So for the last two weeks I’ve been in Houston, celebrating the holidays with Catalina.
Initially, my family came too; they stayed for half a week. Catalina’s mother used to run a restaurant and she kept cooking for us. We tried to stop her by inviting her out to dinner, and we ended up at Dim Sum where she sneakily paid too. Her food was fantastic! Every dish was really good. I think she was trying to fatten the family up. Well, it was mission accomplished for everyone else.
I was able to thwart her by continuing to run every day. This town is not friendly to runners. Or, maybe I should say that being out in the suburbs is not friendly to runners. The roads in the communities have sidewalks, but they are usually blocked by people parking in their driveways across them. However, the traffic is so light in those areas, I feel okay running on the roads. However, the big thoroughfares that have heavy traffic never have sidewalks. In those cases I try and run as much to the side as I can, and on some of the limited grass if that still isn’t safe. (I’m faster on the roads than the uneven grass.) The big storm a few days ago did make it harder to stay off the roads.
There were four cardinal directions I could go. To the west I could eventually get to a creek that I could run along. On the last day I found that on the north side of it there were better trails than the south. To the north I was blocked by a golf course, but that worked out well on Christmas Day when it was unused and I could go everywhere I wanted on it. To the east was industrial, and I did go a couple of times, but it was a bit nerve-wracking being next to a lot of traffic. There was also a gated community that was its own little fortress. It looked like it had good trails, but they were not meant for non-citizens. To the south, there was a bayou; I initially thought I could take a trail through it, but I quickly found it was too wet to make it interesting. I instead ended up getting lost in a gated community that hadn’t guarded its back entrance. On another day I stayed on major roads and was able to go far to the south.
The rest of the time, it was fairly domestic. We didn’t make much plans to do anything and just spent time together. Catalina still had to work, and I concentrated on a software project at those times. I made good progress.
At one point we did go out with the same clothes from our wedding and had a semi-professional photographer take pictures of us. We got some beautiful ones that I still need to organize and post publicly.
I’m now in the plane waiting to go back to Vancouver. We are delayed in leaving because we are waiting for some passengers on another flight that is running late. They have just arrived so we should be leaving soon.
2018-12-28 18:52