You Know You Live In Houston If....

1. You're on your way to work one FEBRUARY morning and suddenly you're trapped in a traffic jam caused by a chuck wagon and fifty horses with riders and you look around to see that everybody in the cars around you is wearing a cowboy hat. Must be time for the Houston Rodeo.

2. The "farm-to-market" roads have seven lanes.

3. You want to be a snob about your grocery shopping,and go to a Randall's Flagship, a Kroger Signature, a Rice Epicurean, or soon, an HEB Central Market to buy bread and milk (but you have to dress up, and your dog and cat are out of luck if you go to the latter - nothing as mundane as pet food there).

4. You have to turn on the air conditioning in January, two days after a low of 29 degrees.

5. You have a Roach Story: You opened your flatware drawer to find a roach the size of the Taco Bell Chihuahua. He stood up and looked you in the eye. You closed the drawer, bought new flatware - and stored it in the oven. Or your friend has a Roach Story - about a dive bomber who crashed her formal dinner party, made several passes at guests whose heads were bobbing like little dogs in car windows, and finally landed in somebody's soup.

6. When you see your neighbor dancing around the front yard, you don't think he's won the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes; you know that he just stepped in a fire ant bed.

7. The name "Bud Adams" makes people snarl, and "Bum Phillips" doesn't mean a bad screwdriver.

8. "Luv ya Blue" still makes you smile, even if you did run the Oilers out of town.

9. You know that the Astrodome will always be the Eighth Wonder of the World.

10. You come to work in short sleeves and walk out at noon to find that a "blue-tailed norther" has blown through and the temperature has dropped 40 degrees in a matter of minutes.

11. Your neighbor's Christmas yard decorations look like a re-creation of the gunfight at the OK Corral, complete with a ten-foot tree decorated with boots and cowboy hats, and a Santa Claus who looks a lot like Wyatt Earp.

12. You wander into a section of town where you can't read the street signs because they're written in Asian characters instead of English, but you don't care because you can get great prices on fake designer merchandise there.

13. You go to an art festival on Westheimer and you're almost run down by two hand- holding cross dressers on roller blades.

14. The "Killer Bees" are not stinging insects, but rather members of the Houston Astros.

15. You hear everything but English spoken when you go to the Galleria to window shop. (You can't afford to buy because the prices are jacked up for all the foreign tourists.)

16. You know that "Dad gummit" has nothing to do with your father's failure to practice good dental hygiene.

17. You think "Y'all" is perfectly good usage if you're referring to more than one person.

18. For a Chili Cookoff, you'll use anything from armadillo to frog's legs, but you know that the only GOOD chili is made with chopped (not ground)- beef, and it has NO beans and NO tomatoes.

19. Spring is not the season, Katy is not the lady, and 1960 is not the year.

20. Society matrons of "a certain age" still sport big hair and faces that have gone east, west and north rather than south.

21. You can leave your house, head out of town, and an hour later you still haven't left the city limits (during rush hour, you haven't left your NEIGHBORHOOD).

22. You've never seen I-45 in any condition other than under construction, and you've lived here for 20-30 years.

23. If the humidity is below 90 percent, it's a GOOD hair day.

24. You know that "Clutch City" has nothing to do with automobile transmissions.

25. The Dream" is not a fantasy.

26. The only REAL Mexican food is Tex-Mex.

27. A 747 with the Space Shuttle riding piggyback has actually flown low right overhead, and nobody paid any attention to it.

28. You know that while saving you money, "Mattress Mac" has amassed more than the U.S. treasury.

29. You're happy to have beaten Los Angeles out of a football team, but you'd rather they keep the title of "Smog Capital."

30. You see nothing unusual about an eighty-something former sheriff's deputy who wears a white pompadour toupee and blue sunglasses, mispronounces names, allows televising of his frequent plastic surgeries, seems unnaturally obsessed with slime in the ice machine, and SCREAMS, "MAR-VIN ZIND-ler, EYE-witness news" into a television camera every night.