My old town

Once again, after saying I rarely used prompts, I'm using another one, mostly because it intersects with something I was going to talk about anyway. The prompt for today is Do you still live in the place where you grew up? How far away are you now, and why?

I may have to go get a screenshot from Google maps to illustrate, because I'm sort of interested in the relationship between the three towns in this area. But the short answer is that I'm living the closest I've lived to my hometown since college - I'm 10 miles away, at the most. (I was wandering around the other day and ended up buying gas there. It was $1.39, which is amazing but that's another subject.) Since I moved back from Austin in 1986 I haven't lived all that far away from it, but not anywhere near this close, where you could just wander over there in 10 minutes of driving.

I grew up in Alvin, Texas, a little town not far south of Houston, which is most famous for being the hometown of pitcher Nolan Ryan. That's pretty much its one and only claim to fame. We lived there from the time that I was born until I was four, and then we moved away for a few years, and then we moved back when I was seven and stayed there until after I graduated from high school. My parents were still living there when I'd come home for summers in college, but they moved out of town shortly after that, in the early 80s, to be closer to my dad's work. But my mom still worked in Alvin and my grandmother still lived there, so I'd still get the Alvin gossip for a long time. But then my mother retired and my grandmother got Alzheimer's and had to move to a nursing home (which was here in Friendswood, as it happens) and my ties to Alvin grew fewer and fewer. Now that they are both dead I really don't have much contact with people from Alvin. Most of the gossip I get comes through my dad, who still has more ties than I do even though he's actually up on the far-north side of Houston.

( Map ahoy )

It's snowing!!!

There is a bad 40-second video as proof on Flickr, but it is. You have no idea how unusual this is here.

The neighbors keep coming outside and doing the "ooh, look," thing, and then everybody goes back inside because it's too cold. It really is very cold.