I’m pleasantly surprised.  I was hoping I would be and I am.

We had planned on moving on Monday.  I took a look at our stuff, told my husband to go get the truck, and fully expected to be loaded and on the road two hours later.  Eight hours later we were still loading the cars and cleaning the house.  We decided to spend the night with my in-laws and head out in the morning, and after a few hiccups with the car trailer, we were off.  On a side note, I highly recommend using moving trucks for moving even if  you are from a small town and have cattle trailers readily available.  This was my first time to use anything but a cattle trailer and it sure beats the pants off of having to go to the car wash to rinse of the cow patties before you can load up your stuff. Also, if it rains, you don’t have to find another car wash to park under until it quits.

My husbands company offered to pay for the move or just give us cash.  Since we are very economical people we opted for the cash and while I still think it was a good decision, I’ll definitely consider it next time.  Most of our stuff is still sitting in the garage three stories below because we are too sore from the first day to carry it up.

After six hours of sweating buckets and cursing silently in my head we managed to muscle the furniture up the stairs with relatively little damage. The very last thing on the truck was the mattress and consistent with our luck, it started raining cats and dogs just as we we were preparing to haul up the mattress.

The Budget Truck Rental office happened to be next to a recent favorite restaurant of mine called Chuy’s.  The Austin original serves up an absolutely beautiful fried avocado and I wanted my husband to experience what he has been missing out on.  It turns out that not all Chuy’s make the fried and stuffed avocado so we were disappointed but too exhausted to complain.  Our very generous waiter heard we had just moved that day and surprised us with a complementary “welcome to Houston dessert” after dinner.

Thanks to him, we feel welcome.

It’s 5:00 a.m. and I can’t sleep.  I keep packing boxes in my head and making to do lists.  I dropped my two year old with chicken pox at my mother’s yesterday and I keep worrying about her too.  We are moving to Houston in about 27 hours.  I am going to really miss Austin.  The top ten things I love about Austin are:

1. The hills. I grew up in West Texas and always wanted to live in a place with some variance in elevation.
2. The trees.  Houston has trees too but they’re different and can be somewhat overwhelming.  I like wide open spaces too.
3. The vistas.  This is becoming less of a draw as cookie cutter McMansions are cluttering the view.
4. The trails.  They combine my top three favorite things.
5. Swimming holes. There is just something about swimming in cold spring fed water that revives the spirit.
6. Men in spandex.  Just kidding.  I don’t know of any other city where so many men feel comfortable going about in stretchy pants.
7. Weirdos.  Austin has more than their fair share but since Houston’s bigger, there’s probably actually more there.
8. KUT Radio.  The best NPR station ever.
9. Music. Music. Music.  Need I say more?
10. The cool casual country culture.  Austin has the coolness factor that most other cities in the country lack.  It’s casual. It’s still country, though that aspect is slowly being eroded away by the influx of foreigners from other states, especially California.

I’m 28 and this is the first time I’ve ever apartment shopped. In Africa we relied on word of mouth and waited three months for utilities. In Abilene there wasn’t much to choose from. Houston is a different story. There are hundreds of apartment complexes in our price range. Our plan was to find a relatively cheap apartment to save a little more for a down payment on a house but after half a dozen visits to apartments in the Westchase area, we realized that we should up our ante to get less dubious neighbors and a clean swimming pool. Houston gets consistently high scores in violent crime and car theft so security was important to us. We ended up with a really nice apartment next to Sam Houston Parkway. Since Houston is also one of the fattest cities in the country, we opted for a third floor apartment. Hopefully trudging up and down stairs with a two year old and groceries while sweating profusely in the humidity will keep me from adding the Houston twenty. We move in five days. My house is mostly packed up. I’ve sold my hideous couch on craigslist. I’m ready to go, but I’ll really miss Austin. I haven’t talked to many people who didn’t offer condolences for moving to Houston; even people from Houston. I’m looking forward to getting to know Houston and I hope that I’ll be pleasantly surprised if Houston doesn’t live up to its reputation.

It all began about two years ago in a sleepy East African village on the Indian ocean.  We were quietly going about our lives with our dog, Amos when I got an amoeba, or so I thought.  After several weeks of nausea and vomiting, we discovered that my parasite was the kind that took nine months to come out and stayed with you for a lifetime.  So we came home to Texas to give our little amoeba a more stable life.  She was born in November and our life hasn’t been the same since.  My husband quickly found out that outside of a church, his Masters in Divinity was pretty much useless, so he enrolled in the MPA program at the University of Texas and will be an accountant in about two weeks.  We tried desperately to stay in Austin but the best jobs were in Houston.  In about two weeks we will be moving there.  I wouldn’t quite call it an adventure; I’ve been on several of those, but I know almost nothing about Houston and will enjoy figuring out the place. It even feels a little like Africa. The traffic is chaotic and there is Indian run restaurants, groceries, hotels, and gas stations everywhere. I love Indian food. If only the sun had never set on the Indian empire rather than the British…  We would have inherited aromatic spices, hot curries, and movies with no plot lines and lots of dancing rather than bland pastries, kidney pie, and rubber stamps.