Today, we are going to the Lakeway Activity Center to check out the city-wide garage sale. We are catered by Red Ash of Austin, and our entertainment is The Beatles.
Menu
WOOD GRILLED 10oz BEEF FILET – roasted shallot butter / 30-day wet age, Fred Linz, Chicago
10OZ BEEF FILET WITH FRESH BLUE CRAB FONDUTA – wood grilled and sliced, 30-day wet age, Fred Linz, Chicago /
WOOD ROASTED BEEF BONE MARROW & WILD MUSHROOM RISOTTO – shallot butter / shaved grana / natural jus
OSSO BUCO MILANESE – extra thick cut, red wine braised veal shank/saffron risotto/lemon gremolata
POLLO ALLA DIAVOLO -half roasted chicken / crostoni / lemon / garlic / calabrian chile / natural jus
WILD RED SNAPPER A LA PLANCHA “LIVORNESE STYLE – Campari tomato/capers / Mediterranean olives
zucchini / fresh herbs/shellfish broth
SAUTEED NORTH PACIFIC HALIBUT – sweet corn risotto / fava beans / calabrian chile / chervil
COLD WATER LOBSTER TAILS “SCAMPI STYLE – emon butter/spaghettini a.o.p. / crostoni
Get on the bus.
The Activity Center
Boxes for leftover “treasure” that folks might want to donate rather than take home.
A lot of stuff.
Click image for a closer view.
A varied collection.
A bunch of books.
All things bottles.
Lamps and more.
Fishing rods and bracelets.
A pink 1960 Triumph TR3
Riding helmets and a tennis racket.
Interesting stuff.
Well, it’s time for food and music. I hope you have a great week.
The song Portrait of My Love plays over and over in my mind. It was the last song on my playlist last night and now haunts me today. A fresh, hot, aromatic cup of joe will chase it away. With hope, the two coffee selection is made on the machine touchscreen. The first sip moved the song to the background. The second brings up “I Like It Like That” by the Dave Clark Five. Feeling doomed, the hope is that the third will bring peace. No such luck as the Westminster chimes of the doorbell join the cacophony of Twiggy and Tempeste doing their best Hounds of Baskerville imitation. Two toys tossed into the soundproof room, and a slam of the door restores peace and harmony.
The monitor shows what appears to be Wile E. Coyote standing on the porch, holding an envelope and a large box marked ACME Vacuum Company. The conversation that ensued forced me(of course) to start the security shutdown process.
The SWAT team needs to be put on standby. A quick text to the leader confirms that status. Also, the flight of A-10 Warthogs must be diverted. Another call to the commander puts that worry to rest. The SEAL team needs to be called off, and a call to the leader makes that possible. The MH-60 Jayhawk Helicopter hovering over the house is diverted. A call to the tow truck driver stops the deployment of an M1A1 Abrams Tank. The control panel simplifies the security system’s shutdown process. The boiling oil vats are put on standby, the turret mortars disengaged, the Trebuchet on safety, the concertina wire rolled, the Claymore mines reset, the tower Gatling guns on safety, the moat net dropped, the alligators fed, and the IEDs and shoulder-held rockets put away. The Proton torpedoes switched off. The gamma ray beams covered. The high-powered maser guns switched to standby, and the nanorobots were chained in the basement. The Klingons are called back, and the Targ is caged. Robbie’s Bot is sent to the basement. The Tasmanian Devil is directed to the food in his cage, and the door drops. The electronic jammer is kept active, given a situation with a robot not too long ago. The locks on the door are thrown. And the door opened.
Wile hands me the envelope and clipboard, which I sign where indicated, and return the board. It is then that the unboxed vacuum is turned on, and my pockets are emptied. Lucky for me, all there is in them is a couple of dollars and some lint. Stepping back and slamming the front door ends the cleanout. These guys are like restaurants that add a 20% sevice charge to the bill without asking. Tipping must be mandatory these days.
Inside the envelope is a message from Linda Hill. It reads: Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “portrait.” Use it anyway you’d like. Have fun!
Today’s good news story comes from Protect All Wildlife. @Protect_Wldlife Thanks to Noelle Granger for sending it to me.
A ROOF TILE THAT’S GIVING LITTLE OWLS THEIR HOMES BACK
In rural Spain, a clever design is helping thousands of nocturnal birds reclaim what modern construction quietly took away.
The Little Owl once nested in old stone walls and traditional farmhouses. But as rural architecture modernized, those natural cavities disappeared — leaving these small hunters without shelter. So conservationists from the Grup de Naturalistes d’Osona and Grup de Natura Sterna designed something brilliant. They created the Teula Mussolera — a modified clay roof tile that doubles as a high-tech birdhouse.
Here’s why it works: It looks exactly like traditional Spanish roofing — preserving the beauty of rural homes. Its internal tunnel is predator-proof and thermally stable, protecting chicks from heat and hunters. It allows owls to live alongside humans as villages expand. And here’s the smartest part… This isn’t charity. It’s a partnership. The Little Owl is an elite natural pest controller — hunting thousands of insects and rodents every year.
Farmers who install these tiles aren’t just helping wildlife… they’re recruiting a silent, feathered security team that reduces the need for chemical pesticides.
Sometimes conservation isn’t about separating humans and nature. It’s about designing a way to thrive together. The good news in this story is that someone figured out how to accommodate both mankind and nature in the same environment. Today’s JohnKu talks about coexistence. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
I am pleased to introduce you to Luanne Castle’s latest book – Scrap Salvaging a Family. Luanne writes beautiful, award-winning poetry and has now taken the step to write a fascinating book about her family
Scrap: Salvaging a Family explores the stain of childhood fear and anxiety on the adult spirit and the experience of reconciling with an aging or dying parent. A daughter has grown up in a household with an angry and abusive father. He keeps the secret of his own biological father’s identity from his daughter for decades. Can this family be salvaged?
This excerpt is from the first of three sections in Scrap: Salvaging a Family. I’ve enjoyed my father’s workshop in the basement of our house, but now the workshop is replaced by a sign of the Cold War.
Daddy moves his workbench to the garage by hoisting the heavy counter up the stairs on a dolly. He lets me carry a leg, but when I stumble, he says I should just watch. He removes all the tools, the scrap wood, even the army sleeping bags from the basement. The space heater in the garage makes the new workshop too dangerous for me. The elves abandon us. Daddy drives home a truckload of cement blocks and carries each brick down the stairs by himself. Each brick holds a secret that I can’t share with anyone. He stacks the blocks in a quadrant-shaped domino pattern, building walls two bricks deep. Without mortar, the bricks resemble my wooden blocks. Rosemary Clooney croons for us to come to her house. My mother tells me we have grown a bomb shelter in our basement. She stocks it with bedding, Spam, and camping gear for three. She sets my fake Raggedy Ann doll on the blankets inside the footlocker and closes the lid on her. Daddy stores a baseball bat and a single-shot rifle and box of ammo in the room. I think those might be to defend our tiny room from outsiders. When I start my imagination train, a giant crab crawls aboard and into my tummy. The bomb I know about. It’s been on TV and the radio, people talking. But this place doesn’t feel like protection to me. Not like the forts I build with our bleached sheets. This shelter turns my stomach and tightens my chest.
What others say about Luanne’s book
Borne of shame and trauma, the secrets uncovered in Luanne Castle’s hybrid memoir reveal her father’s complicated childhood and the impact it had on their relationship. Told in brief, strikingly vivid fragments, and through various perspectives and forms, the book as a whole presents a deeply moving and unforgettable account. We readers are privileged to bear witness to this emotional excavation, one that ultimately reminds us that love is powerful even when it’s painful and that forgiveness is the only way forward. Scrap: Salvaging a Family is a gorgeous and brilliantly original collection. I highly recommend it. ~Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works
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The vignettes in Castle’s Scrap are beautifully rendered. With house as vessel, we are voyeurs through her domesticity, the skilled lens of speaker Luanne’s traumas and perseverance as she navigates the rawness and fragility of youth. The book is both powerful and arresting–Castle is a deft miniaturist–each story etched with a fine blade, yet a delicate touch. Scrap is a collection of constellations of the ordinary. ~Robert Vaughan, Editor-in-Chief of Bending Genres, author of ASKEW.
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Luanne Castle’s Scrap is a memoir in flash. In flashes might be a more accurate term. This is a family story told in bursts of memory and image, puzzle pieces waiting to connect. It’s a young girl’s coming of age, navigating a path to womanhood out of hand-sewn dresses, gym class movies shown behind closed doors, stacks of moldering girlie magazines discovered at the dump. A girl living in the shadow of her father’s anger, violent and unpredictable as the tornadoes her family hides from. Behind the father’s anger, a missing piece. A hole where a father should be, a “space of unknowingness” both child and father must try to fill. This lyrical, beautifully imagistic work is both an exploration of the long roots of generational trauma and identity erasure and a vivid look back at growing up female in mid-century America. ~Kathryn Kulpa, author of A Map of Lost Places
Luanne Castle’s poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, River Teeth, Your Impossible Voice, JMWW, Grist, Fourteen Hills, Verse Daily, Disappointed Housewife, Lunch Ticket, Saranac Review, Pleiades, Cleaver, Moon City, Moon Park, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bending Genres, BULL, The Mackinaw, The Ekphrastic Review, Phoebe, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Gone Lawn, Burningword, Superstition Review, One Art, Roi Fainéant, Dribble Drabble, Flash Boulevard, O:JA&L, Sheila-Na-Gig, Thimble, Antigonish Review, Longridge, Paragraph Planet, Six Sentences, Gooseberry Pie, Switch, and Ginosko. Her story, “Garden Seasons,” was selected for Best Microfiction 2026. She has published four award-winning poetry collections, and her ekphrastic flash and poetry collection Hunting the Cosmos is forthcoming from Shanti Arts in fall 2026. Luanne has been a Fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside. She studied English and Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside (PhD); Western Michigan University (MFA); and Stanford University (Certificate). Luanne lives with her husband and four cats in Arizona along a wash that wildlife use as a thoroughfare.
Today I opened The Last Drive randomly to page 207. With eyes closed, I pointed to the page. The word “yelling” was closest to my finger. That is our prompt today.
This post was published on June 30, 2014, by Marie Ann Bailey and me. It was the last post we co-authored.
The Top Ten Things Not to Do on Your First Anniversary
10 If it is your first wedding anniversary, do not think your spouse will find it funny if you pretend to forget your wedding date. If you do pretend to forget, at best, your spouse will forgive you after you’ve recited a dozen mea culpas and treated your spouse to a romantic candlelit dinner at the most expensive restaurant in town. At worst, your spouse will demand, in addition to the mea culpas and romantic dinner, that you be solely responsible for cleaning out your cat’s litter box until your second wedding anniversary.
9 If it is your first wedding anniversary, do not assume your spouse will want to celebrate the anniversary with all your family, friends, and the same people at your wedding. If you do, at best, your spouse will grudgingly put up with a crush and the noise of partygoers. At worst, your spouse will commit a disappearing act (sneaking out of the house to have that nice, quiet dinner your spouse really wanted), leaving you to be solo host, as well as clean-up crew after the party.
8 If it is your first work anniversary, do not expect congratulations from your boss and coworkers. At best, you will get some recognition for having stayed in the job for a year since no one else (including your boss) has, an insight which might cause you to start looking for another job. At worst, you try to throw your own party during lunch time in the conference room, which coincides with your boss’s own planned luncheon with the CEO, CFO, CIO, and COO, and you wind up playing caterer to them since you are now too embarrassed to admit the food was for your own party.
7 If it is your first work anniversary, do not insist on going to the most expensive restaurant to celebrate with your boss and coworkers. If you do, at best, no one will complain that the only thing any of them (except your boss) can afford is the Caesar salad and a glass of ice water. At worst, in honor of your anniversary, your boss will publicly suggest you pay the bill for the entire table since your anniversary grants you a 1.0% raise, which, after taxes, translates to a 0.3% raise, which, after a year, will cover the cost of the meal.
6 If it is the first anniversary of your first date, do not think your significant other will be unaware of the fact. If you do, at best, your significant other will accept your apologies for forgetting, and you make a promise to yourself not to forget the second anniversary. At worst, your significant other will accept your apologies and then suggest it’s time to see other people, letting you know in no uncertain terms that there will not be a second anniversary.
5 If it is the first anniversary of your first date, do not think a simple greeting card will be enough to celebrate the event. If you do, at best, your significant other will simply sigh and make arrangements for a nice dinner at the restaurant where you had your first date. At worst, your significant other will make reservations at a very expensive restaurant you’ve always wanted to go to but never had the money. For the cherry on top, your significant other will abruptly leave, grabbing the foil-wrapped coq au vin, but leave the check, which, of course, you cannot pay except with long hours of dishwashing.
4 If it is your first blogging anniversary, do not think that no one will care if you ignore the event. If you do, at best, your readers will likely be confused when you start writing posts beginning “When I began blogging over a year ago ….” since it’s fairly common to celebrate such an event, and they won’t understand why you didn’t. At worst, you’ll be spotlighted into shame by your fellow bloggers who go ahead and post about their first anniversary while you sit and watch their readership grow as yours sinks.
3 If it is your first blogging anniversary, do not think you can crowdsource your way to a fancy restaurant to celebrate. If you do, at best you’ll gain enough for a tip, and your readers will just shake their heads over your impudence and continue reading your blog anyway. At worst, several fellow bloggers will show up at a fancy restaurant expecting you to share your crowdsourced meal for one with all of them, forcing you to pony up for the most expensive bill you’ve ever seen.
2 If it is the first anniversary of your book, do not think it would be gauche to promote the hell out of it on your important day. If you do, at best, an ardent fan will recognize the date and promote your book for you, giving you an uptick in sales you wouldn’t have otherwise. At worst, you miss your window of opportunity, and your first-anniversary sale post bombs because no one understands what a year-and-a-day anniversary is all about.
1 If it is the first anniversary of your book, do not hesitate to discount the price on that important day. If you do hesitate, at best, you’ll get lukewarm sales results from your lukewarm effort. At worst, your promotion will be so tepid that none of your readers will understand what you are promoting and miss the opportunity to purchase your book at less than the cost of a tall skinny Vanilla latte.
We can do this the easy way or the hard way, the message on my coffee machine’s touchscreen said. Using the keypad, an inquiry as to which was which was sent back to the machine brain. To my surprise, the machine fired back a message. It read: “We are out of milk, so if you want anything other than a straight coffee, you’ll have to go to the store.” Smiling while selecting the plain coffee, the decision was made to do it the easy way. One sip stopped the klaxon horn low caffeine warning in my head. The second sip, as you might have guessed, was the trigger for the Westminster chimes of the doorbell. Right in step was the crystal-cracking barking of Igor’s hounds.
Two bones tossed into the soundproof room, followed by a door slam, ensured that the window panes would remain intact and that the Waterford would be preserved. The security monitor carried an image of something that looked like the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character. No discussion was possible, so, with a sigh, the security shutdown process began.
The SWAT team needs to be put on standby. A quick text to the leader confirms that status. Also, the flight of A-10 Warthogs must be diverted. Another call to the commander puts that worry to rest. The SEAL team needs to be called off, and a call to the leader makes that possible. The MH-60 Jayhawk Helicopter hovering over the house is diverted. A call to the tow truck driver stops the deployment of an M1A1 Abrams Tank. The control panel simplifies the security system’s shutdown process. The boiling oil vats are put on standby, the turret mortars disengaged, the Trebuchet on safety, the concertina wire rolled, the Claymore mines reset, the tower Gatling guns on safety, the moat net dropped, the alligators fed, and the IEDs and shoulder-held rockets put away. The Proton torpedoes switched off. The gamma ray beams covered. The high-powered maser guns switched to standby, and the nanorobots were chained in the basement. The Klingons are called back, and the Targ is caged. Robbie’s Bot is sent to the basement. The Tasmanian Devil is directed to the food in his cage, and the door drops. The electronic jammer is kept active, given a situation with a robot not too long ago. The locks on the door are thrown. And the door opened.
The devil started whirling and was almost invisible in the tornado created. Out of the vortex flew an envelope and a clipboard. The place to sign was clearly marked. Once done, the clipboard was sucked back into the mailstorm along with several single-dollar bills that were sucked from my pocket. Slamming the front door to protect the rest of my money allowed me to read the message. It was from Linda Hill and read:
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “easy/hard.” Use one, use both, use ’em any way you’d like. Bonus points if you get both words into your post. Enjoy!
Austin, TX — In a small studio at the Hill Country Galleria in Bee Cave, Kim Ortiz spends her days capturing beautiful wall portraits of families and their dogs. But in recent years, her camera has taken on an even deeper purpose.
Ortiz, owner of Kim Ortiz Portrait Art Studio, has launched a new initiative called Second Chances Dogs, a sponsorship program designed to help shelter and rescue dogs get adopted faster through professional photography.
Photo by Kim Ortiz
“I have five rescue dogs,” Ortiz said. “They have the best life. Every dog deserves a loving home, a bed to sleep on, a sofa to hang out on, not to live in a cage or a shelter.”
More Photos by Kim Ortiz
For more than 12 years, Ortiz has supported animal rescues through her studio. But as shelters in Austin and across the country became overcrowded after the pandemic, she knew she wanted to do more.
“A professional photo of a dog with good lighting highlights their personality,” she explained. “Especially black dogs. Without proper lighting, they just look like a blob in a cell phone photo. Studio lighting creates a glow on their fur. Every dog deserves a beautiful portrait.”
The program works by pairing local businesses and individuals with shelter dogs in need of updated adoption photos. Sponsors cover the cost of a professional photo session ($100 per dog) and, in return, receive a social media shoutout, recognition on program materials, and the knowledge that they helped a dog find a home.
Currently, 12 dogs have been photographed through the program thanks to the program’s founding sponsors, KOPA Real Estate Media and Amber Hart Homes. Those dogs include:
Ortiz says her focus is on long-stay dogs, those who have been in shelters for more than six months. At Austin Pets Alive alone, more than 50 long-stay dogs are waiting for homes.
“Shelter dogs can be more challenging to photograph,” Ortiz said. “They’re not used to lights or cameras. You have to be calm and patient. But it’s absolutely worth it.”
The professional portraits are shared on Ortiz’s social media pages, the Second Chances Dogs Instagram and Facebook pages, and are reshared by the shelters.
The program is now seeking 20 founding sponsors in total and hopes to partner with two additional rescue organizations.
“With the Second Chances Dogs program, we exist because businesses who truly love and support rescues sponsor the dog’s photo shoot,” Ortiz said.
For Ortiz, it’s simple: “Every dog deserves a second chance.”
The good news in this story is that Someone is helping dogs find a forever home. Today’s JohnKu talks about helping out. I hope you have a super weekend.
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