Humidity happens.

Well, no dining room table yet....... B couldn't bring it back because the last couple of days have been so hot and humid that the top coat on the table isn't completely dry yet. B now says he will bring the table back on Monday. Are you sure? "Of course I'm sure-- Monday it will be, bless your heart."

I'm not worried about the table... B is an expert woodworker, and well known in this part of the state. His Victorian home is filled with all of his woodwork, so much so that the interior of his home was featured in a nationally famous home decorating magazine a few years ago. B can take a piece of wood and turn it into something that looks like it was handmade a hundred years ago.

So Monday is the day.... and I told B I was holding him to that. We really miss the dining room table-- we use it every night for dinner. The cats keep walking into the dining room and looking--- they know something is missing, I'm sure.


Today is the Rodeo Parade in downtown Houston.... scores of riders and horses, wagons and trail-riders. It's so weird to see that parade as it winds its way through the downtown business area and the theatre district of the city. The Rodeo Parade is Houston's day to celebrate the start of the rodeo in town, and the parade (just like Galveston's Mardi Gras parade) is televised on one of the local channels. We've never seen the parade (except on TV), but we have gone to the rodeo-- the year that Barry Manilow was scheduled to sing there. Had Manilow not been there, we wouldn't have gone.

The rodeo has too many events that I don't care to see--- the pig races, the calf roping, the mule drags (a mule has to drag hundreds of pounds of dead weight across a corral). Just watching thirty seconds of those mule drags made me walk out of the arena-- as soon as one of the mules fell to its knees, I was up out of my seat and headed for the door. But we did get to see Barry and hear him sing at the rodeo that year. Barry hasn't been back to the rodeo since, and neither have we.

As the trail-riders made their way into Houston these past couple of weeks, one of the horses collapsed on the street. The rider managed to get the horse up again, but a few streets on, the horse fell again and died right there. It took a good long while to have the horse moved out of the downtown road, and it was determined that the horse died of exhaustion... he was over-heated, for goodness sake. It wasn't an older horse-- just four years old, poor thing. The horse's first rodeo, and he never made it. (If I were a real born-in-the-state Texan, I would have ended that sentence with Bless his heart.)