Only in Houston

You know you’re in Houston when…

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.)

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

The “farm-to-market” roads have seven lanes.

If you want to be a snob about your grocery shopping, you can go to Randall’s, Rice Market, Central Market or a Kroger’s Signature.

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

When you see your neighbor dancing around the front yard, you know he just stepped in a fire ant bed.

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

You come to work in short-sleeves and walk out at noon to find that a Blue Norther cold front has blown through, and the temperature has dropped 40 degrees in a matter of minutes.

You wander into a section of town where you can’t read the street signs but you don’t care because you can get great prices on fake designer merchandise there.

You hear everything but English spoken when you go to the Galleria to window-shop.

You know that “Dad gummit” has nothing to do with your father’s failure to practice good dental hygiene.

You’ve never seen I-45 in any condition other than under-construction — and you’ve lived here for 20-30 years. (Try 40 years)

If the humidity is below 90 percent, it’s a good hair day.

The only real Mexican food is Tex-Mex.

You see nothing unusual about an 80-something former sheriff’s deputy who wears a white 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.

Thanks to FWD from a life-long Houstonian.