All My Exes Live in Texas

Long-time readers of this blog know the great disdain I hold for the great southwest, a measured response to the dog-years I spent living there. But now another of my friends has decided to move to the tiny little blue dab of jelly in the huge red doughnut of Texas: P-Roo and her husband have packed the dogs and the car and headed out today to Austin.

P-Roo (a new nickname for my girlfriendgirl) and I have been friends for a million years, since the dark days when we were married to earlier, evil husbands. Those two men were as close to being friends as sociopathic lawyers can be, and every time we'd run into each other at some lame-ass law school function, she and I would be delighted to see one another and we'd beg our husbands to make plans for the four of us to go out. They'd agree, and then we wouldn't meet, and my ex, the Antichrist, would conveniently forget to give me their phone number or he wouldn't know it, or something.

We divorced at about the same time, she and I and immediately became the best of friends. Nothing like losing 160 pounds of inconvenient buzz-kill to lighten up a relationship.

P-Roo is an artist, too. She was a jeweler until health reasons forced her to give up metal working (and red meat, and alcohol and wheat and nuts and bananas and strawberries and pretty much everything that makes life liveable. Except coffee. She can still drink coffee. And smoke cigarettes, and what the fuck is it to you if we do?)

Now she is a quilter, and in fact, it is she who does all my machine quilting for me. She designs all of her own quilting patterns and they are pretty amazing. I particularly love the ones she based on a book of Gothic stonework (that I bought for her at a used book store in Sarasota a couple of summers ago). Synergy, people, synergy.

But today she left for Texas, and the only bright spot I can find in this is that the bitch will finally start reading my blog, just to keep up with me.

Any of you out there in Austin, or quilters looking for an amazing long-arm quilter to do your tops for you, drop me an e-mail and I'll tell you where to find her. Austin may be one of the hippest cities in America, but it still can be cold and lonely if you don't know anyone there.