Since I last wrote I moved both myself and my roommate Becky out, signed up with the temp agency, gone to the doctor, and then I went to Texas.
My dad and I arrived back in California on Sunday, and then my parents, my (paternal) grandparents, and I flew out Thursday to Dallas. I got on the next plane to San Antonio, and my sister picked me up at the airport. She took me to the Alamo (surprisingly small) and the Mercado, a collection of booths selling souvenir/decorative items from Mexico (delightfully tacky), and then we went to dinner at a Mexican restaurant right there called Mi Tierra. Man, the food was so good. Mmmmm. Texas does Mexican food right. That night I slept at my sister's apartment and got freaked out because half an hour after I went to bed I woke up with the entire top of my head tingling. What with the tingling hand and the doctor's belief it's in my neck, a tingling head was quite disconcerting. But it went away really quickly and what I think happened was that I had been sleeping with my arm resting on my head and it cut off the blood to my scalp. It was really freaky at the time but funny in retrospect.
The next day by the time my sister and I were up and dressed, the older Pynns arrived (they had driven from Dallas). Then we took my sister to her school to see her art exhibit, and then to graduation. Her graduation was for the most part boring and uneventful. I slept through the speeches and zoned through most of the graduates but was amused by one professor, poor guy, whose graduation garb included a light teal little cloak thing and the same color hat, which is best described as a furry lampshade. Then my sister graduated and my parents' "Financial Freedom Day" was official.
After the graduation we went to dinner with a lot of my sister's friends to "the puffy taco place". I had a dinner that included two puffy tacos. They weren't exactly what you guys would think of as tacos, they were some meat and lettuce on a very thick corn tortilla. Man, they were good.
The next day my mom and sister wanted to go to some craft stores (my sister lives near several good ones) so we went around the city looking at those. I finally found that stupid yellow Jonquil color yarn to finish that little blanket I was making.
Saturday night was my sister's official graduation dinner, so we went to a barbecue place called the County Line. The meat and sides weren't that big a deal to me, but they had homemade bread that was very good and a dessert called "Chocolate Cobbler" which was very delicious. Mmmmm.
The next day all three generations of Pynns loaded into the minivan my parents had rented and we drove four hours (whatever, it actually took all day) to Galveston, that island on the Gulf. We finally got to Galveston, where my dad had rented a house on the beach. And I mean on the beach. It was maybe 20 feet from the water. My dad said all those houses were uninsurable, which makes sense. While we were in Galveston we saw the Moody gardens (we saw the rainforest garden, which was inside a glass pyramid, pretty cool), the Moody mansion (pretty neat old house), and drove toward Houston to see the Johnson space center, where I got you guys souvenirs.
Thursday we drove back to San Antonio from Galveston, which was another full day trip. I had been relegated to the very back corner of the van for the entire Galveston trip, wedged in by luggage, so I was glad when we finally got back. I stayed at my sister's again and we watched all the recorded television we hadn't seen in Galveston. Friday we went to the Mercado again where my mom and I got strings of paper-maché chilies and ate at Mi Tierra again. Later on we went to the Riverwalk, which is where a river goes through a mall, essentially. And then Saturday we flew home.
