Flat Stanley

My friend's son needed help with his Flat Stanley project for 9th grade a couple weeks ago. They live in Utah and had to find someone in another state. I printed him out, gave him a nice trim and had a day of fun. You can read below what I wrote for him; it's somewhat entertaining. And excuse the highly professional photos!

Well, they say, "Go big or go home"! That’s when we gladly welcomed Stanley into our home. Home is Houston, Texas. The terrain is much different than Utah and there are no mountains to speak of in Houston. It is very hot and humid, but this week it was finally “cool” and rained a lot. The big difference is this time of year the rain wasn’t hot and muggy and brought a lovely cool air with it. Because of the torrential downpours, which is a normal rainstorm here, it put a damper on our day of fun with Stanley where we could take him out on the town and show him a good time.

Our adventuresome day started out at home. Now, this is where I spend 95% of my time. I am self employed as a photographer and had some wedding photos to edit and get ready to post online. Stanley was an avid observer and learned how to use Lightroom and Photoshop, plus check e-mails every 5 minutes and respond to those as well. We were then graced by the presence of a DirecTV newbie that didn’t have a clue what he was doing. But after nearly five hours he finally had our dish installed, boxes hooked up, and plenty of new holes drilled into the house to tempt more cockroaches. I quite dislike the nasty, filthy, grotesque rodents and kill them the instant I find one. It’s a necessity to have pest control and I love having them come if I find anything crazy running around the house. If you spent most your time inside the house, you would too! Stanley enjoyed a little cable while I finished up the photos.

Then we were off to the local post office to mail a couple packages. Looked like any other post office in the United States. Nothing exciting, other than trying to get creative with moving the stale air filled with a man’s b.o. standing in line behind me. Then it was off to downtown Houston, about 5 miles from our house. My husband, Conor, works for Chevron in the old Enron building. It’s a beautiful glass building with spectacular views of the city. Stanley hung out in Conor’s office and checked out the sweet view from the window. Amazingly he wasn’t scared of heights!

Conor came home from work and we took a field trip a few miles away to show some of our area. You can see them together in the photos. First was a house a few blocks from ours in an area called the Heights (kinda like the Avenues in SLC). The past couple of weeks an arsonist has been lighting fires to old, abandoned houses in the Heights and burning them. I think there are 9 now in this recent rash and pretty scary when it hits that close to home! Most of the homes in our neighborhood are around 100 years old and have a lot of character. There a lot on the historic register and people fight to preserve them. The Heights is the highest part of Houston and therefore the safest area around for hurricanes. It has been 1 year since Ike hit Galveston, 45 miles from here. Hurricane season is going on right now and it’s something we always have to be prepared for. That’s why Stanley helped me clip some coupons earlier so I can save money building up our food storage!

The next stop was an old historical bridge with the river below. It has an amazing view of downtown and we just showed a small piece of it hear since we were in the tow zone and they were putting out orange cones to do construction right then. But we couldn’t cheat you on the view. We visited Glenwood, an old and beautiful cemetery close to the Heights. Trees and gorgeous landscaping enclose and add to the privacy of this place. As you can see, with all our humidity and rain we receive, it’s really more a tropical area and it stays green almost year-round. It is a busy and fast paced area—4th largest city in the country—and takes quite a while to get around because there are so many people and the city is spread out. It is a beautiful area with many amenities and many options. We were happy to take Stanley into our lives for a day and allow ya’ll to see deep into the heart of Texas!