A bit more than a year ago my wife and I became homeowners. On the whole this is a good thing (property taxes aside). Sadly, between work, school and family commitments I’m not able to spend as much time working on my yard as I would have liked. (In fact, I eventually broke down and hired Bayou City Lawns to handle most of the upkeep for me, ’cause I just didn’t have time…)

The one arboreal solace I’ve left myself is the annual pruning of the four crape myrtle trees in our front yard. Now I’m neither a botanist nor a landscaping engineer, so I have no idea how best to take care of these trees. Heck, I didn’t even know what a crape myrtle was until I discovered that I owned four of them. But I have to admit that I enjoy standing out by the street with my shears & clippers thinning out the young growth and the bits that look like they’re headed for territorial conflict. Instead of doing what everyone else probably knows from experience is the right thing to do, i.e. lopping off everything and leaving stubs, I really do like to pretend it’s a giant bonsai, and that by carefully and thoughtfully doing a snip here, a clip there, I can somehow bring out the inner treeness and become one with my yard.

Or maybe it’s just novel for me to be out in the sun for a bit, so I get a tad delusional. Your guess is as good as mine.

I just wanted to thank the Houston Metbloggers for keeping my up-to-speed (well, sort of) on the haps in Houston. I am currently in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and enjoying the 75 degree weather. I just had to rub that in.

If you want a great travel destination that is a super cheap flight from Houston – check out San Miguel de Allende. I have seen flights as low as $78 one way.

In aikido we study how to blend with an attacker’s energy so as to neutralize the effect of the attack. I really believe we are all given opportunities to study how to blend throughout the day, whether in the dojo or not. I’m often thinking about ways to explain how aikido really works and somehow I keep reverting back to driving. The idea of merging into freeway traffick is a fairly good analogy of what blending should be like. When you don’t blend with your attacker, you end up crashing into them.
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Taken from my journal with a few edits:

I’ve never been so thankful in my whole entire life. This past Tuesday, my car spun around twice (taking up like 3 lanes which included the emergency lane) and my car almost fell off the freeway, and when my car finally stopped spinning, I was facing the oncoming traffic. I was like “Oh my God, please, don’t hit me.” Thank God for miracles like this. No car hit me, no scratch, just simply nothing. Except I’m quite shaken up a bit. I haven’t the slightest clue how I was so calm during that time. I didn’t even panic at all. My hands did all the work and I was able to control the car when it was spinning (desperate measures call for desperate times really).

And this was all because a car was about to hit the front fender near the driver’s side (like several inches away!).

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I’ve seen its all. At the least I believe so, when it comes to movies and movie going. Crowds, noise, different people, the hero worship, naked women(in the audience) and sometimes being crazy enough to watch the movie without even understanding the language it was dubbed into. Theaters, movie theaters.
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What do you do when your rent is late, your car insurance is cancelled, your registration is expired, your car payment is two months behind, your refrigerator is empty, your checking account is overdrawn and you just got pulled over by the police?

I’m totally sincerious!!!! What do you do?

There is an answer…..I’ll be back with it.

How does it feel to be a new guy in Houston? Ask me. It comes with a lot of challenges.
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This is both a hard, and wonderful entry for me to write.  As you have guessed by the subject line, I am leaving Houston.  In fact, I have already left.  I have moved to central Georgia.

It all came down like this:

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My friend Jessie recently took part in a very traditional Indian wedding here in Houston and just posted a great account of her experience on her blog.

Link: A Wedding Like None Other (in my experience anyway!)