texas trip-and-Houston is a problem

I suppose now that I am home, I will blog about my not so exciting maybe worth the expense trip to Texas. The whole reason my mom, dad and I went to Texas was to collect all we could and all we wanted from my Mothers parents who had died last year. We had to go sort through mounds of boxes of books, furniture, jewelry, dishes, old diaries, music and everything they owned. The horrible thing was, they kept almost everything they ever received, which made sorting very time consuming. I never really had to do any sorting, though I must say, that would’ve been much more to my liking then having a child of seven, latch on to me so much as to wait outside the bathroom for me, and then be insane enough to ask me what I was doing in there. My Uncle who is my Mothers older brother is probably 3/4 carnivore, which was horrible news for my vegetarian aunt, Kate. So for the whole time I was there, Monday through Wednesday my Aunt who is my Mothers younger sister, bought dinner and made dinner vegetarian style. Only Wednesday night did she eat the Texas rib roast barbecue my Uncle Ed made, she had to you can’t experience Texas without experiencing their barbecue. We all stayed at my Uncle Edwards house in San Antonio, his wife Sylvia and their three kids, Norma (7), Pricilla(18), and Samuel(2). Also my Aunt Kate, her husband Charlie and their two boys, Benjamin (12) and Declan (8). Plus My mom, dad and me, so they had a full house at least my mom’s oldest sister and her 7 teenagers didn’t come, or my mom’s youngest brother and his two kids, or they would’ve been swarmed! As my mom and dad searched through numerous boxes filled with memories and other things, I was being severely tortured by a tiny kid with a slightly crippled arm. There are many awful stories behind this kid that made me not want to be around her, but at the same time I was doing a huge favor to my Uncle Charlie who had been her buddy two weeks prior to my arrival, when I came, Charlie was discontinued. The only thing we did outside the house besides grocery shopping was we went ice skating, they tell me I was pretty good for my first time, I say not. Pricilla the oldest of Edwards, stayed in her room unless it was dinner, time to feed Samuel or when Sylvia Samuel and Norma were off to the mall. If she needed anything she’d call her mom on her cell phone and get it. The whole time she was a mole never came out to see the light of day. Reminds me of my brother, 18 and mole like. We shipped about five boxes full of what my mom wished to take from her parents, but there are still trillions of boxes in my Uncle’s garage. I got some stuff too, two Thank You for Not Smoking signs and some old jewelry. Texas is extremely humid and when you drive down the freeway, do not fret if you missed the exit to a steakhouse, for there are twelve hundred more down the road. I didn’t really enjoy San Antonio it was big and flat, but when we arrived in Houston late Thursday, I began to like San Antonio a bit more. We were driving into Houston on the jammed traffic congested interstate the view from the rental car window was nothing but box stores, steakhouses, endless construction areas and industrial buildings next to glamorous residential housing. Everything thing is crowded store beside store, and soon you have traveled only six miles into Houston and you begin to wonder if you had already seen that cluster of houses, or that tall glass building erecting from the housing below. Bridges and overpasses lay one by one atop each other making concrete criss-cross patterns in the sky. After struggling through crazy Texas drivers and overpopulated city freeway congestion, we found ourselves looking out at gorgeous downtown Houston. Tall buildings protruded above everything as concrete overpasses cut through the city. I suppose you don’t really come to respect and appreciate the place you live until you’ve experienced a place much less respectable then yours. All in all, it was a trip and riding in the airplane with lightly salted peanuts and a window seat at night was really the best part. Even the turbulence was neat, and I saw the most beautiful sunset on board. On the bottom was a deep red followed by orange and slice of yellow, then green, a gap of light blue and lastly purple below the black night sky, with two bright stars twinkling diagonal from each other. It was lovely seeing Eugene, *********, Salem and then Portland at night with all the lights, after a week of 98 degrees and humidity being back home with 80 and no humidity is freezing See Lacey's flickr for more Texas pictures.