It looks like it’s time to keep an eye on the tropics if you live in this part of the world. Hurricane Dean has reached category 4 and he’s still strengthening. He is prognosticated anywhere from the Bay of Campeche in Mexico to the mouth of the Mississippi, due to come ashore somewhere towards the end of next week. If Erin was a practice run and Houston is even close to that dirty NE quadrant…We could have problems.
Two years ago when Rita struck this state was dry. The ground was a sponge able to suck up water like nobody’s business. This year has been one of the wettest years in our recorded history. It hasn’t been just along the coast either, the Hill Country and West Texas have all had more rain than normal. Here where I live the ground is so saturated that even an afternoon shower leaves water standing in the low spots for the rest of the day.
Luckily for us, by the time we finished with our prep before Rita the fiasco on the roads was already in progress so we stayed put and watched the approaching storm. Now keep in mind this was a full two days before landfall and Houston was on the move north and west. You can blame the scale of the evacuation on the timing, just a few weeks after watching Katrina do in New Orleans. The images from New Orleans had everyone in the path of the storm just a little skittish to say the least. Thank God for everyone in Houston the storm moved east…Sorry Beaumont and Port Arthur and all the little towns in between.
++++++++++
Verlyn Klinkenborg has a new muse out in the New York Times. Introspection to the max…Viewing his world in both directions. From the inside out and the outside in. It’s definitely one to go and read in it entirety.
On the Spot – New York Times
The house I live in here in the country isn’t far from the highway, and every day is filled with traffic passing by. Most of the time I ignore it, but every now and then a car slows and I can see the occupants looking up the hill at the horses or the geese or me on the tractor. I wonder what it is they see. I begin to feel a little allegorical, like a peasant shearing sheep in a medieval book of hours. I begin to wonder what I stand for, whether there is a moral to me or whether I simply illuminate a month in the calendar. This place is a nice spot, and so I am happy to pretend to impersonate one of the merry rustics even as I go about teaching the pigs to like scratching.
++++++++++
Blog Action Day
On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.
Blog Action Day is about MASS participation. That means we need you! Here are 3 ways to participate:
- Post on your blog relating to the environment on Blog Action Day
- Donate your day’s earnings to an environmental charity
- Promote Blog Action Day around the web
I’ve signed up…Won’t you?
++++++++++
There is big news coming out of Floyd County, Va. It seems there was a big discovery of a new element. Should make millions for someone…Go read the piece:
Nameless Creek: No More High Places Forever
You might as well learn it from me right here and now, because this is big news, and it will change everything.You probably haven’t even heard of balonium. But you will. It is a rare metal used for the manufacture of a kind of memory chip essential to the production of iPhones and the very top-selling computer games and certain of the recent generation of guided missiles. And here’s the thing: Floyd County, it so happens by sheer bad luck, is sitting on a mother load of this stuff.
++++++++++
Places to go and people to see…Gotta run.
