I’m still in Houston. I really want to leave, too, because this place is bad for the soul.
To be Houstonian is to be in a car. Without a car, you might as well not exist.
On more than a few days, I’ve walked over to the nearby shopping center, and every time I go there I marvel at how auto-centric it is. There aren’t even sidewalks. It’s supposed to be a neighborhood shopping center, but if you want to walk from one side of it to another, you have to dodge traffic in the parking lot. The traffic lights have walk/don’t walk lights, and buttons you can push to tell the light to change for you, but where there should be sidewalks, there’s a brick pseudo-rustic retaining wall with plantings behind. You have to be in the street to get to the button.
I think today I’ll just walk down the middle of the street and sneer at people who honk their horn at me.
In other news, there’s now a huge pile of antique silver and crystal on my parents’ dining room table. It almost glows in the dark. Grandma ended up with a pile three times this size, and it amazes me that she could fit it all in her little apartment.
I helped mom polish a little of it, and we went through the some antique silver books, trying to find maker’s marks and so forth. Some of it is quite old; old enough that it should be kept in a lock box in a bank vault. Silversmiths have all kinds of strange codes for when something was made, who made it, what city they were in, how pure the silver is, and so forth. For instance, English silversmiths have more coat-of-arms-like marks, while Americans just stamp their name into the silver; a cultural difference that seems obvious in retrospect.
Before long, I’ll have amassed such expertise that I’ll be one of those guys on the Antiques Roadshow that tells you your cherished antique is worthless. What fun!
