If you were one of the Austin adopters who missed our SA pick-up party because of the sudden/unexpected cold weather, here’s the recap:

It wasn’t much of a party… more like people running up, removing one glove to sign adoption contracts as quickly as possible, telling me I was very brave, quickly grabbing their stuffed animals (partly out of happiness, partly to ward off frostbite), and fleeing back to their cars. Over and over again.

The SAs were blowing off the tables. They eventually huddled in a large, fluffy pile enacting a single extreme-slo-mo stuffed Super Bowl dog pile on top of, of course, a single stuffed dog.

At the event’s climax, four children were there at once. They took the time to put the provided sugar-based googly eyes on their pieces of cake and sat eating them, SAs in their laps, while their brave parents waited with hands in coats, pacing to keep the blood flowing and catching or chasing the occasional rogue plate or fork or stuffed animal picked up and flung by the wind. I mostly stood, drinking off-the-shelf Sprite poured from a three liter plastic bottle. It had been keeping my hands warm until that same invisible, unexpected plate-flinging force had turned the Sprite cold, miraculously, without ice.