Hello, friends!

We are settling into life in Austin, which includes doing some exploring on the weekends. On Friday, we decided to start fulfilling our personal mission to eat and rank all the BBQ restaurants in the Austin area and headed over to Terry Black's Barbecue just south of downtown. It. Was. Amazing. Granted, it was only the second stop on our BBQ bucket list (first was The Salt Lick) but I think Terry Black's is going to hold onto that #1 spot for awhile ;).
Here's our food:
I should add that earlier in the day, the exterminator paid us another visit (he's truly the best friend we've made thus far) to investigate the wildlife that has graced our apartment. To no one's surprise, he told us we are the first people in our entire complex that has had a scorpion inside. Figures. He also got excited when I produced the scorpion (that had been out on our balcony in a plastic bag) and let us know that it was a rare breed that he had never seen in person and was almost never found inside houses. So that's cool. And terrifying.  He even asked if he could bring it with him to show his coworkers. We gladly obliged. We've luckily been bug-free since then.

On Saturday, Ali worked and Peter and I got a few errands done before heading to the driving range. Peter used to golf a lot but the lack of a car made it a bit of a challenge to keep up with the hobby in Australia. Since we've lugged those clubs from Minnesota to Missouri to Melbourne and now to Austin, I'm adamant that he actually puts them to use ;).

While Peter golfed, I downloaded and started reading Mindy Kaling's book Why Not Me? and it's absolutely hilarious so far. I loved her in The Office, but haven't really followed her much since then, so I'm looking forward to catching up with what she's been doing.
After Peter finished up golfing, we decided to check out the view from Mount Bonnell, just a bit outside the city on the Colorado River, which is also called Lake Austin. Which is potentially also the same thing as Lady Bird Lake? I'm confused about all the different "lakes" in Austin because they're actually all just sections of the Colorado River as far as I can tell. Anyway, it was too foggy to see much, but you can make out the skyline in the distance.
We then met Ali at Nordstrom and headed to the Cheesecake Factory next door for some dessert. It was super crowded and took forever to get a table, despite spotting about 238032 empty tables waiting to be cleaned off that sat untouched for 15-20 minutes. I think this might actually be my biggest pet peeve. I was minutes away from volunteering to bus the tables myself if it meant we could order our cheesecake faster. Maybe I'm just super impatient, but I cannot stand when restaurants make you wait and then let open tables sit.

After dessert, we headed over to a new rooftop bar called Backbeat for a drink. There was a really unique selection and I honestly don't even remember what was in the one I finally settled on, but here it is in all its artistic glory:
On Sunday Peter streamed the Vikings game from his computer, I lounged around a bit, and then we ran a couple more errands. Fascinating stuff, really.

We have a low-key week planned, with our first visitors arriving on Saturday! Since we won't be going home to Minneapolis for Thanksgiving, my mom and stepdad are going to come down this weekend to check out our new place and celebrate Thanksgiving a little bit early.