saturday morning-

Roll down to Cameron looking for the Tandy store to get stuff for a new mandolin strap. It's a hard place to find - tucked in one of those low-rent garage/body shop strips in a place with bad traffic access like underneath a tangle of texas flyover interchanges - you know the usual Austin kind fo place. There's the leather store (with harleys out front), a thrift store, the amature radio supply shop, and a goodwill. They were teaching a class in back of Tandy and there was a special on full cowskin rugs - pretty cool if the dog wouldn't eat it. Got my 'superior grade' latigo lace and briefly considered the fringed moccasin kit for $27. I tried to figure out where I'd wear fringed buckskin moccasins, cause the kit looked like fun and a pretty good deal for buckskin, but I decided I wasn't sure enough of what size I'd be to buy it right there. I stopped in the thrift store which had a real old VCR - the kind with tape-deck mechanical switches for play/stop/etc. Cool. Anyway, continued my drive over to the east side to check out the lofts where Tamara's 'naked as you want to be' art show was the night before. I didn't go, but I'd never been in that neighborhood and wanted to check it out. It is pretty neat, and you could imagine being in mexico with the way the houses are painted, the restaurants, and the cool-ass spanish colonial style churches, if it were for the ass new 'apartment homes' being built all over. Next stop - South Austin farmers market - I've never been to this one, and figured I'd check it out. There was one stand selling some crappy yellow organic tomatoes. Baah. So back up to the downtown farmers market, which is always bumpin. I didn't have a cooler, so I passed on the buffalo steaks, but it was already getting hot so I got an iced black coffee. I'm always eyeballing the plant guy who has the exotic plumerias, but he's always asking ~$50 for the cool ones, and I haven't been real lucky with gardening in texas. Over to Lamar, stopped in Whole Earth provisions to look at yuppies buying hemp shoes and rock climbing harnesses. 'The Tavern' is up the street from there, around 11th and Lamar. It's a cool old german bar with a deck on top - it looks like a cuckoo clock - I need to check that place out later. It's 11:30am and already 90 degrees, but the iced coffee helps (and the truck's AC).