Rain! Finally!

Storm clouds rolling by. Taken from my iPhone this morning on the way to work.

The Flood of March 2008

We got a lot of rain today. It rained pretty hard and pretty steadily for most of the day. Northwest Highway flooded where it crosses White Rock Creek, as it always does when we get more than a couple hours of precipitation.

It took me almost an hour to get home because they closed the road and diverted everyone. I pulled over and got a couple of photos. Notice the DART bus tipped over about halfway down the road.





In other news, our next-door neighbor was robbed today in broad daylight. They kicked in her front door. Luckily she was not home. The criminals got away with some cash and jewelry. This is the first instance since we've lived here of crime on our street, at least according to the crime reports in the neighborhood newsletter. Doc and I are taking measures to beef up our own security -- although I think we're doing fairly well in that area already. It's unsettling that it happened while Doc was home today. That part really worries me. What if they'd chosen our house instead and busted in on him? What if they had a gun?

(By the way, this does not make me want to go out and get a gun for the protection of my family, in case you were wondering if I was about to get all NRA on you.)

Roadtrip Day 2: Colorado & Wyoming

Today was a pretty damn boring drive. We covered the entire states of Colorado and Wyoming from south to north.

Today's route:

25 from Trinidad, Colorado to Buffalo, Wyoming (600 miles)
90 from Buffalo to Sheridan, Wyoming (30 miles)

As we were leaving Trinidad, I noticed that it has a Stargate!



That 600 mile stretch from Trinidad to Buffalo was, nearly without exception, unendingly boring.



Outside of Colorado Springs we drove past Pike's Peak, but we weren't sure exactly which one it was in the mountain range because nothing looked impressive or terribly peaky and we kind of thought it was supposed to be rather pointy. I called Doc a bit later to express my disappointment in Mr. Pike and his so-called "peak," and he said that when you're travelling across America at 25 miles a day on horseback, after going through Kansas you tend to be easily impressed.

The most interesting event of the day was the windstorm that blew through as we were standing outside the Loaf 'N Jug gas station in Casper, Wyoming (seriously, it was called the Loaf 'N Jug, how awesome is that?!), trying to get the dog to pee. The gust slammed into us and then a cloud of dirt and gravel came roaring in without warning. We ran for the car, dirt in our eyes and stinging the backs of our legs and arms. We waited until it subsided a little before getting back on the highway, but the muddy rain made it hard to see for a while.







Tonight we are staying at the Mill Inn in Sheridan, Wyoming. It is an old flour mill converted into motel rooms, very nicely decorated with Old West art, wooden furniture, track lighting, and Starbucks coffee in the room. Instead of going out for dinner, we bought cheese and crackers and fruit and snow peas at a grocery store, and looked in vain for some place to buy wine.

Tilly and Tigger are doing really well. Tigger has had some intestinal upsets in her carrier, but once you let her out to roam around the backseat, she does fine. I think the carrier makes her nervous. She loves being in the motel rooms, she just wanders a bit and then curls up on the bed and goes right to sleep.

I have some photos of the hotel but it is late, we are getting up at 5:30 a.m. tomorrow, and I will just post them tomorrow instead.

Sick and Tired and Brains and Hail

I've been fighting a mild cold all week. It's not bad enough to keep me in bed all day, but I feel like I'm operating on about 50% of my usual steampower. I bet you didn't know I run on steam, did you? That's why my ass is so big, to make room for the boiler.

I haven't really been able to stay home from work to recover, because this week has been one of the busiest I can remember, and next week will be about the same. So will this weekend; I have to go in to the office tomorrow.

I'm going to need for you to go ahead and come in on Saturday, mmkay? Oh, oh, and I almost forgot. Ahh, I'm also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too.

I went to work late two days this week (sanctioned by my very cool boss, of course) so I could try to get a little extra sleep in the morning, since I've also been having trouble staying asleep all night. I'm physically tired from the cold and the insomnia, and mentally tired from a long week at work.

Do you ever get that feeling where it seems like your brain is simply full? It's a weird physical discomfort as well as a mental one, like you've short circuited. It's hard to think, and impossible to find motivation to care about what you're supposed to be caring about. The brain has shut and locked all its windows and put up a sign on the medulla oblongata stating, "No solicitors. This means you." Anything you try to force into it bounces right off.

At that point, the only things to be done are: a little solitaire or sudoku, or a walk across the street to JD's for a sugar cookie and cherry limeade, or an insane laughfest over the cubes (it helps when it's 4 p.m. on a Friday and everyone's feeling the same as you), or Karen's entertainment news report. Basically, something that doesn't require any actual brain processing power.

This evening, a big storm rolled through. I got home from work, complete with hard-boiled brain, and laid down on the bed trying to figure out if I had the energy to go out to dinner with Leslie for her birthday (unfortunately I didn't... I simply wouldn't be able to be "on" and social in any capacity this evening). A few minutes later, the tornado siren in our neighborhood started blaring. We turned on the TV weather station and decided to prepare the closet under the stairs for shelter. Doc rounded up the fuzzy kids, I got the cat carriers out of the garage, and we filled up a couple of water jugs. We put everything plus my cell phone and the laptop in the stairs closet. The tornadoes dissipated before they reached our area, but we did get quarter sized hail for a while, and then some nice hard rain.

Got tickets! Etcetera

WOOHOO! I am now the proud owner of two tickets to the Police concert in Dallas in June!! Through an odd set of circumstances, I was able to obtain them through a special ticket pre-sale. I think that I will also try to get some tickets at the regular sale on Saturday, to sell on eBay and make my money back.



You seriously don't want to know how much I paid for these tickets. I have NEVER spent this much money on concert tickets before. I sure hope that it will be worth it.

Recent updates:

I got a promotion and a raise at work, and to go along with that, I also get an employee of my very own: a junior designer. I will be shaping the mind and talents of a young artist. Wish me luck!!

Tuesday night I went out for dinner and drinks with Kathryn and Yvonne. I had a fantastic time. It was lovely patio weather once again, and great company.

Today is Brittney's birthday. Happy birthday, if you're reading this!!!!!

We visited our tax man this evening. We owe the government more money than we paid for our down payment on our house (we planned for it, and have enough). Ah, the joys of self employment. At least it wasn't quite as big a bill as we'd thought that it would be.

I got an e-mail from a researcher at the USDA Wind Erosion Research Unit in Kansas, asking permission to publish the photo I took of the dust storm last Sunday on their web site. Pretty cool, eh?

I just made myself sick trying to take a spinny chair photo for my photo of the day. I had to stop because my tummy was churning dangerously.

I just realized that the word "etcetera" contains "cetera," as in the singer Peter Cetera of Chicago fame. So I wonder, if your name was something like Edward Thomas Cetera, you could go by E.T. Cetera. That would be pretty damn funny.

Windstorm

The wind is blowing today, 40 miles-per-hour steady. A little while ago the sky turned pinkish-brown. It's probably red dust blowing in from west Texas.

PCN

Midway through my sophomore year in college, PCN and I had become very close friends. He and my boyfriend J. and my roomate K1 and I and a couple of other people would hang out all the time, staying up late in his dorm room playing spades and listening to Elvis Costello and Midnight Oil, or playing Risk on his Mac Classic with the 9" black and white screen, eating Sunday night dinner out (our one meal per week that wasn't covered by the cafeteria), or just talking. During the January semester, when both of our significant others were away for the month, we spent every second together that we weren't in class. We wrote poetry, we watched thunderstorms, we talked philosophy, he introduced me to my first alcoholic beverage ever (at the ripe old age of 19) and cigarettes. We fell in love with each other, although neither of us would admit it at the time. We were both committed to other people and I wasn't the cheating kind. But things just felt "right" with him. I think that there are certain people in the world who are soul-mates, and he was one of them.

But the fact that I was already in a relationship stopped me from crossing that line with PCN, and I was too young and naïve to realize that I should have reconsidered my relationship with J. at this point. I tried to pretend to PCN and to myself that we were simply good friends, even trying to act "cool" and nonchalant around his friends, not sitting at his table in the cafeteria if he already seemed preoccupied in conversation.

J. had a close female friend who was emotionally troubled. J., being a good friend and a "fixer," spent a great deal of his time and energy with her. I think that my feeling somewhat abandoned by J. is partly what drew me closer to PCN: he was sweet and smart and could be kind of an asshole sometimes, but he knew I saw right through his bullshit and it felt like he was letting me see parts of himself that nobody else got to. With PCN, I felt strong and special. I don't think he was being manipulative; he really did love me and I felt that he understood me in a way that no one else did.

I occasionally wonder what it says about my character that I was "tempted by the fruit of another." Am I making excuses for my actions by saying "yes, but I didn't actually DO anything"? Is going up to the line much different from crossing the line? Part of me feels like a schmuck for not breaking up with J. when I first felt a pull towards another person, and part of me feels strong and proud for getting through it without shaming myself by doing something uncharacteristic and stupid.

I think that it's human nature to be tempted, and it takes strength not to act on it, especially when you're only nineteen and very inexperienced in relationships. So I don't think that this experience says anything about my character except that I'm human and I reacted in an honorable way to a situation that is all too common.

november snowstorm

The unseasonable warmth of the past week collapsed under the weight of a wintry storm. Snow fell for hours. Tiny ice pellets coated my car.

The chill of the north wind cut through my light jacket, through all the layers of my skin, muscle, fat, and all the way to the bone.

Bodies unprepared for the sudden arrival of the twenties scurried from building to building, seeking escape from uncontrollable shivering.

storm today!

After the complaining that I did yesterday about the relentless baking heat, we had our first rain today since July 4: A nice hard steady rain that lasted for about 30 minutes.

storms

One of the things that makes living on the surface of the sun (or, Texas) bearable: Storms.



It's hard for me to put into words exactly what draws me to storms. Violence? Powerlessness? Change? A sense of being at one with nature? It feels like a strong spiritual connection, maybe the way some people feel about god.

Unfortunately this has been a crappy year for storms. Even the storm that produced the Great Flood of March 2006 didn't have much in the way of spectaculars, except for extreme rainfall. I'm pretty sure that was our rain for the year. Everything now feels parched and dusty; my garden, the air, my skin, my eyes. Dry and cracking. The forecast shows nothing but an unmitigated Big Ball of Fire from now through next Thursday, and it's been stuck that way since May.

Maybe it's too hot for a storm to properly form. Today it was 106.2 on my shady porch. That's not the hottest it's been this year, and it neither surprised or fazed me to see that temperature on the gauge.

There's a silly saying about Texas: If you don't like the weather, wait a minute. Sure doesn't feel like that's true anymore.

Having a great time! Wish you were here!

What I did today at work

Today I worked on a couple of projects from home, and then went into the office late morning. And by "the office" I don't mean Exile Island, the frigid attic (as Yvonne put it) on the 3rd floor of McFarlin Auditorium full of boxes of ancient files, t-shirts, envelopes, and old footballs, and which now features card tables with computers for about half of our staff. Today our main task was to pack up our belongings from our flooded office into orange plastic moving crates, in preparation for the Grand Recarpeting Of Spring 2006 (Until The Next Flood).

The interesting thing about the Grand Recarpeting is that we were told to leave our computers and monitors on our desks, and just to empty out about half of our file cabinets. Apparently, they won't be needing to move our furniture to recarpet.

Are they planning on a) magical levitation, or b) x-acto-ing the carpet around the edges of the desks, file cabinets, and cubicle walls and just laying in carpet squares to fill in the empty spaces? I'm not quite sure how they will manage to effectively lay in new berber without moving the furniture.

But then again, I'm not a Recarpeting Expert. One can only hope that they're not hiring BKM ("the Keystone Kops of office furniture," as Brittney puts it) to do the job. (When reconfiguring divider walls in our old building, one of the BKM guys WALLED HIMSELF IN because he had the plans upside down and put the door opening against a wall.)

But as long as it's somebody else and not me who's lifting and moving my 100 pound monitor (when they don't move our furniture), I don't care. It will be interesting to see if everything gets put back where it belongs (after they don't move our furniture).

The greatest thing about working from home...

... has got to be this.



Cats in laps rule!!

Or is the greatest thing about working from home the fact that I brought home my Mac G5 from work, hooked up its ethernet cable, changed its network setting from manual IP to DHCP, and it just worked without me having to do ANYTHING ELSE TO GET IT CONNECTED? (Yet another reason Macs rule!!) Or is it homemade tea and coffee, and being able to cook my own lunch in a real kitchen? Or is it waking up at 8:15? Or is it working in my pajamas and not having to take a shower?

Oh, who am I kidding. I hate not taking a shower. I feel yucky all day unless I shower as soon as I get up. (Showers rule!!)

Guess who gets to work from home?

That's right! Me!!!! Pajamas + cats + homemade coffee. Oh, and sleeping an extra 45 minutes :)

It's times like this when I'm glad that I picked the field of interactive design over print design. Not that I don't love print design, 'cause I surely do. But not everyone in my office gets to work from home while we're flooded out. I'm just saying.

I got to the office this morning in my rubber boots and discovered that while the carpeting was very squishy with smelly dirty floodwater, they had already managed to remove all the standing water. The rubber baseboards had been ripped away and Karen and Hillsman had hoisted up everyone's computers and anything else that was on the floor. Karen said the water was rising so fast she could barely keep up on Sunday.

This morning the maintenence people had put giant blower fans all over the place... trying to dry out the carpeting? God, I hope not. My esteemed place of employment certainly likes to cut corners and the blower fans were their solution the previous two times the office flooded (did I mention this is the third time in 18 months?) Previously only the two offices closest to the back door flooded. This time the entire basement got it, so we've been assured that they are considering replacing the carpet.

All I can say is: Mold. Eeew. And, health hazard, anyone? The place was already starting to smell weird and dirty and chemically.

I guess this is what happens when we get 10 inches of rain in 40 hours.

We had a staff meeting this morning where we discussed options for relocation (after we considered and discarded the idea of continuing to work in our flooded offices while they reconstruct them). Several of us went to scout a couple of locations on campus that had been offered to us, including the White House building (the little apartment building that we worked out of from 1994-2004).

In the end, it was decided that the web team would work from home, the administrative assistant would work from the desk of another administrative assistant who was on vacation, and the rest of the team would move up to the 3rd floor of McFarlin Auditorium, in a room used to store junk. I'm not sure exactly where they planned to put everybody amidst the boxes of t-shirts, footballs, old lamps, boxes of envelopes, discarded filing cabinets, etc. But whatever, I got to go home!

Anyway, they sent me packing, so here I am with my little home office setup for at least the next week. Great timing, since today I took my home computer in for its logic board replacement, and I was afraid I'd be computerless for a week.

Why I Like Rushing Water

I just had a memory from when I was a kid and wanted to write it down before I forget again. Whenever it would rain hard like today (well, not exactly like today, this is the hardest I've ever seen it rain, but you know what I mean), Mom would take me and Bobby and Mikey in the car and we'd drive down to the creek at the end of the neighborhood to see how high it was. Sometimes we'd go up to Parker and across and drive up the creek on that side too, all the way to the lake.

We were never in any kind of danger from rising water; our house was a block away uphill. Stormy weather has always fascinated me; maybe it was because of these drives that we would take. Mom would always point out how beautiful but dangerous the rushing water was.

The satellite photo at right is the creek and the trail at the end of our block. The little white pipe that runs across the creek at the top right of the photo is one of the pipes that we used to get to the other side when we'd go down there to play. I think that Bobby fell off of it once while he was trying to cross and Mike and I had to carry him, soaking wet and screaming, all the way home. We would try to catch minnows and we'd often find fossils in the chalky rock of the banks on the far side.

I think that if we were kids today, we'd never be allowed to go down there by ourselves. But we used to do that all the time; we'd tell Mom we were going to go play at the creek, and we'd just go. I don't know that it was any less dangerous then for kids to be out playing by themselves than it is today (you could also say is it any more dangerous for kids today than back then?), but I kind of get sad when I think about the experiences like that that kids are missing out on today.

For Sale: Lakefront Office Property!

I am sitting here at my computer in my studio, listening to music loudly, and watching the lightning storm outside my window through the rain. I have rearranged my furniture into a much more pleasing configuration (better feng shui, maybe), there is a painting on the wall behind me whose progress I'm very happy with, a sleek black cat is curled up sleeping on the sofa next to me, and I am drinking a cold diet soda.

It doesn't get much better than this. :)

What's going to suck, though, is tomorrow morning when I go into work wearing rubber boots and jeans. Why would I do this, you ask? I got a call this afternoon telling me that our office, which is located in the basement of an older building, contains approximately 2" of water on the floor. My computer is on the floor, as are a lot of my job jackets and god only knows what else that I have sitting on that floor, all of which is now most likely completely ruined. I think the computers, at least, are OK, as our very own Karen Field and Hillsman Jackson valiantly worked to move everything they could onto the desks before the water got too bad this afternoon. Thank god Karen went in to work to type up a paper and discovered the mess. I have no idea what to expect tomorrow. I don't know where they're going to put all of us while they rip up and replace the carpeting. The building's jam-packed with people as it is.

get the cats and board the ark

This is some crazy rain. It's like end-of-days kind of crazy. It's rained hard nonstop for about 36 hours now, maybe more. Actually it's let up a bit now, it's maybe just coming down at a normal-rain rate.

Ah, I spoke too soon. The minute I got that last sentence typed in, it started deluge-ing again. Crazy. Seems like it's making up for all the rain that we didn't get last year -- we were down by more than half of the usual amount, which as you may have guessed, is not all that much to begin with in Texas.

Yesterday I tried to go up to Frisco to the IKEA store to look for a desk for my office, and halfway there had to turn around and come home because the car had sprung a leak and water started coming in through the sunroof. I knew if I parked it at the IKEA in the downpour for a couple of hours, it'd be a swimming pool on the inside. As it was, I was pretty soaked when I got home. We opened the doors and pointed an industrial fan at the upholstery for a couple of hours last night.

We went to brunch this morning (driving in the rain doesn't seem to make the car leak as much as standing still in the rain) and parked under the covered parking at Northpark Mall, then walked across the street to Blue Mesa to meet Brittney and Kirk and Amy. When we were finished, it was raining so hard you could barely see halfway across the parking lot. Doc and I went into Barnes & Noble for about 30 minutes to wait it out, but it never let up. By the time we got back across the street to our car we were completely soaked through from the waist down.

It took us forever to get home due to flooded streets and people going 5 miles per hour. We came home on Walnut Hill because we thought Northwest Highway would probably be shut down on the creek floodplain -- it was almost to the road on our way to brunch.

The creek in back of our house, while not at the top, is the highest I've ever seen it. I don't think we're in any danger since it has a good 6-8 feet left to rise before it would top the banks. On the other side of Walnut Hill it's eaten away a large chunk of the bank and I wouldn't be surprised if several of these trees go down too.

Our neighbors across the street are the lucky recipients of all the rain that has been pooling up in the shopping center behind them. I guess the drains in the parking lot got full because it pooled at the back of the shopping center (we went splashing back there to see how deep it was and the water was nearly up to our knees) and came under the brick separator wall into their backyard, through their courtyard (and probably house too) and is now pouring through their front gate out into the front yard and down into the street. It looks like someone turned on several fire hydrants and is just letting them run out the front gate.

Click here to see a slideshow of the rain.

storm's a-brewin!

it's really windy outside and the temp has dropped about 35 degrees from what it was at 5 p.m.

(it was 85, by the way. i'd bet that's a record high temperature, in a year full of record high temperatures.)

now an "arctic" front is blowing through and the temperature is supposed to dip down closer to normal. it's so nutty, hearing about the "impending winter storm" on the local news channels. they talk about this like it's never been cold here before. like no one owns anything but tank tops and flip flops.

personally i can't wait.

i left work at 5:10 and ran for about two miles, then stopped at the gym. i stretched, lifted weights, and did a little yoga, and left at 6:10 to walk back to the office to collect my things and go home. as i stepped out the front doors of the gym, i could immediately smell something burning in the distance. the wind had picked up quite a bit and the sky was full of giant navy and copper rounded clouds reflecting the setting sun. i was wearing shorts and a spaghetti strap bra-top, and i got chilled really quickly from being sweaty and the strong cool wind. it took me about 10 minutes to get back to my office, and the burning smell kept getting stronger as i walked. it smelled like someone had taken a huge pile of raisins and flowers and thrown it on a wood fire. i swear the air looked hazy too.

wowzers. i just did a little web search and found out that there are fires in southern oklahoma, so when the winds turned from the north it brought the smoke down to us. that's pretty amazing. the smell was so strong that i thought it was maybe in the neighborhood to the north of my office.

that's a fuckload of smoke. it was making my eyes sting. (or maybe that was just the wind)

now i'm sitting in my office writing, and i keep hearing things hitting my roof every time the wind gusts. probably leaves, twigs, and maybe a small squirrel or two tossed by the wind.

why do i always think a redesign will be fun?

yeah. i don't know what gets into my head.

i've spent three to four hours for the past two nights trying to fix my new layout so it will work in internet fucking explorer. that is its official name, by the way: "internet fucking explorer." i don't care if 90% of the world uses it as its primary browser; it is a piece of shit.

so, anyway, this OUGHT to work better. at least, it works structurally in IE for the mac, most of the time. i have no idea what it looks like on IE for the pc, because, in a when-hell-freezes-over kind of way, i do not own one. i can check it at work tomorrow or if one of my three very kind and helpful pc-using friends whose names start with a "b" can check for me, that'll be even better. :)

i'm beyond caring how it looks on IE mac, but i would like it to work in IE pc simply because i have a lot of readers who use that particular platform and browser -- and much as i would prefer that to be different, it ain't gonna happen anytime soon. anyway, mac IE seems to be a good litmus test for pc IE -- at least IE5.5.

i forgot to upload this last week. it actually rained!! i was so excited that i took photos on the way to work, but forgot my camera's usb cable so couldn't actually upload any. don't worry, i had the camera stationary on the steering wheel and just hit the button without actually aiming or composing. my eyes were on the road the whole time!

this first one was taken at the intersection of northwest highway and buckner.

this one was taken at the end of my street, looking across plano road towards the sonic (open for breakfast! shining that bright red neon glow through the windows of the houses! "you'll never forget we have tater tots and strawberry cheesecake shakes, any time of the day or night!!!!")