Memos and Mirth

Dallas Design District

Saturdays in Dallas

November 5, 2016

We had an extremely busy Saturday.

We took a 12-mile walking tour of the city with the dogs. I was exhausted afterward, but had a hilarious time.

The Puppy

The morning started at Starbucks, where we ran into an adorable chocolate lab puppy.

Ingrid the Labradoodle playing with a chocolate lab mix in front of the Oak Lawn Starbucks.

Ingrid is only about a year old now, but the lab puppy made her seem like a gigantic monster.

We then headed to the Design District, where we passed the Playboy Marfa statue and randomly ran into one of our favorite bartenders in at a car rental place.

Where Texas gets its revenue

November 4, 2016

Texas is one of the few places in the country without a state income tax. (This was a pleasant surprise when I moved from Minnesota.)

My latest post for The Dallas Morning News is about where Texas gets its revenue from in the absence of an income tax:

LGBT / Oak Lawn

Oak Lawn’s 2016 Halloween Block Party

October 31, 2016

We had a little gathering in the gayborhood.

Oak Lawn hosts the largest Halloween block party in Dallas. The block party was pretty huge this year, with several pop-up bars along Cedar Springs.

Krystal and some of our neighbors at the Oak Lawn Halloween block party.

A view of the crowds at the Oak Lawn Halloween block party.

These creepy cat costumes were the worst thing ever. Note the t-shirts.

Life

25 weeks of mixtapes

October 26, 2016

Man with guitar by Kimberly Richards via Unsplash.

The music editor.

While most of my friends love Apple Music or Spotify, I am an avid Soundcloud user.

Soundcloud is a Berlin-based audio platform. The long DJ-sets on the platform have provided the soundtrack to my workdays for years now.

I started a little Soundcloud experiment last spring which consisted of producing a weekly 10-song playlist. Twenty-five weeks later, the weekly digital mixtapes have caught on with some of my friends and provided me with an interesting music time-capsule.

Dallas

The State Fair of Texas

October 24, 2016

I finally made it to the State Fair this year.

And it was bizarre.

My first experience with the fair was unusual because I went for a “first-timers at the Fair” news story.

The State Fair marketing team ferried us around the park in these terrifying go-carts and allowed us to cut the lines, so it wasn’t a typical State Fair experience. That story is here.

And yes, a picture of me eating a corn dog made the print edition. Watch out, Anderson Cooper.

Michael and I went back a week later and had a “real” State Fair experience.

Here is what stuck out:

Some fair visitors are surprisingly rude. Moms in particular had no problem essentially cutting people off and basically ramming people with baby strollers.
The butter sculpture was strange. There was a cow with penguins eyeing its utters. I don’t understand.
A lot of things are creepy. Besides the butter sculpture failure, there is a carnival barker with no legs, a lot creepy smiling corn dog pictures, and a Nicholas Cage ride.

Oh, and the giant cowboy puppet that talks!

Here are some pictures.

The creepy carnival barker at the State Fair.

State Fair of Texas butter sculptures. Why are the penguins eyeing the cow?

Big Tex at the State Fair of Texas.

dogs / fitness

Almost Tennis

October 10, 2016

We almost started playing tennis!

I say almost because the primary activity is really sprinting after foul balls before the labradoodle gets to them.

Ingrid the labradoodle hoarding a tennis ball.

Gunter at the Craddock Park tennis courts in the Perry Heights neighborhood of Oak Lawn.

LGBT / Oak Lawn

Texas Latino Gay Pride

October 9, 2016

We made it to Texas Latino Gay Pride.

The festival was held at Reverchon Park, which is at the edge of the gayborhood. There was lots of food, liquor, and some salsa dancing.

Mexican tchotchkes being sold at Texas Latino Gay Pride.

Mexican wrestler masks for sale at Texas Latino Gay Pride.

Dallas / LGBT

Straight Clubbing

October 7, 2016

Although Cedar Springs has a large number of gay bars and restaurants, there aren’t actually that many places to dance.

That is why we’ve found ourselves going to more straight bars. Here are our three favorite straight bars in Dallas right now:

1. Beauty Bar

1924 N Henderson Ave, Dallas, TX 75206 / Website

Who knew that chain dive bars were a thing? Beauty Bar is a bumping place in the Knox/Henderson neighborhood of Dallas. It’s a nail bar during the day, and a dance club at night.

Beautiful people at Beauty Bar in Dallas (Hi Walter!)

The No Requests sign at Beauty Bar in Dallas.

Beauty Bar is a small, single-room place with a retro setting. (It actually reminds me a lot of Liquor Lyle’s in Minneapolis.)

Fort Worth / LGBT

Tarrant County Gay Pride

October 5, 2016

We made it to the other side of town for Tarrant County Gay Pride.

The parade and festival was held in downtown Fort Worth. It was smaller and less organized than Dallas Pride, but still a lot of fun.

There were also a ton of people from Dallas, so we ran into a lot of friends.

Oak Lawn

High-Rise, Dallas

October 4, 2016

The movie High-Rise is about a luxury apartment building that descends into chaos. The film opens with shots of the trashed apartment building and a pool strewn with bodies.

A man then kills and eats a dog.

Although they aren’t eating dogs at iLume Park yet, my apartment building has experienced a rapid and sad decline.

I was so impressed with the building when I first moved in last year – we had a free happy hour every day of the week and continental breakfast in the mornings. There were dog walkers, maids, and tons of events for the residents.

They also did fecal testing / DNA profiles on the dogs, so they could fine anyone who failed to pick up after their dogs.

The building was like a boutique hotel filled with gay professionals and recent arrivals from out-of-state. It was fabulous.

Happy Hour at iLume Park in Oak Lawn, Dallas.

The decline

But the leasing agents had trouble filling the building. They then relaxed their leasing standards, slashed deposit requirements, and started offering 2-month rent discounts to new tenants.

A waive of ratchet residents moved in. There were drug dens, dime bags in the stairwell, break-ins, fights, and gun threats. Many of the original residents fled.

Dallas / Dallas Morning News / LGBT

Fall finally arrives in Dallas

October 3, 2016

Kennedy Davenport performs at Dallas Pride.

That picture sums up my September.

The past month whizzed by.

We had gay pride parades in Dallas and Fort Worth, long pool days, and trips to Six Flags Over Texas. I will cover everything in posts this month because I’ve promised myself to stop having a Truman Capote dilemma and finally start blogging again.

Dallas Morning News / Oak Lawn

Hillary and the pitbull

September 7, 2016

I got up around 4 a.m. today, wrote the morning news roundup, and then posted the newspaper’s Hillary Clinton ‘recommendation’ to Twitter and Facebook (where it would go viral.)

By 5:30 a.m., I was running for my life down Cedar Springs Road.

I came across a stray pitbull while taking the dogs to the walk-up Starbucks at the edge of Oak Lawn. We were several blocks from my apartment building when I noticed the 70-pound pitbull staring at us from behind an apartment building fence.

Ingrid, my labradoodle, barked at the pitbull and it darted toward a fence opening.

Cut to me sprinting at full-speed down Cedar Springs road with a labradoodle and a Chihuahua. It felt like a scene from Stranger Things (or at least a Dallas version of Scary Movie.)

Best Week Ever / Dallas Morning News

Rain, sororities, and the KKK

September 1, 2016

August was a strange.

Like the rest of this summer, there were far more storms than usual. The sight of a rain wall coming through downtown Dallas was a common occurrence and I got stuck outside in the rain all the time.

My weekdays are long now. I wake up around 4:30 a.m. to write morning recaps for the paper. (These will eventually become newsletters.) A long-ish dog walk happens, and then I’m in the office until halfway through the evening.

Life

The Keurig

August 17, 2016

Coffee picture by Mikesh Kaos via Unsplash

I finally bought a Keurig.

My resistance had many reasons like faux-environmental righteousness and germ fears, but my real concern was cost. Why pay $80 for a coffee-maker that requires me to buy expensive pods?

The answer is: convenience. Well, and because the alternatives were equally expensive.

Cocktails

Flamingo Pool Cocktails

August 16, 2016

Amazon purchases at the pool are generally a bad life choice, but there are exceptions.

Last week we saw a guy with a flamingo beverage floatie at the pool. It was so campy that we had to buy some (because, adulting.) A quick Amazon search revealed that flamingo floaties are only $15 for a dozen, so the purchase was a no-brainer.

Flamingo cocktails with floaties.

At the iLume pool with our moonshine based cocktails.

Moonshine-based cocktails at the iLume pool.

Best Week Ever / Dallas

New Routines

August 15, 2016

After being at the new job for a month now, a routine is finally beginning to take shape. I initially tried to bus downtown for the first week, but I gave up and started driving.

I live three miles from my office, so the 45-minute public transit commute felt ridiculous. I also decided that subjecting myself to the chaos of downtown’s West End Station was not worth it. Why was I standing in 100 degree heat among drug dealers, panhandlers, and drunk people while waiting for a bus that would be 20 minutes late?

Now that my public transportation experiment ended, my commutes are way shorter, cheaper, and more comfortable. (Hey, at least I tried.)

Dallas

The Brawl

August 1, 2016

Cops breaking up a fight in downtown Dallas.

There was a bizarre brawl in downtown Dallas yesterday.

The entire trip downtown was a comedy of errors – we first went to the office to set up my new monitor stand, but we didn’t have the right tools.

We then tried to explore the scary downtown Dallas tunnel system, but it’s apparently locked down on the weekends. After being semi-trapped in an abandon tunnel/mall for a while, we emerged to street level and walked to a 7-Eleven store.

A black guy was in front of the 7-Eleven screaming at a heavily tattooed white guy. And I really mean “screaming,” in the Kelis-sense of the word.

There was also a very bored-looking black woman with them.

We stood by some Russian tourists and watched the screaming match, but couldn’t make any sense of it. As the screaming got more heated, I became worried that someone might whip out a gun, so Michael and I went into the 7-Eleven.

There was only a single employee in the 7-Eleven, who seemed more interested in fixing a broken cooler than cashing out the customers waiting to pay. I was standing at the register as the outside screaming match moved down the street. I couldn’t see the men anymore, but I could still hear them screaming from inside of the store.

Then all hell broke loose.

Dallas Morning News / Drag Shows / LGBT / Oak Lawn

Drag queens and buses

July 25, 2016

Last week I started my new job and it was exhausting.

Moving to The Dallas Morning News was a dramatic change for me.

Back in Minnesota, I worked on a 7,000-person suburban corporate campus. The Thomson Reuters campus was so huge that I had law school classmates who worked there for years before I ran into them. It was also common not to recognize anyone in the hallways if you didn’t work in that part of the building.

Since moving to Dallas, I worked from home and didn’t see coworkers in-person unless I was visiting a client’s office.

Now, I go to a downtown office every day. It’s nice being back in a real office because working from home started feeling like being under house arrest. I also had clients in every time zone, so there wasn’t a clear end to the work day.

Dallas / dogs

White Rock Lake

July 15, 2016

Turtles chilling on a hot summer weekend

A day at the lake

White Rock Lake is a massive reservoir about 5 miles outside of downtown Dallas. It is the perfect place for an ambitious morning dog walk. Or so we thought.

The lake was beautiful, but the path was very long.

Fishermen at the dock at White Rock Lake

Fishermen at White Rock Lake (and some lady taking pregnancy photos.)

Turtles chilling on a hot summer weekend

Cocktails / Oak Lawn

Summer Pool Cocktails

July 13, 2016

The pool is one of the best parts of my apartment building.

It’s a great place to relax and socialize with a cocktail during the ~~horribly~~ hot Dallas summers.

However, this summer we had to change our pool strategy.

The demographics of our apartment building changed this spring and now the pool is overrun with children. Our neighbors like to lounge around the pool with booze, whereas children love to run, scream, dive, and splash each other.

It is hard to relax with a mimosa when your pool feels like a Chuck E. Cheese waterpark.

That’s why we fled to iLume – the building across the street. Our complex has the same owner, so they allow us to use the iLume pool for small one-time fee. The awkwardness of walking on Cedar Springs with a bathing suit on is totally worth it.

Cocktails at the iLume Park pool in Oak Lawn, Dallas.