It’s hot in Texas again. It’ll be hot until October. People ask me how I can stand the heat. I tell ‘em, “You don’t have to shovel heat.”

• Read more poems in the book, Newspaper Blackout
• Buy prints in the store
• Share your own poems on the Newspaper Blackout Tumblr

Buy prints and pre-order the book in the store

All taken with my iPhone camera, altered with iRetouch, and filtered with CameraBag or Tilt-Shift Generator.

See more de-signs.

Texans are a lot like Catholics: it’s the converts who are the most fervent believers…

a big / wide-open space / and a cowboy hat / but / what matters most is / the swagger

Speaking of cowboy hats: this morning at a construction site, Meg spotted a cowboy hard hat:

Also, scanned this out of an old scrapbook:

And, to finish off the theme, let’s not forget one of my first blackout poems:

I’m not so much a fan of the hats, but I definitely need some boots.

My wife and I are going to San Antonio this weekend, and we’re looking for fun things to do while we’re down there. When traveling, we love food, art, old buildings, and people-watching. We know about the River Walk and the Alamo. Stuff off the beaten path. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments below or drop me an e-mail!

Meg and I stayed late after work/school and went to see Scott McCloud tonight at UT:

UPDATE: Here’s the Daily Texan on the talk.

It’s 11 o’clock Texas time, and we’re chilling at the LaQuinta Inn in Greenville, Texas, 45 minutes east of Dallas. In Greenville, they used to have BLACKEST LAND, WHITEST PEOPLE, painted on the water tower. Luckily, that isn’t the case anymore.

We swam in the pool, grabbed warm chocolate chip cookies at the front desk, now we’re watching some cable. Today we drove to Memphis and did something I never thought we’d do.

We went to Graceland.

Fun facts about Elvis that I did not know, and did not learn from the Graceland tour, but from my mother-in-law: that Priscilla was 14 when she met Elvis, and that “the king died on the throne.”

Here’s a fun sign on Vernon Presley’s (Elvis’s dad) office door:

I couldn’t get a good picture of Elvis’s office, but there were books about football, karate, World War II, and, oddly enough, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha.

We drove out of Memphis, through Little Rock, and ate at the Whataburger in Texarkana:

The drive from Texarkana to Greenville was gorgeous. Meg saw her first armadillo by the side of the road.

Tomorrow, we’ll be Austin, in our new apartment. Unbelievable.