I stumbled across a show on the Do-It-Yourself Network, “Texas Flip or Move,” and I’m hooked. The premise is that land prices around Fort Worth have gone through the roof, and developers are rejuvenating old neighborhoods with new, pricey mansions.

            Standing in their way are old homes that need to either come down or get moved. Enter the Fort Worth flippers who drive in, bid on a house, move it and then renovate the house. After the rebuild, the house goes up for auction.

            The characters have Texas stamped all over them. There’s the no-nonsense Snow sisters whose whole family is in the house moving and renovating business.

There’s the crafty “Lone Wolf,” also known as Randy, whose goatee, mustache and ability to come in and undercut the others is legendary.

            Cody, the “Young Gun” is no longer on the show, but his appearances the first couple of seasons are worth watching. He has all the bravado one would expect in a brash entrepreneur, and he’s a whirlwind of confidence and mishaps.

            Seeing these flippers take a dilapidated house, rip everything out and turn the disaster into a cozy and livable space is fascinating. I watch each episode with envy because I used to dream of taking an old house and turning it into a true treasure.

            But my skills are somewhat lacking.

            Let’s be honest.

            My skills are woefully lacking.

            The first house I owned needed some work. I imagined wallpaper in the bedroom, mostly because my mom owned a wallpaper store. I’d never hung wallpaper before, but as a 20-something, I figured I could handle the task just fine. Besides, free wallpaper was a lot more attractive than buying two gallons of paint.

            I read the directions, wet the wallpaper and hung it on the wall. I didn’t wait the prescribed amount of time, figuring 10 minutes was a lot better than waiting a half hour. By dinnertime, the entire room was wallpapered, and I felt quite proud of myself.

            Until 2 a.m.

            I woke up to a noise in the room, and I couldn’t figure out what was happening. It sounded like a soft ripping and then a plop. I turned on the lamp, and saw half the wallpaper was in puddles on the floor.

            I watched with horror as piece after piece neatly rolled down the wall and landed in a pile on the floor. I couldn’t watch the massacre, so I got out of bed and ripped the rest of the paper off the wall in an angry snit.

            Three hours of scrubbing wallpaper paste off the wall, some spackling and two gallons of paint later, the room looked great.

            I’m not that fabulous with paint either.

            When I was a teenager, I had the brilliant idea of painting the walls in my room white and the trim a bright blue. Red, white and blue were the fashion choices of the day, and I thought mine and my sister’s room would look great in those patriotic colors.

            I remember holding a pint of bright blue enamel paint in my left hand while painting the trim with my right hand. I was standing on a folding chair and when I leaned a little too far to the right, we all came tumbling down.

            We never could get that blue paint out of the carpet, and we had to use primer to cover up the blue that spilled all the way down the freshly painted white wall.

            I think my sister’s still mad at me over that one.

            There were a few projects that turned out better than I thought. A friend told me to wet the sandpaper and sand my kitchen cabinets that desperately needed refurbishing. Some elbow grease and a can of high-gloss varnish later, I had kitchen cabinets that looked brand new.

            So as I watch these Texas flippers turn trash into treasure, I’m amazed at their ingenuity. I did notice, however, that none of them ever hangs wallpaper.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.

           

            In the 1977 “Star Wars” movie, the film’s high point is when young Luke Skywalker turns to The Force to help him guide his one-man fighter so he can destroy the Death Star.

To get to the target, Skywalker has to maneuver around laser missiles, tall towers and enemy fighter planes. Trusting in The Force, Skywalker closes his eyes and gets a precise hit to the reactor system, destroying the station and scoring one for the good guys.

            I feel a little like young Luke when I’m driving through Fort Bend County.

            Let’s start with Avenues H and I in Rosenberg. If “Orange is the New Black,” we’ve got that covered. At almost every intersection on the west end, there’s at least eight orange cones blocking the roadway to keep people from going the wrong way.

Then there’s orange signs warning about the new one-way direction and orange sand bags holding down the signs. For good measure, there’s orange words painted on the road.

            If that’s not enough of a distraction, there’s piles of ripped-up concrete and now-silent mud-splattered earth-moving machines along the route. They’re about the only things that are quiet as people blare their horns at drivers who take their lives into their hands to cross the avenues.

            And don’t even think you can sneakily get around those cones. They won’t damage your vehicle, as I found out yesterday when making a turn onto Avenue I a little too sharp, but they will scare you half to death when you hit one.  

Rosenberg’s not the only place where construction equals progress, or as many of us would attest, construction equals headache. Highway 59 from Rosenberg to Sugar Land is a nightmare. The lanes are narrow, there’s concrete barricades on every side of the road and, no surprise, orange cones that seem to stretch for miles.

There’s always a road under construction through Houston, and I-10 is an orange-cone buffet. We’ve been driving back and forth to Louisiana for over 25 years on I-10, and I have yet to go through Beaumont without stopping for road construction and, yes, orange cones.

As bad as the cones are, they don’t hold a candle to the concrete barriers road crews put up on either side of the road when they’re working on the shoulders.

I know they’re for safety, but those walls are intimidating because they seem to be about six inches from my fender.

A writer once compared driving along those types of roads to being shot out of a pin-ball machine. For me, it has to be what being shot out of a cannon feels like.

Officials tell us the orange cones and street demolition are temporary. At the end of the Rosenberg project, people should be happily humming along down the one-way streets, wrecks will be non-existent and the birds will be chirping away in the trees.

Until then, the sounds we’ll be hearing is music blaring from car radios, people honking their horns at drivers texting on their phones, oblivious to the traffic, and screeching tires from motorists who somehow forgot that those two avenues are now one-way streets.

But until that magic day arrives, which will probably be in the year 2050, we’ll have to hope The Force is with us as we grip the steering wheel and wind our way through the orange-barrel Death Star corridors.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.

 

 

 

When looking through our old movies on the shelf, I saw one from the 1980s, “Uncle Buck.” The movie, starring the late John Candy, was about a bachelor uncle who came to stay with his nieces and nephew for a week.

Chaos reigned in that house as Uncle Buck learned how to make breakfast, juggle the laundry and take on the task of chaperoning a rebellious teenage niece.

The children, of course, came to love Uncle Buck, and that movie reminded me of how important uncles are in the lives of children lucky enough to have uncles.

I learned important life lessons from my uncles, even though they had no idea they were teaching me anything. They were simply being themselves, and that’s the first lesson I learned – be myself no matter who was around.

The best example of that creed was my Uncle Howard. He was a man of few words, but I loved the times he told us stories about his escapades with my dad.  

Uncle Howard loved the beautiful swamps of Louisiana and he never let a tall tell go untold. He taught me how to bait a crab trap and how to properly eat a crawfish, skills I always thank him for every time I sit down to a crab or crawfish boil.  

The first time I saw my Uncle Lionel, I thought I was looking at my father. Of course, my dad didn’t wear love beads, but the resemblance was uncanny. From Uncle Lionel, I learned to dress how I felt on the inside, not how society told me to dress. From my Uncle Dukie, I learned to stand my ground and follow my own path.

My Uncle Ray always let me count the money in his Liberty Bell bank on Sunday afternoons. It was a slick way to give money to his nieces and nephews, and he taught us a little sneakiness is just fine.

My Uncle Vinnie taught us that even uncles could be singers in a nationally touring rock-and-roll band, move to Las Vegas and begin a second career as a university professor. My Uncle Bob showed me how to take life as it comes and not stress when things don’t go my way.

My mom’s youngest brother, Marshall, died when he was only 21 years old from kidney failure. His nieces and nephews seemed to aggravate him, so we usually steered clear.

One Sunday we were all at a parade and he called me over. He gave me $5 and told me to buy everybody a treat. He must’ve seen the doubt on my face.  

“Just remember I once did something nice for you, okay?” he said. He taught me that one small kindness can plant a seed that blooms for decades.

My Uncle Jim had and still has a tremendous impact on me. I first met him when he started dating my Aunt Bev back in the 1960s. I remember a shy, quick-to-blush young man who put up with my grandmother’s insults because he loved her daughter.

Uncle Jim was a high school science teacher, and he spent his summers renovating houses. I used to watch him rip out walls and porches, climb ladders and paint until late in the night.

No matter how busy he was, he always looked out for us. On our visits to see my grandparents, Uncle Jim checked our car from top to bottom and washed it before we got on the road.

He’s been in love with my aunt for over 60 years and took care of my grandparents without complaining, including showing up early in the mornings to shovel the snow from their sidewalk year after year.

From Uncle Jim, I learned that love is unconditional, it includes looking past the little annoyances and the payoff at the end of a tough job is always worth working for.

Without realizing what they were doing, my uncles have had a tremendous positive impact on all of us, from picking up Tasty Pizza at 10 p.m. to singing in a rock-and-roll band to sitting on the end of a dock, pulling up crab nets, hoping I’ll be as lucky with that catch as I am in the uncle department.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.

 

When trying to decide what movie to see, my husband and I compromise. I like Matt Damon, he likes intelligent movies, so we’ve watched the Jason Bourne movies over and over. Watching “Hidden Figures,” we both won. He loves math. I love movies where women are able to realize their full potential.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, Taraji Henson plays the main character, Katherine G. Johnson. In real life, Johnson was a mathematical prodigy who found her way to NASA as a human computer – a person who double checked the numbers NASA engineers generated.

Octavia Spencer plays Dorothy Vaughan, a woman who has a natural ability with machines and taught herself computer programming. Janelle Monae plays Mary Jackson, a young woman who’s bound and determined to attend engineering school.

Although this story is about black women in the 1960s, there are parallels for all women. When I was in high school in the early 1970s, girls were steered toward careers in nursing, going to secretarial school or learning how to sew and cook.

The boys were advised to go into engineering or the petrochemical industry, especially because we lived in the shadows of so many refineries and chemical plants.

There were some who broke out of the mold and made their way to bigger cities and bigger dreams. But so many of us didn’t realize how big a world it was out there. Some, like the women in “Hidden Figures,” not only saw that dream but broke down every barrier to achieve them.

I was lucky in that my dad believed women could accomplish anything they wanted. Unfortunately, I didn’t see those possibilities until I saw the glass ceiling for myself.

When I was 18, I was working as a summer Kelly Girl in the purchasing department of a paper mill. One of the older ladies in the office knew everything about the company, and was the “go-to” person.

When a promotion came up that she was perfect for, Anne was turned down because she was a woman. More than that, she had to suffer the humiliation of training a fresh-out-of-college boy who didn’t know a paper mill from a pepper mill to do the job she’d been doing for years.

I thought about Anne when I was watching “Hidden Figures,” knowing the struggle women have cuts across culture and color lines. But as we see women making strides in the world, it’s easy to overlook that the struggle is still ongoing.

The “Chicago Tribune” reported on a study of 3,000 respondents stating that women are often the ones in the office who are looked at to plan birthday parties. When a co-worker announces she’s going to have a baby, it’s usually a woman who organizes the baby shower.

Not that men aren’t just as capable of these tasks, but we still live in a world where there’s “women’s work” and “men’s work.” These divisions of labor based on one’s gender is particularly customary in developing countries, but the United States still has a long way to go.

As always, education is the answer. Parents, teach your daughters that they can achieve anything their hearts and minds can imagine. Tell them to break down the doors that stand in the way of their becoming all they can be. And teach your sons to not be the ones holding the door shut.

Grandparents, tell and retell the stories of bigotry and prejudice from your childhood days and remind your grandchildren that the only way to stop inequality is through education and acceptance. And that starts with them.

Hopes are that the movie “Hidden Figures” can open up conversations between generations about appreciating how far women have come, who we have to thank for going through the doors first and how far we still have to go.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.