My car is sitting in a tow yard in south Austin. The side of the driver’s window is messed up from the break-in, the ignition has been torn out, and the windshield looks like somebody threw a bottle at it. The thieves ate our Chex-Mix, took our Ipod adapter, but left our cowboy hats, umbrellas, and flip-flops. They took it for a 100-mile joyride (I know, because I had just got gas, and flipped the odometer) and dumped it in a parking lot.

Tommy-the-Tow-Guy and I, we put in the clutch, stuck a screwdriver in the ignition, and she fired up like nothing happened. It’s totally drivable, but we have to get the insurance company out to assess the damage before we can drive off with it and get it repaired.

So add this to the news that as of tomorrow, I will probably be employed, Meg and I are very happy. Here’s what I doodled last night, thinking I’d never see her again:

Even taking into account the car theft, we’re having a really fabulous time in Austin. Here’s the sunset over Lake Travis that we got to see last night:

Can’t beat that.

After putting a $1000 into my 1997 Honda Accord with 160,000 miles on it to get it to Texas, after it running like a freaking champ the whole 1500 miles down here, two days after it was full of expensive electronics, Ikea furniture, and my life — after all that, some asshole stole it out of our parking lot last night. The police officer I talked to said that 3 late-90s Hondas were stolen in the area last night, so most likely my beloved car is being chopped into a hundred pieces. We were having such great luck so far, too. Damn.

We made it. 1400 miles. The Honda took the trip like a champ. Our life was crammed in the trunk and a rented mini-van. Our apartment is great, but empty. The neighborhood is great. The city is great. Tacos and lemonade for dinner. It’s hot and beautiful. The air conditioning is on. I’m trying to put together an Ikea chair without instructions. Boxes are everywhere. I have a job interview at ten in the morning. Life is good.

“I’m New Here,” from the wonderful Smog album, A River Ain’t Too Much To Love :

No No No No
I did not become someone different
I did not want to be
But I’m new here
Will you show me around

No matter how far wrong you’ve gone
You can always tournaround
Met a woman in a bar
Told her I was hard to get to know
And near impossible to forget
She said i had an ego on me
The size of Texas

Well I’m new here and I forget
Does that mean big or small

Turnaround turnaround turnaround

And I’m shedding plates like a snake
And it may be crazy but I’m the closest thing I have
To a voice of reason

Turnaround turnaround turnaround
And you may come full circle and be new here again

I listened to this song in the early morning one night in Texas when I couldn’t sleep and the a/c was broken. It felt like heaven.

And…we’re back. The trip to Austin: hot, exhilarating, and exhausting. We found a place. We made some really great friends. We ate. We saw. We drove hundreds of miles across town.

I’d write more about our trip, but all the running in and out of 90-degree weather and chilly air-conditioning has given me a headcold the size of Texas.

I want to thank all of our new friends who were wonderful and warm and hospitable beyond belief: especially Tim Walker and his beautiful family, Jon Lebkowsky and his wife Marsha, Megan, who was kind enough to run around with us and let us stay in her extra room, and Stephanie and Adam, who fed us several times.

Here’s what my wife has to say on the subject.

Me and the wife, we’re off to our future home of Austin, Texas to look for apartments. We’ll be there until next Monday. If y’all are from the area and y’all want to grab a drink, shoot me an e-mail…I’ll be checkin’ it. If you have any suggestions for stuff to do, apartments to rent, or possible jobs for me, send those too. We’ll take whatever we can get!

By the way, the New Yorker has two Austin-related articles this week. One is about why the archives of so many writers end up at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas. (On my list of places to visit.) The other is Sasha Frere-Jones reviewing the new album by Spoon, one of my favorite bands in the world, who just happen to be Austin-based.

Wish us luck!

I want to thank my new friend, Tim Walker, for his excellent Austinite advice and for clueing me in to LinkedIn, which seems like a pretty excellent professional social networking tool. (Dig my profile. Add me as a contact!)

I’d also like to note that I’ve been absolutely blown away by the hospitality and kindness of the Austinites that Meg and I have met so far. Y’all rock.

Extra credit if you can cite the quotation above. “It’s Miller time!”

I don’t know if I’ve made this clear in other posts, but Meg and I are absolutely, positively, without-a-doubt moving to Austin, Texas around the beginning of August. Meg will be attending the University of Texas to get her Master of Science in Sustainable Design, and I will be working full-time (yikes!) somewhere to support us.

What we are excited about:

1. warm (hot) weather
2. the unbelievable music/arts scene
3. the abnormally large number of dachschund rescues in the area
4. tacos ‘n’ BBQ
5. cowboy boots

What we are NOT excited about:

1. the cheese factor of living in a city that shares my first name
2. getting a new job
3. moving
4. finding an apartment

As our move approaches, I’ve been thinking more an more about quality of life — how easy we have it here in Cleveland, and how we might make it even better in Texas. For us, anxiety is usually only the product of Unknown Factors, and our Unknown Factors are big ones: Where To Live and Where to Work.

There was a New Yorker article on commuting a week or so ago (it coincidentally had a cool illustration of Glenn Ganges in traffic by Kevin Huizenga) that had a very practical way of looking at the Where To Live, Where To Work question:

Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can spend an hour or two travelling each side. “You live in Pasadena, work in North Hollywood, shop in the Valley,” Putnam said. “Where is your community?” The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had. In that kind of life, you have a small refrigerator, because you can get to the store quickly and often. By this logic, the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul.

Our triangle here in Cleveland is pretty small: we can’t walk to work, but we can and do walk to the grocery store, to the Chipotle, to the book store. I’m hoping we can find a similar situation in Austin.

As for the job search, I have this Bruce Eric Kaplan cartoon posted to the fridge:

If you are an employer — or if you know of an employer — in Austin who is looking for a writer/designer with plenty o’ computer, web design, and customer service experience…please contact me!

If you wondered why no posts, here’s the lowdown:

Wednesday morning I catch some type of 24-hour puke bug.

Thursday morning my wife puts me on a plane to Austin, Texas that she Pricelined only hours earlier. It’s a last-minute attempt to figure out the grad school situation. We eat barbeque at Stubb’s, shop on South Congress, swim in the Sheraton pool, take a look at the architecture department at the University of Texas, hang out on Sixth Street, and watch the bats fly on the South Congress Bridge.

Friday afternoon we’re back in Cleveland.

Not sure there’s anyway to process that kind of whirlwind madness. Couple of thoughts: It feels incredibly dorky to be named Austin in a city called Austin. This dorkiness is somewhat offset by the supreme coolness of the city and the warmness of the weather. Airport security is a joke. Quite literally, in this case.

Got back to Cleveland, and even though we were exhausted, we went out with Meg’s parents to see writer Rick Cleveland (West Wing, Six Feet Under, Cleveland native) do his one-man show, “My Buddy Bill,” at the Coventry Unitarian church. It was hysterical, and it’s gonna be a filmed special for Comedy Central real soon. Here’s a clip on Youtube.

My father-in-law did a great writeup of Rick in the PD yesterday.

So anyways, there you have it. More to come.