Gimme some of that really, really old time religion...

I got home last night. It was raining in Austin when I left. No such luck here. The first thing I did when I got back here (well, ok, not the first thing) was to get some decent Mexican food. I had been jonesing for it, bad. My cousin M - he, his wife and I had a great dinner while I was there - has said that its hard to get good Mexican food in Austin. He's so right!

It was a really long hard week, but everything went well. I rocked on the student teaching portion of the training - something that is always right up there with root canals on my list of things to avoid. Didn't stress too much over the exam and that went well too.

I also had to attend a 12 step meeting during the week. Monday night I ventured out into the city, looking for Narcotics Anonymous. After 45 minutes of going in circles, I realized the concierge had entered the wrong address into mapquest. I stopped a couple of dog-walking yuppies and they pointed me in the right general direction. I ended up at a moldy old Methodist Church in a creepy neighborhood. It was so cool! It was too late to have light to take pictures, but the building was an amoeba-like structure built from stone onto the side of a ravine. It smelled like an old castle should.

The NA meeting was made up of a really interesting and diverse group of people. There were state employees, secretaries, auto mechanics, people with mental illness who lived on disability, bikers, former hookers, single mothers who brought their kids and on and on. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic. It was great to see all of these people who were probably so compartmentalized and polarized in outside society come together with a common purpose - all on equal footing.

For once, I didn't spend much time with the camera this week. I did go to the Texas State Cemetery. It was extensively restored and spiffed up in a three-year project in the mid 1990's. Everything was so shiny-new and the McMonuments and McBurials were so "done" that they were bereft of any character. I didn't even get out of the car. Bah! Give me a forgotten cemetery in a crummy neighborhood any day of the week.

I spent half of yesterday afternoon in various lines at the airport. Got a lot of good reading done. (I found a book by a brand new mystery author. Its the first in a series. So far, so good.) At one point, the PA announcer deadpanned "Will the band members of Kosher Gospel please meet their contact at the baggage claim information desk." Kosher Gospel? I had to laugh. Evidently no one else was listening or if they were they didn't think it was funny, because I immediately had a lot more space in line.