Stimulating

As you may have heard, President Bush, or Congress, or whoever, have decided that the economy needs stimulating. In order to do this, they're going to give everyone $600 to do with what they want. Free money! Hurrah! Just don't go spending it on Chinese toothpaste.

Unfortunately, everyone does not mean everyone. In particular, those of us who are non-resident aliens. Now, residency status in the US is confusing. Meaning badly organised. You can be resident for tax purposes whilst being non-resident for immigration purposes. You can be resident in a state without being a resident of the country. Essentially, no-one cares about what we do or think, and we pay taxes without being allowed to vote on how those taxes are used, or get free money along with everyone else.

Galveston

A few weeks ago my Dad and Beverley came to visit Texas, giving us all an excuse to make a trip down to Galveston. Which is on an island. Apparantely a lot of Texans don't realise this. It seems a pleasant enough tourist-seaside town, a bit like Brighton maybe, except with sandier beaches and warmer waters...



and stranger looking birds:

Sunshine

I seem to have lucked out this spring with the weather. As I understand it, the weather in both the UK and in Evanston has been miserable. But Houston has been lovely - I suspect nicer than the average April due to the general coldness of the whole country. Here's a view of downtown Houston from the Buffalo Bayou park on a beautiful Sunday afternoon:

Indicators?

It almost makes me want to take back everything I ever said about drivers in Evanston - the driving in Houston really is appalling. I made a quick survey on my way to work on Friday morning, and 25-30% of drivers turning left did not indicate. There are many places where the driving is known to be difficult - if you've ever driven in Italy, you'll know that drivers are aggressive, and if you want to get anywhere, you have to be aggressive too. But in Houston it's different. I don't think the drivers are doing this out of spite, or a need to get anywhere quickly, or because they want to show off how man they are. I think they actually are just plain dumb. Maybe of them don't realise you're meant to indicate when you change lanes on the highway, or stop at a stopsign, or give way if you're turning left. I'd be interested to see what the driver's education here is like, and then I'd like to challenge someone to try and fail the Texas driving test. Having seen the drivers that have passed, it cannot be a triviality.

Bigger

So I suppose I should try and give some reason to the lack of recent postings - I'd like to say it's because nothing in Texas has given me cause for irritation but sadly that's not quite true. Mainly it's just laziness. But also, I've been spending a lot of time on the climbing wall at the university gym. As with everything in Texas, it's Bigger, and at 53 feet high is the second tallest indoor wall in the US.

Efficiency

As some of my readers will know, that is, if I have any readers left after leaving such a long gap between posts, I'm going to be moving to New Zealand later this year. One of the annoyances of the New Zealand visa system is the 16 page health check form they make you fill out - presumably to stop ill people coming in and using up all of their free healthcare. I was slightly irritated by the University of Houston's on-campus health centre's refusal to do this health check for me ("we don't want to take responsibility for filling out the paperwork"... sigh - you're doctors - isn't taking responsibility your job? - anyway...) but managed to find myself a nice friendly family practise near the medical centre in Houston. Having got this and all the other paperwork for the visa together, I sent of the application by UPS on Friday, and being the slightly neurotic type that I am, was continually checking the UPS tracking website until the package arrived in Washington at 2:15pm on Tuesday. To my surprise, I had an email from the New Zealand Embassy only 2 hours later requesting additional details (ok, things I'd forgotten to fill in - it's a 16 page document, who isn't going to make mistakes?) on the health check form. A model of efficiency indeed. Let's hope the rest of the visa process goes through with the same speed.