Sam's mom messes with Texas

I'm back from a grand weekend in San Antonio with this cute little boy and plenty of delicious margaritas.

I am sorry to report that this a color photo of the first draft of my travel wardrobe.
I shook things up by adding in a pink scarf, a green cardigan and some  purple flats.  Snappy!

His company paid for every imaginable whim of several hundred employees and their guests, including round trip travel (involving six separate flights for me.)  I had a lovely massage at the hotel spa and we even had enough room credits left over to buy a few souvenirs for the home fries. I also passed around a few pictures of Sam before he was a a successful grownup, including this shot:

Sam was rocking that scruff at age seven, and yes,  Lillie's [unappreciated] costume is Amoxicillin 

Look kid, if you're going to invite YOUR MOM to this kind of event, you'd better reconcile yourself to a little humiliation in front of your bosses and coworkers who still see you as some upstart pup.  I was therefore obligated to prove them right.   I expect there will be a parental-exclusion policy in place next year.

I am kind enough not to show you the multi-colored fanny bruise under that hotel robe

The first afternoon, we played on the hotel's water slides and floated around the 'lazy [pretend] river' (me slathered in sunscreen to ward off my enemy, the too-friendly Texas sunshine).  Flailing and struggling  to climb out of an inflatable  plastic inner tube, I sat down way too hard on some concrete steps and am now nursing a rainbow-hued, fist-sized bruise on my can. Leisure time is fraught with danger.

When I was lamenting to the friendly hotel desk clerk that it would take three flights and all day to get back home, she laughed and said her hometown is an hour south of mine.  And the clerk in the gift shop asked where in Chicago Sam lives; turns out she grew up a few train stops away from his apartment in Bucktown.

airline travel is so glamorous

Too soon, I was back home again to find anxious cats, more political bad news, and smoky skies.  At least the badly needed rain in Texas held off until I left.  It was a wonderful trip.

 my poor kitties cried themselves to sleep every night