Adventures with Gravel

Before I headed out on my second round of travel for the Fall 2013 season I bought a new pair of dress shoes.  My old ones looked fine but due to my irregular step pattern I have worn out the soles to the point that I had little holes in both heels.   Instead of ruining a perfectly good pair of shoes with all the travel I decided to run my old pair into the ground and took them in lieu of the brand new pair.  It is with these little holes in the each heel that my adventure with gravel begins.  I had no issues until I arrived at my family’s cabin.

The quarter mile drive from the road to the cabin is all gravel and the path you would walk from where one normally parks their car to the front porch is also gravel.  This gravel happens to not be tiny tiny gravel but it’s not larger stones either…in fact it is the perfect size to be jammed up into a tiny hole in the heel of some over worn dress shoes.  I had quickly got a stone or two stuck in each of the holes which caused no physical discomfort but a minor annoyance in that the clicked together as I walked.  This caused a sound very similar to Mexican Jumping Beans (which are neither Mexican nor beans…they are some kind of insect) jumping around in the plastic cases they are sold in.  Every time I stepped they would click.  They made me sound like some poor man’s cowboy who couldn’t afford real spurs.  I didn’t think of it as an issue until I started my round of high school visits. 

High schools – no matter what age you are – have this incredible ability to transport you back to your own high school days if you don’t watch out.  And that is exactly what my Mexican jumping bean shoes did.  I would walk through very quiet halls (as everyone was in class) and have every one’s head turn as I walked by.  On top of that when I would present to the students the only noise that was made was when I talked, but I also move around and walk when presenting.  Which meant every time I stopped talking but kept walking that my shoes would click – like plastic flamenco shoes.  I would see their eyes keep bouncing from my face down to my shoes as they tried to figure out what that noise was.  The incredible thing about people in general  - and especially teenagers – is that people are too afraid to ask questions that they may have that might break the social contract.  Perfectly viable questions like…what is that clicking sound when you walk.  After a little insecure feeling about it I decided that I just don’t care what they thought and let it slide; silently cursing the gravel in my show for transporting me back in time to when I worried about such things.  That was my mistake right there…

…my second adventure has to do with the consequences and ramifications of cursing gravel and upsetting the gravel gods.  So as the travel season wore on so did my shoes.  They became what one would call talking shoes as the front of the sole started becoming unglued from the actual shoe.  Not the first time it happens but the leather still looks nice, so I kept them going.  Besides I am an admissions counselor and I can’t afford new pairs of shoes left and right – remember I have a nice brand new pair waiting for me when I get back! 

So there I was back in the cabin trying to get the music app on my phone to read my mircoSD properly and getting frustrated (it kept reading all the old songs I already deleted and would freeze up because it couldn’t locate the file!)  Trying to kill two birds with one stone I was currently unloading the car and working on my cell phone at the same time.  I dropped off my laptop in the cabin and was walking back towards the car when it happened.

My flapping sole at the front of the shoe flopped down scrapped the gravel and caused me to trip and fall.  With my ninja like speed and cat like reflexes I put my hands out to break my fall and save the beautiful visage that’s was bestowed upon me by the divine – so I may embellish a little but you get the point.  Unfortunately for me my phone was still in my hand.  So in the end I broke my fall….with my phone.  And the gravel got its revenge for me cursing them because the weight of my crashing down on my phone and the gravels determination to become one with my phone had caused my screen to shatter.  Not only had all the glass shattered – much like the dreams of many of the students applying to my Uni – but the screen itself under the glass had shattered and there was no coming back from that. 

The gravel had exacted its sweet, sweet – bitter to me – revenge.  In the end I lucked out getting a new phone ( I was on a pre paid plan for dirt cheap and they don’t insure those phones) and got a dirt cheap plan with a phone whose music works like a charm.  I have since gorilla glued my sole back to the shoe and asked for forgiveness from the gravel.  But the gravel gods have the last laugh as I still have two stones stuck in each heel of my shoe…taunting me as I take each step.

It’s Been the Worst Day Since Yesterday...

Now there is something you must know about me and Houston.  We have a hate-hate relationship.  I hate Houston and Houston gives me no shortage of reasons to hate it.  Ever since I first went there in the fall of 2011 I have had nothing but Murphy’s Law; and let me tell you every little thing does go wrong.  Schools forgetting I was visiting or writing down the wrong day to booking hotel in the not so nice side of town.   But no matter all that Houston had to give me more reasons with my last day in town.

Now on my last day in town I was visiting three schools.  I had a good turn out on two of the visits and one visit in which only one student showed up.  Ok…it happens…better than when I first got to Houston and no one should up to my visit from a school we see a lot of applications from (frankly I think the counselor was checked out even though she was brand new.  She just didn’t care).  But talking to one student is not a problem….rather talk to one than none.  After that visit I went to get some delicious BBQ before my last high school visit and run to the airport.  All week I have been eating delicious smoky brisket.  So smoky that even 30 minutes after eating it I was still breathing the smoke.  So smoky I had withdrawal symptoms after leaving Texas.  So smoky I would not be surprised if I ended up with lung cancer  (and unlike cigarettes well worth the price I would have paid.  Death by brisket!)  But not on my last day in Houston.  Oh no, not Houston.  It wouldn’t be proper of Houston for me to enjoy my last meal.  Houston wanted me to leave with a bad taste in mouth and it made sure that happened.  The first place I had it on the fateful last day was Brookstreet  BBQ (not located on any street named Brook but stay away from the Westheimer location).  Now I have had the brisket from Brookstreet BBQ in Sugar Land and it was right up there.  Delicious and smoky …just like me (oh yes I went there).  But they have committed a cardinal sin in this restaurant.  Not only was that brisket not smoky (it definitely had no smoke rings which the meat gets from the slow smoking process nor a hint of liquid smoky as a form of cheating) but they cut off all the sides that would have trapped any smoky flavor in before serving it!  I had really juicy pot roast on a sandwich!  Not brisket!  And the sides were canned sides!  I couldn’t believe it.  I was disgusted but hungry all at the same time and since I spent the money on it I ate it.  None too pleased but I ate it.  Oh and for the topper of that lunch Houston made sure that they ran out of sweet tea by the time I got there!

Well after that I did my last high school visit in that cesspool of human waste known as Houston.  Lovely visit and great kids, couldn’t have asked for more! So then I went my merry way to the airport.  I was running a little late since one of the counselors decided to describe to me in vivid detail just what students do in their four years at this high school.  Not one to be rude, I sat and listened and listened….and listened….and listened.  Really cool stuff but I had a plane to catch.  Now on my way to the airport and stuck in traffic I referenced my phone to look on the map where in relation I was.  So I know I had my phone on the way there.  I stopped to fill up the rental right close to the drop off point (makes it sound like a drug deal or government spy…funny how descriptions of both of those coincide) and while I was fueling up I emptied the car of all the garbage and stuffed my work carryon full of materials and threw away the boxes.  Then I high tailed it over to the drop off center for the rentals.  Grabbed my backpack my suitcase and carry on and went to go catch the shuttle.  As I got on the escalator I went to check my phone to see what time it was.  That’s when it hit me.  I realized my phone was not in my pocket!  I searched my backpack and carryon and knew it wasn’t in my suitcase.  I must’ve left it in the cup holder of the car!  I ran over to the car rental people and asked if I could leave my stuff there while I ran back up to the cars.  They politely obliged and I ran back up to the car rental area and went to find my car I dropped off 7 minutes ago.  Well never mind the fact there was around 30-40 cars that were recently returned waiting to be taken down to cleaning, my car was amongst the first to be taken from the drop off zone.  The gentleman there directed me to the little kiosk in the middle of the parking deck.  I went over there and explained everything to which a very nice and sweet lady said she would run down to find it.  So off she went…and I stood…thinking it odd that they cannot communicate between themselves and another area of their organization just down the ways.  And I waited….and I waited…and waited…and waited.  They assured me she was looking although they could call her to see what was going on.  I would’ve happily called her myself if I had my phone but then again I wouldn’t be in this mess if I had had it!  So the time ticks by and soon 30 minutes fly by and then 45.  I asked if they had heard anything at which point a gentleman said he would grab a car and run down to see what was going on.  And so he did.  And so I waited….and I waited….and I waited.  Finally I had less than an hour for my flight to leave.  I decided to chalk up the phone as a loss and catch my flight back home.  I hop on the shuttle to the terminal and go to get my ticket and check my baggage.

As I am trying to do this the machine notifies me they cannot check my luggage. So my waiting commenced again, and when you are trying to catch a flight and need to clear security then every second seems like a minute, making every minute into an hour.  Finally a nice lady came over and told me that they don’t check baggage’s this close to departure because they can’t guarantee I would make the flight.  So I had to catch a later flight (thank you Houston!)  after we got all that straitened they checked my bag and gave me my new ticket.  Well now with time to kill I hopped back on the shuttle bus back to the car rental place the check on my phone.  In that 20-30 minute period they had forgotten what I looked like because they thought I was checking out a car when I went back to the kiosk.  I mean really how many men with glasses, saved head, majestic beard, wearing a full suit in this ungodly humidity and heat, and wearing a bowtie do they see every day?!!?  Anyways when I told them I missed my flight and had time to kill and came to see if they found the phone they simply told me no.  Damn.  All that and still phone less.  Sad, down trodden, and with a broken wallet I hopped on the same shuttle bus I just took back to the terminal.  Went through security and entered the crappiest terminal ever.  Most terminals are nice and are long with various stores.  One book store, an eatery, and dimly light waiting terminals with no free wifi, least not working free wifi.   So I went to the one store and after about 5 minutes had seen everything they had to offer…twice.  Finally I went to eat.  Even though the stress caused me not to be hungry I knew I had to eat at some point and it was hours since I last ate.  I went and found the BBQ place thinking oh delicious smoky brisket with your delicious side of mac n cheese and oh so sweet side of yams would cheer me up.  Damn you a third time Houston for playing me the fool!  This brisket was unedible!  It was mostly grizzle.  I hate grizzle.  So much fat on this that less than 40% of the serving was meat.  That and the yams were canned and over cooked and way to sweet.  When they served me some of the yam juice found its way over the partition into my mac n cheese totally ruining those!  So all in all two meals as a loss.  I went to wait for my plane.  Finally got on and took off with no issues.  Hit some turbulence in the air that was awesome (hey I can say that cuz we landed safely) and got to my office around 1:00 am Saturday.  Never mind the fact that I had to pack the car with ten boxes full of materials for my trip to the UP and had to leave the next day to get to Escanaba!.  But Houston was not done there.  It had to give me one last punch like in a cheesy horror movie that once you think the monster is vanquished it lashes out with its dying breath to inflict that one last kill!  Well  I had bought a little gift for a friend from work, a small token of my thanks for giving me a lift to the airport, and in trying to open the plastic lid that was taped down really tough,  the plastic broke and jammed right into my finger tip.  So now I had to find that first aid kit and get all bandaged up.  Touché Houston touché.  


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YYfn32yRlM

Fear and Loathing at the Galleria Mall

One day I had finished all my visits and found myself with some time to kill so I naturally did what most people do when they have time to kill...I went to the mall.  Not just any mall however but Houston's Galleria mall; the 7th largest mall in North America (didn't know 7th place as anything to be proud of but we do live in a time of everyone getting participation trophies...but that's not here nor there).  Now you might be wondering with all that the 4th largest city in the US has to offer why the mall?  This is a just and valid question; however what you probably don't realize is that the urban planners of the city of Houston over the years have decided to take all common sense and years of perfectly fine city layouts and toss them right out the window.  This creates navigating your way around the city a little tricky.  Worst of all is that I really wanted to go to the Johnson Space Center but that is on the far opposite end of the city from where I was at.  That and the small fact that by the time I had finished with all my visits it was nearly 4 in the afternoon.  The Johnson Space Center closes at 5:00 pm during the week, which means that if by some miracle of a chance I can avoid the rush hour (which starts a little later than SE Michigan) I would get there in time to see the guards punching the security code as they went home for the evening.  Now if you are familiar with the area you may be saying to yourself  'Wait a tick....you could've gone to the Museum district and seen some awesome things.'  To which I would say, 'I am not going to pay to go to the museum to then have then close soon after getting there! (I have no clue when the different museums closed but I assumed around the same time as JSC)  So off the the Galleria I went.

Now I must say.  it is a giant mall.  There might be 6 other malls bigger than this one but this is plenty huge to kill a couple hours and get lost (more on that a little later).  I had been there last year but I guess I must've only explored a fraction of the actually mall.  It took me a couple hours just to walk all floors!!!  I didn't go into very many stores.  Most stores are the really nice expensive stuff.  Chanel, Burberry, Louis Vuitton, Mont Blanc, etc.  This mall is so huge that there were two of the same stores!  And the department stores had smaller sections of some the aforementioned expensive ass shit (and some I didn't name).  The whole thing really was disgusting.  So much money flying around that mall and for what?!?  Clothing?!?  Accessories?!?  Disgusting...the whole rich lot of them!  Really threw me into sharp realization that I need to get my money situation in order (damn student loans and credit cards!!!!).  But the mall did have it's fair share of affordable stores and kiosks too, so the whole mall doesn't deserved to be demolished.  I definitely did have that scene from Dark Knight Rises playing in my head; the one where they storm all the rich peoples apartments and rip them from their decadent lives.  One can dream I guess.  Well like I said earlier I did enter some stores.  The first department store I entered was Neiman Marcus.  Now you are probably wondering why I had ventured into that store after just going on a rant of the expensiveness of a majority of the mall.  Well I had wanted to go to Macy's as they always have good clearance for men, but alas I was lost and could not find the Macy's I had seen over an hour ago.  Quick side note this mall does NOT have very many mall directories.  Huge oversight there...or perhaps not; perhaps they want you to wander around with no direction or means of finding a direction to go where they desire to shop, in hopes that they will stumble into other stores and spend even more money than they initially intended...perhaps.  Anyways I found myself in Neiman Marcus.

This is a giant Neiman Marcus.  It was 4 stories I believe of all really expensive things.  Needless to say I did not belong in there, but since I had just finished some visits and was still in my suit no one gave me a second thought, as per usual.  After finding no sign of a men's section on the main floor (and no signs telling me where the Men's section might be found) I made my way up to the second floor.  Same luck there...so I naturally made my way up to the third floor!  It was on my decent to the third floor that the fire alarm in the store went off.  And just like when any fire alarm goes off in a non-grade school setting people do not pay it any attention and look for someone else to take the lead. Realizing that we are on the third floor and that perhaps in the case of a real fire I may want to be closer to the ground floor I made my way back down the escalator (just when I found the men's section!)  On the second floor I did find some employees which had radios to other employees who presumably knew what was going on.  These fine and stellar employees of the Neiman kept saying false alarm  (something I am quite familiar with at my place of work.) So naturally after hearing the phrase false alarm for the fifth time I went back up to the 3rd floor to continue my browsing.   As you might imagine I didn't find anything I liked in which I also liked the price.  Don't get me wrong there was plenty of fine clothing but none, in my not-so-humble opinion, of which the price justified the purchase.  I am not sure how much time exactly passed by (probably like ten minutes) but I couldn't help but notice that no one else was around.  No one was shopping, no one asking if I needed help nor trying to hustle me into buying something I don't need (more of that later) and more importantly no one at all in the men's section.  No on the third floor.  No one on the second from the short trip of one down escalator to the other (which were still going) and then when I reached the first floor there they all were....waiting outside the store.  I would like to take this time to thank management for their superb job of making sure customers are out before they themselves evacuate.  Perhaps you should look at the Italian Cruise ship industry...give that a whirl.  Anyways at this point I promptly made my exit from the store and the whole area of the mall.  I don't there was any fire as I didn't hear anything about a fire, so I really do believe it was a faulty alarm.  Furthermore I didn't hear an firetrucks or other emergency vehicles but then again I got out of there fast and that mall is so huge there could be a riot on one end and the people on the other would be none the wiser of it.  

(if this is getting too long then this would be the best time to take a break as I am going to talk about the fear part of the trip to the mall)

So like I had said I hightailed it out of there.  Wandering the mall again I had no idea where I was when I got yelled at by girl from a kiosk about 15 meters away.  I was in the middle of responding to an email on my phone so when the yelling started I had no idea what was going on...it turned out she was just trying to get my attention to lure me into her web.  She came with ferocious speed, grabbed me and dragged me over to her kiosk.  Before I knew what happened my hands were hovering above a wash basin as she was spewing some unintelligible nonsense about the salts from the dead sea.  Then she critiqued my hands and the callouses as if they were the worst she had ever seen!  Always up for something new and different I found my self rubbing the dead sea salts into my hands and boy were my hands soft.  It was nice and soft and she then gave me some body butter and she told me something about lotion being bad, but since I am always up for something free I bore through it.  Then came the selling point.  I could have the salt straight from the dead sea and the body butter with all its buttery goodness for the low low low price of $99.00 USD.  Wow what a...crock of crap (set to simmer all day).  Being a seasoned vet in the world of kiosking she knew this wasn't going to fly so she told me (in her thick Israeli accent) that just for me I could have the salt for $50.00 USD! Wow still a crock of crap!  I told her no.  The haggling began.  I told her I had to think about it...I hadn't planned on spending one hundred bucks on salt!  This must've offended her because she said Fine!  Fine!  threw her hands up and started yelling at me!  We went back and forth on why I didn't need fancy salts to fix a problem I really never had anyways.  I don't know what really set her off....I'm sorry you are tasked with the duty of selling over priced exfoliating salts but I wasn't born yesterday nor do I have all this money to spend on salt (dead sea or not).  In the middle of rant I promptly turned and left.  The positive side to all of this is that I had the world's softest hands! for about 30 minutes.  Then they went back to how they were before ....and then got a little drier.  That's what you get for using salt!  

Well it took me another hour after the salt incident to find out where I parked and the entire time I was terrified I would end up by that kiosk.  Military service is required of all Israeli citizens so she could probably snuff me out when my back is turned.  Thankfully I stayed away and finally found the section I entered in at ( had to go through Saks 5th ave! a store i never enter normally ha!) And I even got some christmas shopping out of the say.  Yes it's September.  I like to get it done early so during the holidays I can sit back and enjoy watching everyone freak outt, but that's besides the point.  Should you ever find your self in the 7th largest mall of North America keep your wits about you and watch out!