"Wintry Mix:" May Contain Raccoons

In Syracuse, where my parents live, they get snow. They get a fair amount of snow. When they are done getting snow, they get some more snow. Then the weather rolls up its sleeves, flexes its elbows, and gets down to some serious snowing. Upstate New York is like that.

Here in Texas, we get something called "wintry mix." It's kind of like trail mix, only not as tasty. It's made of fairly unpleasant ingredients, like snow, freezing rain, sleet, and bewildered Texas drivers.*

Adverse weather events mean emergency operations and extra hours in the office, unfortunately, though it would be much more pleasant to stay home, huddle under the covers, and warm myself with cats and possibly the odd raccoon (though Dave hasn't come banging on the locked cat door for many a night now). So, because I have committed to a car-free lifestyle, my boyfriend will come and pick up Anna and me in his Jeep Liberty and drive us to school and work.

It's easy to commit to a car-free lifestyle when you have someone who will drive you anywhere you want.

Like happy hour, for which it will hopefully be warm enough on Friday. We should go to Deep Eddy Cabaret, because it may be our last chance. Deep Eddy Cabaret is one of those grand Austin traditions of which I don't have much experience - I think I've even been to the Poodle Dog Lounge more often. Trophy's was another; I went two, or maybe three times with my sister Margie, when she had a friend working the bar who would give us free Lone Stars. Even though it's just about half a mile from my house, I hadn't seen Trophy's since they started working it over, so was a little shocked to see it looking lit up and shiny a couple of nights ago, with red and white striped awnings. Awnings! It makes me sad to think of all the displaced cockroaches - probably hanging out with Dave behind the dumpster, licking a scant sustenance out of discarded Lone Star bottles.

Deep Eddy, though, is the last place I ever got carded. It was a few years ago - I might even have been on the right side of 40 - but still, being asked for ID was enough to get me all tingly. I handed the bartender my license. He squinted at it in the low light of the bar.

"Hold on, let me get my glasses," he said. "I can't see for shit."

An experience like that is well worth braving a little wintry mix.


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*From California

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Our Team

Are you a sports fan? Apparently nobody isn't these days.

My boyfriend insists on watching football. He cooks, so I put up with it. And, since I fell in love with Seattle when we went to visit Margie last month, I was pleased that the Seattle Seahawks won their game against whoever it was they were playing. "Hey, they won," I said at the end of the game. "Isn't that nice."

Fans don't get much more die-hard than that.

I wasn't in Seattle this past week, but might as well have been:

Tuesday night it was a business dinner followed by a panel discussion at an industry meeting in San Antonio on Wednesday, and from there my favorite photographer Kevin and I drove down to South Padre Island to conduct a site visit for our April conference.

This is what winter in South Padre looks like. It's almost never really cold, but the weekend and much of the week were damp, gray, and chilly. The Winter Texans are pissed. They didn't schlep a fifth wheel all the way down from Manitoba for this crap.

The weather was no problem for us; it was 12 degrees in Austin the morning we left, and frankly, walking along the beach is monotonous under the best of circumstances.

It was much colder in San Antonio on Tuesday night. Dining at a restaurant where the 6-ounce filet costs about what I spend on a weeks' groceries with my boss' boss' boss and a handful of high-ranking strangers (our panelists) made me feel like a kid permitted to sit at the grown-ups' table.

And unfortunately, the conversation neatly sidestepped any mention of topics about which I am knowledgeable - say, tourism, or opera, or (if you want to be naughty) salacious gossip about people who work in tourism or opera - and focused almost entirely on two areas where I can't say anything at all: 1, football, about which I understand nothing whatsoever; and 2, politics, about which I have opinions I won't air in mixed company. I think I was the odd man out on both fronts.

So aside from a few pleasantries with my boss' boss' boss (whom I really like a lot, and who had brought me along with her to help with planning the logistics for the panel session), I had nothing at all to say during dinner, and got the distinct feeling that my only function was to be needlessly expensive, kind of like government relief programs, but not at all like Mack Brown or whoever that other guy is they got in to replace him.

I wonder if I could find a tourism job in Seattle?

On Your Left, Thank You, Have a Nice Day

Yoga is good for your spiritual well-being. There's a lot of talk about why this is, but what it boils down to is that yoga makes it much easier to reach your toenails. One cannot achieve inner peace with a sloppy pedicure.

Fortunately, I've always been flexible, so I'm really more into cycling.

Bicycles are, alas, the red-headed stepchild of modes of transportation. Drivers, who are naturally entitled to get wherever they are going as quickly as possible, get very frustrated at the presence of cyclists. (Less so, oddly, at the presence of thousands of other drivers, who are slowing them down a heck of a lot more; but there you go.)

Pedestrians don't like cyclists either. On shared-use facilities, you're supposed to yield to pedestrians, which is theoretically no problem. But it would be nice if pedestrians on a hike-and-bike trail had more sense that maybe they ought to be prepared to encounter different types of trail users, to keep to the right and try to refrain from taking up the entire width of the trail whilst too engrossed in their dogs/children/conversation partners/phones/navels to notice repeated calls of "On your left!... Excuse me!... Behind you!... On your left, folks!" to the point where you just want to say fuck it and get an air horn for your bike and if they don't like it they can maybe, I don't know, STAY OUT OF THE GODDAMN WAY.

But that's the path to the Dark Side. It's important to be nice. And it's even more important to be nice to the people who piss you off than the people who don't, because, you know, it's easy to be nice to the people who don't. And where's the sport in that?

Today was a nice day, a brief respite from the bipolar swing of "SUMMER! NO, WINTER! NO, NOW IT'S SUMMER! Ooh, spring. PSYCH! WINTER, BEEYOTCHES!" that Texans typically endure from November through February. It's also a Sunday. It's the Sunday after Thanksgiving, which for some people involves second helpings, pie, and - God help us - Cool Whip.* So the beautiful hike-and-bike trail around Town Lake, for which we have Lady Bird Johnson to thank, to the point where you'd think they'd name the lake after her or something, but no, it's called Town Lake, was pretty crowded.

I like the part east of I-35. This picture was taken behind the softball fields at the Holly Street Power Plant, where a giant live oak shades the park bench overlooking the grass sloping down to the water. It's a beautiful spot, the turnaround point of my lunch hour rides, though of course today we didn't have to hurry back. You can also see, across the water, the new boardwalk under construction that will complete the hike-and-bike trail loop around the lake. It's well elevated on pylons above the water, since we do get flooding now and then, and plenty wide enough for three suburban moms with double baby joggers to spread out comfortably and ignore your attempts to alert them to your presence.

But you can't see it in my picture, so someday when it's open I'll have to brave the crowds and go out and get some pictures of it.

Meanwhile, have a nice day, and maybe get out and ride your bike. Don't forget to yield to pedestrians.

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*I'm sorry, but there is just no excuse for Cool Whip, especially not in this day and age.

The Writing on the Wall

Under the South First bridge by the hike-and-bike today, I noticed a painted scrawl: "Houses are graves for the living."

It's supposed to get down below 20 degrees later this week.

I did wonder, bemused, at the hand and mind behind that sentiment. I thought of my own house, which I've been so enjoying decorating and claiming as my own space. It's a haven from the world, certainly; you leave for work, or visiting, or errands - or to stroll along the Town Lake hike-and-bike trail - and there is your very own warm house to come back to. You can also welcome friends, a delicious luxury I've been missing for many years. So I can't agree with the sentiment at all, though I suppose matters might be different if you hired Morticia Addams as your interior decorator.

Or Martha Stewart, for that matter.

There was another interesting series of graffiti along the South First bridge pedestrian walkway, on the high wall that separates joggers, hikers, strollers, and bicyclists from automobile traffic. "Fuck the laws," read one message; and fifteen or twenty feet further along, the next one read "Fuck rent," then "Fuck the system," "Fuck the police," and then, rather to my alarm, "Fuck this wall."

I was with the author up till that point - at least in a spirit of gentle sympathy for his possibly somewhat naive ideals. But as a trail regular, I'm a big fan of the wall between Austin traffic and my head. It's a lot easier to fight for your principles when you're not pinned underneath a Smart Car. (The irony factor alone would be fairly overwhelming.)

People have believed, pretty much as long as they've been around, that everything is going to hell in a handbasket. Well, maybe it is - though you'd need a fairly large handbasket, really, and who would even carry the darn thing? Heck if I know. Well, activism, and attempting to raise the awareness of others about causes that concern you, are noble enough. But the last two entries in the Bryl-Cream series on the South First bridge wall were "Think!" and "People wake up! Shit is NOT OK!"

And here's where specificity would come in fairly handy.

Not to argue, not by any means, that there aren't a lot of things in the world that aren't okay. I think it works well when people single out a particular cause (or two or three) to support, espouse it, possibly recruit others, but allow other people to follow their own paths as well. I donate a little money to Planned Parenthood through work; I give blood; I get a little long-winded (given the opportunity) on the importance of allowing nature and human instinct to take their course as much as possible in childbirth and parenting. This is a fairly tiny sliver of the myriad issues that need addressing, but it is a Thing, and it's mine. I think it's important to find your own cause and support it, whatever that may be, unless you're into defacing public property, in which case I feel the police are fully justified in arresting you and providing you some rent-free digs in the city jail; or unless you're trying to get Sarah Palin elected in 2012, in which case I hope you get run over by a Smart Car.

Bloody Weather

Do you know what I miss most about regular, twice-daily meetings of the 3-Martini Break Group? Well, I'm going to tell you.

It was so educational. Billy will agree with me, having only yesterday been exposed to such phrases as "tramp stamp" and "bullseye" for a lady's lower-back tattoo. Me, I just learned what a "shocker" is, yesterday, from Diane. I can't tell you what it is, because my parents are reading; but I was quite shocked (haha!) to discover that Thomas was already familiar with the term. And I thought he was so nice!

It was also from my time in the 3MBG that I learned about crop-dusting, a deplorable practice familiar to many of my friends but never, I hasten to add, known to me in any but the most hypothetical, or at least purely accidental context.

My parents had never heard a more innocent phrase I introduced a couple of years ago, when I mentioned that a clubgoer in a bar my stepsiblings and I visited looked as if she had been "rode hard and put away wet." I didn't get that one from a 3MBG member - why, I've known that phrase for a coon's age - but I was certainly doing my 3MBGly ("threm-BIG-ly") duty in passing the information along to the uninitiated.

Of course, if there's one topic the 3MBG knows more about than practically anyone else in the world, it's the weather, and I'm no exception, especially now I'm in my current job. Any one of us could step up and be a meteorologist. We'd all look quite fetching in front of a greenscreen. I probably need to work on my "push the weather system away" move, but otherwise, I've got it down. So it was with no small degree of authority that I informed Robbie this evening that a weather system, bidding fair to become Tropical Storm Ana, is loafing around near the Yucatan Peninsula - not yet doing anything criminal, just shouting insolent remarks at passing ships, and threatening to spray-paint gang tags on the coast.

"And what hurricane," Robbie asks, "comes after Ana?"

"I don't remember," I said.

We agreed that the next named storm after Ana will probably draw a bead on the Texas coast, moving purposefully towards it, yet never actually make landfall, eventually coldly informing the bewildered coast that it wants no contact of any kind. "Or it will call up at the last moment and say something came up and it can't make it," added Robbie.

"Nonono," I said, "that'd be Hurricane Greg."

Tony gets his own hurricane in - I don't remember which year without looking it up. That'll be a big beefy one. Hurricane Billy would carefully avoid damaging environmentally sensitive areas, ranches and farms, but would completely wipe out every Wal-Mart in the state. "And Hurricane Beth will have two big, beautiful - eyes," says Robbie, who can be pretty smarmy when he wants to be.

I'm glad to have good friends who teach me more than I ever wanted to know. How else would I manage to put up with this miserable weather?

Kitten Farts: Not So Cute

Noticing a particularly spectacular example and exclaiming "holy chihuahua!" is one thing. Actually hearing the kitten produce the emission is something else altogether, and probably indicates you should buy a different brand of cat food. Check the bean content on the label. And check the fat, because - crowded as my brain may be with generally useless information (a fact which doing a whole book of New York Times Sunday crosswords will tend to point out to you), there are some things that everyone really ought to know - incontrovertible facts, truisms even, pillars which support the very structure of reality as we know it. And high on the list of these is the fact that CATS ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE BUTT CHEEKS.

It's also not supposed to be this damn hot in June.

I think I'll just ride my bike back to Syracuse. What's a few hills? I love Austin, but farting kittens and weather from Death Valley? I think I preferred when it was raining frogs.

Here Comes Another One

There's a hole in the ozone layer with my name on it.

Actually, I doubt it. For one thing, I'm not sure that the fumes from printer toner destroy the ozone. They probably do cause some nasty disease I'll come down with later in life due to the months I spent, at my previous state job, with the department's printer in the back of my cubicle. To this day I can only hope I got out in time.

I see a few people from the old place at break now and then - Jason is still there, and Ernest of course, and there's a new guy who's actually 3MBG material - if there were still a 3MBG (sighhhhh). There's still fodder for the group, too; I bump into Coworker-You-Idiot occasionally, though I'm afraid I pretend not to see him. It's not often. I'll pop into the Kwik-E-Mart for a Chronicle, and he'll be there buying State Employee Chow of some kind or another. He's still got the zip-off pants and the antenna coming out of his head, thank God! It's reassuring to know that some things have stayed the same.

As for me, aside from being a little lonely at times, I still feel perfectly normal - but then, I would, wouldn't I?

My recent assault on the environment stems from the fact that I'm teaching a class tomorrow and Friday to a group of employees from other divisions who will come in to help us answer our 1-800 line in case of an evacuation. Most of them are returning, having helped out in last year's efforts, but a few, bless them! are new. This will be our last year to receive their assistance, unfortunately. One of the whimsical outcomes of this past legislative session is that the divisions these helpful people belong to are being removed from my agency and will be set up as an agency of their own.

It puts us in a real bind, because those divisions are really the only ones, besides us, who have direct dealings with the public. Even assuming we could cut through enough red tape to be able to request much-needed seasonal assistance from some other division, I'm not sure we'd want it. Picture Coworker-You-Idiot handling emergency phone calls. You know he'd hit on all the female evacuees. If it were me, I'd take my chances with the hurricane.

So I've done lots of research, I've compiled updates to the manual, I've printed up enough copies that I may now personally be responsible for the destruction of more trees than Ike was, I created handouts, and it goes without saying that I put together a kick-ass PowerPoint. This is the fun part of my job - well, this, and most of the other parts, of course.

Oh yeah, and for the other thing, I can't figure out how you're supposed to put your name on a hole, seeing as how a hole is where something to put your name on isn't, capisce? Still, sorry about the ozone layer.

Allegro, ma with a 40% chance of non troppo

“And today’s weather should be Beethoven-esque,” enthused the announcer on KMFA this morning, “because it’s going to be absolutely gorgeous!”

I don’t mean to be unfair – he didn’t ask to have my alarm clock set to his station; and honestly, there’s probably not a lot he could be saying at 6 AM that wouldn’t piss me off. Still his statement seemed fairly insipid (and if he improved on it any I didn’t hear, because I hit the snooze button). Beethoven’s gorgeous. Brahms is gorgeous. Prokofiev is gorgeous. But they’re hardly interchangeable.

Much of Beethoven’s music has a dark, troubled beauty, better suited to an impending storm than to a bright, warm spring day. Mozart, on the other hand, brings cheerful breezes and sunshine to mind.

Bach weather would be calm and pleasant, without surprises. A Bartók day would be disjointed and jangling. You’d be on your way to the pool to work on your tan and suddenly get lost in a blizzard.

Pretty much all your Russian composers are extremely windy. Shostakovich also has acid rain.

Philip Glass is a long, monotonous, dull Sunday afternoon with nothing to do, and you’d like it to come to an end, but it does not.

Then you have your really heavy composers. If it’s a Mahler or Bruckner day, you probably want to board up the windows and stay in the basement. Wagner weather takes things further: it uproots mighty trees, razes buildings, disorders the universe, and seduces your wife.

I’d get a job as a radio announcer, but you have to get up too early.

Reign of Frogs

There’s a massive winter storm up in the Panhandle today. Huge stretches of I-40 and I-27 have been closed altogether due to ice and snow accumulation and blizzard conditions.

Blizzard conditions. In Texas. In April, almost.

Here in Austin, the morning was heavy and black with thunder and rain. This afternoon it’s bright, sunny, and 81 degrees.

What’s going on here?

Ever since starting at my new job (I say “new,” though my first anniversary was February 25th) I’ve been plagued by a low-performance computer. 504MB of RAM, I got. 504MB!! And ever since I started on I’ve wanted to get ArcGIS software installed, because come on, I work in travel – and it just so happens I know how to make maps. Travel. Maps. Hello?! We have a license, it wouldn’t cost anything. But I couldn’t have it, because Arc requires a minimum 1GB of RAM.

This morning I came in to find a sticky note on my computer from our IT guy. “E – I installed 3 more 512s to your RAM – G”

Naturally, this sprang instantly to mind.

And speaking of LOLZ, two years ago, the day after my now-painfully-estranged friend left our old division for his new job in the building where I also work now, I sent him an alarmed email. “You clearly play a larger role in holding the fabric of reality together than I had realized,” I told him, “because today, Bitching Bubbly Smoking Nonsmoker came over and made friendly chit-chat with me for half an hour.”

She’d never really spoken to me without snarling before.

She got fired the same week I started my new job, and I had no further contact with her. But then, two months ago, my poor little friend and I fell out and stopped speaking, and she turned up and friended me on Facebook...?

Coincidence??

Especially considering that Facebook was the final contributing factor in our falling-out?!?!?

I’m glad my computer is a lot faster now, and I’m glad the day is so pretty. But I wouldn’t mind if the universe would start being a little more normal again.

Out in the Cold

It snowed a lot in Alabama today. I went to high school in Madison, and during all my years there I only remember one solitary snowfall sparsely dusting the ground with dirty white. Cue all the usual phenomena: those unaccustomed to the sight are awed, not to mention immobilized - schools and businesses shut down, while those who have lived in more northern climes take grand pleasure in scoffing at the natives. "Look at that!" we say, oh so worldly and superior. "Why, when I was in third grade I walked to school in two feet of snow."

Once, I think, because I'd missed the bus and Mom was about up to her ears with me. I don't remember it being uphill either way.

Meanwhile, back home, I'm annoyed to find that the weather forecast calls for a freeze tonight. Day before yesterday it was ninety degrees. Once again, the plants come inside, all 327,964,898 of them. Tomorrow they'll all go back out again, hopefully this time for good, or at least until December.

The bromeliad cluster from my ex-mother-in-law (this would be a band name, except it's much too long - perhaps one day I'll use it to title a novel) got all excited about the warm weather and is sending out several buds - so the expectant mommy is safely ensconced in the laundry room for the night. I'll have to get a picture when they bloom, because the flowers are strange and beautiful: bright red buds that bloom into electric blue blossoms edged with vivid yellow; alien, unearthly. Spikey, the crack weed from Corpus, produced a gigantic floral cluster about a month ago, and now has babies all over the flower bed. The aloes are burstingly fat and the ivies all need trimming. I love my potted garden, and I'm so glad it's a long weekend for us government-employee types: tomorrow I anticipate spending a happy day rearranging everyone in their proper places on the front porch.

Tonight it's cold, but tomorrow's another day. Tomorrow will be a good one. I'll make my garden grow.

Lessons Learned

Last night I dreamed I was shopping for canoes with a coworker. But the canoes in the variety store last night were of a very inferior quality - rather small and flimsy, bearing perhaps more resemblance to keychains than to watercraft. And they were so cheaply made that when you picked them up, all the flocking rubbed off and left a green mess on your fingers.

I'm so glad the call center closed today.

One of the things I've learned from this experience is that in the future, hurricanes should strike somewhere else. I'd like the NWS to make a note of this for next time. I've never had a problem with the upper Gulf Coast; but Dallas could do with a little smiting, don't you think?

I might not care much for Corpus, but I do have a few friends there, so it's important that they be safe. Still, the northern end of Padre Island might not suffer too badly from a direct hit.

I've been all over that region, of course - to Mustang Island, and Port A, and Padre Island National Seashore. It's beautiful in its way - salty winds, empty skies, grayish sands, spongy beached seaweed and jellyfish, all the hungry seagulls in the universe, and tiny crabs that scuttle sideways out of your path with amazing rapidity, leaving random tracks in the wet sand before disappearing into millions of little holes that they dig out only as fast as the lapping waves fill them in.

And the tall dunes are no-man's land, impassable because the sand slides out from under your feet, and pockmarks of burrows among the pepper-scented beach grasses remind you that you're in snake territory, and anyway where would you go? Every dune looks just like every other one.

Most of it is in its wild condition - a fairly logical condition for a barrier island. Streets and houses and parking lots and (Port Aransas, you dumbass) golf courses kill the beach grass whose roots are what's holding the sand in place.

But at the northern end, across the causeway from Flour Bluff, a handful of moderately wealthy people have built their homes, digging out chunks of the island, their neighborhoods honeycombed with tiny private bays for their boats, the brownish-gray water dull next to the turquoise gleam of the swimming pools. The owner of my former employer lives there. I heard a story about her once.

Ursula was a cruel person and not a pretty one, with bleached-blond hair, an unfortunate (not to say disastrous) physique, and a vicious, unpredictable temper - the Emperor of Rome at its most decadent and chaotic. Her husband was the vice president of her company. He was jovial and friendly, but had a tendency to hug the female employees a little too tightly. When you hug someone you aren't on intimate terms with (or don't want to be on intimate terms with, anyway), you kind of stick your butt out, you know how you do? And you generally try not to have your tits squished. Hug != mammogram, and not only because the results aren't as accurate.

Whereas Mr. Ursula could probably give you a detailed topographical map of your internal breast tissue within sixty seconds. Anyway, the story I heard was that the neighbors called the police to complain about Ursula and her husband. It wasn't a matter of noise - or it if was, that was an entirely secondary consideration. The police came out to tell Ursula's husband that please, please, when he and his wife were enjoying the sunny weather on the patio by the pool, he needed to - well, he needed to enjoy nothing else besides the sunny weather. At least not with his tongue.

So if the hurricane had hit the north end of Padre Island, it would only have wiped out those who deserved to be dead, and maybe a few others who devoutly wished to be.

"How are you doing today?" asked a coworker today; "can I help you with anything? Because yesterday, you looked like you were ready to punch a kitten."

We'll hope this got it out of my system, but I don't think I'll go canoe-shopping for a while.

Something's Not Right

I've been eating, sleeping and breathing nothing but hurricane for the past - has it been a week? I don't remember what day it is.

Hurricanes are not particularly nutritious, and they're hell on your lungs.

And then you have the dreams.

When I was a teenager I used to have nuclear war nightmares a lot. You'd hear a "boom" and look out the window and see that telltale mushroom cloud ballooning up out of the horizon and you knew, this was it, it was over. I still can't think of anything else as scary as that, not even the thought of Sarah Palin as -

On second thoughts, perhaps I'll sleep with the lights on tonight.

But answering phones is scarier. I hate it as much as going to the dentist, or getting a mammogram - the difference being that you have to make an appointment to do those things, which makes them significantly easier to avoid than something that sits on your desk and yells at you until you pick it up and talk to it, sort of like my elderly cat Romeo, only not quite as likely to drool on you.

So this is a no-brainer: I simply don't go to the dentist or get a mammogram, and generally wear absorbent clothing. But there is no avoiding the wrath of the telephone.

I dreamed about it night before last, only I'd be hard-pressed to say exactly what those dreams were. Nothing about the callers themselves - for whom, individually, I have nothing but deep compassion. I have no problem answering most of the emails that come through the website, with all the helpful advice I can muster. Some of my responses are a couple of pages long. Either I'm single-handedly eradicacting the ancient image of the faceless, unresponsive government agency, or all my correspondents are saying "well all righty then" and embarking instead on a mercifully brief and impersonal exchange of ideas with the IRS.

Last night, after spending 13 hours in the call center Sunday, with the prospect of another early morning at it today, I inexplicably dreamed I was shopping for wedding dresses. I almost woke up screaming.

This weather is driving me crazy.

Ya Don't Say

I get the night off!

"I should have called you," apologized my boss when I arrived; "it's been so quiet all day, you really could just take tonight off, unless you'd rather work."

"No," I said, "I have a bit of a headache, and this afternoon I almost put toothpaste in my armpits."

"Why don't you go home," she suggested.

Actually it wouldn't even be so bad if I hadn't been awakened at the crack of noon (having gone to bed at 7) by Anna's teacher, calling to tell me that oh by the way school was closing early to avoid anyone having to deal with hurricane traffic (here?) so could I please come pick her up immediately, she was waiting. I arrived, ten minutes later, out of breath, to find that Anna had been put to work cleaning up the classroom. "Sorry I'm late," I said, "I worked 9pm last night to 6am today."

Like she cared. "Well, you should come see us more often," sang the teacher as we left. "And don't do any traveling this weekend! There's a hurricane!"

What? Where?!

I hope it was just because they didn't need me that I got sent home tonight. Last night, craving a caffeine kick (despite being the only woman in a room full of men, which generally keeps me on my toes; but they were all pretty busy) I grabbed my wallet out of my backpack and ran downstairs for a Coke. I stopped by my own desk for a few things, so I was gone a good ten or fifteen minutes. And when I got back, I saw that the vanilla-flavored condom I have been carrying around ever since it was tossed to me at the Gay Pride Parade in 2007 was perched in plain sight in the splayed-open pocket of my backpack.

I'm not sure it's even possible to coordinate emergency response efforts while working from home.

Take a Hike, Ike

So says a good friend of mine in Corpus - a former coworker who is now wrapped up, as am I, in emergency preparations.

How funny. Friday evening I met a woman through someone else I used to work with. He and I were not in the tourism industry when we worked together; he still isn't, but his new coworker, attending the party Friday night, is. And it turns out that she and I are involved in a project together. Funny to find myself at a party with a drink in my hand, talking to a stranger I met through someone I used to work with in an entirely different industry, suddenly on the job.

So I'm glad I hadn't found the margarita machine yet.

My Corpus friend worked for the same soulless marketing firm I did, but is now part of a non-profit aid organization. The soulless marketing firm was travel-related. I got my current job largely on the strength of that experience.

All in all, I'm just struck with the way these tangled threads keep weaving together, and how often they seem to lead you back to a common place. Doesn't it make you wonder? Maybe you really can't go back in time and become your own grandfather. I hope this doesn't put a damper on your vacation plans. Might I suggest a trip to San Angelo instead?

Maybe the universe is just too densely interconnected to be able to change history. Or maybe you were always meant to become your own grandfather in the first place, sort of a houndstooth-check in the grand tapestry of the cosmos. Who knows?

Life is full of mysteries. The only thing I'm absolutely sure of is that it's a very, very bad idea to make fun of Florida on your blog. Especially if you work in the tourism industry.

You Can Run, but You Cannot Hide

I'm thinking of repurposing this as a weather and travel blog, and giving up altogether on such unattainable concepts as humor and insight. Today at work, my boss asked me to do some research on one of the San Angelo-area attractions we'll be visiting. So I googled it. First place result? My blog!

Oops.

For the moment, Ike's path is forecast far enough northward to bring him up against a substantial chunk of Florida - aimed smack dab at the northern Everglades, in fact. Sucks to be you, Florida! You get all the violence of a hurricane and droves of storm-tossed alligators, flung this way and that by the wind.

Actually, this could make Fox News' on-the-scene reporting significantly more interesting.

Lately I've wondered if it wouldn't be a better idea to abandon the coast altogether. We don't build on greenbelts because of the flood risks, right? Never mind that it hardly ever happens. But what with climate change and all (thanks a lot, Al Gore, you bastard, for inventing global warming) it seems like living anywhere along the Gulf Coast is roughly equivalent to playing Russian roulette.

Not that moving inland helps you out that much. Go to Oklahoma or Nebraska? You've got your tornadoes. California? Earthquakes. The island paradise of Hawai'i? The pristine, pine-forested beauty of Washington State? Oh sure, I suppose you enjoy being drowned in a river of molten lava. And then you've got your wildfires. The Dakotas won't do because they're extremely cold, though I imagine the biking is fairly easy (if perhaps a bit dull) during the warmer months, assuming they have any. Idaho and Montana are just as bad, only with hills. Michigan has Detroit, and Utah has Mormons. New York City is the subject of way too many disaster movies: sooner or later, one of them has to get it right. Virginia has the Beltway and hillbillies; if that isn't proof that there's no God, I'd like to know what is?

Austin is plagued with Californians and fire ants, so it's got problems of its own. I suppose Colorado is nice.

In PowerPoint clip-art today I came across a photo of a picturesque little village on the Isle of Skye, perched in multicolored, historic prettiness on the shore, with the stone ruins of a castle peeking out of deep woods at the top of the cliff above them, and soft green hills and villages fading off into the distant mist across the water. I want to go there. Think I can get a travel job with ScotDOT?

The Travel Job

The only drawback to my travel-related job is that I only get to travel in Texas. Tuscany? Not so much.

So I think it's super thoughtful of them to go to such pains to simulate massive jet lag.

Ike is now a Category 3 hurricane, did you know? Of course, he's still several days away. And his path looks like he might just wobble (meteorologists just love the word "wobble;" and who can blame them?) far enough north to hit the southern tip of Florida - not that the southern tip of Florida ever stopped anybody; besides which, it's unclear whether the northern turn at the end of the current 5-day forecast will continue to carry him north, or if he's just trying to be a little shit and hit Every Single Island in the Bahamas. Bastard.

In any case I should get this coming weekend off. It might come in handy for trying to rebuild a sleep schedule that never was that strong to begin with.

I should think Russia would be lovely in late summer, too, wouldn't you? Just imagine sitting at a quaint little sidewalk cafe near the Red Square, sipping a mojito* and admiring the luxuriant moustaches of the passerby. Of course, where I've always wanted to go is Ireland. Or Cornwall, where I would join the task of reviving the Cornish language. I might also raise sheep.

They have sheep in Texas, too.


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*I'm trying, Robbie, but I'm feeling kind of tapped out lately.

Lessons from the Graveyard Shift

Man cannot live by bread alone. Doughnuts, however, are a whole nother story.

Fox News anchors only have two emotions: outraged, and smug. They also make strategic use of lip gloss to blind you so you can't question the veracity of their reporting.

My building has a secret penthouse perched on top of the uppermost floor; it's mostly gutted now, but in the 70s it was the swanky private office/shag-carpeted love nest of the building's original owner. It's accessed by what would then have been considered a graceful staircase, framed in ugly 70s metalwork, which has now been walled in and hidden behind an unmarked, locked steel door. It has its own private bathroom with a shower stall. The bathroom still boasts the original 70s wallpaper - with the kind of color scheme it's only wise to install within easy sprinting distance of a toilet; and the suite has huge sliding glass doors that open out onto the flat roof, where we stood taking a break in the balmy late-night air, gazing at the glittering city across the river as the sounds of live music wafted up to us. Wow, y'all. It was COOL.

In New Zealand, or indeed any British-English-speaking country, you shouldn't introduce yourself at an elegant dinner party by sticking out your hand and saying "Hi, I'm Randy." Especially if that isn't actually your name, and you also waggle your eyebrows suggestively.

The friendly nation of Liberia helps us out by selling us commemorative coins at face value (plus shipping) for a limited time only. Like a $20 silverleaf coin/bill commemorating 9/11 with a big image of the WTC-dominated Manhattan skyline in the center, and the number 9 in two of the corners and the number 11 in the other two (because that adds up to 20!); plus, for those of you who feel that ordinary money is just too small, it's half again as big as those boring old $20 bills you can carry around in your wallet! And for a limited time only, you can buy them at face value for $20! (Plus shipping.) Normally it's $39.95! Limit 5! And they are actual legal tender! (In Liberia.)

When you're in the middle of a 13-hour shift at 3am on Labor Day weekend, you can damn well look up currency converters on the internet and consider it work-related. You get to make executive decisions up there in the EOC. Playing God? Well, somebody has to! Of course, it's usually Morgan Freeman.

Sleep deprivation makes people so goofy that they will pee themselves with laughter at the slightest provocation. It's better than pot. Last night's recurring joke? "Hey look, you guys, a hurricane!" Hilarious.

It isn't going to be good. Keep your toes and fingers crossed.

I Just Work Here

So I got out of the office at 6 p.m. today; I'll be working 3 p.m. to midnight tomorrow, and probably 7 p.m. to 8 a.m. Sunday/Monday and Monday/Tuesday. Then Gustav makes landfall, and then things start to get crazy.

It's been a long, long week, and there's no weekend in sight.

Not that it's really so bad. (Ask me again in a couple of days.) This is the un-fun part of the job, but every so often there aren't any hurricanes; it's meaningful and helpful; I'm not facing it alone; and I'm pretty certain that my bosses are happy with me and that their happiness with me is in direct proportion to how good a job I'm doing - which is a darn sight more than I could say at some places I've worked. And the rest of the time? Fun!

But the forecast models predict a very low possibility of going on break any time next week.

We have this 1-800 number you call for road conditions information. We've been working on finding a new vendor for the system; my cow orker who primarily deals with it is a former employee of a major phone company, and really knows his stuff. There are a lot of features we're looking for that my cow orker feels the new vendor might not be able to address adequately. Like the hearing-impaired line.

How, I asked in our meeting, is this such a problem? They just call the special number and hear: "HELLO!!! WELCOME TO THE ROAD CONDITIONS HOTLINE!!!!! IF YOU'D LIKE TO BE SHOUTED AT IN SPANISH, PLEASE PRESS 1 NOW!!!!!!!!!!"

Yeah, SNL already did that.

It's time for a nap; if somebody would send me an economy-size spray can of Gustav-B-Gone, I'd be grateful.

Where Am I?!

1. I'm in Harlingen! We arrived late this evening for our surprise inspection and will drop in on them in the morning. Won't they be amazed? They certainly know we were just in Wichita Falls on Monday and Tuesday, and may or may not be aware we were in Gainesville Tuesday and today. But they won't be expecting us to come all the way across the state! It's great, because I've never been to the Valley before (like, omigawd, gag me!), and the supervisor here is a crazy fun guy, and we get along great, and I owe him some payback for fingering me at Conference when Grapevine came along looking for skit victims,* and we'll probably get taken out on the town and finally get to do some serious drinking.

Or:

2. Our section director called as my boss and I were eating lunch (some kitschy, exotic little Denton establishment known to the locals as "Cracker Barrel") and said, hey, Gustav's looking pretty ominous, and the state's going into emergency operations; it's likely to hit Louisiana instead of Texas, but even so we'll have to deal with evacuees; you guys need to change your flight and come home to Austin. And as nice as it is to be back, I'm a bit grumpy about it because (a) I don't get to sleep in a Hampton Inn bed for the next two nights, (b) I really was looking forward to Harlingen, (c) I have to go into the office tomorrow and Friday, and almost certainly Saturday, Sunday, and Monday as well, and (d) the baggage handlers broke the telescoping handle off my suitcase on the return flight.

Go ahead. Take a wild guess.

Never mind. Here's that picture I promised of the Red River, although (e) it really didn't come out, since I took it standing in the shadow of I-35. That's Oklahoma on the opposite shore, that is. And the river really is amazingly red.


Here's a picture, which was supposed to capture the pretty rolling countryside, which I took a couple of miles further south. I was initially annoyed because an 18-wheeler happened into the photo, but ended up thinking this one was much cooler. Guess what that big thing is that the truck is towing?

It's a windmill turbine. Who knew those things were that big?!

See? Life isn't completely full of disappointments.

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*Inside work reference. Sorry, can't be helped.

'Tis the Season

Hurricanes are exactly like tennis balls, in that the west coast of Africa launches them at us, one after another, faster than we can hit them back.

Except that the west coast of Africa doesn't launch tennis balls. Okay, let's say that the west coast of Africa is just like a tennis ball machine, in that it launches hurricane after hurricane towards the Gulf... only tennis ball machines don't launch hurricanes.

The Gulf of Mexico is just like a tennis player, and Florida is the racquet, except that even when we parry a hurricane just right, we still don't angle a masterful shot and send it careening back across the Atlantic into Côte d'Ivoire, drawing a hushed murmur of appreciation and smattering of polite applause from the crowd.

And of course they aren't hurricanes when they're launched, so it's more as if the tennis ball machine were firing off bits of rubber and yellow flocking, which didn't even form into tennis balls until they had already made it past our defenses. Pretty poor sportsmanship, if you ask me.

June through November is just like a tennis match, only not anywhere near as long.