San Antonio Day 1

What pleasant weather. High 70s to low 80s with a cool breeze all day. Eat your heart out, Utah. :)

I wasn't able to get all 9 wards in, but I got 6, including one from each of the 4 meetinghouses, and all 3 at the one that may to be the sweet spot between niceness and commutability. San Antonio does not have any convenient-but-expensive downtown housing to speak of. What little housing exists downtown, you don't want to live in. The farther away you get, the nicer the neighborhoods get, but the more your commute sucks.

My plan to hit all 9 was foiled mostly by driving time. Mormon churches are not as close together here as they are in Utah. Who would have thought. :)

The photographic evidence of my labor is over at jbellis.wordpress.com. I didn't want to put what is mostly temporary clutter on the savage peanut, and the stupid iphone can't mail multiple pictures in a single email. Since I had 30+ pictures and wanted to group related ones together, the simplest solution I found was a wordpress blog. The wordpress iphone app is smart enough to upload multiple pictures at once. Bite me, Apple. The silver lining is that now the rest of you get to see the pics, if you care.

Summary: Eden and SA 8 are small wards. San Pedro is the next smallest. SP and Deerfield contain most of my preferred locations. SA 8 has the locations with the shortest commute. Eden gets a few leftover subdivisions on the border of SP, plus some less desirable areas. Encino Park and Canyon Springs (and Stone Oak and Sonterra, also north of 1604) are big wards -- they are the closest to the temple -- but probably will fail the commute test.

The commute test is tomorrow morning. I will go up to 281 and drive downtown at 6:30. Then, if there is time, I will go back up and repeat it at 8:00. The clerk of CS said that as long as you don't have to actually negotiate the 1604 -> 281 interchange, it's not so bad. I don't believe him.

Now it is dark and threatening to rain. I should go do some preliminary neighborhood casing. I probably would, if it weren't such a hassle with the gps-that-doesn't-work. It found one of the four meetinghouses on its own. One! The others I had to trick it by finding an intersection nearby that it recognized. It never got the first alternative interesection I tried, either. What a turd of a GPS.