Galveston Sand Castles

We drove out to Galveston yesterday, to walk along the beach and look at the entries in the annual Sand Castle contest. Over 50 different sand creations yesterday, many of them intricate versions of castles, some of them using themes from popular movies...... all of them very distinctive and very creative. I told my husband that a cool entry would be a sand castle made up of White Castle hamburger-shapes. We could call it the "White Castle Castle." But you'd have to be from NY and know what a White Castle burger looks like, in order to understand the concept.

So hot out on that beach yesterday... it was 99 degrees here in town..... we could see lots of sunburned backs and arms on the people working on the castles. All of the people who enter the contest work at architectural firms.... we heard that one team flew in from Chicago early yesterday morning to compete in the Galveston competition. I guess they don't build sand castles in Chicago.

As hot as it was in the sun, it was enjoyable to see....... and the ocean wasn't too rough yesterday. Still a lot of seaweed on the beach, though. Guess they can't keep up with that, or control it very much.

We also tried a new Thai restaurant on the way home.... we got take-out, rather than eating in the restaurant, being that we felt wind-blown and sandy from our long walk on the beach. The new Thai place wasn't as good as our usual one here, or as good as the downtown one we went to last week with K and B. We ate our dinners, but we wouldn't go out of our way to go back to that restaurant again.


Our young friends C and L surprised us this morning... they rode their bikes here around breakfast time and spent about an hour with us before they had to go and meet their friends. C was all excited because she starts her driving lessons tomorrow. L doesn't know when she'll get her license...... my guess is that her parents will make her wait till her twin brother gets his. In her family, I think her brother is higher up on the totem pole than she is, and that's a shame.


We're still talking about that big house up in East Texas...... we got a call from the realtor, who tells us that the sellers are very anxious to sell and were hoping we'd make an offer..... they are strapped for cash and need to "get out from under that house," to use the realtor's words. Which makes us think, of course, that we could offer them less than what we were thinking of offering for that house. So we may just be doing that, but we want to wait a few days... to talk about it some more, and to check the real estate listings once more before we come to any final conclusion.

I guess I'm over the point of getting myself heart-sick about any of the houses we've been looking at. I felt so badly about that house at the top of the mountain in Comfort, but I can see now that the very long drive from here to there wouldn't have been the best thing for us. I'm not getting attached to any of the others we've looked at, no matter how pretty the house is or how gorgeous the views are from the back porch. One of my husband's real estate rules is "He who holds the money holds the power." We still have the money, so we still have the power to look at dozens of houses and chose just one. I feel badly for the people who built that lovely house up in East Texas, though....... they must've felt that the lake-front house up there would be their retirement dream home....... then Enron went bust and took their dream with it. Very, very sad.