My car has been registered in Texas for just over a week now, and I'm already getting scam junk mail from these assholes. Giving away my personal information is probably the most efficient thing that Texas has done for me since I moved here.
Note: 13 years later, I still miss all of these things about Atlanta, and many more. Cactus Car Wash (the one on Ponce) is still there but it's called something else now. I've grown to hate Houston, and Texas, much more in the last decade.
So I've lived in Houston for a couple of months now, and am finally starting to find my way around. While I still don't think of Houston as home, I definitely feel somewhat settled in (when Clio and my furniture get here, the illusion will be mostly complete).
But there are a few things that Atlanta really did better than Houston:
Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of nice things about Houston (such as NASA). They've just fallen a bit short on details.
... for real this time. I came to Texas for work as a temporary sort of thing, the idea being that I would stay for three months on this contract working for NASA (via Jacobs), then come home to Atlanta and be unemployed again.
But work is actually pretty fun. It has its ups and downs, and I've already started picking fights with some of my less reasonable superiors, but I get to play with neat hardware, see fun sights, meet interesting people, including astronauts (who aren't crazy, though some of them seem to have ego problems) and so on.
So I'm going to stay in Texas and work for NASA. There are still some logistics to work out, such as moving all of my furniture here and renting out my house, but I'm well on my way to being a registered Texan, and I try to not let that depress me. I have one co-worker who recently relocated to here from Idaho, and another from Indiana, and they seem to be adjusting reasonably well so perhaps there's hope.