Miscellaneous

Hurricane Ike and Shit

By Chris Stevenson

1. As is my custom, I'm blogging about something long after being late doing so was fashionable.  We spent the actual landfall of Ike in Austin.  We actually drove to POC Wednesday night to save what we could at the Bayhouse.  At the time, the projections had the storm going in at Austwell, which would have put POC on the dirty side of the hurricane.  I suspected, even then, that Ike was going to pull a Rita and turn north, but I would have hated to be wrong about that and done nothing.  The fiance' had planned to be there that weekend anyway visiting friends and attending yoga classes.  I had planned to be in POC for a friend's bachelor party but that plan was scrubbed because of the hurricane so we relocted to Austin.  (Note to those not wise in the ways of women:  DO NOT under any circumstances discuss the goings on of a bachelor party with any female.  If pressed, only say that the bachelor party exists and give only "yes" or "no" responses and then a maximum of two questions and then only if the question is not, "Were there strippers?"  Don't even discuss it if you think the female is "cool" with everything.  ESPECIALLY not then.)  We got word from our neighbor on Saturday afternoon that our house was not damaged but that there were a lot of trees down around our house.  We also go word that there was no electricity in our neighborhood.  We stayed in Austin through Monday afternoon and then headed back to Houston.  As soon as we started getting inside the city we could see signs of damage - downed trees everywhere, damaged signs, roofs - things like that.  Even though I was expecting it, the sight of our house when we first pulled up was shocking.  Huge sections of several of our largest trees had crashed down in the yard covering the sidewalk and our driveway.  Where there weren't large limbs there were smaller twigs and leaves covering every square inch of the yard.  Surprisingly, there was no wind damage to the house; no shingles gone or anything.  The neighbors had already chopped up another large section of a pecan tree that had fallen in the street.  They had stacked the debris in my yard, which I questioned, but it had obviously been a lot of work.  I got to work on the trees in our yard and pretty soon a neighbor came over with a chainsaw.  He seemed very eager to break in his new saw.  He explained that he didn't have any large trees down in his yard so he didn't even get a chance to use the chainsaw.  I sensed that he was disappointed about this.  He proceeded to make short work of the trees, nearly cutting the support out from a huge limb that he was standing directly under and then burning up his brand new chainsaw in the process.  That's what happens when pasty accountant types get to go apeshit with manly tools.  It took me 4-5 hours to clean up the debris from the trees and I have rows of debris 4ft. tall lining nearly the entire curb around my house.  We lived without electricity all last week, which really wasn't as sucky as you would think.  Of course, we have a gas not water heater and stove so we could take hot showers and cook meals.  Plus, the weather has been very mild so the nights were cool.  If it had been sweltering I'm sure there would have been riots in the city.  So we lived without TV, AC, fridge or lights at night for about a week.  We ate by candlelight, talked more, read more and went to bed earlier than normal.  These are all healthy things.  The electricity came back on Saturday afternoon and now it's like it never happened.  They tell me that there are still 3/4 of a million people without power in the city of Houston, but I wouldn't know it.
2. I won the Solo Unlimited class at the Jr. Texas Water Safari this past Saturday.  First time I've gotten first place in an athletic event in a while.  Truth be told, I benefitted from a small and fairly weak field (no offense to those paddlers who read this, but it's true), but it felt pretty good to win all the same.
3. Texas looked good in their blowout win over Rice.  Sucks real bad to lose Irby because he was emerging as a future NFL type guy.  I'm looking down the road to the OU game and I don't really like what I see.  OU is having a juggernaut type of season.

Full post as published by Cursed With Ambition on September 22, 2008 (boomark / email).