Parking at the rodeo was a real pain. I even got there a couple of hours early to avoid traffic and it was still pretty bad.
It was very cold out, especially because the wind was really strong. Nobody was even thinking of buying ice cream.
The poor girls handing out programs were freezing, too. I would have gone up to random people and hugged them just to stay warm.
In the expo they had cows you could walk right up to. Knowing people who had been kicked and stepped on, I stayed a safe distance away. I'm surprised they were allowed to do this considering the lawsuit potential.
I didn't see anything on the tickets that indicated which gate to go in, so I had to ask an employee at one of the gates. The general tickets all go in through the Coca-Cola gates, and while there was a line, it moved pretty fast.
The numbers on the right are written backwards; it should be 504-530. They did it to match the actual layout, but it was still kind of confusing. I saw 530 was the first number, stopped reading because my number was lower than that, looked at the other side, and saw 530-552, which was mind blowing.
Houston has two major areas with skyscrapers. This one in the distance is the more western one.
And this in the eastern one, which is the actual downtonw, in the distance behind the closer buildings.
It was so windy garbage cans and giant event stands were being blown over.
This must have been one of the suites. A few people in our class got free tickets from one of their friends. When they got to the rodeo, they realized they were in a suite, which was pretty fun.
Team roping. They had a bunch of giant screens to watch the action on, too.
Barrel racing.
Bull riding. A lot of my classmates had never been to a rodeo before, so I explained a lot of the events to them.
The calf scramble, where kids have to catch calves and drag them into the center square. More people got hurt during this than during the regular rodeo events. Also, once the calves dug in, it was pretty much impossible to get them to move going forwards, so a lot of the kids grabbed the reins and the calf's tail and drug them sideways.
A covered-wagon race.
There was a pretty impressive fireworks display, especially for being indoors.
Tim McGraw was the main event, although he didn't sing very many songs.
One of the patients coming out of the University Eye Center hit my truck. Thankfully nobody was hurt and both vehicles were still perfectly driveable. My door, lock, handle, and window are all messed up, and he damaged his front-right headlights and grill.
I drink about 1 can of soda a week. I can't believe how people drink so much of it that this is a good deal; I'd have it stored for half a year.
Since I couldn't get my truck window up and it was supposed to rain in the afternoon, I took the bus to school on Thursday so I could leave the truck at home under cover. Some of my neighbors had said they take the bus to UH every day, so I figured I'd give it a try.
Well, it takes me about 25 minutes to drive to school, and the total time with the bus was about 1 hour 15 minutes. Also, because the bus stops a few blocks away from the apartments and it drops me off on the wrong side of the university, I spent about 30 minutes just walking to and from the bus, so I actually lost useable time (I can study or read on the bus, but I can't really do anything useful while walking). It was pretty disappointing, especially considering in San Francisco the time it took to get to work by subway and by driving were fairly close, depending on traffic.