Not from today, but you get the idea of Izzi in the Pacifica

H. and Izzi were wonderful today and let me go on an exploratory trip to a historic town called Granbury on Lake Granbury,  southwest of Fort Worth. It has a great courthouse with massive windows that make it a secular cathedral, the sky framed in clear glass with heaven pictured clearly in cerulean and wisps of white.

Izzi was great until about 10 miles out on the 70 mile trip, when she started to get a bit stir-crazy. We forgot to put the DVD player in the car, which probably would have mitigated that, but the fact that she was so good for nearly 90 minutes was really cool.

The town was nice, with a courthouse square configuration, much like where we live now, though it lacked the sizable lawn that we have. There were a lot more antique and knick-knack shops than we have, though that was a challenge, because Izzi wanted to touch everything that she came near today. That’s not unusual for her to want to touch things, but today it was EVERYTHING. We had a nice lunch at a restaurant called Hank’s and Izzi ate homemade mac and cheese with cheese on top as well as 1 1/2 pieces of chicken. The staff was OK and the food was good. I had a brat and sauerkraut sandwich with good peppered fries. H. had some form of Club. We split a slice of Dr. Pepper cake with ice cream, which was really nice and more like pound cake that the other forms of that cake I have tried. We were only about 40 miles from Dublin, TX, which is where they still bottle small glass bottles of pure cane sugar flavored Dr. Pepper, so it’s kind of a big deal. They charge like $2.50 a bottle for about 10 ounces. Once place in our own  illustrious city actually has “Dublin Dr. Pepper” from the fountain, which I allow myself about once or twice a month.

Then, she insisted on ice cream, which we wound up getting her very quickly, just to get into a building out of the heat (the car read 103 degrees at 2:30 PM). The smell of spoiled fried food in the ice cream place was appalling, sickening both H. and I a bit, though Izzi seemed to ignore it, opting to chow on her vanilla with a force unparalleled by other children’s weaker, tiny white teeth. It may have been the fried pickles, or perhaps spoiled onions or shrimp. Whatever it was, that smell and the fact that it was nearly as hot in there as outside had us out in the street as quickly as we came in. Other visitors randomly shoved the very clearly pregnant H. as she tried to pay for the ice cream and they berated the staff working there loudly and unpleasantly. It was lovely and really helped the small town feel that they were clearly trying to push there with all the American flag bunting hung around the town.

We walked from shop to shop, finding some interesting antiques ranging from expensive 1800s handguns and knives to rustic furniture and baby clothes. Izzi was on a rampage, grabbing at everything, knocking things down. I’d pick her up and tell her she couldn’t get down unless she promised to stop touching things. She would agree and say, “I’ll listen to you, Daddy.” This would repeat every few minutes. Often, she would be touching things (a piece of cabinetry, a fireplace cover, plush horses) AS I PUT HER DOWN.

One place smelled like leather, which I love and had great candles, tin pieces, and the other kinds rustic Western kitsch that I have liked since moveing to this part of Texas. Of course, it all clashes with a lot of the modern things I’ve always really liked and collected the last 10 years.

The whole town just wasn’t kid friendly, with all the sale objects being far to close together. There were too many breakables at 2 and 3 year-old child height, and many shopkeepers provided a distinct feeling that kids just weren’t wanted. One woman, when she wanted us to go, told another woman a story about how strollers weren’t allowed in town and that women were having their kids shoplift for them. We had no stroller, but, apparently, that’s what we were going to be doing. That’s what we, a pair of college professors were there to do. We HAD to, compulsorily, shoplift their cheap, schlocky crap and the fantastic, “authentic” salsas that every store had, which were exactly the same but bottled/jarred just for them with their name clearly written across the top of the Mason/Ball jar. It was so spectacular that we just wouldn’t be able to help ourselves. What a nice town.

By the time we went into the sports store, I couldn’t keep up with putting back everything Izzi took off the shelves. It wasn’t helped by the fact that they ha just left a lot of sports team items laying haphazardly on the walls near the floor. There was exactly one store that carried any items from the university where I work, which just bothers me for some reason, given its proximity to where we were. There is no pride about the school in the DFW area and its really sad. There was crap from UT and A&M which is standard, but they had garbage from Arkansas, OU, OK State, LSU, Missouri (which doesn’t even border Texas), TCU and even a couple of Yankee schools.

I’m considered a Yankee, and attended two Yankee schools, but did do a Masters at another fine school in Texas, which has a good football team and a lot of graduates (including a former Speaker of the House known as “The Hammer.”) There was not a single thing on the shelves from the school that pretentious UT and A&M grads call “Cougar High.” Nothing from the school I work at 70 miles and about an hour away, which has 35,000 students. It shouldn’t bother me as much as it does.

Based on my experience in Michigan, Virginia and Indiana, it’s true in other states as well that the big land grants are the only ones that are paid attention to, but it just grates on me here more than there for some reason. Izzi is wearing a Virginia Tech hat in the photo, because we have a lot of family (including father-in-law) that are proud (possibly rabid) supporters of that school. It’s cool, until the other schools get completely ignored. Tech isn’t really like that and is more of an underdog school, so I support it (despite having no academic ties to it).

I didn’t deal with Izzi grabbing things in that store and we took her to the car. H. waited with her there, while I went into a very nice kitchen/cooking store called The Panhandle. It was like Williams-Sonoma, but had a few unusual items. After I wandered around blindly in there for a couple minutes cooling off from being angry at Izzi, I headed back to the car and was almost hit by a Cadillac driving 25 miles an hour backwards in the parking lot. They looked at me like it was my fault. Truly lovely people there.

We bought almost nothing while we were there. It’s not that there weren’t some interesting things, it’s just that we didn’t need any of it as gifts for other people. I really was hoping to find something for H. for our anniversary on Wednesday, but between not being able to really focus on anything while I was constantly keeping Izzi’s wandering, grabbing hands in check and nothing being particularly special, we found a baby book for Luke that H. really liked, and otherwise left Granbury as we found it. I had the camera the whole time, but couldn’t take any pictures, because of keeping track of and locking down on Izzi the whole time.

There were one or two nice older people who doted on or at least talked to Izzi a bit. For the most part, it just wasn’t worth the drive except for maybe the Dr. Pepper cake and the baby book. To the east is a town called Glen Rose that we may visit in the future when it’s cooler in the late fall or spring when it’s MUCH cooler. They have a huge fossil area and park that I think Izzi might like. It also has an interesting looking old downtown, based on the pictures on Google maps and elsewhere.

On the way home, Izzi fell asleep for about 20 minutes until we got to Lake Worth. She freaked out a bit in her sleep and wanted a blanket over her. Even awake, it took a few minutes to calm her. She eventually calmed down, but didn’t fall back asleep. Izzi has nightmares fairly often and has ever since she was really tiny and I’m not sure why, but they are scary for both of us. H. slept for about 20 minutes, looking uncomfortable in the back seat of the Pacifica, but still angelic.

We listened to a lot of the new DMB and Kings of Leon on the trip. Izzi now knows the words to several songs by Kings of Leon (especially Use Somebody for some reason) and will sing along with in the car. She seems to be actively trying to learn the words to a lot of songs, but has my memory problem, where only some of the words really stick (especially choruses). She sings the choruses really, exquisitely loudly, which is great.

H. let me take a nap when we got home @ 4, since the sinus infection is still so bad it’s sometimes closing my eyes involuntarily. She woke me about 6:20 and sent me off to the movies as part of my Father’s Day present, which was very cool. While I was gone to see “The Hangover,” she and Izzi went to the store for groceries and had dinner. I scarfed Burger King before the movie, which was not too bad as long as not performed regularly. The movie was pretty funny and I’m glad I got to go. Zach Galifinackis (sp?), a Houston native like my wife, was fantastic. We saw him open for Janine Garofalo (sp?) a few years ago and he killed. He was even better in the movie, bizarre alternating with vulnerable, mildly strange, incoherent, and occasionally frightening.

I arrived back at the house about 9:20 PM and Izzi was still up, fighting H. on going to bed. I held her for a couple of minutes and Izzi declared, “Put me down. I’m going to bed.” We wandered in and I hugged her, she hugged me. After about 5 minutes, it was clear that Izzi would not be sleeping as long as I was in the room. I kissed them both, then wandered back out here to the living room to write. H. came out about 20 minutes later, Izzi being fast asleep on her fancy new hypoallergenic pillows. I’ve not been writing for more than an hour, so it is time to stop and go to bed. By go to bed, I mean put on the “Wonder Boys” movie, take my antibiotic, and fall asleep in the chair until about 1:30 AM, when I’ll wander into bed to wake up H. with my snoring until she comes out here and falls asleep in the chair until Izzi wakes us up between 5 and 6:30 (depending on the day.)

On an unrelated note, Bioshock, a great game, finally showed up after more than a week since I ordered it from Best Buy. Bestbuy.com is awful and slow in shipping anything. I managed to get the game loaded, but then the activation code wouldn’t work. Maybe they have some secret Bethesda Softworks surveillance program that discovered that I finished half of it in D.C. when visiting my sister a few weeks ago and feel I don’t deserve to play it further.

Ah, well. I don’t have time to play video games anyhow, whether it’s part of my research or not. Maybe in a few years when Izzi is in elementary school, Luke in Montessori, and things have settled down again. Perhaps, I’ll have gone in a completely different direction by then.

Maybe not.