The Good Life Blog

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Sarah Bird’s new novel, how perfect is that, is a scream. It captures exactly what life was like among the rich and fiercely aggressive social climbers of West Austin starting in the spring of 2003. If you are willing to laugh till it hurts and then laugh some more, this is indeed a must-read. 

Bird wowed a crowd of more than a hundred people last night at Austin’s BookPeople. She had the standing-room-only audience giggling from the git-go, first by advising what folks were missing on TV by coming to her gig. Chief among these was Quads With 2 Moms, in which same sex couple Karen and Martha discover they are both pregnant with twins! (Gosh, why would anyone want to miss that?)

But Bird’s reading brought the biggest howls as she breezed through the first chapters, providing an irresistible tease for anyone within earshot who hadn’t already bought the book. Seems like most already had, of course, given Bird’s huge hometown fan club from previous novels, many of them also set in Austin. She patiently signed copies for more than an hour after her reading and even those of us at the tail end of the long line were not complaining about the wait.

My favorite excerpt—and your tease to grab a copy—of what Bird read: “Wretched Xcess was not just the name of my (catering) business but the encapsulation of an entire zeitgeist as manifested in Austin, Texas. That was a heady time when when too much was never enough and the clever boys in the backward caps, Teva sandals, and cargo shorts could not burn through their venture capital fast enough. Excess, that’s what my clever boys wanted and that’s what I provided.”

If you missed last night’s reading I urge you to turn off the tube and get to Barnes & Noble on Thursday, June 19, to see and hear Bird charm the socks off another crowd. It starts at 7:30pm at 10000 Research Blvd. in the Arboretum.  You won’t be sorry, I promise.

We know we need to backup data, but often we don’t, and someday we pay the price 

Today’s story in the Austin American-Statesman about the burglary of the Hays Free Press office in Kyle is a heartbreaking reminder of the necessity for maintaining a secure source of backup data, off-site, for any business. We can only hope that publisher Cyndy Slovak-Barton had provided a means to retrieve invaluable files that were on the computers taken by thieves. Unfortunately, judging from the photo of her, head in hands, elbows on her desk, it seems that may not be the case.

The same thing happened to us when we were publishing the In Fact newsletter, before we launched The Good Life magazine. Someone broke a window in broad daylight while we were away and took off with our computers and some other goods. We had our computer hard drives backed up on other drives in the office, but the sumbitches stole those, too. We had some older files on discs stored out of the office, but not nearly enough of the files needed to reconstruct our whole operation.

Making the situation worse, our finances were thin and buying new computers was beyond our means. Had it not been for friends who let us use a credit card to buy new computers we would’ve been out of business. The newsletter, which we ultimately owned for five years and is still being published by the current owner for a grand total of almost thirteen years, would not exist today had it not been for the generosity of those friends. 

Today’s story about the Hays County Press burglary gave me a sinking feeling and reminded me that we were just as vulnerable today as we were when our computers were stolen before.  And the story prompted me to do what I should’ve done years ago. I signed up for an on-line data backup service that will automatically retrieve and store our data. If crooks ever hit us again, they may get the hardware but the data’s safe, secure, and can be quickly retrieved and downloaded to new computers. 

We opted for backup through Moxy.com, a service that’s got great testimonials from top-flight businesses, and it’s cheap at $4.95 per month per computer with unlimited storage space. A salesperson walked me through the sign up, log in, and setup procedures and coached me on how to select the files I wanted to backup and kickoff the uploading process.

I’m going to sleep much better now.