maitresinge

Back from my weekend trips... settled down for a while. I brought back a few photos, too, which I'm now finally bothering to upload.

Texas was fun. although the weather was just pure spite. Cristy (whom you can see in my pics folder) gushed for weeks that I'd just love the 80 degree weather: an oasis of warmth in my mid-Atlantic winter. It was 80 degrees on Thursday. It got cold literally during the drive from the airport to her house. It stayed 50 and raining for the next few days, and turned back to 80 in the afternoon on Monday, just in time to taunt me with the fact that MD is still cold.

We still had our fun, though. Turns out her little border town has a surprisingly good zoo. I hadn't been to a zoo in years, so it was a lot of fun to see the animals again, without the lens of childhood. Most of the animal photos were too large for the 100kB/file limit on SG accounts, but I added a couple that scaled down well, including the Demon Turtle:


This thing is approximately 4 feet long, and has got to weigh a good 700-800lbs. And it just stares into your soul, as if to demand that we acquiesce to its power and just jump down into its mouth. It dares you to continue existing in the face of its infinite majesty.

Here around College Park, UMD has commercials for their sports teams, the Terrapins, with the tagline, "Fear the Turtle." The commercials feature a little box turtle opening its mouth, with a roar dubbed in. I will never be able to view those commercials the same way.

Anyway, we also took an evening trip across the border into Mexico. They had a little festival going on (Cristy's town will have a corresponding festival on their side of the Rio Grande, next week), so I got to walk around and listen to the songs and eat some food. They had corn on the cob, covered with mayonnaise, then coated in chili powder and parmesan cheese, and then brushed with lime juice. It's a pretty... interesting taste sensation; I don't know how to better describe it than that. They use a different kind of corn. I guess it might technically be "maize." It's less sweet, more grain-taste-y. Also more grainy texture. Pretty good, though.

The day I left, when it was finally nice weather again, so Cristy and I went to the beach about a half-hour east of her town, on South Padre Island. It's one of those barrier islands, miles and miles long but only a half a mile wide at its thickest. Unlike most of the islands up here on the East, though, it's not really developed. You can see construction proceeding up the island from the bridge to the mainland north, but there's still plenty of empty sand. Cristy apologized for how crowded the place was, because another human being was visible. Even in bad weather, Ocean City's beaches are at least half covered with towels. So we lounged around the dunes, and I climbed up and down a few. If you turned around and positioned yourself right, the dunes were big enough to hide the ocean, and it was like just being in empty wasteland. Doesn't sound good, but I've been a city (or at least suburbs) boy my whole life, so empty nature has its appeal to me.

Then, this past weekend, I went off to see J (also among the pics), in Western MD. No really exciting stories to tell there. We tried to go out to the restaurant/piano bar that opened up in Cumberland (the closest city), only to find that they hadn't been able to hire a pianist, so the bar part was closed, and we ended up just going out to a regular bar for a while. I actually didn't bring any decent clothes, so I had to borrow a shirt from her boyfriend. It's a little weird to be like, "Ok, well, I'm gonna go wear your clothes and take your girlfriend out on a date." They've pretty much agreed to split once the lease period on their current place ends, though, so I don't think jealousy is much of an issue anymore. Besides our attempt at a little outing, we pretty much just spent the days hanging around her place and relaxing, like we usually do.

Oh, and look at me! I have a signature .gif now!