Can you guess which option we chose? Yes, this haircut is a little bit too short for Canada!In spite of my early intentions (i.e. an update once a month, I have been able to achieve a rather lower frequency - more like once every three months. But I will get better. It is not that there would be no news, it is just that the organization is not fine tuned to the point that there is time for everything. Among other things my old scanner died one day and I have yet to hook up the new one. Once I do that I will do a major re-design of the page. This will coincide with moving the page to a different server - we now have cable (which is much faster when it works!). In fact, change the address of this web page to http://home.houston.rr.com/frydl because that is where it will reside in the future. At the moment the page exists at both sites but I will be closing the flash.net down as soon as Alice goes back to Canada (she still needs the phone connection to hook up her laptop).
In the last three months we moved to Houston, went back to Dallas to a wedding, went
back to Dallas to visit INS, I went to a conference in Istanbul
and stopped in Prague on the way over. Alice came to join us for the summer
and to make some money for next school year. There are clearly
lot of photogenic news items and they will form the backbone of the
update, so check back in about one to two months. Remember: it
will be a new address.
23 April 2000
Well it is getting warmer and little bit moister but it is still pleasant: this means at least three months of good weather in the spring. We will have to wait a few weeks to find out what kind of a price we will have to pay in terms of heat and humidity and spectacular storms and associated flooding. Hope it will not be all that bad. I have noticed that local residents have developed a very keen eye for the smallest changes in slope - it probably comes from having to learn where they can drive and where their car will drown when it rains.
There are some interesting differences between Dallas and Houston, the differences are trivial but all the same I would not have expected them given that the two cities are in the same state and really not that far appart. For example almost every major intersection has people standing on the divide selling the local newspaper. Have not seen this very often in Dallas. There are many Japanese restaurants but many are fake. I do not want to sound like a snob by insisting on Japanese ownership and staffing, but when you go into a sushi restaurant you do not really expect that they will be burning incense. This actually happened in one place.
Another type of eating establishement are Taquerias. Mostly very down to earth, mex-mex restaurants. I do not know of any in Dallas with a possible exception of a counter in the Fiesta supermarket. That does not mean there are not any, but certainly their numbers are vastly inferior to what one sees in Houston. They are all different, some are bad, some are good and from time to time one comes accross a very good one. It would be an interesting project to make a guide to Houston taquerias but unfortunately my metabolism is so slow that it would take me 20 years to try out each and every one of them. And so I am satisfied with occasssional random sampling.
25 March 2000
I have been a very bad boy! Originally I promised to update this page about every two to three weeks and it is obviously turning into something more like two to three months. This is still a higher update frequency than the one with which I typically wrote letters and I will make superhuman effort to update this page on a monthly basis. But of course, only time will tell.
What is the excuse? Well, rather busy and turbulent few months. To start with I am kind of floating between two places at once: Houston and Dallas. And of course a new job ( or an old job in a new company), looking for a house, getting ready to get out of the house we are in - it all sort of adds up. Only now am I beginning to establish a new routine and becoming a little bit more efficient.
So what is Houston like? Well, let me tell you, it was not love at first sight! More like an arranged marriage. At first sight Houston is ugly - no point in mincing words. Part of it is geography, building on a coastal plain puts everything on the same elevation and that is an architectural handicap that is difficult (but not impossible) to overcome. Well, Houston does not even try. It is supposedly the fourth largest city in the US, but I would not be surprised if it is number two or one in terms of area. It is HUGE!!! Makes Dallas seem neat, compact, organized, kind of European. At first the size and the amount of driving necessary was mind boggling.
All that said, I am getting used to it and I think I am going to end up enjoying living here. Now, before you think that this is kind of a seal of approval I must warn you: I liked every place I ever lived in - eventually (took me 12 years to get to like Prague!). Big part of it is, of course, that humans learn to filter out the unpleasant. Things that sent me for a spin initially do not seem to upset me that much any more. I re-calibrated my sense of far and near ( it is relative anyway), found a few nice restaurants, accepted that this is a driving town (you cannot walk from one restaurant to another - even on the "restaurant row" (Westheimer) they are likely to be at least 0.5 km apart. And there are some positive aspects: the ocean is about 90 minute drive and so one can decide to go on Saturday morning after late breakfast and it is not a big deal - little bit like driving to the mountains from Calgary. That will probably amuse us for a couple of years. There are a lot more Spanish speakers than in Dallas (about 4 times more Spanish radio stations) even though there is not a bilingual or Spanish Toastmaster's club - and I will miss that.
And so far the weather has been fantastic! Nicer than Dallas, which still has a winter-like feel about it while in Houston it's spring. It never occurred to me that I would ever come to think of Dallas as the "northern city". But I am told the worst is yet to come: the proverbial hot towel in the face should be making its appearance in May and shortly thereafter we will be probably treated to torrential rains and flooding. So I will give you a full evaluation of the climate in October.
Check back in a month, I will post some pictures. And in case you did not read the January update, keep on reading.
So here we are in the next century and all that. Somehow it did not feel all that momentous. We did not do anything special, the weather was very mild and so we just drove down to the White Rock Lake (the "white rock", incidentally is the Austin chalk of Cretaceous age which outcrops all around the lake). It was a nice sunset
and this is what we looked like just before the end. Of course in a way we did not have to make any special effort to mark the end of an era: as it turns out, Powers beyond our control have worked hard to make sure that the end of the millennium (I realize it is not strictly speaking correct)will be marked by momentous events.
In a series of ironic developments the company where I have worked these past 19 years ( and which for the same period of time took care of all our bills) ceased to exist in the last month of 1999. No matter how one looks at it translates into a drastic change in our lives. At the same time, Mobil's symbol - the Pegasus neon, which used to be on the top of the Magnolia building in downtown Dallas and became a city symbol but which had not been turned on for several decades now, has been renovated and the lights were turned on again to welcome the year 2000. The irony is, of course, that this was happening just as Mobil was beginning to fade into history as an independent company and physically moving most of its Dallas workforce to Houston.
This, of course results in a major perturbation in our lives. I had been offered a job with the new company (ExxonMobil) continuing what I have been doing for the past 5.5 years: exploration in the South Caspian. Like most other exMobilites we had two choices:
1. Option one: reject the offer, leave the company, return to Canada, pocket a very generous severance payment and either retire, look for another job in the industry or start something completely new. A very surprisingly large number of people (possibly more than half) have chosen this option (even though, being American, they could decide to stay in Dallas.
2. Option two: accept the offer, move to Houston and hope for the best - and that very simply means hoping for reasonable and stable oil prices (over $20 per barrel). Can you guess which option we chose? Yes, this haircut is a little bit too short for Canada!
In any case, the next few months will be very busy. I will start commuting between Houston and Dallas at the end of this month. Kumiko and Monica will stay in Dallas until the school ends and then we will all move to Houston.
The moving around effectively starts today as Alice is heading back north to resume her studies on Monday.