A few important things to know on Thursday.

In this post: Thursday events, appreciating Texas.

It’s 6:25 Thursday morning, and here are four things you need to know today:

1. Clayton and Ricky, our chucklehead remodeling team, will arrive sometime between sun-up and 8 a.m. to start working on the shower in our master bathroom. However from prior experience (see previous post) I’ll assume that 10:15 is a safer bet.
2. I’m definitely having baloney and American cheese on low-carb white bread for lunch. My baloney of choice is always Oscar Mayer even though they spell it B-O-L-O-G-N-A. Nobody in their right mind should spell baloney like that.
3. You should watch and/or record the following movies today on TCM: The Lady Vanishes (1938) starring Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave; Happiness Ahead (1934) about an heiress and a singing window washer starring Dick Powell and Josephine Hutchinson; and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) starring Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner.
4. The state of Texas is HUGE. Details follow.

And now for some details about the size of Texas. (I’ll wait while you grab a cup of coffee.) The Lone Star State is 791 miles long (268,000 square miles), and the red zone on the following infographic shows how far 791 miles stretch from our borders. There are cities in Texas that are closer to cities in different states on different coasts than they are to other Texas cities. We even have cities that are closer to capital cities in other countries than they are to other Texas cities.

For instance ...

• Beaumont is closer to Tampa than to El Paso.
• Brownsville is closer to Mexico City than to Dallas/Fort Worth.
• Texarkana is closer to Atlanta than to El Paso.
• Dallas is closer to Little Rock than to San Antonio.
• Corpus Christi is closer to Cuba than to Denver.
• Austin is closer to New Orleans than to El Paso.
• Downtown Fort Worth to downtown Dallas is longer than the entire Gaza Strip and longer than the English Channel.
• Dallas to Houston is nearly the same distance as Paris to London.

Practically everybody in Texas agrees that South Padre Island in the Gulf of Mexico is the best beach in the state, but that’s a one-hour flight from Houston (1½ from Dallas) plus 45 minutes by car just to get there. And if you prefer to drive the whole way? Figure eight hours from Houston and 12 from Dallas. Holy crap, right?

There’s a quiz at 11. Thank you for reading this.