Okay, so today I met with Juan Lopez, who, like me, rides the VIA bus. If you live in the city, the bus is pretty good if you're going north/south.  It's the crosstown buses and the 551 Looper that drives me crazy.  I wish they were more colorful, like in Mexico, and that the drivers were allowed to play their music!  This Calvinist heritage!  But I love the bus.  Babies, tattoos, the elderly, ride the bus. Humanity.   For reals. Today, Juan said something really profound. "If the city is so concerned about DWIs (Los borrachos, he means), then why doesn't VIA offer 24-hour service during Fiesta?" Are you listening, VIA? I know you offer special service for the basketball games, the Rodeo, And God knows what else... Or is the City wanting the fines from the DWIs or maybe just wants to put more borrachos in jail? http://www.viasmartmove.com

I am the oldest of eight.  I am going to tell you something my siblings won't face -- the drugging and drinking that has destroyed us as a family. Alcohol.  Drugs.  All my siblings, addicted now or in the past, except me and the disabled Daniel.  The reason for prison, death, and jail and/or -- for three of my brothers -- each a separate story but the same one too. My father, Roberto Renaud, passed away a few weeks ago.  He was 95 years old, and had spent the last three years in a nursing home here in San Antonio, Texas.  He was a brutal father, but he tried.  He tried.  A sharecropper who worked infinite hours in the Texas Panhandle.  A WWII veteran. His family, an old Tejano family, has a family plot, a camposanto, outside of Raymondville.  It's all the family has left after the U.S. Mexican War.  It's a windswept acre of land a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico that includes our family's graves beginning in the 20th century...