Elizabeth’s Journal

Wonderful Week in Houston—except that it was Houston

Jonathan and I had a great time last week in Houston—Kathleen & John are always easy to stay with, and Jonathan was just thrilled to have Matthew and Courtney around so much. It is so nice to have such a fun family that lives reasonably close by! I know there are many families that might not even know that a niece had been in town, but our family flocks to where a visiting family member is. Felicia and Cat came for dinner on Wednesday, and when Jonathan & I went to Tim & Felicia’s to spend a lazy afternoon in the swimming pool on Thursday, Felicia talked me into staying over there for dinner, and Kathleen, Courtney, and Margaret all came over. I love that!

Having made those nice statements, may I just say now that Houston is a cesspit. The weather, although unseasonably nice a few evenings, was just miserably humid, and it never smells fresh there—too many cars, too many people, too much concrete. It’s an ugly city, except for small (expensive) areas like West U. And definitely still a difference in attitude between it and Austin, even if Austin has grown quite a bit the last ten years. I’ve been keeping an eye out for free wireless access sites for Matthew when he comes next week to UT; it hasn’t been very hard since there’s been a link to some on the home page of the Austin 360 site for a while now—there are about 15-20 listed. I myself have been to one and successfully gotten onto their network, browsed the Internet, downloaded my e-mail, etc. And in a city the size of Houston, wouldn’t you think there would be comparably more? Nope. After about 20 minutes Googling, I found exactly ONE site with free wireless access—the Schlotzsky’s on San Felipe, by the Galleria. I went there on Tuesday after visiting Central Market, and their network was down (many bad words). On Wednesday, after visiting the Cockrell Butterfly Center and the planetarium with Jonathan, Matthew, and Courtney, we went by again, and this time I was able to access my mail online—all 571 messages. (This was all necessary b/c Kathleen’s computer won’t allow anyone to access a site that begins with https, and no one can figure out how to fix it; and then my dial-up modem wouldn’t recognize their phone line and kept telling me there was no dial tone—but it worked fine at Felicia’s. Go figure.) Anyway, traffic in Houston is terrible—good thing Matthew advised me to go the wrong way on I-10 for two exits in order to get on the HOV lane to return to Katy, otherwise I might even now be still sitting on the highway. It’s ugly. It’s humid. It has bugs. And the radio sucks. Man, am I glad I don’t live there anymore.

I did have a very nice lunch with Amanda (Mims) Campbell on Tuesday, sans Jonathan (he was getting Courtney all to himself and didn’t even give me a hug when I returned 4-1/2 hours later). She is 24 weeks pregnant and looking lovely. I offered to stay with her when all the family depart, and she thought that was a great idea, so it looks like I’ll be there in January sometime for a few days (she’s due 5 Dec but will probably have a C-section earlier due to her back problems). It’s her first child, and of course since I’ve known her since birth (her dad and mine were roommates at Rice University), I am very happy for her & James.

I also want to say what a nice time Jonathan and I had on Thursday at Tim & Felicia’s. We spent about 2-1/2 hours in the pool—Jonathan wasn’t keen on going down the slide or off the diving board himself, but he vicariously did it through me (“Mummy, do the slide! Mummy, jump on the diving board! Mummy, go down the slide again!”). I think I must have gone down the slide about 30 times and jumped off the diving board at least 15. It was fun! Cat was looking lovely and enjoying her first few days in junior high, and her new kitten Scarlett is as cute as can be—Jonathan thought she was great and giggled whenever he saw her. Jonathan also enjoyed getting in Tim’s boat, although he didn’t like the horn.

Finally, before we headed out on Friday, Jonathan and I had lunch at a Cracker Barrel with Kathleen, Courtney, and Matthew. Towards the end of the lunch, Jonathan put his hand up Matthew’s T-shirt sleeve. Both Matthew & I thought he was trying to just wipe off his hand on Matthew’s arm (wouldn’t be too surprising), but we then realized that he just wanted to touch him—he does that all the time with Dale, me, Jenny. He did the same thing to Courtney after that.

Oops—that wasn’t the real “finally”, this is. We had some great evenings of playing cards while I was there this time. On Monday Courtney, Matthew, and I kept Kathleen up until 1 a.m. playing Nertz, which is basically a game of speed solitaire. Then on Wednesday the four of us stayed up until 1:30 a.m. playing euchre. Thursday Matthew was playing volleyball, so Courtney, Kathleen, and I had a go at playing Ugly, which was pretty fun and would have been more successful had Kathleen not been totally exhausted (hmm, wonder why?). We said all evenings that Grama’s (Kitty Lou’s) card spirit was there playing with us.

Posted by elizabeth at August 17, 2003 10:51 PM