Sorry for the silence, another wretched summer cold has struck, & I've been flat on my back, snuffling snorting sneezing, and generally providing too many bodily fluids. Oh well, mostly over it now, and back at work (altho whether I'll last past lunch is a moot point so far).
On the bright side, we had another visit from Ray last weekend, which was really great for both of us: it's kinda weird to make such a good friend, at the age of 50, but we seem to have so many shared/overlapping experiences, it's like I've known him forever, without ever meeting: like some parallel dimension.
We did a couple of sessions of Runequest, so he could see what it played like: I was a bit lacking as GM, with a sore throat precluding much detailed descriptions, but it seemed to work pretty well overall, and gave him a fair picture of classic Gloranthan RQ.
Cat keeps getting snippets from NZ about her father's arrest, which has finally happened (thank ghu) - but then his idiot brother wants a 'family conference' to sort things out, i.e. help Ashley escape the just retribution coming his way; then the police were asking her whether she was interested in 'restorative' justice rather than 'punitive' justice ... I ask you, what is it he's going to restore, her childhood innocence? the years wasted in mental hospitals because her accusations were deemed to be psychotic fantasy? the years after that where she was miserable, offcentre, and self-hating? Fortunately, she didn't get sucked into that, and firmly expressed her opinion that there was no avenue for that with her, and the best restorative she could have was to see him rotting in prison at last.
Of course, all this has left her extremely upset, and depressed. I've gotten her to talk to her therapist in the UK, to try & identify a US therapist that might fit her, and she has, I think, some hints about what to loook for - hopefully she can find some help shortly. I do what I can, of course, but I'm hardly a trained therapist.
Well, back to work now, there's actually something for me to do today :)
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Monday, September 8, 2008
Storms
Well, we survived the remnants of Hurricane Gustav pretty easily. Weds was quite stormy (even by Wellington-winter standards), and produced quite prodigious amounts of rain: enough to persuade me to stay & work from home for the day, rather than risk the car aquaplaning all over the road: but other than that, it wasn't too bad.
The creek in the back yard must have risen by 8 or 9 feet I guess - almost to the top of the banks - but that's no real threat to the house, as there's another 8 feet or so of elevation before it would get to the foundations (and much wider, of course). The dead tree out the front yard shed quite a lot of branches, and has kinda broken in half, with the upper half now dangling down in the fork of the bottom half - we're waiting for the landlords to fix this, lacking appropriate tools (a decent length of rope, essentially).
Parts of the city lost power for the day, but nowhere near us (they appear to be the, umm, poor parts of town, for whatever reason). We did have a lot of N'orleanois up working in our Little Rock office for the week, as it seems to have been moderately badly hit again.
And afterwards, we've had just a stunning few days of weather - warm, sunny, and with just enough wind to be pleasant.
We had Betty & Dennis over for lunch on Sunday - Betty works in the quilting shop that Cat goes to all the time, and is (of course) a keen quilter, and Dennis is her husband - an interesting mix of Texas hick and sophisticate. I think it went very well, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and the food seemed to work well : I made bacon&egg pie, and Cat made corn/cheese/onion muffins, neither of which they had ever had before - Muffins in the US seem to be exclusively of the cakey, very sweet, saturated with syrup variety, so savoury ones were a great surprise :)
Other than that, just trundling along, trying to find friends, and trying to fit in.
The creek in the back yard must have risen by 8 or 9 feet I guess - almost to the top of the banks - but that's no real threat to the house, as there's another 8 feet or so of elevation before it would get to the foundations (and much wider, of course). The dead tree out the front yard shed quite a lot of branches, and has kinda broken in half, with the upper half now dangling down in the fork of the bottom half - we're waiting for the landlords to fix this, lacking appropriate tools (a decent length of rope, essentially).
Parts of the city lost power for the day, but nowhere near us (they appear to be the, umm, poor parts of town, for whatever reason). We did have a lot of N'orleanois up working in our Little Rock office for the week, as it seems to have been moderately badly hit again.
And afterwards, we've had just a stunning few days of weather - warm, sunny, and with just enough wind to be pleasant.
We had Betty & Dennis over for lunch on Sunday - Betty works in the quilting shop that Cat goes to all the time, and is (of course) a keen quilter, and Dennis is her husband - an interesting mix of Texas hick and sophisticate. I think it went very well, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and the food seemed to work well : I made bacon&egg pie, and Cat made corn/cheese/onion muffins, neither of which they had ever had before - Muffins in the US seem to be exclusively of the cakey, very sweet, saturated with syrup variety, so savoury ones were a great surprise :)
Other than that, just trundling along, trying to find friends, and trying to fit in.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Good days
Well, last weekend Ray drove over from Oklahoma City & spent the weekend, which was really good: we had a game of Fields of Glory on Saturday and discovered we knew the rules a lot less well than we thought: went out for dinner and brunches to the best bits of Little Rock that we've discovered so far: and talked our heads off.
It's rather odd to find a friend, at age 50, who feels like you've known him since age 10. We seem to have had so many parallel experiences, between wargaming and roleplaying, and identify closely with many shared ideas and thoughts (everywhere except politics where he seems to be wrongheadedly and stubbornly Republican, which I just dont get - he'd doubtless say the same, in reverse :) Saturday night we were up talking til 3 o'clock, just chewing over ideas for roleplaying: it's a damn shame OKC is so far away, too far really to run a regular RPG group from Little Rock, or I'd definitely run a campaign: but 4-5 hours drive every weekend, or even every 2nd weekend, is just too much (time, and especially cash for gas - it must be $40 each way at least I guess).
It's not just with me, Cat and Ray also enjoy talking, about America & just generally: certainly made for a great weekend.
Oh, and Bridge last night was -scorching- I haven't seen the results yet, but I don't doubt that we placed top: some of the hands I got to play were just wonderful, so tricky, but yielding great results for the right approach - I had a 3NT contract making every trick, and a 5C contract that everyone else went down 2 on, where I managed to make it, with some very tricksy discards to fool the opposition: several others too, but those were the most memorable. Cat was bidding much more precisely, and delivered exactly as promised: and her defensive play was outstanding too, she seemed to read my mind for picking the right leads, and we had a couple of spectacular results that way - a 2NT contract that should make, went down 2 because Cat found the right lead to me twice, a 4H contract that went down 3 (altho that was partly just gross optimism by our opposition, because they insisted on bidding on over a sacrificial 3D I made, and then got excited by 3H) .. oh, and funniest of all in some ways, a 4NT contract that went spectacularly down 3, where it should have been 4S making 5 (due to their initial 3S followed by my preempt 4C throwing them into a panic).
Fun times :)
It's rather odd to find a friend, at age 50, who feels like you've known him since age 10. We seem to have had so many parallel experiences, between wargaming and roleplaying, and identify closely with many shared ideas and thoughts (everywhere except politics where he seems to be wrongheadedly and stubbornly Republican, which I just dont get - he'd doubtless say the same, in reverse :) Saturday night we were up talking til 3 o'clock, just chewing over ideas for roleplaying: it's a damn shame OKC is so far away, too far really to run a regular RPG group from Little Rock, or I'd definitely run a campaign: but 4-5 hours drive every weekend, or even every 2nd weekend, is just too much (time, and especially cash for gas - it must be $40 each way at least I guess).
It's not just with me, Cat and Ray also enjoy talking, about America & just generally: certainly made for a great weekend.
Oh, and Bridge last night was -scorching- I haven't seen the results yet, but I don't doubt that we placed top: some of the hands I got to play were just wonderful, so tricky, but yielding great results for the right approach - I had a 3NT contract making every trick, and a 5C contract that everyone else went down 2 on, where I managed to make it, with some very tricksy discards to fool the opposition: several others too, but those were the most memorable. Cat was bidding much more precisely, and delivered exactly as promised: and her defensive play was outstanding too, she seemed to read my mind for picking the right leads, and we had a couple of spectacular results that way - a 2NT contract that should make, went down 2 because Cat found the right lead to me twice, a 4H contract that went down 3 (altho that was partly just gross optimism by our opposition, because they insisted on bidding on over a sacrificial 3D I made, and then got excited by 3H) .. oh, and funniest of all in some ways, a 4NT contract that went spectacularly down 3, where it should have been 4S making 5 (due to their initial 3S followed by my preempt 4C throwing them into a panic).
Fun times :)
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
RPGs
On a brighter note, we've started playing with a local D&D group, after a 7 year hiatus. It's run out of a games shop - the owner has a whole mezzanine that he makes available to boardgamers and RPG'ers, as they all seem to do here. This group is us, plus 4 other players and the GM: we're trying out the (brand-new) 4th Edition of D&D which - I think - is fairly terminally silly, but at least a balanced game where all the classes get a decent chance of action at all times.
As with most RPG groups, it's a bit of a mixed bag, but at least noone too awfully immature, and a couple of the players are both skillful and worth knowing (probably above average), so overall it's a positive experience.
The first try at it was pretty rough, due to lots of breaks and delays, and people arriving late, but our second session was much better: smoothflowing and enjoyable. The only real problem was the volume of noise from the gamers upstairs, but that's probably just me being spoilt for playing at home, the other players didnt seem too bothered.
As with most RPG groups, it's a bit of a mixed bag, but at least noone too awfully immature, and a couple of the players are both skillful and worth knowing (probably above average), so overall it's a positive experience.
The first try at it was pretty rough, due to lots of breaks and delays, and people arriving late, but our second session was much better: smoothflowing and enjoyable. The only real problem was the volume of noise from the gamers upstairs, but that's probably just me being spoilt for playing at home, the other players didnt seem too bothered.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Hanks - No Thanks!
well, time seems to be slipping away from me at the moment. Most of that is just (finally) getting busy at work - now that we've officially taken over the production facilities from our customer, there's actually some things that need doing (and a few, I'm discovering, that are woefully overdue in fact). It's fairly weird, working in one city, on a contract where all the clients are in another city (another state in fact), while the rest of my team are in that state, and my bosses are in yet another state. Not exactly designed for close supervision, but I'm doing my best dedicated worker bit.
Cat has given up smoking again, thank god - but because of that, her temper has been a bit frayed, unsurprisingly. She was prescribed Chantix by the doctor, to help this, but one of it's side-effects was warned as depression, and this really hit her hard, so I got her to stop it after a week: nothing is worth that level of depression and suffering, not even stopping smoking. Fortunately, the pills don't seem to have been helping that much, as their absence hasn't made it any harder, apparently.
Mind you, her temper has had some reason to fray - we bought a dining table & chair at a place called Hanks Fine Furniture (a chain of stores): and paid $75 (!) for delivery on Wednesday, a scant halfmile down the road. The arrangement was that they would phone us the previous day to confirm the time of delivery, then phone on the day, an hour before arrival, to make sure we were home. However, the only phone call we got the day before, consisted of some guy bellowing requests to speak to a Matilda, and not being willing to talk or entertain the idea he might have the wrong name: then on Wednesday, I phoned the store, and was told we were 7th on the list and should get delivery mid-afternoon.
Of course, they didn't actually turn up 'til 6 p.m. - when we were already at the bridge club for our weekly game - and instead of phoning an hour ahead, we got a call when they were 5 minutes away from home, plus another when they arrived & we weren't there: followed by a threat that they would just drive away & we'd have to pay another $75 to get our stuff. Well, we couldn't make it back in time anyway, not that we were inclined to, at that point, so Cat tried to discuss the problem with the store manager, three times, only to find that he was another of these idiotic bullies who is completely unwilling to listen, and insists on overriding anything you might try to say with his own opinions and worthless bombast.
We gave up on any redress, so I called the store manager, to find out how we could pick the items up ourself, and when: of course, he gave me a wrong address for the warehouse, but we eventually found it (along with the guy who cuts our lawns, who was willing to rent out his truck to carry the furniture), only to find the store manager had tacked on a second $75 delivery charge to the account. Fortunately, the warehouse manager was willing to be reasonable, and cancelled this charge, and handed over the furniture.
So that's another store we won't be going back to - a shame, they have some quite nice pieces, but with staff like that, who would want to repeat that experience. I do have to thank Robert, the lawnmower man (so to speak), for his help, and his navigational skills in getting us there!
Well, another week, another gripe: doesn't sound that positive, really, but it's not really like that: just easier to write about the most vivid, and worst, bits. There have also been some good bits, of course - bridge is going well, although playing twice a week was a bit much for both of us, so we've cut back to once a week for a while.
Mostly just, we're still adjusting, finding our way around & trying to work out how everything works. We did go out to dinner with a couple - Cindy, who works at SAIC with me, and is a keen quilter and gardener, and her husband John - which went really well, and we're planning to repeat that shortly: and gradually making friends at the bridge club.
Have to remember, we've only been here 3 months, it's not surprising we're still finding it alien.
Cat has given up smoking again, thank god - but because of that, her temper has been a bit frayed, unsurprisingly. She was prescribed Chantix by the doctor, to help this, but one of it's side-effects was warned as depression, and this really hit her hard, so I got her to stop it after a week: nothing is worth that level of depression and suffering, not even stopping smoking. Fortunately, the pills don't seem to have been helping that much, as their absence hasn't made it any harder, apparently.
Mind you, her temper has had some reason to fray - we bought a dining table & chair at a place called Hanks Fine Furniture (a chain of stores): and paid $75 (!) for delivery on Wednesday, a scant halfmile down the road. The arrangement was that they would phone us the previous day to confirm the time of delivery, then phone on the day, an hour before arrival, to make sure we were home. However, the only phone call we got the day before, consisted of some guy bellowing requests to speak to a Matilda, and not being willing to talk or entertain the idea he might have the wrong name: then on Wednesday, I phoned the store, and was told we were 7th on the list and should get delivery mid-afternoon.
Of course, they didn't actually turn up 'til 6 p.m. - when we were already at the bridge club for our weekly game - and instead of phoning an hour ahead, we got a call when they were 5 minutes away from home, plus another when they arrived & we weren't there: followed by a threat that they would just drive away & we'd have to pay another $75 to get our stuff. Well, we couldn't make it back in time anyway, not that we were inclined to, at that point, so Cat tried to discuss the problem with the store manager, three times, only to find that he was another of these idiotic bullies who is completely unwilling to listen, and insists on overriding anything you might try to say with his own opinions and worthless bombast.
We gave up on any redress, so I called the store manager, to find out how we could pick the items up ourself, and when: of course, he gave me a wrong address for the warehouse, but we eventually found it (along with the guy who cuts our lawns, who was willing to rent out his truck to carry the furniture), only to find the store manager had tacked on a second $75 delivery charge to the account. Fortunately, the warehouse manager was willing to be reasonable, and cancelled this charge, and handed over the furniture.
So that's another store we won't be going back to - a shame, they have some quite nice pieces, but with staff like that, who would want to repeat that experience. I do have to thank Robert, the lawnmower man (so to speak), for his help, and his navigational skills in getting us there!
Well, another week, another gripe: doesn't sound that positive, really, but it's not really like that: just easier to write about the most vivid, and worst, bits. There have also been some good bits, of course - bridge is going well, although playing twice a week was a bit much for both of us, so we've cut back to once a week for a while.
Mostly just, we're still adjusting, finding our way around & trying to work out how everything works. We did go out to dinner with a couple - Cindy, who works at SAIC with me, and is a keen quilter and gardener, and her husband John - which went really well, and we're planning to repeat that shortly: and gradually making friends at the bridge club.
Have to remember, we've only been here 3 months, it's not surprising we're still finding it alien.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Catchup
Bleh, sorry for the silence, but last week I was sick - came down with something respiratory on Friday, spent Sat/Sun in bed, tried to work from home Mon/Tues (but mostly back in bed), then crawled to work and worked at about 40% capacity the rest of the week. The most debilitating thing about it was that I couldn't seem to stay asleep for more than a few minutes at a time, so I spent several days living in this twilight haze of overtiredness without sleep, a very strange and uncomfortable state.
To make matters worse, that was the week leading up to our handover of work for the contract I've been hired to work on, and after months - literally - of people dawdling or simply not responding to my requests, requirements, urgings, attempts to plan, and general frustration, all of a sudden it was panic stations: just what I needed when I'm feeling so wretched :/
On the bright side, I got the database monitoring working as designed, with a couple of days to spare - and then when the Security team decided this design was going to overstrain their communications channels (and why did they not think of this 3 months ago? oh well), I got it redesigned and implemented by the due date (Midnight Sun/Mon), with a whole 90 minutes to spare in fact.
On the down side, I had to guess at where to host it, and chose the wrong host (too busy really), but when you don't get answers to your questions, you sometimes just have to stab blindly in the dark.
Enough of that, anyway.
Before I got sick, we had another sparkling Wednesday night at Bridge, getting top place again, but after a weeks' break, our performance this Monday was just woeful: Cat was bidding OK, but her play and cardsense was woeful, and while my play was accurate enough, if not inspired, my bidding was absolute rubbish, both overoptimistic and overpessimistic, both at the wrong times. Last night was considerably better, tho, and we were much sharper - we didn't place, but that was (after examining the results) due to an A class pair slumming it, that we had to face over 3 tricky boards, and a certain amount of bad luck, rather than any egregious decisions on our part.
Perhaps the classic example was when we were sitting EW, and N (Dealer) opened 2C. I checked to make sure this was 23+ as I thought, then surveyed my 13 HCP and passed. S passed (!!!) as well, then Cat (with 16 HCP as it turned out), also wisely passed - well, wisely if N wasn't lying about her hand.
North had of course meant this as a weak 2 (despite their not playing this), but it completely killed our bidding chances, and she was very fortunate that her partner did not respond as she was required to! As it was, we took her down 4, for a 200pt score ... but of course all the other EW teams scored game in spades or NT, for 600+ pts, so we came out bottom ... hard to see what to do about it tho, altho in Cat's seat I might have doubled for takeout, if I'd worked out that N had misbid egregiously.
And this weekend we've got dinner out with a couple from work, and Sunday playing D&D to look forward to :)
To make matters worse, that was the week leading up to our handover of work for the contract I've been hired to work on, and after months - literally - of people dawdling or simply not responding to my requests, requirements, urgings, attempts to plan, and general frustration, all of a sudden it was panic stations: just what I needed when I'm feeling so wretched :/
On the bright side, I got the database monitoring working as designed, with a couple of days to spare - and then when the Security team decided this design was going to overstrain their communications channels (and why did they not think of this 3 months ago? oh well), I got it redesigned and implemented by the due date (Midnight Sun/Mon), with a whole 90 minutes to spare in fact.
On the down side, I had to guess at where to host it, and chose the wrong host (too busy really), but when you don't get answers to your questions, you sometimes just have to stab blindly in the dark.
Enough of that, anyway.
Before I got sick, we had another sparkling Wednesday night at Bridge, getting top place again, but after a weeks' break, our performance this Monday was just woeful: Cat was bidding OK, but her play and cardsense was woeful, and while my play was accurate enough, if not inspired, my bidding was absolute rubbish, both overoptimistic and overpessimistic, both at the wrong times. Last night was considerably better, tho, and we were much sharper - we didn't place, but that was (after examining the results) due to an A class pair slumming it, that we had to face over 3 tricky boards, and a certain amount of bad luck, rather than any egregious decisions on our part.
Perhaps the classic example was when we were sitting EW, and N (Dealer) opened 2C. I checked to make sure this was 23+ as I thought, then surveyed my 13 HCP and passed. S passed (!!!) as well, then Cat (with 16 HCP as it turned out), also wisely passed - well, wisely if N wasn't lying about her hand.
North had of course meant this as a weak 2 (despite their not playing this), but it completely killed our bidding chances, and she was very fortunate that her partner did not respond as she was required to! As it was, we took her down 4, for a 200pt score ... but of course all the other EW teams scored game in spades or NT, for 600+ pts, so we came out bottom ... hard to see what to do about it tho, altho in Cat's seat I might have doubled for takeout, if I'd worked out that N had misbid egregiously.
And this weekend we've got dinner out with a couple from work, and Sunday playing D&D to look forward to :)
Thursday, July 17, 2008
We aren't in ArrrrKansas any more, Toto
First off, our stuff has arrived from London at last!! However, it arrived at 6 pm on Thursday, when we were due to go away Friday morning for a weekend in Dallas, so it's pretty much still there, piled up in boxes.
Well, our weekend excursion to Dallas was pretty good overall. Driving down went fairly well, altho my driving was a bit dodgy, as I kept crabbing right in the lanes - the natural instinct for driving on the other side of the road, & apparently quite hard to ditch. Cat got a bit nervous about it, so she did the bulk of the drive down.
We met up with Ray & Pat from Oklahoma, & Ray acted as native guide, steering us to the biggest available branch of Half Price Books, where we spent a couple of happy hours wandering around and oohing and ahhing, buying a relatively restrained pile of books at the end. I have to say, we really needed the native guide - Dallas traffic is almost as aggressive as London traffic, and the city centre is a spectacular spaghetti of freeways: quite beautiful and awe-inspiring as an object, but also pretty daunting as something to navigate! Oh, and I should mention, Dallas is Hot Hot Hot - I thought Little Rock was pretty hot & sticky, but Dallas has it beat into a cocked hat.
Monty had arrived by the time we got back to our motel, so we all went out to the nearby Steak&Ale place for a drink (and in Monty's case, dinner), and sat and talked for a couple of hours.
Saturday, I went off with the lads to the wargames tournament, playing FOG. As I hadnt had time to excavate any armies, I had arranged to borrow figures from the umpire, Ian Buttridge, and took an Aragonese army - I'll post the list & battle reports on Kruppfalz .
During the first round, John Witstyn pitched up, with his son Austen in tow (about 12 I think). Once I'd finished off my opponent, we went off for an early lunch, and a chance to catch up and chat. He's changed remarkably little - quite a bit greyer, but that's hardly a surprise - much the same calm and happy John that I remember so fondly, with all the verbal quirks, and the same sparkle.
The rest of the tournament took up Saturday pretty thoroughly, and we didn't get back to the motel til about 9:30, then went next door for steaks & beer, and a post-tournament dissection. Cat had intended to go shopping in Dallas, but the traffic had intimidated her enough that she chose to stay at the motel and read her new book for the day.
Sunday we had planned to go spend time with John & his family, but we were both so tired (and probably a touch hungover from the beers), and so worn from the heat & humidity, we had to cry off, and just drove home - I did a lot more driving this time, & seem to be getting over the crabbing problem.
I was quite surprised by how green the bit of Texas we saw was, but then, it's just the very north-east corner. It was quite noticeable when we passed from Arkansas to Texas, tho, both in the change in terrain, from rolling hills and plains, to pretty flat (not Nebraska-flat, but still, flat), and in the change in feel of the rural homes, from fairly prosperous in Arkansas, to looking quite shabby and poor in Texas - until we hit the edge of the commuter belt, when it abruptly changed to 4000sqft mansions on hobby farms or half-acre sprawls, of course.
Oh, and I won the tournament, which was a nice way to start things off in the USA!
Well, our weekend excursion to Dallas was pretty good overall. Driving down went fairly well, altho my driving was a bit dodgy, as I kept crabbing right in the lanes - the natural instinct for driving on the other side of the road, & apparently quite hard to ditch. Cat got a bit nervous about it, so she did the bulk of the drive down.
We met up with Ray & Pat from Oklahoma, & Ray acted as native guide, steering us to the biggest available branch of Half Price Books, where we spent a couple of happy hours wandering around and oohing and ahhing, buying a relatively restrained pile of books at the end. I have to say, we really needed the native guide - Dallas traffic is almost as aggressive as London traffic, and the city centre is a spectacular spaghetti of freeways: quite beautiful and awe-inspiring as an object, but also pretty daunting as something to navigate! Oh, and I should mention, Dallas is Hot Hot Hot - I thought Little Rock was pretty hot & sticky, but Dallas has it beat into a cocked hat.
Monty had arrived by the time we got back to our motel, so we all went out to the nearby Steak&Ale place for a drink (and in Monty's case, dinner), and sat and talked for a couple of hours.
Saturday, I went off with the lads to the wargames tournament, playing FOG. As I hadnt had time to excavate any armies, I had arranged to borrow figures from the umpire, Ian Buttridge, and took an Aragonese army - I'll post the list & battle reports on Kruppfalz .
During the first round, John Witstyn pitched up, with his son Austen in tow (about 12 I think). Once I'd finished off my opponent, we went off for an early lunch, and a chance to catch up and chat. He's changed remarkably little - quite a bit greyer, but that's hardly a surprise - much the same calm and happy John that I remember so fondly, with all the verbal quirks, and the same sparkle.
The rest of the tournament took up Saturday pretty thoroughly, and we didn't get back to the motel til about 9:30, then went next door for steaks & beer, and a post-tournament dissection. Cat had intended to go shopping in Dallas, but the traffic had intimidated her enough that she chose to stay at the motel and read her new book for the day.
Sunday we had planned to go spend time with John & his family, but we were both so tired (and probably a touch hungover from the beers), and so worn from the heat & humidity, we had to cry off, and just drove home - I did a lot more driving this time, & seem to be getting over the crabbing problem.
I was quite surprised by how green the bit of Texas we saw was, but then, it's just the very north-east corner. It was quite noticeable when we passed from Arkansas to Texas, tho, both in the change in terrain, from rolling hills and plains, to pretty flat (not Nebraska-flat, but still, flat), and in the change in feel of the rural homes, from fairly prosperous in Arkansas, to looking quite shabby and poor in Texas - until we hit the edge of the commuter belt, when it abruptly changed to 4000sqft mansions on hobby farms or half-acre sprawls, of course.
Oh, and I won the tournament, which was a nice way to start things off in the USA!
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