Rain! Finally!

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

Birthday weather & stuff

Once again, the first cold front of the fall season has come through on (or within a few days of) my birthday! I am so very happy. A break from the oppressive summer heat is the best present I could ask for.

On Saturday we got some rain from Hurricane Ike (for those of you wondering: no, we did not have lots of wind, we did not lose power, we did not lose phone service, and we only got about 2" of rain over 24 hours) and so it was rather wet and humid near the end of last week.

Yesterday was sunny, dry, and rather pleasant, temperature-wise. Today was absolutely amazing. Again, sunny and dry, and the high temperature reached maybe 78 or so. Right now it's in the mid-60s and we have all the windows in the house open.

Also, the light changed this weekend. It's taken on that goldeny fall hue, and the blazingly white summer washout light is gone. Somehow it's easier to see. Things seem prettier.

I had a really nice birthday weekend. Doc took me out Saturday night to a yummy family-style Italian restaurant, and we met some friends there. No wine with my meal, but only 11 more weeks to go on the moratorium (actually I don't crave wine anymore so it's much easier these days). We stuffed ourselves and then came back to our house, where we had coffee and cake, good conversation, and played some "Pain" on the PS3. I had a great time with good friends and good food. Maybe that's the point of life: good friends and good food.

One of my favorite gifts from Doc is a book called "Hello Cupcake." When it's our turn to bake cupcakes for our son's class, they will be the best damn cupcakes ever!



Maybe a boy child won't really want these particular cupcakes for class, but I think they're beautiful:



And probably the cutest cupcakes EVER...

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.)

More snow

Twice in one week, it snows in Texas. In March. Crazy.

A little bit of snow

It's not much, but it's more than we've had all year! The snow has been falling steadily since about 7:30 p.m. I think that the temperature outside is fluctuating because our deck will accumulate a thin layer of snow like in the photo here, and then 10 minutes later it will have mostly melted. Then the snow comes down a little harder and it stays cold enough to accumulate again.

Two days ago, it was 80 degrees. Ah, the "joys" of living in Texas.

Scenes from Boston

Doc and I went to Boston for a conference (Web Design World, which was really a fantastic conference) and to visit Bob for a few days. Boston is a beautiful city, especially in winter. It's been really cold and wet and snowy here, and I love it.

The churches in Boston are so beautiful that they almost make me want to actually GO to church!


We took a self portrait on the street.


This is the Christian Science Church.


The Boston Public Library is one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen. This is part of the main entrance hall and stairs.


The library had an exhibit of intricately detailed dioramas.








I love Johnny Cupcakes!! Especially the cupcake-and-crossbones logo.


Me and Doc next to a subway station.


I love wearing my scarf and coat.


Not the Old North Church, but the Old South Church.


A big pile of icy snow.


Today we ate breakfast at a place down the street from Bob, then hopped on the subway to go to the Aquarium and the Science Museum. By the time we started off to the train station, the snow was coming down pretty heavily.



Bob and I at the Aquarium. It had closed 2 hours before we got there, due to heavy snow.


This is the snowstorm that seemed to be shutting down the whole city.

It finally feels like autumn!!

There's nothing better than waking up to a cold rainy day. (Except the "having to get out from underneath the warm comforter" and the "going to work" parts)

Last Day of Roadtrip: Coming Home

No matter where you've been or how good a time you've had, it's always nice to come home from vacation to your familiar environment. Your family, your cats, your own bed, your own shower.

However, it took me twice as long as it should have to actually arrive home.

My plane was delayed for 90 minutes due to bad weather in Dallas. Once airborne, things went fine until the pilot announced that we'd have to change the flight path and go way out of our way to avoid some bad weather. Then we flew in 300 mile diameter circles around Dallas for a while before turning around and heading to San Antonio to land, refuel, and wait out the storms in Dallas. Originally we were scheduled to arrive in Dallas at 5:30 p.m., and we didn't get there until well after 9.

To add to the fun, a few minutes after landing in San Antonio the flight attendants announced that the bathrooms were "full" and would be closed until further notice. I had just taken advantage of the facilities and so I remained comfortable until we finally deplaned in Dallas, unlike some of the unluckier cross-legged passengers.

I guess this is not really that interesting of a story, other than to say I was on a plane for 8 hours instead of the normal 4, and also that airplane food is no longer free, which I find mildly insulting considering the rather dubious quality of said food in the first place. I strongly feel that when you pay anywhere from $250 to $1000 or more for a plane ticket, the least they can do is throw in a soggy turkey sandwich and dried out carrot sticks gratis.

And do you remember when airlines would charge you to rent a set of earphones? Doc notes that their little jacks were proprietary, utilising some sort of whooshing air-based sound transmission system of a horribly tinny quality, and if you owned your own set of earphones you were out of luck because they wouldn't fit in the jacks.

Of course, that was also when in-flight entertainment was free (even if it was just nine channels of radio through the arms of your seats). Now you're charged $10 to rent a little device that plays, on a 5" screen, a select (read: crappy) set of films or television shows, chock full of advertisements.

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.

Morning in Colorado

I woke up at 5:50 a.m. (no, I have not been replaced with an a robot that is a morning person) and walked out of the motel room in my pajamas to take the dog outside, and it was 57 degrees. In June. This does not compute, my brain is short circuiting.

I'm really glad that I brought my hoodie with me, I'm going to have to dig it out of the trunk of the car!

Gotta go, time to pack up the car and get on the road. I'll write more tonight.

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.

Happy Hour Tonight

Had a nice spur of the moment-ish happy hour after work today, largely because of the fan-fucking-tastic 75 degree patio weather. Due to the fact that I was drinking incredibly strong $2 margaritas (love you Gloria's!) only two of the photos I took came out even halfway decent.

Heathaze

The trees and I are shaken by
That same wind, but, whereas
The trees will lose their withered leaves
I just can't seem to let them loose

And they can't refresh me, those hot winds of the south

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.

aimee mann and my 34th birthday

I had a pretty good 34th birthday. Doc surprised me with a homemade miniature cake (red velvet and white layers, with cream cheese icing and crushed up cookies in the center) and a big Hello Kitty balloon. The balloon has actually been the source of a very entertaining revelation: Loki is scared to death of balloons, or Hello Kitty, or both. He hid under the bed for two days straight, and hasn't been downstairs at all until just last night. The experiment that proved my theory left me with numerous cuts on my right hand.

Saturday night we had a little cookout party, which was a lot of fun. I wish it hadn't been so hot outside, because I was hoping that we could spend the evening on the patio.

Sunday was a very different weather situation. I got up early to run around the park, and it was cloudy and low 80s, which was OK for running (humid, but OK). On my second lap, a reddish-brown medium sized dog fell into step beside me and ran with me for the next two miles. He had no collar, and no owner in sight, and he just silently trotted along by my side, only occasionally stopping to sniff at something or to meander out into traffic. I'm sure that people driving by thought I was his careless owner. He didn't seem to listen when I tried to call him back on to the sidewalk. He stopped and waited for me while I stretched afterwards, then dutifully followed me home. I wouldn't let him in the gate, and he looked sad, but then moseyed off.

Later on, I met Yvonne at the Farmer's Market where we stocked up on fresh vegetables. It's nice to go with a friend and split the goods, because if you have small families like we do, you often can't eat the quantities that things come in.

It stormed all afternoon. We watched television for a while, then napped for a few hours while it rained buckets outside. The temp dropped into the 70s.

Then that evening, we went to see Aimee Mann do an acoustic show at the Lakewood Theatre. It was a fabulous concert! She played a good mixture of older songs and new ones. She also has really good stage presence and is very entertaining when talking to the audience between songs. Before "Save Me" she said, "Most people know this song from the movie 'Magnolia.' But I like to think of it as the one that lost an Oscar to Phil Collins' cartoon monkey love song."



At the end of the show, she said "This is the part of the show where we leave, and you clap, and we come back. Or we can just stay and play some more songs." And then she took audience requests! And played several songs that they had not rehearsed in a long time and weren't even sure they could do -- I don't think it was just an act because they did mess up at the beginnings a few times. On Driving Sideways, they told the pianist the first chord, and a few seconds later he asked "Ok, now what's the second?" I did not shout out any requests, because she did three of my very favorite songs: Wise Up, Red Vines, and Driving Sideways. The only songs that I wish she would have also done were How Am I Different and Satellite. Other songs she performed included You're With Stupid Now, Invisible Ink, Goodbye Caroline, You Do, Invisible Ink, Little Bombs, and One. There were several others as well which I don't remember now.

Two big bonuses: I did not smell like smoke afterwards, and I was not deaf. LOVE the Lakewood Theatre!

i've unpacked most of the boxes...

SUCCESS! Mostly!

Something Shiny Disorder is now up and running and I think that most of the links work.

I'm having a little bit of separation anxiety, like I've sent my 5-year-old off to the first day of kindergarten. Some sections that were linked from my old website aren't linked from here anymore, like my art gallery and my resume. I'm not sure if I'm going to link them or not because the URL of those sites contain my real name.

In other news, some little crawly beastie went on a feasting rampage up and down both of my arms sometime last night or early this morning. I woke up itching like crazy and I'm covered in little red welts. Or maybe I'm having an allergic reaction to something. It's really maddening not to scratch. Reminds me of when I had chicken pox, except without all the calamine lotion and fainting.

It has rained all day today, a slow steady Washington rain. High temp: 74F. Who woulda thought we'd get this little treat in early September? Certainly not before my birthday, which is usually right about the time that we get the first cool front of the fall. I'm disappointed that we had a nonexistent thunderstorm season this year, but it's good to finally get a soaking rain.

I'm glad that the rain didn't start yesterday, because it would have ruined the fireworks show I went to see with Britt and Chris. It's always fun to watch shiny things explode in the sky. I love the sparkly crackly ones. This show had a couple of blue fireworks. Not bluish-purple, which are also pretty, but straight-up blue, which I haven't seen before.

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.