Maybe I Should Do Like That Guy in Memento

I was born about 100 years too late.

I mean, I know they didn't have air-conditioning, or phones, or non-animal transportation back when everyone lived in a little house on the prairie, and that would be tough. There'd be no television, which would mean no Bravo, which would mean I'd never have learned that the Real Housewives of New York City make the Real Housewives of Orange County seem like simple God-fearing country girls. And I couldn't have a blog. So yes, all those things would be drawbacks.

But 150 years ago, life was a lot simpler. Sure, I'd have a lot to do, but each day would be pretty much the same. Get up with the sun, milk the cows, get the well water, feed the younguns and the varmints and the menfolk three times, wash and mend in between, go to bed about 8, and get up the next day and do it all over again. What I wouldn't have had back then is meetings, or appointments, or carpools, or freelance deadlines, or schedules.

And here's why that's important: I WOULDN'T NEED A CALENDAR.

This is on my mind today because I have lost mine. A few days ago I began to have the vague sense that my calendar was missing. Now I've looked everywhere and it is Officially Lost.

If you want to feel like a loser in a 24/7, multi-tasking, use-your-time-wisely world, just lose your calendar. It's speaks volumes about your ability to cope.

It's like publicly acknowledging that at 48, you still haven't quite gotten the hang of tying your shoelaces or telling your left from your right.

It's like saying "You Who?" when people are talking about YouTube.

It's like walking around with your skirt tucked in the back of your pantyhose.

It's also scary. A few of the dates that were written in the calendar are also floating around in my head. But as I've already written, my cranial hard drive is already full. I really need to be able to delete those dates from my brain files, or else something important, like my address or my shoe size, could fall out my ear at any time. But a lot more of those dates never spent five seconds in my brain. They went from the pen to the calendar, and that was that. Who knows what appointment I may be missing as you read this.

I suspect this happened last week when it rained in my dining room. I had to move everything out of there in about three minutes, and it's not all back yet. My guess is that my calendar was lost in the shuffle that day.

So tonight, I have two wishes. One, of course, is that I find the calendar. (April is a lousy month to try to find a new one.)

The other is that all those women I've volunteered with, who insist that I'm "so organized!", would finally get it. If I'm organized, Paris Hilton is Nobel Prize material.

And if I can remember when our next meeting is, I'll tell them.

Rainy Days in Dining Rooms Always Get Me Down

Here’s a riddle.

What is the connection between this



which is our dining room, and this



which is Billy's bathroom?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

I’ll give you a hint: The bathtub is right above this:



I know this because sometimes, when, ahem, issues arise in the bathtub area, water comes streaming out of the chandelier. It has something to do with gravity.

Seven or eight years ago, it rained in our dining room a couple of times after the boys had bathed in that tub. We were never exactly sure why. The rains had to stop, though, so Bob and I made the ultimate sacrifice.

We made Billy and Ben take their baths in our bathroom.

Four people are most definitely a crowd in the 7 x 10 confines (what a perfect word!) of our master bathroom. But we got used to it.

Besides, Billy’s bathroom was unfortunate. I don’t have photos, but I can draw you a couple. Here is what the floor looked like:


Here is what the walls looked like:




And here is the light switch cover.



(I had to keep it. Wouldn't you?)

The light switch cover is probably why Billy seemed perfectly happy for the longest time to share a bathroom with his parents. For years, we basically forgot about his bathroom. Our two cats had the biggest kitty litter room on the block.

But all good things must come to an end. And so one day about six months ago, all involved parties, except the cats, agreed that it was time to make Billy’s bathroom useable. For humans.

It started out such a tiny deal, as deals go: a miniscule deal, actually, involving only new floor covering, some fresh wallpaper, and a determination of why it was that every time I washed clothes in the laundry room next door, strange bubbles arose from the toilet.

But you, being the astute reader that you are, surely have figured out that remodeling that bathroom turned out to be a huge deal.

Putting up new wallpaper involved taking down the old, and trying to figure out why the two walls at one corner of the bathroom dormer had split. By the time the crack detectives had solved that mystery, we’d replaced half the drywall.

Replacing the Marsha Brady vinyl with ceramic tile meant that the vinyl had to be ripped up (please do not say scary things to me about asbestos -- the contractor told us we didn’t need to worry and it’s too late to start now). When they did that, they discovered that the plywood sub-floor was too thin to support tile. So they ripped up the sub-floor. This was in December, so I guess the most appropriate way to put what happened next would be this: “And what to the plumber’s wondering eyes did appear, but a whole system of drain pipes that was about to blow.”

Yes, folks, the plumber insisted that he had gotten there just in the nick of time – that if we’d been even a little later, a plumbing Armageddon would have transpired. The original builder, who apparently had the construction IQ of a cheese ravioli, had laid the drain pipes running uphill. Water had been sitting in that old and gnarly cast iron for years, just waiting to burst through our first floor ceiling at the least opportune moment. (Actually, when would a ceiling collapse be opportune?)

When layman like us receive this sort of news, we really have no choice but to put ourselves at the mercy of the plumber. This was actually not that hard, because we were otherwise occupied, what with buying Christmas presents with our few remaining pennies and worrying ourselves sick over what else the builder of our house had done catastrophically wrong.

If you have ever remodeled, you know that it won’t be long before “in for a dime, in for a dollar” becomes your favorite saying. The self-talk goes something like this: “Weeeeell, if we’ve got to replace most of the plumbing, we might as well move the toilet over there, because that’s a lot more private than right here. And if we do that, well, shoot -- suddenly there’d be room for a really neat storage closet. And honestly, who ever has enough closet space? I mean, turning down a closet is like telling a Girl Scout you don’t like Thin Mints. And since the closet has to have doors, it would really make a lot of sense to match them to the vanity. But we really can’t do that unless we replace the vanity. And if we replace the vanity, we’ve got to get a new countertop, because, I mean, it would be really, really stupid to put the ugly old sink and faucets into the new counter….”

And of course, we needed a better light switch too.

So that before we knew it, we had suddenly spent about seven times more money than planned on Billy’s bathroom. (And yes, I know you’re thinking, “But isn’t he the one who’s going to college in 16 months?” and yes, you are correct, and I appreciate that you’ve been paying close attention, but now really, if you’ve spent enough time reading me to know that, surely you’ve developed at least a fondness for me, and you wouldn’t want me to fall on the floor writhing with regret, now would you? So will you at least not remind me what a bad financial decision this was? Thank you.)

Anyway, in just a few short weeks, which in contractor math means 2½ months, Billy had a gorgeous, almost entirely new bathroom. We replaced every last thing except the toilet, the tub, and a little bit of pipe beneath each of them.

We never gave a second thought to the problems we'd had with the tub in the past.

Which brings me back to this week.

Now that he has a lovely new bath, we don’t see a whole lot of Billy. He shaves in that bathroom without being reminded and showers every morning and bathes every night. Which was what he was doing Tuesday night when Bob shouted “Shit!” from the dining room.

I ran in there to find water streaming down the chandelier cord, streaming around the fancy parts of the chandelier, and then scattering in oh, four or five directions, all of which ultimately ended at the surface of the dining room table. A huge white spot had already appeared, the laptop was wet, and there was a rapidly growing puddle on the floor.

What – what’s that you’re saying? “But I thought they just replaced all the plumbing in that bathroom!” What a coincidence – that’s EXACTLY WHAT I SAID!!!! Only I also said some bad words too.

But not nearly as many as I said the next morning, when the dining room ceiling appeared to be caving in.

I was in my office upstairs, reading blogs (what else?). A load of laundry was churning away in the upstairs laundry room. The friend who cleans my house (and believe me, only a friend would take that on) was downstairs. Suddenly, she was yelling just like Bob had the night before. “BETSY, THE WASHING MACHINE IS LEAKING THROUGH THE DOWNSTAIRS CEILING!!!!!!”

Not that I doubted her, but I did run downstairs for independent verification, stopping only to turn off the washer.

I had already left a message with our contractor that morning, asking (politely) that he come figure out why we’d had the chandelier leakage. Now I called back and, not quite as politely, told him that I really had an urgent need to know why water was POURING from ALL the drywall nails in the ceiling AND parts of the ceiling were SAGGING and EVEN the ceiling in the adjoining room was starting to look A LITTLE FUNNY!!!!!

My friend and I moved everything out of the dining room except the piano, which was too heavy, and the dining room table. I can’t stand that table, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to have my homeowner’s insurance buy me a replacement.

In just a few minutes, which is two hours in contractor math, our contractor’s right hand man was there. He disappeared into the bathroom and a few minutes later came out to ask me when the toilet overflowed.

I told him the toilet hadn’t overflowed.

He told me it surely appeared to have overflowed, there being all sorts of mushy paper and unspeakably gross black stuff all over it, and the bathroom floor, and the rugs, and the towels Billy had left on the floor.

Oh. That toilet.

I followed him up and saw what he meant. The source of the water wasn’t the washing machine. It was our geyser, I mean, toilet.

I was bound and determined to persuade him that there was a connection between the toilet overflow and the tub leak, and that the connection was the brand new drain pipes we’d spent so much money on. He was just as convinced there wasn’t.

So we did what any reasonable adults would do. We cut four holes in the dining room ceiling to see where the water was coming from.

He was right.

There was all kinds of wet stuff underneath the bathroom floor. Only none of it was under the new pipes -- only the two small stretches of pipe we’d chosen not to replace.

What’s more, the nighttime chandelier leak had resulted not from defective contracting work but from Billy’s filling the tub nearly to the rim and then sloshing water all over the edge of the tub, which, my contractor friend pointed out, had absolutely no caulk around it.

Which was probably, now that we think about it, why the tub leaked eight years ago.

And the toilet overflow? Billy’s disturbing propensity to put way too much toilet paper and assorted debris in toilets was all coming back to me. Nine years ago, we had to quit shopping at my favorite boys clothing store because Billy flushed so much toilet paper down the store’s stockroom toilet, he transformed it into a water volcano that damaged several thousand dollars of merchandise.

I couldn’t stand it. I had to know. So I drove to Billy’s school to haul him out of class to find out just what he’d been putting in his toilet.

I caught him between choir and chemistry. I didn't particularly care whether I embarrassed him or not.

“Billy, just what have you been flushing down your toilet?”

“Nothing. I mean, I flushed some paper towel the other day. But it was only a sheet or two.”

“What else?”

“Some matches."

"Matches?"

"They were paper matches.”

“How many?”

“Oh, two or three.”

“Two or three every time you burn incense?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“What about the incense ash?”

“Well, that too.”

(I know what you are thinking. Believe me, I have a sensitive nose, and it can pick up pot from a mile away. He honestly just likes incense. I’m reminded every time I’m near his room of my father, who, during my baby sister’s incense-burning stage, told my mother he was sure there was a dead animal stuck in a wall somewhere.)

It was time for Billy to get to class, so the lesson on What Toilets Are For had to wait for last night. It was conducted while he scrubbed the toilet, the floor, and the tub.

Meanwhile, I had to go home and eat crow.

As it turned out, the contractor was a little bit at fault. They had forgotten to seal the tile floor, which meant when 50 gallons of water started spewing all over it, there was nothing to prevent it from seeping through the tile into the dining room.

But besides that, it was just bad luck, and a teenage boy with excellent personal hygiene.

Speaking of bad luck, the ceiling didn’t fall in. So I don’t even get a new dining room table.

How Not to Lose a Car

It's Works for Me Wednesday over at Rocks in My Dryer, and have I got a tip for you. I have so little good advice that I can't participate every Wednesday, or else I'd exhaust my supply. But I'm so excited about this one that I couldn't wait any longer.

I am a Momnesiac. Once upon a time, I had a fabulous memory -- at least that's the way I remember it. But then my children were born, and my to-do lists got much longer, and my attention got pulled 32,019 different ways, and the next thing I knew every last gigabyte in my personal hard drive was full. My files began to be corrupted, and I couldn't remember whatshisname's name or what happened in the movie I saw last weekend or whether it was All the King's Men or All the President's Men I had read back in high school.

Or where I'd parked my car.

This last one was particularly vexing. I've come to depend on my car quite a lot, actually -- not as much as my lungs, perhaps, but way more than my vacuum. Leaving a store and spending the next 18 minutes traipsing back in forth through a parking lot pushing the panic button on my key chain was starting to really get me down.

And then one day I pulled into the parking lot at our brand-new Publix. Because I'm a poor planner, I go to the grocery several times each week. Every single one of those times I park. And on that auspicious day, a thought came to me: What If I Always Parked on the Same Row?

What a beautifully simple idea! I know now that no matter what -- summer, winter, rain, shine, just-a-gallon-of-milk or Thanksgiving-dinner-for-12 -- my car will be parked at the back end of the center row in Publix's parking lot. I don't even have to think about it, and as if it were on auto-pilot, my cart and I find my car instantly.

If I insisted on parking right next to the building, this plan might not work. But I don't. I'd much rather settle for a distant spot on the same row each visit than an up-close one on any random row. Besides, it's exercise.

If you've spent more time than you care to admit wandering around looking for a lost car, try this idea. It Works for Me!

Team Sofa

Happy Easter everyone!

Having worn myself to a frazzle fixing brunch, I am now parked on my back on the sofa, my laptop propped on my knees. This is where I plan to spend much of the rest of the day. (My contract only calls for me to cook these people one big meal per holiday. Tonight it's quite literally every man for himself.)

So it's the teensiest bit ironic that I've got the NCAA basketball tournament on the television, just like I have all weekend.

I am as unathletic as a person can be. I'm not just talking picked last for teams. I'm talking a fear of the ball so powerful that when I was asked by a partner at my old law firm to fill in on the firm softball team, I burst into tears.

Which is why it seems a bit odd that the four days during which the 64 are cut to the sweet 16 are some of my favorite days of the year.

It's not just the games. Shoot, I couldn't spot a pick and roll if it bit me on the leg. It's the upsets and the hype and the Cinderellas and the stupid fun facts about players ("Verne, he told me he really admires his dad."). It's that squeak that basketball shoes make on a gym floor.

And this year, more than I ever remember, it's the commercials.

One in particular has me mesmerized. Apparently it's for something called Nike Sparqs. (The fact that I can't tell you for sure what's being advertised suggests that maybe Nike could spend its advertising dollars more effectively.)

If you haven't seen it, this commercial shows all these muscular, athletic men and women doing muscular, athletic things, like running with parachutes attached to their backs and catching hails of tennis balls. The pictures are interspersed with screens that say "my agility is better," "my power is better," and my "quick is better." Editor that I am, I don't think that technically one's quick can get better, but it sure as hell sounds cool.

I find this very inspirational. In fact, as I lie here typing, I feel like a jock. I'm thinking about actually going for a walk later, maybe, if I feel like it.

Or maybe not. I wouldn't want to miss an upset they'll be talking about for years to come.

My lazy is better.

Catching Them If They Fall

So apparently a wrinkle in time occurred during College-Tour-a-palooza, because I just noticed that the post I wrote on Wednesday, March 19, is actually dated Tuesday, March 18. Yes, it's all been exhausting, but I know I wrote it on Wednesday. That's why the title is "If Yesterday was Tuesday ..." Maybe I got my wish to get my hour back ....

Anyway, we are home now, and not a moment too soon. College-Tour-a-palooza was a great success -- more on that in a minute -- but things were starting to get ugly, calorie-wise. I mean, I ate a cheeseburger and french fries dipped in feta cheese dressing for lunch Friday, for God's sake, and added some perfectly horrible McDonald's chocolate chip cookies during our final drive just to keep my strong coffee company. Of course, I've spent my first day home eating some more: I topped a hot brownie Ben had just baked with a large spoonful of peanut butter, and dinner was way too much pizza. But not too worry -- I have burned at least 50 calories typing today, and I managed to gather a load of laundry and actually walk all the way upstairs to wash it. (Yes, you're right -- I should be careful not to overdo it.)

We went from Texas the beginning of the week to Georgia, where we visited Emory on Thursday and the University of Georgia on Friday. (No, Billy's not set on a southern school; it was just cheapest to stay in one region of the country on this trip.) Billy loved all of them.

There are actually two sets of impressions of all these schools. One is Billy's; the other is mine and Bob's. Although often we agreed, it's important to remember we're talking about two different entities. "We're" not going to college anywhere. Billy will be leaving us at home, which is best for all involved.

Yet trying to imagine my firstborn living and learning away from home -- in some cases far away from home -- is both exhilarating and anxiety-provoking. I realized as I crossed a busy street near Rice's campus that I was envisioning Billy being mowed down there by a car. By the time he actually enrolls somewhere he'll be 19, but in a part of my heart he will always be someone whose hand needs holding in traffic.

I saw that part of him last weekend at the Houston Rodeo, of all places.

Not being real experienced cattle folk, we Birds had no clue what exactly we'd be seeing during the calf roping, which was the first event. We settled into our seats and looked at the huge video screens (we were about $30 per ticket too far up in the arena to see what was actually happening without magnification) only to see that the parts of the calf that are roped are both the neck and the legs. In other words, a tiny little cow is strapped into a bundle sort of like a shoulder bag and dragged away.

We're not animal people. We have two rather neglected cats, one fish, and absolutely no desire for any other pets. But I found myself wincing as I watched this, and wondering whether PETA was listed at 1-800-FREE-411. I certainly could be wrong, but it appeared to me that the roped calves would never be the same.

Billy was two seats to my right, and I happened to glance over at him. His huge brown eyes were glistening. And he looked at me, and he said, almost in a whisper, "I don't like this."

He's taller than I am, and he drops the f-bomb way too often, and he has secrets I'll never know. But for a few moments, his world was wrong, and he was looking to me to make it right. He was my little boy.

I held his eyes, and a few seconds later I did the only thing I could. I whispered "I love you."

Soon the moment had passed, and he was back to being a teenager and ordering crappy food. But I had seen that part that my heart knows is always in there somewhere.

When kids are little, they need you in every way. You wipe their bottoms and buy their shoes and make their breakfast. As each birthday passes, they need you a little less, until one day you realize you don't have a clue what their bathroom habits are, they won't wear anything you buy, and they don't eat breakfast. They don't need you and they don't need you and they don't need you ... until all of a sudden, they do.

The trick to parenting teenagers is to remain both vigilant and out of the way. I remember when Billy and Ben were little how I would hover with my hands cupped, ready to catch them if they fell as they climbed the ladder up to the slide. In a sense, I'm still doing the same thing.

So I've got my own opinions about the various schools. I'd sleep soundly at night if he were at Rice. I'd be worried sick if he enrolled at Texas. No matter how hard I try, I can't see him at Emory. I'd be happy as a clam if he wound up at Georgia.

But this is his decision to make. And because I know that he's three parts young adult and one part kindergardener, I realize that our opinions, if he knows too much about them, ultimately will shape his. That's why I'm trying to keep them to myself.

And so we'll continue on, considering these colleges and visiting others. He'll sample the food and check out the dorms and think about majors. And I'll be in the background, my hands outstretched, waiting to catch him if he falls.

If Yesterday Was Tuesday, Then What's the Name of This One Again??

Day 5 of College Tour-a-Palooza, and here's how it goes.

1) Get up while it's still dark.

2) Squeeze into tiny motel bathroom for your allotted seven minutes of personal care. Dry off after shower with towel the size of that new Apple laptop. Use more concealer than usual.

3) Grab two cups (or seven) of bad coffee and a few of those little cups of liquid plastic -- I mean Coffee Mate -- and get back in the rental car.

4) Get lost due to traffic construction not shown on www.devilspawn.com -- I mean MapQuest.

5) Huddle in a corner of the admissions office while awaiting arrival of the other 497,913 families touring colleges this week.

6) Follow student tour guide who you cannot hear over the sound of torrential downpour.

7) Listen to adult admissions person talk about how painful it is to turn down several hundred totally qualified kids each year because there's just not enough spaces in the class.

8) Thumb through brochures. Spot tuition, room and board expenses for current school year. Lose appetite for lunch.

9) Eat lunch anyway, on campus. Realize reasonably priced meal plan is probably waste of money.

10) Attend class with your child. Discover they haven't made philosophy any easier to understand than it was 30 years ago.

11) Get in car. Take off soaking wet shoes. Drive to next town.

12) Eat way, way too much dinner. Wish you were not the designated driver.

13) Go to another motel that looks just like the previous motel. Attempt to sleep while children attend to important iPod, laptop, and cellphone business.

14) Do it all over again.

By this morning, our asses were dragging, so much so that we definitely needed this Flying Alarm Clock.

"This digital alarm clock launches a rotor into the air that flies around the room as the alarm sounds, hovering up to 9' in the air, and will not cease ringing until the rotor is returned to the alarm clock base, compelling even the most stubborn sleepers to get out of bed on time."


Now that's American innovation. I wonder where the inventor went to college?

The Bird Family Debating Society and Supper Club

Greetings from the Lone Star State!

We Birds flew the coop yesterday on spring break and ended up in Houston, long considered a major spring break destination.

We are actually here because it's our first stop on College-Tour-a-palooza. For the virgins among you, this is the time in a parent's life when you spend a lot of money going around to visit schools that may not let your child in and that will cost you an arm and a leg if they do. The economic irony of the process would be intolerably painful, however, if we focused on that reality, so instead we laugh a lot and throw in some tourist attractions and really good food, thus putting an even heavier burden on the credit cards.

Yesterday, we drove around Rice University. Tomorrow we'll do the official tour and dog and pony show, but yesterday, we were just trying to get a feel for the place. What we felt was hot, which shouldn't have surprised us, this being the southern part of a southern state and all, but did catch us a bit off guard. Ben, who is trying to milk his "I-gave-up-the-beach-for-my-brother" martyrdom for all its worth, persuaded me to buy him some sunglasses to protect his dainty eyes from the Texas glare. This wasn't a problem, as Billy got off the plane with such painfully stopped-up ears that we had absolutely no choice but to hit up Walgreens. (Your travel correspondent is here to report that if you've seen one Walgreens, you've seen them all.) Ben chose some mirrored lenses, Billy downed some 12-hour Sudafed, and we were off.

It wouldn't be a Bird family vacation without an argument about where to eat.

We are all of us about the food, so much so that one of my roles as Mama Bird is to scope out restaurants in advance. I'd done plenty of research using magazine websites and my favorite, Chowhound, and printed off a great list of Houston possibilities. Which, apparently, are still lying in the printer tray back home.

This was a scary situation for a Bird to be in. Well not Bob -- he will eat anything, and as long as it doesn't cost much, deem it absolutely delicious. But the rest of us want to know in advance that those in the know have given our restaurant choice an A.

Thus, it was with a great deal of trepidation that we found ourselves adrift in Rice Village, a shopping area near the campus, trying to choose between an Italian place and a Turkish place, both of which I vaguely remembered from my research.

Billy, the world traveler, was all about the Turkish place. Ben, the picky eater who was already miffed that we weren't at his grandparents' beach house in the first place, thought we should play it safe with Italian. I was just ready to sit down and get out of the sun, and Bob, who's nursing the cold I gave him, just wanted to curl up in a corner somewhere and die.

So the four of us engaged in, shall we say, a spirited debate about which restaurant to choose. This is a scenario we've engaged in about 735,129 times in the past 18 years; the Bird boys can disagree about anything, but usually, it's about where to eat. Finally I proposed a diplomatic compromise a lot better than the State Department could come up with. (Perhaps this was because we were a stone's throw from a college school with a bunch of stuff named after James Baker.) We'd eat lunch at the Turkish place and dinner at the Italian place.

This decided, we went on to discover we loved Turkish food -- even Ben, of course. (It turns out Turks eat pizza.) His stomach full, Billy announced that between his cold and his horribly stopped-up ears and the fact that he'd only slept three hours the night before (we'd had terrifically bad hail storms during the night), all he really wanted to do was go to the hotel and go to sleep.

So we spent the rest of the afternoon not strolling around Rice but napping at a Fairfield Inn in Katy. Now I'll grant you that Katy isn't exactly tour-bus worthy, but it is the former home of Renee Zellweger, so the afternoon wasn't a total loss. And Bob and I were exhausted.

Why were we all the way out in Katy, which is like 45 minutes from Rice? Because we are visiting Houston right smack dab in the middle of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which we will be attending this very afternoon. All the cowboys and cowgirls got the good rooms, and we are out her in Katy in a motel populated primarily by a European soccer team and its entourage and a bunch of American cheerleaders and pep band members who are apparently in town for a basketball tournament. (Not to digress, but when did it become mandatory for cheerleaders to wear GIGANTIC bows in their hair? In my day, cheerleaders were all about the long sexy hair, and now they look like they're all dressed up for the preschool Easter pageant. And whatever happened to the big pom-poms? Honestly.)

Anyway, back to yesterday ... after two-hour naps, we got up and began the arduous task of deciding where to eat dinner. I mean, you could be excused if you're thinking I could never travel with these people IN A MILLION YEARS. We even drive ourselves crazy, I can assure you. Armed with the names of three Tex-Mex places (perhaps because he'd had pizza at luch, Ben was willing to broaden his horizons and forget about the Italian place near Rice), we left the hotel for another arduous trek back into town.

Our first choice turned out to be located between an AutoZone and a liquor store, which meant there was no way, no how Ben was eating there. I found this a little surprising, seeing as how he was still wearing the mirrored sunglasses and looked vaguely menacing himself, but I was a bit uncomfortable with the parking situation, so we headed back to number two on our list. This place turned out to have limited parking as well, so that you pretty much had to pay $5 for valet parking. Bob and his congested head and chest hadn't been saying much, but no way no how was he paying someone $5 to park his car if he didn't have to. So we drove on, finally ending up at a Chuy's. Here you could park your car yourself for free; you could absorb a little history, since if I'm not mistaken, it was at a Chuy's in Austin that Jenna Bush got busted for underage drinking; and you could get a yummy frozen Margarita, which of course I was in dire need of at this point. It was our kind of place.

Now we're all up and almost ready for our first full day in Houston. (Thank God we've got brunch reservations, so we'll have at least one meal without a debate.) We're going to try to see a bit of the school we've paid all this money to come visit, and then we -- the least roping and wrangling of folks imaginable -- will make our way to the Rodeo. I'd appreciate your thoughts and prayers, because God only knows how many choices of food will be available there.