Portrait of Frida Kahlo from MFAH exhibit On the day before we left Katy, Texas, my friend Tina and I went to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston to see a special exhibit that had just opened, highlighting the art of Frida Kahlo art and homages to her work and her personal style, I guess you’d call it. Since the 1970s people have been inspired by her artwork to paint similar works, and commercially her image is a big seller on t-shirts, bags, high-top sneakers, and almost everything else you can imagine. Some odd but interesting paintings by Frida Kahlo at the  Museum of Fine Arts Houston exhibit of her work and life The commodification of Kahlo at left, Tina against a wall of Frida impersonators, at right The exhibit was intriguing, and really big. Gallery after gallery after gallery of her surreal paintings, constructions, and photographs of her, plus the of many artists who admire her. We were there for hours, but also had a little time to see an exhibit of Roman art in the time of ...

We’re in Texas, and I’m happy to say we survived driving right through the middle of Houston on I-10. It helped that we did it on a Sunday morning; the traffic was almost reasonable. I drove, Mike navigated, and when it looked like there was a bit of a jam right downtown, he called for a detour to one of the many ring roads, in this case I-610, and that kept us in traffic that was still moving. Houston’s highway system is not for the faint of heart (Wikimedia Commons photo) On the far side of Houston, we exited the interstate and it was just a short hop over to our friends the Michels’ house in Katy. Specifically, in the Cinco Ranch part of Katy. I believe I expounded on the massive neighborhood of Cinco Ranch last year when we stayed here, but I’ll say it again—it is a very well-designed area for as big as it is. Although mostly everyone drives cars and trucks, it was set up in the 1990s to be very walkable. There are so very many shops, banks, schools, and restaurants—oh, my. There...

 After our tour of Mammoth Caves, we headed south, stopping not far past Nashville for the evening. Nashville apparently was having a big New Year’s Eve bash, but we did not join in that celebration. We walked next door from our hotel for the night to where there was a nice restaurant. Lots of dressed up folks, though kind of Nashville dressed up, so sparkly shirts and jeans, for the most part. We had a nice dinner, I got a texted photo of my nephew celebrating 2026 at 9:00 pm Pacific time, when he could watch the midnight ball drop in New York City without having to stay up late, and we called it a night, too. Woke up in 2026 and kept heading south, through Alabama and then across Mobile Bay into Mississippi. We stayed in Biloxi, which is a city of casinos. We heard that twenty years ago, the rule was that all the gambling was offshore on big boats, but then Katrina came along and that was the end of the floating casinos. Now highrises line the waterfront, one big casino after a...

After another enforced four-month stay in Cincinnati, while Mike got a diagnosis of an extruded disc, then back surgery (on Halloween), and a couple of months of recuperation, followed by the holiday season, we finally managed to hook up the Scamp and get back on the road a couple of days ago. We spent three months in a furnished apartment in Westwood while Mike had the surgery and then got back on his feet. It was a nice place, but unfortunately we had a bowling team of buffaloes living upstairs and they drove us a little crazy. I think we weren’t meant for apartment living, but it was just another part of our experiment in capricious living situations in the previous 15 months since we sold our house on Covedale. The apartment house in Westwood where we lived from October through December 2025 It was somewhat portentous that the weather, which had been a balmy 70 degrees when we started packing up, plummeted to the low 20s, complete with snow flurries, when we rescued the camper an...