The fun begins around 8 AM and lasts until 2 PM. Saturday’s sale was held in the South Lamar Shopping Center, where the new Alamo Drafthouse is located. Sunday’s sale is at Taco Xpress, 2529 South Lamar.

To read more about this fundraiser and the village of Aragumbay, visit tsunamibakesale.org.

If you have some gift or other shopping to do this weekend, please stop by Ten Thousand Villages of Austin, a nonprofit fair trade retail store at 1317 South Congress.

On Saturday, January 22nd, from 11am - 9pm the store is hosting a benefit for survivors of the tsunami in Southeast Asia and will donate 50% of its sales to the MCC Asia Earthquake Fund. There will also be live music.

I noticed a sign taped to the window at Jo’s, too; a portion of Jo’s proceeds will go to two different organizations, one benefitting animals and the other benefitting children. I’m sure there are other merchants in the South Congress shopping district who will be participating (if you know of any, leave a comment and I’ll add a list here).

Photographs don’t adequately convey the experience of 37th street. The closest simulation I’ve found is the virtual tour of Central Texas holiday lights.

The pictures that follow were taken in Jamie Lipman’s back- and side yards. Jamie is, by all accounts I’ve read, the man responsible for starting the tradition.

Visitors should heed the advice given by Adam Rice: walk, especiallysuperimportant if you’re attempting to make the trip on a weekend. Drive down 38th (the purple line on the map below—click ‘continue reading’ for the map) and find a side street to park on. Avoid turning down Cedar on a busy night, as this is the street the cars turn down after they’ve driven through the street. Speedway, W 33 or W 32, and Grooms are the streets I’d try first. We did get lucky this year, finding a plum space on Cedar, but it was part luck and part stupidity—I’d intended to go all the way to Speedway and just turned too soon.

If you want to see the lights but can’t make the trek on foot (I can think of several cases in which this might apply), you will want to line up to drive through the street by driving north on Guadalupe and preparing to turn right on W 37th (the blue line on the map below).

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In Austin, 91.7 is a shared frequency, with KOOP broadcasting between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. weekdays and 9 a.m. and 10 p.m. weekends, with KVRX, UT’s student radio station, broadcasting at all other times. Both stations give airtime to music not otherwise widely available on the Austin airwaves, and like Austin’s two other listener-supported stations, KMFA and KUT, are absolutely worth a listen.

Listen:

• KOOP program schedule
• KVRX program schedule
• KMFA’s on-air guide
• KUT’s program schedule
• KAZI FM homepage

I was also surprised that we didn’t have to wait very long. On primary day the line stretched out the door, but today there were only ten or so people in line when we arrived. We signed the book, received little blue strips of paper proclaiming us ‘qualified’, voted, and were back in our car within ten minutes.

I never vote early because it makes me nervous. I always think my vote will somehow be ‘lost’. This anxiety has only been intensified by new e-Slate machines, which I don’t have much faith in to begin with. My old lost-vote nightmare involved my paper ballot fluttering out of the locked ballot box into a paper shredder, or something equally unlikely. Now, all I have to do is imagine a power failure.

No offense meant to anyone who lives in a cooler climate. Folks for whom 80 degrees is hot are not usually living with the same concentration of air conditioning that we do in Texas (though not everyone who needs a fan or air conditioner has one). In the everydayness of life, I find it quite easy to forget what ‘normal’ is for other places. Just as some people aren

Online information on early voting for residents of

• Travis County
• Hays County (refer to the downloadable PDF)
• Williamson County (refer to the downloadable PDF)

Travis County residents can verify their voter registration online using the one of the most helpful tools I’ve ever encountered on a government website!