Houston, Texas

I am in Houston getting ready to attend the National Social Studies conference which begins tomorrow morning. I left home yesterday morning (with another teacher from McNair - Terry), and we drove as far as Dallas. We had tickets to see King Tut which was showing at a big museum in downtown Dallas. My nephew, James, and his wife Allison met us at the museum and toured King Tut with us. The exhibit was great! It was neat to see in person so many of the things I've been teaching the kids about ancient Egypt. I had such fun getting to see James and Allison as well. We stayed at their apartment last night and got to visit for a short while. (Thanks James & Allison!) We left this morning and drove the rest of the way to Houston. Our hotel is downtown and is connected to the convention center where our conference is located. It's a really, really nice hotel! The only problem is that this place is crazy because the Latin Grammy Awards are going on across the street from us. There are cops everywhere, and tonight when we were trying to come back from shopping, all of the streets were blocked off. We drove around for 15-20 minutes trying to figure out how to get back to our hotel. We also saw some crazy teenagers at the Galleria where we went shopping. There were close to 3000 (I kid you not!) teenage girls standing in line to see "Jacob" from the Twilight movie (from the famous Twilight Saga book series). We talked to some of them and found out that they had been standing in line since 3:00 a.m.! Unbelieveable! Terry and I do our presentation tomorrow morning at 10:15. I'm actually kind of nervous. I'll be glad to have it over and done!