Don’t you just love long weekends?
I spent my Memorial Day weekend in Texas with Brenda. I flew down on Friday and got back late last night. I had a great time, but there were a lot of annoying bumps.
To start off, I’ve been trying to get direct deposit set up, but my employer seems to be having some problem accomplishing this. Despite being told that direct deposit would be set up by the time payday rolled around on Thursday—the day before I flew—I still got a paycheck instead of a direct deposit receipt. Between meetings and such, I didn’t get a chance to deposit my paycheck until after banking hours, which meant that the money would have to post to my account on Friday. Unfortunately, when I landed in Houston in the morning, it hadn’t posted, so renting a car was made considerably more difficult.
The rental was a pain in the ass, too. Since they were only a couple of dollars more than a compact, I rented an “intermediate” car from Enterprise. We took a Dodge Caliber that I am reasonably certain was possessed by the devil himself. We got a “change oil” message about ten minutes after leaving the rental and discovered that there was no windshield washer fluid.
The car itself was a typical example of why our auto industry is being consistently beaten by the Japanese and Germans; the engine was clearly underpowered for a car of that size. What my little Nissan Sentra would have no problem with, this car strained to do. Accelerating from sixty to seventy miles per hour should not in any way involve the engine racing. Oh, and did I mention that the car burned fuel so fast that I was certain there was a gnome siphoning gasoline from our tank? Holy cow, did this car ever guzzle gas!
The car was clearly possessed by some dark force, as evidenced by the fact that the passenger-side dashboard slopes downward, guaranteeing that anything you put there—like, say, an iPhone—will slide promptly off when any acceleration is detected. My poor iPhone fell off the dash and struck the lever that you use to pull the seat forward and back and suffered a nasty ding right over the speaker and spider-web cracks in the screen. It will sadly have to be replaced, perhaps in a few weeks.
We went to the Menil Collection museum, where we saw some very nice art, including three of Joseph Cornell’s beautiful boxes. I’ve loved Cornell’s boxes for ages, but I’d never seen one in real life before that. Something about his works are so marvelously meticulous that I can’t tell whether a crack in the paint is the result of time or if Cornell intended it to look like that. We also went to the nearby Rothko Chapel and reflected on his paintings. (We also found out that the paintings, which are enormous, were brought in through the ceiling, since there was no way they could fit through the doors.)
We spent the night at the house of Brenda’s friend Lulu, who is very nice and lives in a house that is extraordinarily big for one person. Next morning, we went with Lulu, Jose and a few others out to New Braunfels (which is just outside San Antonio), where we were going to tube the Guadalupe River. Brenda and I ran into one small snag, here, as we accidentally followed the wrong red Chevy Silverado for about ten minutes. It was an easy mistake to make, since everyone in Texas drives a pickup truck. Everyone.
We eventually got to the river and had a nice time floating along. Since it was in a park which was okay with open containers, virtually everyone was floating down the river with coolers and drinking themselves silly. Still, the river was clean and cool on a hot day and we eventually met up with Lulu and Jose again. I banged the hell out of my heel on a rock jumping into the river. I thought I might have broken my heel, but since it felt a little better the next morning, I decided it was just a nasty jam and that was it.
Jose, Lulu and the others went camping that night, but since Brenda and I had no camping gear, we opted for a nearby hotel.
The next day, the others went off to Austin, while Brenda and I stayed in New Braunfels. Brenda and I tubed the river again and the following day, we went to Schlitterbahn, a water-park nearby, which was really impressive. (They had uphill water slides!) It certainly beats the pants off of Splish Splash, a mediocre water-park on the east end of Long Island. Schlitterbahn was a lot of fun, although the saturation of German-shounding names for rides and attractions unnerved me a bit. One ride even had music playing which sounded like Wagner. I half expected a ride to ask us to annex the Sudetenland.
We drove back to Houston. On the way, Brenda called Lulu, who said she’d gotten a tattoo of a fish on her leg to commemorate the weekend. I think if I were to do the same, I would have to get a tattoo of a speed-bump. We returned the devil-car and I flew home.
All in all, it was a fun, if not the smoothest, weekend.
