Houston, We Have a Problem

About a month ago, Kim and I decided that it had been way too long since we'd made the trip to Houston to see our H-Town friends. Our trips to visit Christina, Jill and Whitney (and now Kile!) are always so fun and always involve the same itinerary: shopping and margaritas on a patio somewhere. Yeah, those events were not in the cards for this trip.

The first bad omen was the torrential downpour that followed us all the way from around Corsicana to Houston. It was seriously raining so hard that Brian and I couldn't talk to each other without yelling--the rain was that loud. We finally made it to Houston and the exit to Christina's neighborhood only to see that traffic was diverted around cars that had stalled in high water! So we took a few detours and drove through some water that was MUCH higher than I was comfortable driving through, but we made it (practically floating!) to Christina and Tim's house in one piece. Maybe I'm a wuss, but I was actually pretty scared. (I asked my Houston friends if that was what it was like being in a hurricane. They laughed at me and said no.)

We ate a quick lunch and then it was on to our next stop: no, not shopping, and definitely not margaritas on a patio. Here's a hint:


Yes, that's us hanging out in a hospital room. Jill had been admitted Thursday night with a 104-degree fever! The doctors ran pretty much every test imaginable and finally decided she had pneumonia. Poor Jill. On one hand, it sucks that she was in the hospital the weekend we came to visit, but on the other hand, I'm so glad we got to visit her while she was stuck there. She looked great and was feeling much better by the time we got there. As you can see, she even let us take pictures of her. What a good sport!

We left the hospital to let Jill rest, and Whitney headed back to Spring to get some rest of her own (she is 28 weeks pregnant with twins and I think we wore her out!). Kim and Levi ended up heading home Saturday evening, which dwindled our group of ten down to four. But Tim, Christina, Brian and I had a great time at El Tiempo, where, although it was not a patio kind of evening, we did get our margaritas! And we had a good laugh when we realized that we ate dinner, drove home, turned on Saturday Night Live, and got comfy on the couch without anyone even asking whether we were going to go out after dinner. We are so darn old now that we all just assumed that we'd turn in for the night after leaving the restaurant--it didn't occur to any of us to go out and party after leaving the restaurant!

Anyways, although the weekend didn't quite go as planned, we all had fun together and got to spend some time catching up, which (besides shopping and margaritas on patios, of course) was the whole objective of the weekend. Mission accomplished!