Houston

Houston was wonderful! Mary had her apartment meticulously clean with folded towels in the bathroom that were color coordinated (black for Dan and salmon colored for me) with a chocolate on top for each of us. Her walk-in closet was full of neatly hung clothes sorted not only by kind, but also by color!!

We spent most of our time following Mary around during her day, attending music history class and opera rehearsal. The opera is called Street Scene and was interesting to watch. The story was rather depressing, but the singing was wonderful and there was a great dance number in it. Of course, Mary's orchestra was wonderful as well. We attended a student recital, an orchestra performance, and visited the Metropolitan Museum's visiting impressionist art collection. It was fabulous and we were impressed with the orchestras as well.

Mary was wonderful on her concert. She played even better than she looked and she looked great!! The only disappointment was that there weren't more people there to hear her. She has a DVD of the performance if anyone wants to see it. Afterwards we had refreshments and a nice visit with Mary's teacher and her two children.

We ate a lot of good food...pizza, Tai, sandwiches, pitas, and Mexican. Mary made brownies, and other goodies for us. We met Mandy's boyfriend, John and visited the ward where Mary goes to church. There are a lot of nice young people there.

Mary has a great set up in her apartment. She has her own bedroom and bath and dad helped her buy a table with drawers in it for her printer after we tried to print the programs with the printer on the floor and found it didn't work very well. We also fixed up her car while we were there. We found a great garage to take it to. The man replaced the axles, changed the oil and put dye and freon in the air conditioning all in two hours on short notice. His helper drove us to the mall to shop while we waited. Wow, what service!!...and the price was reasonable as well.

The traffic in Houston is terrible. I pray that Mary will be safe in her travels!! Many streets are one way and there are many roundabouts. Mary was fine, but Mom was a wreck.

We went for a Sunday drive around some of the rich neighborhoods and saw some plantation type houses. The gardens and houses were beautiful.