· You're on
your way to work one FEBRUARY morning and suddenly you're trapped in a traffic jam caused by a chuck wagon and fifty horses
with riders.
· The "farm-to-market"
roads have seven lanes.
· You have to
turn on the air conditioning in January, two days after a low Of 29 degrees.
· You have a
Roach Story: You opened your flatware drawer to find a roach the size of the Taco Bell Chihuahua.
· Your friend
has a Roach Story - about a dive bomber who crashed her Formal dinner party, made several passes at guests whose heads were
bobbing like little dogs in car windows, and finally landed in somebody's soup.
· When you see
your neighbor dancing around the front yard, you don't think he's won the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes; you know
that he just stepped in a fire ant bed.
· The name "Bud
Adams" makes people snarl, and "Bum Phillips" doesn't mean a bad screwdriver.
· "Luv ya Blue"
still makes you smile.
· You know that
the Astrodome will always be the Eighth Wonder of the World.
· You come to
work in short sleeves and walk out at noon to find that a "blue-tailed northern" has blown through and the temperature has
dropped 40 degrees in a matter of minutes.
· Your neighbor's
Christmas yard decorations look like a re-creation of the gunfight at the OK Corral, complete with a ten-foot tree decorated
with boots and cowboy hats, and a Santa Claus who looks a lot like Wyatt Earp.
· You wander
into a section of town where you can't read the street signs because they're written in Asian characters instead of English,
but you don't care because you can get great prices on fake designer merchandise there.
· You go to
an art festival on Westheimer and you're almost run down by two hand-holding cross-dressers on roller blades.
· The "Killer
Bees" are not stinging insects.
· You hear everything
but English spoken when you go to the Galleria to window shop. (You can't afford to buy because the prices are jacked up for
all the foreign tourists.)
· You know that
"Dad gummit" has nothing to do with your father's failure to practice good dental hygiene.
· You think
"Y'all" is perfectly good usage if you're referring to more than one person.
· For a Chili
Cook off, you'll use anything from armadillo to frog's legs, but you know that the only GOOD chili is made with chopped -
not ground - beef, and it has NO beans and NO tomatoes.
· Spring is
not the season, Katy is not the lady, and 1960 is not the year.
· You can leave
your house, head out of town, and an hour later you still haven't left the city limits. (During rush hour, you haven't left
your NEIGHBORHOOD.)
· You've never
seen I-45 and I-10 in any condition other than under construction - and you've lived here for more than 30 years.
· You know that
"Clutch City"
has nothing to do with automobile transmissions.
· "The Dream"
is not a fantasy.
· The only REAL
Mexican food is Tex-Mex.
· A 747 with
the Space Shuttle riding piggyback has actually flown low right overhead, and nobody paid any attention to it.
· You know that
while saving you money, "Mattress Mac" has amassed more than the U.S.
treasury.
· You're happy
to have beaten Los Angeles out of a football team, but you'd
rather they keep the title of "Smog Capital."
· You see nothing
unusual about an eighty-something former sheriff's deputy Who wears a white pompadour toupee and blue sunglasses, mispronounces
names, allows televising of his frequent plastic surgeries, seems unnaturally obsessed with slime in the ice machine, and
screams, "MAR-VIN ZIND-LER, EYE-WITNESS NEWS" into a television camera every night. But some folks are still upset with him
for shutting down the Chicken Ranch.
· If the humidity
is below 90 percent, it's a GOOD hair day.
· And you understand
all of these.
