Catchy Name Needed

Again, I haven't posted about movies in ages - since I said the same thing several months ago. The only movie I'm sure I saw in August or September is Logan Lucky, which I really liked. I kept saying the best way to explain it was as a redneck Ocean's Eleven. But I think that doesn't do it justice. It's funny and it has great actors and there's very little car racing even though a lot of it takes place at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. Definitely worth catching somewhere when you get a chance.

I can't remember anything else. I refused to go see IT - Rob went twice. I did actually read most of the book once (it's 1100 pages long) but I quit before I got to the very end because it was just sort of dragging on and it was giving me nightmares. Horror is just not my thing, in general. (Apparently King wrote it during the period when he was doing drugs, which explains a lot. I didn't know about that 25 years or so ago when I read it.)

And then this weekend we went to see Blade Runner 2049, which I also really liked. Or maybe I should say loved. I always loved the old movie as well, but in recent years I quit rewatching it because the way that Decker treats Rachael now seems very sexist. In 1982 it didn't bother me at all - in fact I thought it was very romantic. I grant that the new one does seems nearly as male-gaze-ish in some ways but I still liked it. It built on the old one and yet was different. And it was so beautiful. I didn't even think it seemed particularly long. (Rob got up and went to the bathroom twice but I never did, partly just because I didn't want to miss anything.)

I was thinking about seeing the first one in 1982, when it first came out, over the weekend. I think I saw it at Dobie Mall first, and then later I went to see it on a double-bill (which was not common even then) with The Wrath of Khan, which came out the same year. That was the big theater, I think the Hancock Theater in Austin. It was the only place (other than the Paramount, and this was before the Paramount was refurbished, I think) that hadn't been carved up into multiplexes. One of the people I went with was a male friend whose brother had recently died, and it didn't occur to me to warn him that death was a big theme in Blade Runner. I remember sitting next to him and he sat through the part with Rutger Hauer's big speech with tears just streaming down his face, and you know, that was in the macho era, it just wasn't done for men to cry, even in a movie theater. I've never forgotten that.

Neither of the movies I talk about above made any money to speak of. Logan Lucky cost something under $30 million and had almost broken even, the last I saw. I imagine Blade Runner will also break even in the end but it started out very badly, didn't it?


I noticed that I did the post about Hurricane Carla but I never said anything here about Harvey. That's probably mostly because I was posting everywhere else about it because everybody kept popping up and saying they were worried about us - until then I was just kind of saying random things because I was just sitting at home twiddling my thumbs. I can't say I was "unaffected" by Harvey because I was physically right in the middle of it, but other than missing some work (my boss tried to get me paid but since I am part-time it didn't fly - and I work for a state university so nobody's allowed to cheat on things like that) all that happened was that we were stranded, effectively, for several days. The water stopped down at the end of the block, but it didn't actually even come close to us. Where we live is in the middle of several creeks and that's why we were stranded. "Behind" us (at my back as I sit at the computer, but also further away from the main road) was where the some of worst flooding was in this area, but the feeder creeks of course also flooded so there were flooded roads in every direction. I don't know how much rain we actually got but it was a lot. I saw a NWS list that had a crossing that's only a couple of miles from us getting a total of 52" of rain. It might have been somewhat less than that here. But anyway, our power only went out for about an hour the first day and then stayed on after that, so we had a/c and computers and TV and we had plenty of food, so all things considered we were a-ok. (It started raining on Friday, the worst of it was on Saturday night/Sunday morning but it kept raining off and on until Tuesday, I think, and the sun didn't come out until maybe the end of the day Tuesday, and then only briefly. Rob got to the grocery store on Wednesday but we didn't have to go back to work until Friday. So I had an unexpected week off, in the end.)

I found an HEB receipt in my Franklin Planner today that I feel like I ought to keep as a historical document, or something. It's from the HEB in Bryan, pre-hurricane Rita. We bought gourmet bread because it was the only kind of bread in the whole store, and organic milk for the same reason. We bought carrots and lettuce (green leaf) and coffee because my aunt wanted them, and we bought blackberries - even though they were more expensive than gas - because I love them, and we bought spring water because they did have that and we were surprised, and we thought it might be a good idea to have some more just in case. (I think there's still a few bottles out of that case in the refrigerator.) People were a little crazy in HEB that day, but the cashier (whose name is Nellie, according to the receipt) thought we were the crazy ones when we said we thought everybody was getting hysterical for nothing, because the hurricane was going to turn and not hit us. We weren't psychic, we just had been watching way too much TV, and it had already started turning by that time. (We had that gourmet bread for dinner Sunday night before we left for home, though. It was yummy.)


I get a lot of catalogs this time of year, because I order a lot of stuff online, but the last couple of days I have gotten a couple of the stupidest catalogs ever. I've been trying to figure out why I got these catalogs - is there a "tacky catalog" mailing list I got on by accident? Now I admit, I have a soft spot for certain kinds of kitsch, but a fiber-optic Irish angel is not one of them. Neither is a comical moose print.

Oh, and goooooo Astros! (I am skipping quilt guild to watch baseball, that's how big this game is.)

There are still a couple of TV trucks parked out on the Seawall. I guess they're doing follow-up stories.

Galveston has been all over the news, of course. Anderson Cooper was broadcasting right in front of our apartments the other day (while we were gone, more's the pity) and I saw somebody I know on Larry King yesterday. Very odd.

There is a tropical depression in the Carribbean. The very thought makes me feel panicky. Isn't hurricane season over with yet?

We just found out that we're supposed to be back at work Tuesday, so we're going to go ahead and leave in the next hour or so - we think the traffic will only be worse tomorrow. Cross your fingers for us.

If you've seen the reports on CNN today about the massive traffic backups in Houston, that's more or less what happened to us yesterday, although we avoided the worst of it by making a big circle around the western edge of Houston. We left really early yesterday morning - before 8, which is incredibly early for us - and there was no traffic to speak of. The water was dead calm so there weren't even all the surfers that we usually get before storms. (The pelicans were having a really great time, though, by all appearances.) We got to my mom's on time, more or less, and got shifted around between cars, and got away, still really early and in light traffic. We had decided not to stay together, and so Rob and I started looking for a place to have breakfast. We were going along the feeder road to the IHOP and my attention wandered for a minute and I somehow managed to hit the curb pretty hard - and the tire immediately went completely flat. We thought at first we were going to get off pretty easy because a very helpful policeman came along and gave us a hand, and there was a Sam's right across the street from the IHOP so we thought, well, we'll just go get a tire there.

But it turned out about half of Houston called in sick to work yesterday (no big surprise, I guess, under the circumstances), so the IHOP was swamped (and we were starving by that time, too) and then there were only two or three guys working in the tire department at Sam's so that took forever, too. And by the time we got on the road again the nice clear highways were no more. We started around the Beltway - the outer loop around Houston - and it was moving at first, if slowly (they had even closed the toll booths), but after a while it really started crawling along, and we finally got off and moved over to Highway 6, which is further out, and then when that started doing the same thing, we went even further out away from Houston. We ended up going to Bryan via Rosenberg and Brenham and Caldwell, which if you look at a map is a good bit out of the way, but we got there in 7 hours (from the time we left Sam's), which is apparently much faster than other people got anywhere. (About three hours of that was actually in Houston traffic, but even after we got out on the little two-lane road in the middle of nowhere, there was still enough traffic that it backed up for 5 miles or so at every light. Just crazy.)

When evacuating, do I take my fabric stash? (I think this question is somewhat moot, though - I can only get it in the car if we don't take any clothes.)

People from Louisiana are everywhere here. (It's easy to tell when you listen to them talk.) There's the Red Cross shelter at the Methodist church, and people staying with relatives, and apparently people in several formerly-vacant units in our apartment complex. And tomorrow they're moving 4000 people from the Astrodome down here to a Carnival cruise ship. Those tiny cabins are going to seem like the lap of luxury to somebody who's been living on the floor of the Astrodome for days, aren't they?

Update: Except they don't want to go, apparently. I can see that they've been uprooted multiple times already, in a lot of cases, but still, it's hard for me to imagine that anybody really wants to stay in the Astrodome rather than have some privacy. (And I'm a person who has so far refused to go on a cruise because I'm claustrophobic. Between the two extremes, though, I think I'd choose the tiny cabins, assuming that the ship is staying at the dock and you're allowed to come and go freely. That's just me, though. The evacuees have been through hell and if they want to stay at the Astrodome, they ought to be allowed to stay.)

How did Katrina sneak up on us so much? Was I just not paying attention last week? I usually am very aware of potential hurricanes even when they're way out in the ocean - you get that way after living on the coast a while - but somehow I missed this one until it was nearly to Miami.

(Family stuff, and some whining, under the cut.)

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Rob and I went to see The Brothers Grimm yesterday after I got home. We read all the bad reviews before we decided to go, but enough of them made it sound interesting that we went anyway. Armed with very low expectations, we actually enjoyed it quite a lot. That always helps.