Houston

The best part of the last week was not the two-day work week, but the looong weekend I got to spend in Houston. I flew in on Friday night, apparently along with half of Texas. IAH was ridiculously crowded. On Saturday we met up with Sarah, Cari, and Gavin for lunch at Mely's and started drinking before 1pm. After my one margarita and a quick stop by JSC to see the shuttle launch get scrubbed though, I fell asleep for about three hours. Apparently my tolerance for alcohol has regressed to a new low. Don't even ask what happened after the bottle of champagne we drank on Saturday. But I was awake! for the delicious dinner that Josh cooked earlier that night.

Sunday was a day of errands, and on Monday we went downtown to the Museum of Natural Science to see the Body Worlds exhibit. I discovered, at the exhibit, that my queasiness of medical-related bloody body parts applied to dead stuff, in addition to alive stuff. The exhibit is pretty neat though, and it's definitely unique. I was doing fine at the beginning when all the dead body parts still looked fake, but then we got to the knee joint that's been mangled by arthritis - that's when my stomach started to churn. That was only the beginning of entire bodies cut apart to show various organs or a skinned man carrying, you guessed it, all his skin like a potato sack. And of course, no medical exhibit would be complete without a display of some lungs charred by cigarette smoke or in the advanced stages of emphysema.

After the dead people, we walked around Hermann Park a little bit and wandered through the Japanese garden. Then we went to The Chocolate Bar! Mmmmmm. They had chocolate-covered just about everything and 10-inch tall cakes, but we opted to just get ice cream. I think this place has my new favorite cookie dough ice cream. :) I had convinced Josh to go see Stick It with me at the dollar theater afterward, but we got there a little early, so we went next door to Slick Willie's to play pool and kill some time. We didn't do anything out of the ordinary that day, but it was really nice to just be able to go out on a date.

Tuesday was the 4th (hooray for Discovery!), and we met up with Laurie, Drew, John, and Anne for dinner at BJ's, and then went downtown to see Nick's new apartment. He's in a great location, and the apartment has an incredible view of the Houston skyline. There were just a few trees that obscured our view of the fireworks, so hopefully he can get those cut down before next year. ;) The fireworks were pretty cool, but I think Seattle's still got the best show that I've seen.

Josh and I both played hooky on Wednesday, lounging around until I had to go to the airport in the afternoon. The plane ride back was uneventful, but I did get to sit in the exit row seat with no seat in front of me, so I had plenty of leg room. But I spent most of the flight with my legs scrunched under me to hide the bag that I couldn't fit "under the seat in front of me" because there was no seat in front of me and I didn't want to leave my book and magazines in the overhead bin.

Anyway. Only one more trip to Houston, I think. I'll be in town again during the first weekend of August, but that'll probably be the last time for a while. It was a little weird to be back last weekend... I haven't been in Texas for a long time, and it felt somewhere between sad and happy, familiar and unfamiliar. It seems like my friendships with some people haven't changed at all, while others are completely different. It brought back a lot of memories of not fitting in, not feeling like it was the right place or the right time, and therefore happiness and some relief to be out of it, but there were twinges of regret when I saw everyone so excited about the shuttle flight. Although I'm happy with where my life is now, I'm realizing how impatient I was about everything back then. Things were bad, so I wanted to fix them immediately. My timescale was in months and semesters, but it should have been in years and projects. But maybe the line between wasting time and sitting on an okay job while you look for a better one is always blurry, no matter what your timescale.

Okay, enough philosophizing for one night. It makes me sleepy. Kind of like champagne.