SPENDING THE WEEK IN HOUSTON. TEXAS.

Yeah, on purpose. I know. I know.

Maybe you’ve heard that it’s hot in Houston. It is. Humid in the morning. Sultry at noon. By 4PM, broiling. Evenings settle into a steady oppression.

It’s nice.

This morning’s wake up temp is the same as today’s high in Northern California. With nowhere to go but up.

Houston’s Morning News weatherman isn’t as cute as our NorCal weather girl, er, meteorologist, nor as happy. I suppose all that moisture dampens your disposition. Yuk yuk.

There’s a 30 % chance of rain every day down here by the Gulf.

For clarity, that’s a 100 percent chance that 30 percent of their viewing area will have thunder storms, at least for a few minutes, every blinking day. Regulation storms with anvil-shaped thunder heads and lightning, lots and lots of lightning.

After it rains, all that water simmers on the pavement for a few minutes and then rises up into your lungs.

Some Houstonians look a little fishy.

Houston gives a whole new meaning to ‘hot lunch.’ After frying your breakfast egg on the sidewalk, you can heat your burrito right there too. Pop your corn. Sizzle your sushi ‘cause you really wanted fried fish anyway.

Dinner is always well done in Houston.

Everybody’s assigned a personal sauna here. You carry it with you. It’s a steamy open-your-pores kind of vapor bath.

Clothes are not drip-dry…they’re just drip. Rumple drip.

We played golf. So. Just imagine.

People talk funny in Houston. It’s lovely. They’re very nice here too.

Houston’s a big, big town — like LA — but people here act like small town people — a little bit nosey and free with their opinions — but nice. Like family, my family anyway. If they want to love your neck, you should let ‘em. Give ‘em some sugar.

The oil industry is not a villain in Houston. So if you, or your family, or anyone else you love is being supported somehow, someway by oil, it’s OK to say so out loud. People here treat oil industry peeps just like regular people who work for Google or Genentech or something. Normal.

Texans love their guns like Californians love organic produce. You can get your Concealed Carry Permit after a weekend in a parking lot alongside other citizens sporting beards and camouflage. There’s a circular logic around the phenomenon.

I recommend ‘don’t ask/don’t tell.’ Let’s just say you don’t want to set yourself apart.

I don’t feel unsafe; but I don’t feel safer either. If I think about it for more than a minute, say, if somebody honks at an intersection, Concealed Carry makes me a little twitchy. But Texans are good with it.

There are more churches per capita in Houston than in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (That’s the benchmark, if you were unaware.) And these aren’t mom and pop chapels or cinder block startups. These are the Joel Osteens of the church-going world. On alternate corners. Multi-level. Parking controlled. Neon. Televised. Digital portals to salvation.

I already know the highlight of my stay will be NASA. It is so totally cool. You must go!

Take the Blue Tram tour and visit the control room for the Apollo space missions. All those funky TV screens mounted in the institutional green, riveted metal workstations — remember Ed Harris in Apollo 13 — you think they’re hooked up to the sweetest old feeble computers. But guess what? They weren’t hooked up to computers at all! They were display screens only!

Mission controllers directed manned space exploration and trips to the moon and back using slide rules and data read-only from a single computer in a room downstairs with 1 MEGA(not giga)BYTE of power!

And you have to go into that big chicken barn of a storage building at the edge of the Rocket Park. They should rig the door of that place to trigger the soundtrack from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Wah! Wah! Boom boom! Boom boom! The Saturn V rocket launcher rests on its side there, monumental, majestic.

Walk the length of it; then we’ll talk.

All those other times you said something was “awesome”? Well.

Museum of Natural History tomorrow. Or Modern Art. Or the zoo. Galveston…

How can you top Neil Armstrong?

Carolyn Plath, M.Ed., is a Benicia resident and retired high school principal. Read her blog at thinkdreamplay.blogspot.com.