W.

We drove downtown yesterday to see the movie "W." with K and B. The "W" in this case stands for "What?!" -- as in How did we ever elect this idiot to not only one but two terms? And, I'm sorry to say, I was one of the fools who voted for Georgie W, as my husband likes to remind me. My only excuse for that vote was that I thought Georgie was the lesser of two idiots. After seeing this movie, I no longer believe that. Can we have a do-over on that vote?

After the movie, we all went to a Turkish cafe for dinner. Delicious food there-- all the best restaurants are now downtown, being that the waterfront restaurants here still aren't opened yet. And it will be a while till they're ready to open, I'm sure.

While we were waiting for dinner, K said "Name one good thing that W did for the country while he's been in office." I told K that he got the country ready to finally accept a black president.


I drove across town this afternoon, and what used to take no more than ten or fifteen minutes took nearly forty. The traffic on the main road was absolutely horrible-- and there was no road work going on, this was all just traffic, with most of the cars headed to the mall. I hate malls. Always have, and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.

The traffic was so backed up, and the street lights were so out of sync, that I took the first left turn that I could and tried to get to where I was going by taking the back roads, driving through some of the shopping centers along the Gulf Freeway. Well, I wasn't the only one who had that idea, so the traffic going through the shopping centers was bumper to bumper as well.

This town has grown too large, too quickly, and it's filling up with ticky-tacky shopping centers and town home complexes. I love that phrase-- ticky-tacky. I wish I could take credit for that, but it's not mine... I read it in The Chronicle-- someone else was complaining about all the "ticky-tacky town homes" that are being built all over town. Happy to know that I'm not the only one who has taken note of that. My question now is "Do the Powers That Be realize how they are changing this town by letting in every builder who wants to stack up some bricks?"

On the bright side... I found a 25th anniversary edition of "Up the Down Staircase" by Bel Kaufman in the bookstore today-- just one dollar for this beautiful edition of that book. I can still remember taking that book out of the library when I was a teenager. I liked it so much that I read it once a year, for the four years that I was in high school. Reading habits never die, I guess. I'm still re-reading favorite books, as well as trying to keep up with the new ones. Never enough time to read everything, no matter how much you read. Especially when you're stuck in ticky-tacky traffic for forty minutes on such a beautiful day.