Home is...

...where the pool is.

...where I eat the last bite of tomato and basil salad.

...where Lucy sleeps in my mom's suitcase.

I haven't blogged since the last photoblog. I'll try to be more responsible in the future. Next week's topic is...

Movement.

Straight Lines

I took this from the car at the U-Haul return

The railing on our porch

There is a wine rack above our fridge. We keep our booze in it.

Everybody's workin' for the weekend... except Matt.

Matt starts work today. I understand why he's excited. It's a new place, new people, new learning, etc. I understand why I'm excited. I'll get to relax a little, we'll finally have some money, 24 hrs a day for 2 weeks is too much "togetherness," etc. But this marks the start of real life in Houston. The grind, as they say, and I don't know that I'm ready for that. So far it's felt like vacation. It's hot, we don't know our way around, we eat out every night, I don't do my hair... sounds like vacation to me. But when Matt left for work this morning it was a very real reminder that, eventually, I will have to live in the real world again, too. Will I like Houston as a home and not a vacation? Only time will tell. I like it so far, right?

I'll post my photoblog in a little bit. I'm not quite ready. I procrastinated.

H.E.B.

It stands for Here Everything's Better. I think it's the stupidest name ever for a grocery store (reminds me of B.C., Best Choice, Pizza in Evart), but hey, I would shop at a store called Dead Puppies if they had a large selection of food and organics... and no actual dead puppies. And this place has that (selection and organics, I mean, not the dead puppies), so I think we found our grocery store! This is a major accomplishment. In Appleton we couldn't find a grocery store. There was a Piggly Wiggly, which was super-crappy and didn't even seem totally sanitary... shocking with a name like Piggly Wiggly. Then there was Copps, which was clean and big but shockingly disorganized and had nothing organic. Woodman's was like the local equivalent of Wal-Mart. Festival was pretty nice, but 25 minutes away from our apartment. Seriously, I think we went to each of these grocery stores once and didn't go back. Then we moved to Ludington and the choices were Meijer and Wal-Mart, so we chose Meijer, which I like, but it was like baby-sized. Seriously. Our meat choices were (old) steak, (old) chicken, and (old) bacon. It was such a struggle - you don't realize how important a good grocery store is until you don't have one! So finding HEB here in Houston is really exciting. It has the feel of Whole Foods but not the insane prices. It's big and bright with tons of beautiful produce and seafood cases and organic garlic and everything I want in a grocery store. They also make a ton of cool breads there, which is exciting because I kind of love anything home-made-y that I can just buy without making myself.

Yesterday we found a big produce market to the south where I think the Mexican vendors gave me a deal for speaking Spanish to them, and a bakery called El Bolillo. I think the technical translation for bolillo is a white bread roll, but it's also a slang term for a white person in Spanish. Needless to say, I will shop at that bakery forever because I think it's so funny to be the only white person in a place that's basically called White Person.

We made it!

Alive, well, and with relatively few problems, Matt and I got to Houston today. Seeing the skyline for the first time was really exciting. I only got to see it from a distance because we don't live very close to downtown and we just went right to our apartment. So far the feel that I get from this place is good. I like the way the roads feel, how the plants grow, how close we are to everything, the pace, and, mostly, the fact that we live like 5 seconds from PF Chang's.

We are kind of moved in to our apartment, but not really. It's really nice, but it seems so small after having a two bedroom. I have to keep reminding myself that it's only for 6 months and we don't want to pay to air condition anything more than we have to. When we were signing the lease the girl was super nice, but I was SO over it. Matt and I kept looking at each other like, "We know..." Mentally, we're very ready to buy our first house down here. Financially, we need a few months. Wouldn't it be cool if instead of moving all this stuff into this random apartment we were moving into our first house? I know.

We broke half the front bumper off Matt's car taking it off the trailer. I told Matt to just forget it and buy a new car. He told me I was only saying that because I was hot and tired. I said he was probably right so he should take me up on it before I changed my mind.

The cats officially hate us. After shoving sedatives down their throat, forcing them into cages for hours, bouncing them out of their soma vacation on the highway, and then giving them a bath when they finally got to their new home, you really can't blame them. There's as many of them as there are of us, so we think they might be staging a mutiny. Only time, and the litter box, will tell.

Drive drive drive

Well we made it halfway in just one day. We're in Charleston, MO and if this is any indication of what Texas is going to be like, I'm a little less excited. Super backwoods. At least Houston is a big city. I'm anxious to get there and see our new home but we still have a day and a half of driving before that happens! Tomorrow we stay in Texarkana to see Troy, which is fun because Troy's so insanely smart that I always leave hanging out with him with a brain full of mush. It's a good mush, though, like mashed potatoes.

D Day

Tomorrow morning we leave. I feel like a marshmallow inside, even though I don't exactly know what that means. I don't know how I'm supposed to do this so I will either figure it out as I go or fake it 'til I make it. Not sure which one yet. Really, I'm leaving everything I know and only taking one accessory: Matt. Arguably the best thing I could bring, but still, that's only ONE thing. I don't know if we're "starting over," or just in a new place, or if this is just the next step in life. Either way, I think this falls under my top three biggest events of life thus far. I'm disjointed and discombobulated. I'm starting to cry more often. This isn't like moving to Ludington (close) or Wisconsin (short-term). This is like moving to... Houston. Far away, new culture, new job, new highways, new weather, new people, new accent, new everything. I don't even know how I'm going to do my hair down there. My hair! If you should be able to control one thing it's your own hair! Sooner or later I'll figure it out... with my learning curve, probably later. But I'll adapt. That's just what you do. Adapt and flourish. Or fail to adapt and go extinct, I guess. But I'm really going to try to flourish.

No school!

Now that it's actually light out when I get to work, I have to wear my sunglasses to school in the morning. Well, I recently came into some new sunglasses and I was wearing them this morning when I walked into school because my hands were too full to take them off. As I walked in and looked down the hall I looked at another teacher and yelled (loud enough for about 20 freshmen to hear me), "Geeze - these sunglasses are amazing! It looks pitch black in here! I can't even see my door!" As quietly as she could, so as to spare me further embarrassment, she replied, "Actually, the power's out." Right. No power. So I go into my room to drop my load of stuff. (Honestly, it was mostly 6 dozen tamales, not papers or books or anything.) Then I scurry right down to the office to see what's going on. I swear, the teachers were swarming around our principal worse than any of the kids were swarming around us. "How am I supposed to take attendance with no power? Will we still have exams tomorrow? How are my exams going to get copied? Will school be canceled today? If so, will we have to make the day up? If so, can I call in sick?" (No one said that last one but I was thinking it.) All in all, the morning was a little slice of madness. On the other hand, the kids were totally calm. They were just excited that they got to legally use their cell phones in school as mini-flashlights to open their lockers with. As it turned out, something happened with the transformer (probably a cat, that seems like something you'd hear) and it wouldn't be fixed all day so I got a free day!

We're going sailing on Sunday. I'll be sure to report back all the cool words I learn.

:*(

Matt and I are watching Animal Cops: Houston on Animal Planet. Hey, we'd like to know something about this city before we move there! Unfortunately, I don't think that Animal Cops is the best place to get your information. It is, possibly, the saddest show ever. We just saw an old, blind Shih Tzu with matted hair, a debilitating spinal injury, and maggots coming out of her bottom get put to sleep because no matter what they did she would never have any quality of life ever again. Is there a sadder animal than that?? No, there is not. So of course, I'm crying. (Thank you, Yaz.) I want to go volunteer at this animal place and then bring all the animals home, but then I would probably be arrested for animal cruelty just like everyone else on the show because there's no way anyone can take care of that many pets. But still.

Home sweet home?

We went home this weekend and it got me all thinking about the move. Everyone kept asking me if I was excited and I was like, "No," which shocked them. "But it's a new adventure!" So I asked myself: Why am I not excited? Well, moving always, always blows. So that led me to another, more interesting question: How would I feel if I wasn't moving to Houston, if we were staying here in Ludington or moving somewhere else? Well that made me make my icky face... you know, the face you make when you smell feet, with your nose all scrunched up and and your shoulders pulled up around your earlobes? That one. I don't want to stay here and I don't want to move anywhere else. I know in my head that Houston is the rightest place for us. It has everything we want: lots of culture, sports, great jobs, parks, beautiful weather (except for sweltering summer), low housing prices, palm trees, tons of unique restaurants, shopping out the wazoo... everything. But still, it's a move to a brand new place. I remember moving to Ann Arbor and Wisconsin. It's a new "adventure" that involves leaving everything currently in your world, not knowing anyone, and being lost all the time. Not easy things, especially for someone who doesn't like change. But I trust that, with time, I'll adjust and be fine and, probably, pretty happy.

Matt's reading the list of foreign language-speaking doctors to me from "Physicians, Hospitals, and Other Health Care Professionals," the directory of covered medical type people that his new employer/insurance sent him. There's about a million doctors in there that speak the most obscure languages - like Hausa, Kannada (what they speak in Canada?), Igbo, and Sinhalese. Diversity: One more reason I'm excited for the city.