Bigger or Better: Life outside of Texas

To get to and from work, I take the metro, then a shuttle bus, then I walk through the university campus to the hospital [and the reverse of that to get home] . Sometimes the shuttle bus isn't immediately there, so when it's windy and cold I wait in the lobby of some gymnasium building where I can keep an eye on the bus stop but not freeze while doing so. Recently, while waiting for the bus, I noticed there were several manikins in school-color uniforms. And I realized, without having to look too closely, that the female manikin in field-hockey garb was wearing a sports bra underneath her jersey. I gotta wonder what made that particular outcome occur. A few days after that, I killed some time looking at the sport trophies of the university: track and field, cross-country, field hockey, soccer, and basketball. Each one had a small figure in relief, matching the action and gender of the associated trophy; for example, a girl running on the "Cross-Country" cup, or a...

Most families have family traditions, especially surrounding holiday time. Same with Mark and me, except it seems that our "tradition" is more of a curse, and a year-round kind of thing. Remember when my youngest brother got married  and I noted that something is usually wrong with my parents' septic system right when Mark and I visit? Yeah...we almost had a visit to their house  this past week with no incident. Until I noted to my dad that the downstairs bathtub continually dripped water, and the sink faucet was loose. I'm not familiar with septic systems (or anything involving non-human-anatomy plumbing), so I wasn't aware that if water continually drains in a septic set-up, the septic pump has to run near-continuously, which is bad for the motor, which could lead to it dying, which would mean septic flooding. So, yeah, problem. Which is why a call to the plumber was necessary. Making this approximately the 4th-time-running that Mark and my visit to m...