Yo kiddies.  I was up in Dallas for the ALA midwinter convention.  Whenever I travel I notice the weird little things that are totally different from my home city.  Well, Dallas was my home once too and I got to stew in some memories while I was there.  Here are just a few little observations (comic to the right from the Drawing Board – just a little peek into my ALA experience).

• Everything’s bigger in Texas – yup they say it ’cause it’s true.  For example, in Tampa you can go into a CVS and get a 3 Liter bottle of Carlo Rossi wine; in Dallas you get a 4 Liter.  Everything’s bigger except for the traffic lanes and parking spaces, that is.
• The coffee downtown is too expensive.  I know this may be just a downtown phenomenon shared by cities all over the world–but hey, I don’t get out much.
• Either people in Dallas have more common sense/the courts just don’t entertain stupid law suits or they’d never put such dangerous looking cactus on the sidewalk.

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• Dallas is always under construction. When I lived there we used to make a joke that the Texas state bird was the Crane.  One tiny problem with this is that signs you would normally rely on while driving aren’t necessarily there for you.  Yeah, I drove past the airport.  On the other hand, the exits were labeled much more clearly from the other direction.
• This signage thing, and the narrow traffic lanes thing would’ve been a lot more scary if Dallas people weren’t such great drivers.  I mean, they know how to merge (one car from each side like a zipper), they let you in the lane when you have your signal on, they slow down and stop when the light turns yellow and red.  It made not knowing where I was driving a lot easier.  I didn’t even witness any jaywalking that wasn’t perpetrated by my librarian brethren (aka not Texans).  I mourn for the Texan who drives in Tampa, I apologize for all of us.
• Of course you know I would go out of my way to visit some of the food establishments that were treats in my childhood.  So, what do you suppose would happen if you baked some biscuits, real buttery ones, and while those were in the oven, you fried up an egg in a plain old fry pan next to some bacon and then combined all those things with a square of processed cheese?  You’d have a Grandy’s breakfast sandwich is what would happen.  There is no standardized shape or pre-assembled/most likely frozen business going on here, it was like it came out of my kitchen–except for the cheese.  Why oh why are Grandy’s not all over this country?
• Does anyone else have a cemetery in front of their convention center?  — really, I’m asking ’cause it seemed both weird and wonderful to me.
• And finally, Dallas is big on big sculpture–which made getting lost downtown kind of nice, until I started running out of time before my meeting.

That’s all I got.  I’m sure there’s more that I took for granted, ’cause I used to live there too.  Dallas, I enjoyed you big bunches.  Thank you, LeE.