So I haven’t been posting here in a while. Every time I am on the computer I feel like I should be prepping for my lecture or finding interesting exercises for my students to try. Even right now, I don’t feel fully prepared for tomorrows class so I will be up late.

My parents visited this weekend and it was good. Usually I have more family come at the same time. With so many people in the house it can get really crowded, and that’s because we have 4 bedrooms! But hey, I’m used to it (6 in our family when I was at home). It was just nice to be with my parents though. Just kind of hang out and have fun.
Danny is out of town for some gigs with a guy named Eric Tessmer. It doesn’t look like a permanent thing, but it was a couple of well paying gigs. He’ll be home soon.

I am half half about the neighborhood I live in.
On one hand it is at times called the ghetto. Last week a cop shot a kid (18 yrs old) in the face and riots broke out. Okay, small riots, but that happened about 3 blocks away. Not too long ago, there was a hostage situation and they called my house and a recording said to “stay indoors”. That was 2 blocks away.
But on the other hand…even though stuff has happened nearby, I like our house and our neighborhood. We live in a cul-du-sac and don’t have many problems here. It seems to be “over there” or “those houses” that have issues. I think the neighborhood is changing. We are considered east central Austin which is good, especially since a big development is nearby. Our house value has grown too, so I think it was a good investment.
But today I was pretty annoyed. My mind started pondering the thought of moving out of here. I have found I can’t go walking alone (even with the dog). I get honks and shouts from trucks. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’m so amazingly hot that they can’t help it, I think if anything with legs and long hair was walking – the low lifes would honk. Today I got the honks and shouts, but then I had someone pull near me and ask if I was “selling”. I did not look up and I ignored him but…grrrr. I went straight home and decided that I can’t go alone anymore. While my neighborhood is changing, it’s still has a way to go.
I do think it’s interesting that our neighborhood is predominately black, yet we have pockets of Mexicans. Like our neighbors who go back and forth from Mexico often. They speak a different Spanish than what I am used to and tend to wear more cowboy clothing. Not sure if being a “cowboy” is a Mexican thing or what. Corpus was like the birthplace of Tejano but I didn’t see nearly as many cowboys as I do here (and that’s because most Tejano bands have matching cowboy shirts!). I know that’s a weird observation but it just stood out to me. To bring this back to my original point, those are the people who I keep getting honks from. *sigh* I was happy moving into our area because there was a mix (and more whites are coming in too). I like the diversity and it reminded me of Taft (my birth town). But today I was reminded why my parents worked so hard to move our family out of Taft. It wasn’t the ghetto they were worried about, it was the barrio. Why am I back when they worked so hard to get us out?
No rash decisions need to be made now, but just something else to think about that we’ll probably need to do before we have children.