Despite the antics of perhaps the most micromanaging governmental board in the Houston area, the third-largest community college system in the state continues to provide cost-effective education to 53,000 students enrolled at 17 sites around the city and its suburbs. HCCS offers vocational, adult literacy and accredited college-level courses at a fraction of the tuition of state and private universities. Voters will have the opportunity this November to vote on a $151 million bond referendum to finance campus improvement projects. At a cost of $15.70 a year to the owner of a $100,000 home, it's an education bargain too good to pass up.

Houston's hardy downtown residents have earned charter memberships in the first real community among the skyscrapers since the early 1900s. "Almost everybody who lives down here now knows each other, and it's a good bunch of professionals," notes Solero restaurant owner Bill Sadler, who lives just a block away at the Rice Hotel. Being at the center of things also means you can go days without using your car, a virtual necessity almost everywhere else in Houston, says District I Councilwoman Carol Alvarado, who also rents at the Rice. Of course, with the state of the street construction downtown, human internal combustion machines can get around faster on foot than their automotive counterparts anyway.

Galveston needed a four-star hotel, and the San Luis gave it one, complete with a truly fabulous steak house (one of the top ten in Texas), a completely redesigned pool area with swim-up bar, and all the little niceties any sophisticate would expect. What you might not expect, but what you do get nonetheless at this upper-crust refuge, is good old-fashioned Texas friendliness. Even the room service attendants remember your name and stop to chat about the weather and what's going on around the island.

All day long, cars pull into the driveway of the RecycleXpress center; car doors fling open, and conscience-minded citizens separate their colored and clear glass, bimetal cans, paper, cardboard and plastics (nos. 1 and 2 only, please) through square slots into great mounds. Even though some of them drive SUVs and many of them don't read the instructions and forget to do things like take the caps off their milk jugs, or flatten their cardboard boxes, at least they have the right idea. On the weekends, sometimes someone brings a kid along, but most of the time it's just single folks driving decent cars, passing strangers by as they trek back and forth from the car to the recycling bins. Okay, so we don't know if they're all single, but everyone seems to be checking everyone else out.

These days of low interest rates make us a little homesick -- for a new house, that is. Whether you see yourself ensconced in a little Heights bungalow, perched in a high-rise condo downtown or building your own place on some land outside the city, the Houston Association of Realtors' Web site lets you live the dream. Just type in your most important criteria (two bedrooms or three, centrally located or suburban, a lot of money or a whole lot of money) and the site spits back hundreds of homes that match -- many with photo galleries or virtual tours of the property. You can even calculate a hypothetical mortgage and check out area schools for your hypothetical children. It's the next best thing to driving around town with a realtor. Actually, it's much better than driving around town with a realtor -- especially when you're just fantasizing.

If you want to see really funny pictures of your friends, and possibly yourself, making waves in Houston's nightlife, this is the site to visit. There are pages and pages of pics from Houston's clubs and their raucous partyers. From the Lotus Lounge to the Social, you can peruse photo albums of people gettin' jiggy with it. Some of you should log on just to make sure there's no incriminating evidence on you. If you have a friend coming to H-town who's looking for the lowdown on the hottest party spots, send 'em here. It's interesting to see how the nights progress (these pics are not for the faint of heart). If anyone should say Houstonians don't know how to get their groove on, the Pimp will prove them wrong with a bitch-slappin', off-the-hook site.

We're not sure that radio guy John Granato is being completely honest with us when he says that, in addition to a great product line, there are cocktails and girls in bikinis on hand at Trailer, Wheel & Frame, but we like the idea. Where else can you get your hands on things like ritzy-rails, bug-guards, big wheel juniors, T-trailers and dual tandems? What are they? We don't know, but we like saying the words.

Face it. Even the friskiest Fido eventually gets bored doing those leg lifts in the same old neighborhood spots. And the Great Dane becomes mundane when marking the same trees day in, day out. The leash, uh, least one can do is break the monotony with a pilgrimage to every mutt's mecca. There's an hour or so drive involved, but that just gives the dog the necessary time to muster up that once-in-a-lifetime leak. Pack him in the car and head east on Interstate 10 to Beaumont; take the downtown exit. Lurking around the corner at the Fire Museum of Texas is every dog's dream. It came all the way from Disneyland, where it was crafted to promote the rerelease of the 101 Dalmatians video. The fiberglass structure has a reinforced interior of 1,000 feet of steel and weighs 4,500 pounds. And the shape? You guessed it. A 24-foot-tall fire hydrant, white with dalmatian dots. Nearly three stories of sheer canine excitement.

Oral satisfaction all in one location. Inside the industrial-looking building you can chow down on a sandwich or chili dog, and then step across the hallway and get your teeth cleaned or cavities filled. But for the dentist's sake, go easy on the onions.

Three years ago, if you were traveling from downtown Houston to the Great Southwest along Highway 59 anytime between 4 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on a weekday, you'd hit the wall around Bissonnet. The wall of traffic, that is. For the next eight miles, all the way to State Highway 6, you'd sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic -- changing lanes, exiting and re-entering the freeway in a useless attempt to shave seconds off your commute. It wasn't uncommon for it to take an hour to drive this tedious stretch. Then, overnight (well, almost) on Memorial Day weekend, the wall was removed. Now, the traffic doesn't begin to back up until Highway 6, where the road narrows to two lanes again. The only downside to all this is that gratefully speeding drivers might not notice the attempt to improve the aesthetics of this section of U.S. 59 with the addition of painted columns imprinted with the Lone Star as well as a crown, the symbol for Imperial Sugar Corporation, which is based in Sugar Land.