Catchy Name Needed

(From Facebook, but I just thought it was funny. And, though it may not sound like it, basically completely correct.)

 Public service announcement for all you new Residents!
 

If you are new to South Texas, we are about to experience “Texas Winter”. This is 6 or 7 days of cold, maybe some ice and snow. Frank Billingsley (long-time local weather guy) will threaten snow. It may snow, it may not and if Frank says 2 inches it could be 10 or it could be 1/2”. It doesn’t matter how much snow it is, we’ll all freak out because we don’t see snow often.The threat of snow (or ice) from Frank is your prompt to head to the grocery store and buy milk, eggs and bread. It doesn’t matter if you need these items. It’s just what we do. Everyone in town will be there.
 

You’ll also need to make a mad dash for faucet covers and finding them and getting out of the store will be like an episode of the hunger games. You’re in the redneck district.
 

Don’t look for a sled. You won’t find one. In the rare chance we get enough ice or snow to sled grab some cardboard or a trash can lid and go find the nearest hill. Yes, we know it’s not a hill. You live in the flatland, just go with it. You’ll be alarmed by the fact that you’re “sledding” towards a bar ditch, fence or maybe into a farm to market road.

Just go with it.

You’ll be fine.
 

We don’t have equipment to handle the winter and weather. The roads will be a mess and even though the state has been telling you for a week they’re ready, they’re not and it won’t work. Just stay home if you can and if you can’t just come to terms with the fact that nobody here knows how to drive in snow and ice.
 

Whatever you do, DO NOT talk about snow tires.
 

If you happen to slide off the road or get stuck, turn your flashers on, take a deep breath and wait. Two guys in a four wheel drive truck will be along in no time to offer assistance. Don’t try to help them, they live for this stuff, and will do what they can to get you back on the road. If either one of them screams “hey y’all watch this” just get back and get your phone out and start recording, you’ll probably have a viral video.

Also of note, when they offer you beer and deer sticks, don’t be rude, take them and smile.

No matter what you do, don’t talk about how they did it back home in any of these scenarios.

Nobody cares.

You live in Texas now.
 

When we act like we’re going to die and start to complain about the 7 days of winter just shush, we’re serious and we don’t care how much you love it.

We don’t.
 

You’ll be back in shorts and flip flops in a week to ten days and it’ll be nice until right around Easter.

Texas “second winter” will be 2 or 3 days and will hit right around Easter, usually the week before or the week after. This will hit right around the time you plant flowers and a garden.

We know you’re not from around here when we see you’ve planted flowers before Easter and before the “second winter” has hit.

This is why all the people at the nursery don’t sound like us when you’re shopping for plants.

We know better.

During second winter it’ll go from 70 to 25 and you’ll experience all four seasons in one day.

This too shall pass, get used to it and when second winter is over you can enjoy the 3-4 weeks of “spring” before summer gets here and it’ll be melt your face off hot until sometime around Halloween.

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Also note that the last time I went "sledding" was in Austin (a bit further north) and so there were hills and we used metal cafeteria trays and they worked great.

 I finally started radiation treatments yesterday. I'm kind of fascinated by the equipment - it has all these pieces that move around and paint laser targets on you and stuff. The clinic where I go is brand-new so I'm sure it's the most state of the art equipment - I keep wanting to ask a bunch of questions but they make a big deal about getting you in & out of there in half an hour or so, so you can go about your life. And I grant that that's important, so I can't really demand a full tour or anything. And you're supposed to stay very still - of course - but I keep wanting to look around. (You can't really do that much, either, though.)

So far the main symptom has been a slight sunburn. But I'm only on #2 of 20. We'll see how it goes.


In other news, we had a little fun a couple of weeks ago when Houston got all that rain. We work 'til midnight, remember - and we drove home in pouring rain, and then when we got to the freeway exit everything was flooded. We drove carefully around for a while trying to see if we could get where we needed to go, and basically we couldn't. After some time, the feeder roads cleared up, and we got a little further along. But then the road home was completely flooded - they were fishing cars out of it. They said it was only passable with a very large truck, which we definitely do not have. The emergency people that were out in the road, whoever they were, showed us a place where it was high ground and said we could wait it out if we wanted to. And we tried that for a while. I even fell asleep for a while, and when I woke up it was 2am and Rob was watching the road and it pretty clearly wasn't cleared yet. And Rob had to be back at 1pm on Friday. So I said, "I wonder if we can get back on the freeway," and it turned out we could - and we drove back to Galveston and checked into a hotel. We still didn't get a whole lot of sleep but we got some, and we got a shower and breakfast. And our local city government's e-mail list announced later in the morning that the roads were clear and that (amazingly) no houses had flooded.


And the only other thing I have to say is that I did drag Rob back to Endgame this past weekend, so that's three times now. Actually I noticed a lot of stuff this time that I'd missed in the overload the first two times. (I told Rob, "Thank you for giving this nine hours of your life.")

I went to San Antonio to see my sister, and briefly to Austin, and when I got back late Wednesday I was already planning out the entry I was going to write. Then the exhaustion set in. I didn't sleep well in the unfamiliar bed, for two nights in a row, that's the main problem. Plus I drove all the way to San Antonio (which is a several-hour drive at best) in the rain on Monday, and spent more time walking around than I'm accustomed to on Tuesday, before driving back again on Wednesday. I enjoyed the trip more than that makes it sound like I did, but still, I'm tired. Yesterday I still felt pretty much exhausted, but today it's better.

I meant to leave earlier on Monday, but I dawdled around and kept thinking of things that needed doing, and then I lost my debit card and had to go to the credit union and get a replacement one. (I wasn't sure if I had actually left it somewhere else or not, but the old card was having an issue with the stripe and so I needed a new one anyway. I finally did find the old one way in the depths of my purse, last night.) We had worried about me hitting rush hour traffic in San Antonio because I was planning on leaving in the early afternoon. Instead it was four o'clock by the time I left, and I ended up in Houston rush hour instead. It took two hours just to get across Houston in the spitting rain to I-10 so I could go west. Not fun. (I could have skirted around the edge of Houston somehow, but I'm pretty sure anything like that would have taken just as long.)

(I hit enter accidentally - I keep doing that - so I might as well do this in installments.)

 It has been cold and wet for several days, and they started saying tonight that there was a chance of snow flurries. I drove all the way home from work without seeing so much as a tiny flurry, and I was about to start complaining to Rob when I looked up and decided there was snow mixed in with the light rain. And, guess what, now it's snowing, flat out. It's above freezing and the ground is wet, so I can't imagine that it's going to stick.

The #houstonsnow hashtag is totally blowing up on twitter, so clearly it's snowing all around. On the far north side of Houston they might get snow on the ground, and my sister in San Antonio texted me a video of the snow they had on the ground earlier tonight, but still, we live in the southern suburbs of Houston, and we don't see a lot of snow around here.

I just rechecked the Weather Channel. They have changed the predicted low from 33 degrees (F) to 32. If the snow freezes the wet ground then we are going to have a mess. As somebody on Twitter has already pointed out to me, we don't have snowplows around here. And nobody knows how to drive in snow.

But meanwhile, I'm going back to lean out the front door and watch the snow fall.

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.)

Look, we finally have actual fall color:

This is in the corner of the parking lot at home. But I've seen a good bit here & there. I realize this may not seem like much to people who live in other parts of the country, but we just don't get a lot of fall color down here, so we try to enjoy the little we get! And it's typical for us not to get any until very late in the fall - usually Thanksgiving at the earliest.

We had some cool weather a couple of weeks ago - which I imagine is what finally triggered the color changes - then it got warm again, but today it's raining and apparently there's a "winter storm" of some sort behind that. I saw something vague about severe weather, but all I really know is that it's supposed to get colder again. (Here's what the Weather Channel says - possible severe thunderstorms for the Houston area tomorrow, looks like.)

This is one of those entries.

It's cold. Well, cold by our standards. We didn't get any ice-storm like Dallas did (so far, at least) but it's 39 degrees (F) at 4 in the afternoon, that's cold for us. The good news is that - according to my phone, anyway - it's not going to get much colder. They had 39 for the low. This kind of seems like that kind of weather - it's still overcast and I can see that it might just stay the same temp. Which is good, I'm not even wearing socks. Socks do not like to stay on my feet well, so I don't put them on until I'm absolutely freezing. But much colder than it is now and I think I would have to!

I have been amusing myself this afternoon by looking at Tumblrs, because I happened on one Buzzfeed piece and then another one, as one does, both of which linked to various Tumblrs that they liked. (I've lost the links now, one was something like "best Tumblrs of 2013" and the other one was something like "57 cutest Tumblrs ever" - I'm sure you can find them from that much information if you really want to!) I really should be studying, but no, I'm looking at Tumblrs and writing blog entries. (I finished one about my nail polish earlier, complete with picture, so if that interests you, go on over there.)

One thing I found in that process was this great still from Dazed and Confused. I love that movie, and I can't believe it's 20 years old. (There's a Rolling Stone article about all the music that's 20 years old this year - two words: bee girl! - but if there's something similar for movies, I haven't stumbled across it so far.) D&C has always seemed really personal to me because most of the movie characters are the age I was at the time the movie is set - that is, finishing their junior year in 1976 - and because Linklater gets everything so unbelievably right. If you weren't around then, or were around but not that age, even, you just wouldn't believe how right this movie got everything. Just... everything. I can't even really pick one thing to talk about. Not just the colors, but the clothes, the cars - the hair, oh god - the way everybody talks and the things that they do, it's all like a time machine to me. I'm sure it helps that I grew up in suburban Houston, and the movie is set in Austin (which is where I went to college), so it's literally as well as figuratively pretty close to home for me. -- I haven't watched it in a while, either; it's clearly time for a rewatch.


holidailies.org

Do the Republicans really think that what Harry Reid said is equivalent to what Trent Lott said back in the day, or are they just grabbing at straws? I mean, clearly what Reid said was tactless, but that it's the same as making pro-segregationist remarks? Are they really that stupid, that they don't see the difference? or are they just trying to make trouble? They're so crazy these days that I honestly don't know.


I was going on about Devil Wears Prada and stuff yesterday, and I completely forgot to say that we went to see Zombieland at the Dollar Cinema yesterday. (Which is actually $1.50 nowadays, even for a matinee. I hadn't been there in ages.) Rob had convinced me that I would like it, and I did. Apparently I only like zombie movies when they're comedies. It wasn't as good as Shawn of the Dead, but it was good. Bit gross in places, but not too bad, considering.

And I'm beginning to think that I am going to have to reconsider hating Woody Harrelson. It's very disconcerting, really, suddenly finding somebody you've hated for years turn tolerable.


It's finally getting warmer here. We've had freezing temps at night for days and days, which is very unusual for us. I've had a sheet over my plants all weekend. (It was the Norfolk pine I was mostly worried about.) I think I can go take it off tomorrow, because apparently it's not actually freezing tonight, although it's still pretty chilly.

Good lord, it's 2:00 already. I gotta go get some studying done before bedtime.

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.