dallas!

i'm in dallas, texas and it is hot. i mean, this is to be expected, but i guess i just didn't really understand it until i was on my bed near my window with the ac blasting and could still feel the heat leaking through the closed window in that same way the arctic chill seeps into your bedroom in the winter.

my favorite sight seen thus far (and i'm guessing this might not be as rare around here as one might think) was the lifted, silver toyota tundra iForce v8 pickup truck with the "DON'T F*** WITH TEXAS" license plate frame and the "Vote NObama" bumper sticker proudly plastered to the back tailgate. well pal, you're too little too late with the bumper sticker, but good try. i'll be sure not to f*** with your state. or you for that matter.

my rental car is a 2009 chevy malibu. had it been a 2001 malibu, i'd almost have opted for the red volkswagon beetle, that was also available to me. but its the newer one with the redesigned look, and overall it's pretty nice. not as fast as i'd have hoped - what with the redesign and all; and i got it in a delicious, creamy, beach-lifeguard's-nose, sun repelling white, but it's alright. besides this and the beetle, i could have taken a prius. looking back, saving some money on gas would have been nice; but as soon as i ran through just one hypothetical me-attempting-to-avoid-an-accident-by-accelerating-quickly-out-of-danger scene in my head, i decided to stick with the extra couple possible pounds of torque that the good ole 'merican "muscle" might bring me.

the place we're staying is pretty snazzy. it's a temporary living apartment/condo for people like us in town on business for anywhere from a few weeks up to a year. in some ways it beats a hotel, especially considering we have a full kitchen. though it falls short of a hotel stay in the fact that we don't have hundreds of eager post-high school and college hotel management majors zipping around, tending to every care and desire we might have in order to be promoted out of the graveyard shift at the front desk. you also don't get free continental breakfast, which is tragic if you dwell on the fact that the make-your-own-waffle waffle maker is showing its face more and more on the continental breakfast scene. though this is nothing that a few boxes of cereal and some pop tarts can't fix.


















































what else? oh yeah. lunch was amazing. went to some place down the street. pretty authentic mexican food. they offered us real mexican coke, made with sugar cane. it so beats our coke, by a longshot. and nothing beats the ice cold glass bottle it came in.









when my check came, i noticed a 10 character long number underneath my total. everything was handwritten, so at first i barely noticed it. thinking again, i figured i should find out what the area code was around here since it was so quickly starting to smell like a phone number. sure enough, later that afternoon, i discovered that the first three digits of the mystery 10 digit script at the bottom of my bill match the local area code. flattering as it may be, i'm definitely already spoken for. oh yeah... and also not overcoming any eligibility restrictions by being being significantly over the age of 16.

anyways, it's been an interesting first 24 hours here in texas. more tomorrow!

-m-