CCE Day 0: Lodging

Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck gettin' dirty-'n'-gritty
Been down, isn't it a pity
Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city
All around people lookin' half dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match-head.

The Lovin' Spoonful, Summer in the City (1966).

In the next six weeks, we'll take a 35-year-old law student from Houston and move him 214 miles south to Corpus Christi to work in the 13th District Court of Appeals. Will he stand up to the pressures of the job? Will he be able to take the heat? Will he learn the difference between buñuelos and pan de polvo? Stay tuned as we join Brave Ulysses on Day Zero of the Corpus Christi Experience!

The goal is to enhance my ongoing legal education by working 240 hours at the Thirteenth District Court of Appeals... and of course, I have no idea what I've gotten myself into. I rolled into town today at about 1:00 PM. I found the apartments again easily enough, but the office people weren't as prepared for me as they could have been. After signing the paperwork and getting my key, I wakled to my new apartment and stepped inside to find a chair propping open the furnace cabinet and a note that read "A/C not working." Uh, that's a problem. The heat index for today was 103 degrees. I looked around and noticed that the furnace panel was open and wires were hanging loose as if someone was working on it and never quite finished. I complained to the office and they had it fixed in about 20 minutes. I was still annoyed. As you might imagine, it takes a really long time to cool an apartment in 103 degree heat. Although the apartment comes furnished, there was also no shower curtain, no bedsheets, no wastebasket, no toilet paper. So, after unpacking everything I'd brought, I made a trip to Wal-Mart. I had to buy twin-size sheets. I didn't want a $40 comforter so I bought a $10 serape that was the right size for the mattress. Cheesy, I know, but it will do the job. Right now I'm wondering why I'm even bothering with sheets in this heat.

Here are some pictures. It's actually a two-bedroom apatrment, and they lock each bedroom individually so that if you have a roomate, you can't mess with his stuff, and if you don't have a roommate, you can't use the second bedroom you didn't pay for. Clever. So I have a second bedroom with no roommate (hopefully it stays that way) and I can't say I know for certain what's behind Door Number 2. It's a little creepy, if I think about it.

I drove straight through Corpus to get to the apartment and haven't seen anything yet except the Wal-Mart, so the touristy stuff and analysis of the zeitgeist will have to wait for another day.