in my final project, but once I’m rested and look at it with unfuzzy eyes tomorrow, I may see all sorts of things wrong with it. I thought I was through with it a half hour ago and then I saw where one of my classmates suggested (on a message board) a site where you could see how your pages looked on other peoples different browsers and computers. Great, you should do that! Or so I thought until I saw that mine had a big ol’ problem that needed to be fixed. I would have put that off until tomorrow except that it takes me SO LONG to remember where I was and get started again, I knew I’d better fix it now.

So, with that accomplished (hopefully) I can rest easy. Tomorrow is a busy day and I don’t want to be worrying over a web page.

But, concerning that headline up there, we did eat well today. Mark has done some work for the AME Church here in South Austin. They had a big gathering of some sort this afternoon and needed extra PA equipment and a video feed to their Fellowship Hall because the crowd was going to be too large for their sanctuary. Mark is good friends with a gentleman that attends that church and he helped him get it all set up so everyone could see and hear. In thanks, Charles asked Mark to come by the church after their meeting and pick up a couple of plates of food. The church was having “dinner on the grounds” and we were welcome to share.

Mark stopped by and met the nice folks that prepared him a plate and he brought it home. They made a convert out of me! It was a big take-out container brimming with, get this: A couple of spicy hot chicken wings, roast beef, sausage, green beans, mashed potatoes, jambalaya, a pasta dish with a cream sauce and shrimp, and a big hot roll. And there was “jelly cake” on a separate plate. It was a Sunday dinner like Sunday dinner ought to be.

I wasn’t able to eat everything on my plate so Mark was helping me out, but I insisted on putting the rest of my roast beef away. Tonight I made a big roast beef with mayonnaise sandwich and enjoyed every minute of it.

So we have eaten well today and appreciate those good folks so much. I will try to “pass it forward” in my week ahead. Amen!

I had a job in sales once . . .I sold audio and video programs for a motivational training company. I don’t need to hide names, I worked for the Zig Ziglar Corporation for four years, a small miserable portion of them in sales. It was truly one of the worst jobs I’ve ever had and I have never hated a job more than that one. [yes, I will delete this post when I have to start applying for sales jobs] I had wonderful co-workers and a future opportunity of being a speaker and trainer and that’s why I held out and continued in the job.

I was a pretty darn good salesperson, despite hating it. But my story hinges around two miserable Saturdays that they required us to be in the office for the whole damn day to learn a new sales technique. This super-highly paid trainer attempted to teach us how to speak in our customers language. Her theory was that everyone learns and functions primarily in a visual mode, an auditory mode, or a tactile mode. I’m sure there are still sales seminars based on this theory. She told us how to listen for cues and then speak in that person’s language.

For instance, a visual person will say things like “I see!” or “Show me what you mean” and we were supposed to respond in kind with “let me paint you a picture” or “look at what I’m saying.” Auditory people want things “as clear as a bell” and tactile people want to “touch base.” It was a huge crock of hogwash, in my opinion.

I don’t use those auditory terms, yet I believe I am a very auditory person. I love music, obviously, and I love a person’s voice. I am very good at recognizing people’s voice on the phone. So maybe that is why I am so tired of this video world we live in. I am tired of opening emails with a youtube link. Yes, many of them are funny, or entertaining, or have a point, but I don’t want to spend the time watching them (and I usually don’t, sorry folks- DELETE). What I really don’t like is the news link on the internet. I see an intriguing headline like “Woman foils bank robbery attempt with shoe” and I click on the link only to have it go to a video clip that has to load (and, yes, I am impatient and, yes, I do have a fast internet connection) and then it is bound to play a commercial before I ever even know the gist of the story beyond the headline. I give up long before it gets to that point. I figure I will see the written story somewhere if it is good.

I’m sure my attitude is as old-fashioned to a person that grew up not knowing life before the internet as preferring going to bed with a book instead of staying up and watching Johnny Carson was to me.

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On a totally different subject, I’m taking a website making course. In some ways it is way too elementary for me and in others it is SO over my head. I am bumbling through and have to be done by Thursday. But as we complete the assignment (a six page website for a fictional computer company with the teacher supplying three product photos and that’s all) we have to post our website. One of my classmates has already finished his/her website and it is worth seeing. Of course, once I saw his/her creativity and sense of humor, it made mine look more dull and homemade. But, coming from a life of “no need to excel when it is a pass/fail course” I will plod my way through to the end. Click here for the funny one.

I realize I am preparing for this blog each day in much the way that I prepared for my radio show each day for 30 years (almost) . . . Yes, I read the paper, I a list of ideas, but nothing was really planned or formulated.

But I’ve been looking through lots of old photos for the last week or so. I inherited a bunch of pictures from Mamma Williams so I’ve been scanning them. I have also been doing a lot of genealogy and that makes me look through all of the great old pictures I already had. And I noticed something. We have become WAY too accustomed to our air conditioning. Remember picnics? I realize that this is not exactly a week we would have been having picnics even 40 years ago, but the pictures do remind me of an era gone by . . .

This is a picture of my family having a picnic in Raton, New Mexico, in about 1960. That’s Mom holding me, Mackie with some sort of hat on her head, Daddy with his usual straw cowboy hat, and that’s Pappa Williams’ legs in the picture, too. Mamma and Pappa Williams lived in Raton for a while. I don’t remember them living there at all. Pappa was a truck driver driving to Denver and Amarillo so Raton was a good mid-point to live in.

But back to the picnic. How about that six-pack of King Size Coca-Colas? Glass bottles out in the real world. That is a bygone era. And that heavy metal cooler. We must have gone fishing with that thing a hundred times. Remember when I picnic really involved putting together a meal?

Seems like today we don’t picnic at all, and if we do, we stop at Subway or Burger King and take the sack with us to Zilker Park.

I remember lots of picnics from my childhood. Picnics just in the backyard when family visited. Or even a lunchtime picnic in the middle of the week. I remember vividly a picnic at a big park in Amarillo on Washington Street with my Aunt Dorothy and Mom and my sister. I don’t remember if my cousins were there or not. They may have been in school. My Uncle Homer worked for Santa Fe and Daddy worked for Colorado Interstate Gas and they both came and met us and we had a picnic lunch. The men, as men did back then, went on back to work and we swung on the swings and played on the big slide. What a great summer memory!

I found this great picture of a picnic sometime, too. That’s my great-grandmother’s sister on the left with her grandkids and daughters. How about all those mattresses? A picnic AND a camp-out! And when was the last time you sat on the ground and ate a watermelon? Yes, we’ve gotten used to air conditioning and lots of running water!

I’m trying to remember if we have pictures of my nephews and us having picnics. I hope all of their memories aren’t from fast food restaurants.