The weekend

Water aerobics, lunch and library on Thursday, in that order!  On Friday Peter returned from a flying (ha!) visit to London.  He took the shuttle from Houston to College Station which seems a sensible alternative to getting on another plane and flying to College Station and a much better alternative than asking your nearest and dearest to drive 2 hrs to Houston through murderous traffic and back again (Peter's night vision being an excuse to hand all the night time driving to me).  A sensible alternative turns into a nightmare when everyone else on the bus has taken the opportunity to pay an extra $5 to be dropped off at their home.  So Peter spent 45 minutes cruising round College Station while I sat at the airport and eventually dashed home to turn the oven off and then dashed back to the airport again.  Fortunately it's only 10 minutes away! We were eventually reunited!

On Saturday we boosted the audience at St. Michael's Episcopal School where they were doing their annual Gilbert and Sullivan with a friend playing the piano, scenery by her husband and direction by their daughter, who is a teacher at the school.  The jokes were good...not many people got them...and the production was brave...

On Sunday we went to hear the Brazos Valley Symphony play music featuring the brass section...a bit of Britten, Handel, Beethoven, a bit of this and a bit of that.  All very enjoyable and very well played.  Afterwards we joined a jolly group at Napa Flats, a restaurant which seems to have some relationship with the Symphony.  The Maestro is there and goes round meeting and greeting and the waitress brings hors d'hoevres courtesy of the management.  Extremely civilised!

Nineteen days to go before we leave and people are asking us how we feel about going home.  Mixed is the right answer!   Some of the things we'll miss are:

• Being warm most of the time
• Water aerobics on offer every morning
• Hassle free driving on wide roads
• Always having somewhere to park wherever you go and never having to worry about it in advance
• No parking meters
• No house maintenance, apart from changing the odd lightbulb
• Open, interactive, unstuffy people
• Excellent service and an almost total absence of surliness!
• Regular, free, high quality chamber music
• Cheap cinema tickets
• A wide variety of lovely fresh fruit and vegetables
• A crisper drawer in the refrigerator that really keeps salad crisp.

I'm sure there will be others!

We're looking forward to:

• Home (there's no place like it)
• Grandchildren and children
• Friends
• The bulbs coming up in the garden, digging in soft wet soil
• Walking....in the city, in the countryside, round to a friends...just walking! 
• Public transport, trains
• The National Health Service! 
• Radio 4, BBC News, Newspapers