Well, 3 of the 5 are 7 and under so, it's not like they cost as much as a teenagers.

I'm just a lowly noc engineer.

Loving County, in far west Texas, is small but only has a population of 60.

http://www.us-places.com/Texas/Loving-County.htm

West Texas is booming now thanks to oil. Our population is currently is around 400,000 in the Midland-Odessa area and is expected to reach 700,000 by 2017. Was only about 300,000 two years ago. Times are crazy around here.

And unlike the oil boom in the 80's that came crashing down hard in 1987, I don't forsee this boom ending anytime soon. I dont think we'll ever see gas go back under 3.00 per gallon unless there's a major global economic crash.

We go to W. Texas (Big Bend National Park) about every two years during Thanksgiving. We rent a cabin inside the park and do lots of hiking. The park restaurant is awesome - huge windows to look out at the beautiful views while you dine.

Austin....ugh...too many hippies up there.

We're starting to see a little bit of a backlash against the transplants moving in.

Q: What's the one thing a native Texan hates to see?

A: A U-Haul with out-of-state plates.

Lol. I always get a kick out of Austin. Here it is the State Capital with a majority rule of republican government(Thank god!) And it's the most liberal city in Texas. Keep Austin Weird is an understatement. Love the music, and have many friends/relatives living there.
But at the same time I always joke about "Austin, California"!

And yet I'm sure by comparison that cities like San Francisco and LA make Austin seem like a bastion of conservatism.

I really liked Big Bend. It was pretty interesting when it rained. The entire desert seemed to explode with flowers.

San Francisco is not what it used to be. Since the first dot-com bubble, it's been increasingly gentrifying, and within the last couple of years, it's been suburbanized because a lot of people from the East Coast and Midwest are moving to the Bay Area because they want to work in Silicon Valley and live in SF, as a result there's just two kinds of people: yuppie bros and Zuckerberg wannabes. They are tearing down the older Victorian and mid-century buildings, which is what gave SF its own unique character, and building condominiums to house all these turkeys.

Haight Street, which people associate with hippies, is gone. That used to be a place to see offbeat, weird things, now it's another street lined with yuppie boutiques. I hear Austin is actually more diverse now, you don't have to be a millionaire or a trust fund kid to live there, so they get different types of people. That won't last if it starts to do what it's doing in SF. The biggest single demographic here in SF is 'douchebag.'

We refer to Austin as San Francisco East.

Well, I know a lot of Texans are put off by Austin or whatever- which is kind of ridiculous, it is after all your capitol and an important economic and cultural hub.

At any rate, let me know when people can pull off stuff like this in Austin- this is sort of exemplifies the worst of what's happening to this area:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ar...-excess/276521/

More and more people just kind admire this kind of thing rather than oppose it, their heroes are young rich douchebags, just because of the fact that they are extremely rich and can get away with whatever they want.

I'm not one usually given over to nostalgia, but I kind of miss the day when teenaged kids thought it was cool to be The Stones and be the next copy cat band, drinking, smoking, doing drugs. Now they admire any douche who makes tons of money and would destroy something cultural just so they can put up a giant statue of their own faces in its place. I'm not aware of Austin quite becoming like that yet. People who have never been to SF or who haven't been recently probably have a very wrong impression. It's a rich kid's playground.