Texplanations

Last Saturday, the Ward toiled again at Peggy's house. The fellows were outside in the rain scraping paint and the women/youth were inside painting. I ended up pulling ceiling duty. I pooped out by the time they got to the fourth room, so I only did a little stripe of paint in there.

We ended up taking a young guy and his ladder home. He grew up in the area and is headed to grad school and eventually for work on a Navy submarine. I kidded him about getting as far away from the RGV as possible. He laughed, but didn't confirm or deny.

So far, he offered the best explanation/description of this part of the world: The RGV is not Mexico, but it's barely Texas. And that the RGV is what Mexico would look like if the U.S. invaded and solved all its problems.

To which I would add, this is what Reynosa would be like if it had better shopping, slightly better drivers and four Applebees.

Since Mike and I carpool to work most days, we've seen a lot of the RGV's bad drivers on their way to work. My biggest peeve is the kamikaze/ill advised left turn, especially when a driver noses out of the Stripes/Vallero parking lot through stopped traffic on one side of the road to get to the median to complete the turn. My next biggest peeve would be median drivers. Every time I want to make a left turn, I have to check for drivers barreling down the median at 45 mph before I can safely enter to make a turn.

Mike's biggest peeve: the aggressive, high speed lane changes made by folks who, for all their efforts to get ahead of cars going the speed limit, end up waiting at the same stoplight with everyone they passed.

Those assholes don't peeve me as much as scare me. I'm actually more scared of drivers here than of Los Angeles drivers, LA freeway shootings, street racing, overpass rock droppers and some unpredictable Asian drivers notwithstanding.