Hole in the Clouds
Apr 27, 2015
(This is a guest post by Ted. Since my mother is helping my grandmother move, and will not have time to write Good Mornings for ya'll, she has handed me the keys to her weblog. I will try not to wreck it.
With possession of the keys, and a full tank of gas, I decided to head on down to the Lone Star State. This is the first in a series of three posts from Houston, Texas. The next two posts will be about cowgirl boots. This is Texas after all.)
I happened upon the Houston Harry Potter Meetup Group's Owl Decorating Contest while enjoying a Sunday afternoon walking around Discovery Green, a lovely park in Houston.
The picture above contains the entire Houston Harry Potter Meetup Group (or at least the ones that showed up for the Owl Decorating Contest). I stood on top of a picnic table to take this picture and asked everyone to hold up their owls. My friend Tia, who hosted me in Houston, is also in the picture. She can be identified by her beautiful yellow dress and lack of owl.
I asked who was judging the competition and learned that the sole judge was Alyssa, head of the Gryffindor House. She is pictured below wearing an awesome shirt. Because she was the judge she was not allowed to enter the contest, but she did decorate an owl anyway.
Tia and I were offered owls to decorate, but we declined the offer.
Laura, the Deputy Headmistress, requested that I send her the picture I took of the group. I did so, via text message. Later in the evening I sent Laura another text message asking who won the contest and was informed that Robin was the winner.
Laura directed me to the group's Facebook page, which contained a picture of Robin's winning entrant:
We here at Hole In The Clouds would like to congratulate Robin on her big win. That is indeed a nice owl.
Ted
Harry Potter
Owls
Houston
Allysa)
(Image Credits: Lil' iPhone
Apr 28, 2015
(This is a guest post by Ted, the second in a series of three posts from Houston, Texas.)
When I was a little boy growing up in the Bible Belt my mother told me something I will never forget. "There is no god" she said. "But that is a secret. You must remember not to tell anyone else. They will get very mad at you if you do."
There are many types of atheists; some are as intolerant of other ideas as the people I had to keep my atheist secret from. I have even heard atheists say there would be no war or oppression if there were no religion. Given the history of atheists like Stalin and Mao I find this belief a bit, well, faith based. Point being, I am a devout atheist, but not an evangelical or fundamentalist one. My mother doesn't raise intolerant atheists.
The preceding paragraphs were a bit of a circuitous path to lead up to the following short sentence: I don't mind going to church.
While in Texas, my host Tia, whom you met in yesterday's Good Morning, invited me to attend her church. Tia is on a "prayer team" and people lined up to pray with them. I snuck some glances at the people praying with Tia and her team. There were hugs and there were tears, a lot of emotions packed in to the few short minutes each person had with a member of the prayer team. I could tell those prayers help a lot of people get through the week.
Friends have taken me to many houses of worship all over the country. Some favorites were a black upper class church in downtown Washington, DC (I liked the women's hats) and a white working class church in rural Alabama (I liked the banjos). I have seen many churches, but never one like Tia's. The sheer size was mind boggling. The band had at least twenty instruments and the choir was the largest I have ever seen. There were thousands of people dancing and singing and praying and rejoicing.
Pictured up top is your correspondent and the church, before all the seats were filled with worshippers.
It is true what they say, things are bigger in Texas.
Not everything is bigger in Texas though. Little girls attending church are still little girls attending church. There is, however, one difference between little girls attending church in Texas and little girls attending church elsewhere. Cowgirl boots.
Ted
church
cowgirl boots
Houston
(Photo Credit: Lil' iPhone)
Apr 29, 2015
(This is a guest post by Ted, the third in a series of three posts from Houston, Texas.)
When Hole in the Clouds sent me to Houston as a travel correspondent, the timing couldn't have been more perfect; my business associate Robert Fox happened to be getting married in Houston that very same weekend.
The wedding chapter of Rob and Shawna's story begins back in the winter of 2013, at the NASA Johnson Space Center. The two of them had flown from their home in D.C. to Texas, to spend some time with Shawna's parents. Unbeknownst to Shawna, Rob had been carrying a ring around in his pocket for the past few days.
At the space center, Shawna found a cool rocket and set up her camera on a timer, the way tourists do. But when she came back to pose for the snapshot, Rob dropped to his knee. The surprise on her face in the picture above was genuine.
This past Saturday they were married in Texas, in a wedding with a theme. The theme was brunch.
Shawna is a senior producer for NBC's Meet the Press, and there were lots of Washington media types at the wedding, including some of NBC's White House producers. This is how they party:
To help the media types feel at home during the moments between their tweets and e-mails, there was a newspaper for them to read, The Brunch In Love Dispatch (Hot Topic: "Washington, DC, Couple Weds in Texas"), with little NBC logos on each page.
The proposal was in Texas. The wedding was in Texas. According to the Brunch In Love Dispatch, the bride is "a Texas girl with the tattoo to prove it."
And yes, the bride wore cowgirl boots.
Texas
dancing
wedding
Ted
proposal
NASA
Rob
cowgirl boots
Shawna
Houston
dodgers
(Image credits, top to bottom: Shawna Thomas, Ellen Van de Mark, lil phone)
