Catchy Name Needed

There's a snowball in my freezer.

I put it there, but it still startled me this morning. (It didn't help that it's in a zip-lock bag that says "Trick or Treat" on it.) I was like, What the hell is this thing? before I remembered. The snow came off my car, although I think there was enough snow sticking to the grass by the time it stopped snowing that you probably could have gotten a decent snowball there, too. It never did stick on the streets that I saw, though. My car was really covered, and I was a bit worried that it would turn to ice overnight, but since I didn't have to get up early it's not really an issue; it was melted by the time I finally got up. We only have one covered space, which Rob uses, so his car was fine.

I think it's a snowball that would have hurt if I had actually thrown it. The snow was kind of damp, and the snowball was heavy. I am no expert on the physics of snowballs, though.


I have been working on cards this afternoon. One night last week I wrote addresses on a bunch of envelopes, but that was as far as I ever got with that, so today I signed cards and added stamps and licked envelopes. That fun stuff. I don't know why I like sending cards so much because it's really kind of a pain. (I like getting them, I suppose, for one thing - but no, there's some part of sending them that I like, too. It's not that simple.)

I keep saying I'm going to go up to Houston to shop, and today would have been a good day to go since it's warmer and sunny, but, well, I'm still here. Maybe tomorrow.

I forgot to say that Rob came in from running talking about all the reporters out on the Seawall. (I should've made him count TV trucks for me. But I'm not quite obsessive about it enough to do that.) He said that guy from CNN who we were mocking a while back for being out in the Mississippi in hip waders every day - he's here. Reynolds Wolf, I think.

(Maybe I'll go play WoW while I can. Nothing much else to do.)

(Sorry, I can never resist being silly.)

Three TV trucks this afternoon (one said CBS News Dallas, and one was the Houston CBS affiliate, which seems sort of redundant) - that's still not very many. I have the local CBS station on though (aka Channel 11) and they are in full-court press mode about the storm - I've been home almost an hour and it's all they've talked about. Also they said they've gotten a million hits on their website, which is interesting. They usually are known locally for having the best hurricane coverage - they are the station that hired away the director of the National Hurricane Center 20 years or so ago to work for them, just for moments like this. He is semi-retired now but he's been on the air today just the same.

Rob is calling this "Hurricane Smitty" which is an old Gaido's joke that nobody else will get, but basically it means it's a little piddly thing. (I thought about trying to explain this expression but it's much too complicated.) We don't live in a spot that should flood from a weak Category 1 storm, and it doesn't sound like the wind will be that bad, so we are staying put unless things change. We don't have to work tomorrow, for sure, and if we get up in the morning and it looks like it's going to be worse than we thought, we should still have time to get out.

It was horribly foggy this morning, and it kept getting worse as I got further down the island. Actually I say "horrible" because I don't like fog, but it was never quite so bad that you couldn't tell where you were or anything, so it really wasn't as bad as all that. Still, I want it to go away, and it looks like I will get my wish, because there's a cold front bearing down us at this very moment. I don't think it's supposed to get incredibly cold or anything, but at least it should be enough to blow the fog away. I hate fog, can you tell?

Once again I have written an entry and left it where I am not. So you will get that one later, I imagine. Meanwhile, I am kind of upset by something that happened - not to me, but sort of a family thing - and I am having trouble thinking about anything else. It's not something that I feel free to write about, though, since it concerns somebody else's life and not mine! But suffice it to say that it upset me. My mental state has been sort of precarious lately, anyway.[Bad username or unknown identity: superplin ]wrote an entry where she mentioned the word "limnal" and it keeps popping into my head that that's how I feel these days. I was talking the other day about my life being in transition, and I guess it's part of that. I feel between. Between being happy and sad, a lot of the time. I veer back and forth but I don't spend too long in either place. I guess it could be worse - if I'm not spending a lot of time being terribly happy, at least I'm not spending a lot of time really UNhappy, either.

We went to see The Golden Compass yesterday. I knew the reviews weren't especially good but I wanted to see it anyway. And the reviews were about right, it wasn't great. It wasn't terrible either, it just didn't seem to hang together very well. I think it would be confusing if you hadn't read the books, although Rob hasn't and he seemed to be following it ok. It was pretty to look at, though, which is basically why we went.

I really like this one a lot. Apparently this has to do with a Japanese folk story about wisteria turning into butterflies, or hatching butterflies, or something like that. I'm not sure what those hourglass-looking things are supposed to be, though. (Anybody got any ideas?)




And I think I linked to the pictures the other day, but I'm linking again, because there are more of them now, and besides, I put a lot of work into taking them, and attempting to match them up with the right names, and all that. I'm not nearly done yet, either.


The cold front finally came through about noon today. It didn't really get cold at all, although you could tell the difference - but I think it will be pretty cool in the morning, by south Texas standards, at least!

I have been working on a Spreadsheet From Hell at work - 60,000 lines or so that have to have things done to them manually. The end of that is finally in sight, though - I've been working on it sporadically for about the last 10 days. Now I just have to find my boss a nonstop flight to Pensacola that doesn't cost $900, which may be a harder job than the spreadsheet.

It rained on us off and on most of the way up to Austin on Saturday, starting the very minute we got in the car. (If we hadn't left exactly at 9:00 like we said we were going to, we would have gotten very wet. It's very unusual for us to be right on time like that, so we were lucky.) There wasn't any visible flooding in Austin, but all of the electronic traffic signs around town said,

FLOODING POSSIBLE
THRU SUNDAY
IF WATER ON ROAD
TURN AROUND
DON'T DROWN

The Brazos river was visibly very muddy, even on Monday, but the Colorado wasn't at all - we figured maybe it was because the Brazos was coming straight down from where all the rain was, while the water in the Colorado had been through a couple of lakes and over Mansfield Dam and so forth, in between. (Or it could just have been a difference in the soil upstream, I suppose - that east Texas red mud.) Anyway, both of them were really high, you could tell that very easily.

And gee, it's raining again now. So much for rockets' red glare for the 4th, unless this stops.


(More on the trip to Austin later, if I can get around to it!)

It was actually chilly outside today. It was around 80 a couple of days ago, but it's somewhere in the 50s today, which means I actually wore a coat this morning. In Galveston, this is a big deal, the first coat day of the season. (Some years it comes considerably later than this.)

Galveston is due to be invaded by some 300,000 bikers this weekend - it's something called the Lone Star Rally and it's been going on in Galveston for several years now and seems to be growing exponentially. Coincidentally, I am going to be out of town a good chunk of the weekend, which seems fairly fortunate. I have no problem with bikers but any of those times when there's an extra quarter of a million people on the island tend to get a little crazy.

I am going up to Houston for the International Quilt Festival, which I do every year, but this year for the first time I am spending the night. A couple of years ago they built a Hilton adjoining the convention center, and the temptation to book someplace to be able to go and collapse was just too much.

I know most non-quilters seem to have trouble even imagining what a quilt festival is like, but let me assure you, a lot of you artier types would like it a lot. They have literally thousands of quilts on display - both traditional and art quilts, and even a certain amount of clothing and dolls and so forth. Then there are the vendors, which go on for 20 aisles or so. They sell fabric, yes - but also antique quilts and all sort of sewing stuff and beads and gifts and well, you name it. If they think it will appeal to women - because a good 95% of the attendees are women, I would say - then somebody will be selling it. There are also classes and lectures and things that go on all week, and which usually fill up way, way early. I have never bothered with those.

So it's huge and really tiring, and I have developed this habit of taking hundreds of pictures to post online, so spending the night and going for two days sounded like a good plan. Last year I spent a whole day taking pictures and never even really looked at the vendors at all - I didn't really need to buy anything, god knows, but still I felt like I missed an awful lot. So - two days. Expensive (well, sort-of-expensive) hotel room. Camera and lots and lots of batteries. I'll get to test the limits of my memory card at last - maybe. (I have a really big memory card. That might be another one of those things I couldn't really afford. As is the camera itself, probably!)


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We are going to start having the option to do "compressed schedules" at work - things like working 4 10-hour days every other week and having a day off. No way I am doing 10-hour days - it doesn't make any sense for my job really, anyway - but my boss & I discussed a modified one where I would have a half-day off every week, which would be nice. I'm trying to decide if I could manage to get to work at 7:30 - then I could work 9 hours and still get off at 5:30, which wouldn't be bad. (I could also theoretically switch to 30-minute lunches, would be another option.) All that is still up in the air, though. We're not even implementing it till at least after Thanksgiving, it sounds like, anyway.

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I mentioned Holidailies yesterday - it makes me a little sad to look at that website. There's nothing sad about Holidailies, you understand, it's my entries there's a problem with. I'm up towards the top of the list of participants because I actually did update every day - but all those entries are gone. They were on Diary-X, and Diary-X blew up, for those of you who don't already know the sad, sad story. There was some sort of incident with a crash and bad backups, and everything that was there is just gone, gone, gone. (I may have drafts of some of those entries. To be quite honest, I haven't really checked. But I know that I would tinker with my entries after I put them up and I never would bother to save them again. So there's definitely no record of exactly what I had up over there. I even tried to look in the Internet Archives - whatever they're called - and nada.) I guess I should have learned from that. Do I have good copies of what I've written on Livejournal? Heck no.columbinahas an echo of his entries on his personal website, and I really should do something like that, but the odds that I will are pretty damn low.

 

Have y'all realized that not only is the first anniversary of Katrina coming up next week, but right after that is the 5th anniversary of 9/11? We're gonna be subjected to relentless disaster documentaries in the next couple of weeks.



It's rainy again today. I guess that's better than blazingly hot.

It has finally stopped raining here - it started raining Friday, I think, and pretty much rained continuously until yesterday. I didn't hear anything about significant flooding here - the advantage of living on an island is that there's usually somewhere for the water to go - but there was a lot of flooding in Houston, especially Monday when a lot of places got 10" of rain overnight. It was bad enough that people were saying it reminded them of Tropical Storm Alison, about 5 years ago when Houston flooded so bad. Alison was supposed to have been a "hundred year storm" so anything that even seems vaguely like that is a little scary.