The Great Sunday Times Scarcity Conspiracy

I’ve been using Google calendar in tandem with Remember The Milk to get me organized and it’s working super-good because I’m more organized than I’ve ever been.  The only cracks are when there’s stuff I know I need to do but haven’t yet decided when.  So Saturday I started a list: cats to the vet, shop for desk glasses, buy plants for house, order blood pressure monitor, etc.  This is what I mean by organized.

Early morning sky from Spin Cycle on Guadalupe

Almost immediately the mystery was solved for one thing on the list, the “subscribe to Sunday New York Times” item.  I like my Sunday Times a lot, even though it’s only a habit picked up in the last year.  The trope is you go out and get it along with your coffee and spend the morning in bed with them, but I don’t drink coffee.  What I do is digest the Times piece by piece at lunch during the week; I read slow so I’m usually finishing the book review just when the Chronicle comes out Thursdays.

Not this week.  There were few Times to be found in Austin, apparently, and none at my usual outlets.  Pronto Market: “Never got delivered.”  Fresh Plus: ditto.  Called BookPeople: “We order twenty every week and only got four and they’re all gone.  They’ve been shorting us for weeks now.”

WTF?  The Times is printed locally, or so they say.  Is demand suddenly outstripping supply, or have primo markets like Hyde park dropped off the map, or something else?

Spring comes to the Elizabet Ney

Either way, I’m getting my butt in gear to subscribe.  Then all I’ll have to worry about is someone nabbing it off the front lawn.  Seeing as most people in the hood are either students or act like them, I can’t see too many of them being up early enough Sunday morning to do that.