Snow!!

This photo shows what passes for "snow" in Houston. The little dusting barely registered on the snow-meters, but it certainly caused havoc on the roads. 

The flurries started in earnest around 3:30 yesterday, or at least that's when the gal from the neighboring office ran into mine and said, "It's SNOWING!" I thought it was a joke, of course, but when I turned it looked like a scene out of White Christmas -- well, if you squinted real hard it did, anyway. 

Nothing really "stuck" until late in the evening, and even then, as you can see from these pix, we didn't have much sticking. As far as the dog is concerned, it was nothing more than thick rain, spoiling her ability to play catch -- because *someone* said it was too cold & wet to play outside. 

Although it was cold as snakes this morning, the snow was all gone from the roads when it was time to drive to work. That's *my* kind of snow.

Why The Woodlands Cares About Hurricanes

I've mentioned before that I am pretty far away from the coast, which means worrying about hurricanes is a bit silly. It would take one whopper of a storm to bring hurricane-force winds all the way up here.

But if they did get here, it would be pretty catastrophic: It's not called The Woodlands just cuz it's a pretty name. The photo on the right shows my house, sorta. What it shows more clearly is the reason I wanted to live there -- the enormous trees. There are six 100-foot pines in my front yard. (My ballpark estimate on the height). There are a bunch more in the neighbor's front yard. And more in my backyard. 

It's a happy place for trees. Unlike typical suburbs, The Woodlands has historically required developers to plan out their subdivisions with minimum possible impact on the existing environment -- the big trees. And so we have these great neighborhoods full of greens and browns and the smell of pine after hurricanes.

Because hurricanes are not that great for tall pine trees. After Rita, when I lived in a townhouse with much less lush forest around, we had one tall pine go down in the neighborhood, not because of the wind but because of the combination of wind + wet. Because unfortunately, once the ground is wet the tree roots don't hold onto the ground so well, allowing the trees to topple.

That was the problem with Alicia in '93. My parents lived in Memorial (closer to Houston but on the west side) at the time and lost some big pine trees. It had rained a lot right before Alicia, and the trees just went "schloop" out of the mud when the wind hit 'em.

We don't expect that for Ike because it has been very dry for weeks here. But we probably will still have a lot of branches to clean up. The big hope is that none of them go through a window. 

The big question remains as to where Ike will hit. The latest forecast moved him northeast a bit. 50 more miles northeast and The Woodlands will move from his "dirty side" with higher winds & more wet, to the "clean side," a veritable walk in the park as we had for Rita. 

Crossing my fingers & hugging my trees.

As I write, dad is on his way over to help me bring the outdoor furniture inside. Such a good daddy!

Ike Looks to Mess Up a Weekend

It appears Hurricane Ike is going to rampage across Southeast Texas this weekend. 

I'm something like 65 miles inland from Galveston, but the latest update to the National Hurricane Center map (right) looks like Ike may come a lot closer than storms of recent memory. (Remember Rita?) If you look very closely at the map, you'll see a little reddish "x" just north of the 30-degree line and just a tad east of the hurricane path. That's approximately where I am. 

Assuming there's anything to say, I'll blog here and/or microblog via Twitter as the cable connection + iPhone allow. 

Eddie the Wimp

Here you see Lakrids the Intrepid Storm Chaser, decidedly bored by the whole Edouard thing. It rained all day, but the predicted tropical storm-force winds never materialized. The storm also didn't seem to include any thunder/lightning, at least not in our neck of the woods. We had a scarier, more fierce storm last weekend in a normal quick Texas thundershower.

My impression from radar is that we've seen the worst of what we're going to get. So it was just a quiet, rainy day for us. Others lost power -- some 13,000 people supposedly are dealing with that annoyance right now. We've avoided that problem, unless they do as they did after Rita, and subject us to rolling blackouts for the next few days while they try to get the power grid back online. We'll see....

The good news: The backyard is very green & not a lake. All the work on the drainage did exactly what it was supposed to do -- yay!

Edouard comes to visit

There's a tropical storm in the neighborhood, and apparently he is due to drop in with high winds & heavy rain sometime this afternoon. 

The last hurricane to threaten the area was Rita, whom I wrote about back in 2005. This Edouard was headed directly for Houston but veered off in a somewhat Rita-like direction. He's heading a little more obliquely north, however, which should put tropical storm force winds right over The Woodlands sometime this afternoon.

For now, it's just raining with a few gusts. No thunder/lightning, even. Just a pleasant, cool, rainy Houston day. I brought in most of my outdoor furniture because of the threat of high winds. My neighbor behind, however, has left his screened-in tent out there. Could be interesting....  

I'll update whenever it seems like there is something to say, assuming I still have Internet + power. When power is gone, I will still be able to Twitter from the iPhone. Thus far, I can still hear birds singing while they enjoy the much-needed shower. The birdback out back is almost full, and the fountain is not yet overflowing, so we haven't gotten more than a sprinkle here yet. 

I have a real backyard!

When I left home a few weeks ago for a business trip to Oklahoma, my backyard looked like this:


I was only gone a few days, but when I came home, I found that the landscaping elves had visited. So it looked like this!:


Another week or so later, more landscaping elves came to visit, so it looked like this:


And finally, it looks like this!:


After three weeks, the dog & I have not yet managed to kill the new, expensive shade-loving (AmeriShade) grass.... Hurricane Dolly did us a bit of a favor with a few rainshowers. At least for that little bit of rain, the landscaper's leveling and French drain prevented the usual lake from forming in the backyard.

I also posted pix without the story.

Photos & phlowers

Pink Hibiscus Bits

When I bought my house two years ago, the yard included a number of climbing rose bushes, most of which have produced no or very few blooms and many feet of annoying, thorny, scraggly stems. I hate the things.

Saturday, mom & I went over to my favorite garden store, Arbor Gate, because it was nice out, and mom wanted to mess up her hair in the convertible. Among other little plants I snagged for the front yard, we found a couple of gorgeous hibiscus plants to replace the annoying, non-blooming, killer roses on either side of my garage.

After struggling to rip out the thorn bushes, I planted the new flowering bushes, which are covered with flower buds. (Dad came over on Sunday to single-handedly plant the annuals -- yay dad!)

Wednesday morning, I had my first hibiscus bloom, which I shot with the new camera. The uncropped version is here on Flickr, where I have been playing a lot lately. 

I'll close with my other neat photo of the day, a work photo:

Trees and dirt

Big Daddy

On the right, meet Big Daddy, the biggest tree in my tree-filled but otherwise ugly backyard. He's a big booger of a tree, 90 inches in circumference at the base. (Yeah, I just ran out & measured.)

Daddy & the other cool trees (left) are a primary reason I live where I do. When I was looking for a house, I found that most of the new places in my price range were on lots that had either recently been farmland or were razed of their old trees to simplify construction of little cookie-cutter homes. Each of those homes gets one 25-gallon tree for the front yard, and so the neighborhood *might* look like a forest again in 25 years or so.

My current house is about 15 years old, but the rule in The Woodlands (until recently but don't get me started...) always was that developers had to work around the existing trees as much as possible. Plus there are wild spaces all over. So driving in The Woodlands makes you feel like you're driving around in the woods -- to the point where it's darned easy to get lost out here.

Anyway, I love my trees. But I do not love my backyard. As mentioned in a previous entry, I've asked a landscaper to design something wonderful. Unfortunately, I have not heard from him since our first meeting. I know, these things take time, and I am *trying* to be patient. Meanwhile, here are the "before" pictures. Sad, but true. Except for the cool trees, it's a mud-pit.

Above, we're looking from the concrete slab porch toward Big Daddy. On the left, we're looking from Big Daddy back toward the porch. Pretty, right? I am pretty sure grass will grow in a lot of that dirt space if the landscaper can do some grading to prevent Lake Smukke from forming out there after every 1/4-inch of rainfall. Oh, sure, having some real *soil* out there instead of this sandy dusty crud would probably help, too.

Professionals

I'm a professional communicator. I don't have any fancy license, but I have a college degree and people have paid me to write & edit text for the last 25 years or so. 

I am not a professional engineer, but I occasionally make forays into that world. Every time I do, I fix some typos, turn some passive voice into active voice, and learn a lot about how the world works. I take engineering classes to expand my mind & my technical knowledge, but I never think, "Any monkey could create a job design if they had the right software. Why the hell do we need these high-priced engineers?" 

Holiday Inn Express commercials notwithstanding, I believe many things in this world are best done by trained professionals. Heart surgery, for example. Soldiering. Plumbing. Electrical wiring. Bridge-building. Cooking. Cleaning.

I had a professional landscaper visit my house yesterday to plan out something wonderful for my backyard. I could go out and buy 50 plants, dig some holes and stick plants in 'em. Afterward, my backyard would be the landscaping equivalent of the newsletter that one of our engineers recently threw together using a hideous Microsoft Word template, some dark photographs of unidentifiable instrumentation, and some random text in a miniscule font that his target audience will not be able to read without a magnifier. Not to mention the black text on dark blue background. (sigh) Because, of course, any monkey with the right software can be a professional communicator. 

Or, perhaps, a professional landscaper. This evening, I told my neighbor about the landscaper's visit. He said, "Why don't you just do it yourself? I did mine..." In a rare burst of restraint, I did not say, "Yes, I see that." This is, after all, the neighbor with the naked guy on his back porch.

Irony? He's a professional elementary school administrator who complains that people think it's so easy to deal with 200 screaming kids all day long. 

R-e-s-p-e-c-t. 

The Naked Guy

Got up at the usual hour, dragged my sorry self out of bed, got ready for work, let the dog out into the backyard.... Everything is normal, and then I see the naked guy.

I can't be sure he's completely naked because he's on the other side of the fence, in my back-door neighbor's yard. He's at least not wearing a shirt, and it's only about 40 degrees out there. And he's decidedly not my neighbor, who is not tall enough to be viewed so plainly over the fence.

Obviously, I'm curious about this fella, who appears to be staring in the back door of the neighbor's house. My first thought is that he's a pervert, perpetrating a sex crime right there in my (well, almost) backyard. Then I wonder if he belongs there & I'm over-reacting like a nosy neighbor.

Either way, I wonder exactly what I'm supposed to do. I figure running out into my yard and yelling, "Hey, you pervert, get away from that door!" is probably not a good choice. I can't really see far enough, well enough, to decide whether he is a threat. However, before I get the phone out for a little 9-1-1 action, I figure I ought to be prepared to answer when the dispatcher asks, "What is your emergency?".

So I grab my trusty binoculars and try to look out the window in such a way that if the pervert turns his head, he can't see that I'm looking at him through binoculars. And that's when I see...

...that he is just a life-size mannequin standing on the back porch. I first saw him Monday morning. He's still there, freezing his sorry butt off out there. I'm awfully glad I took a moment to use the binocs before I sent some of Montgomery County's finest over there with guns drawn and adrenaline all rushing. I can just see the headline in the local paper on *that* police report:

Nosy neighbor reports peeping tom in neighbor's backyard. Officers respond to find that both she & the alleged perpetrator are BIG DUMMIES.

Neighborly update

The bad news: The rain destroyed Sunny's web, and she disappeared. The rain also did quite a number on the white spider's web. (I'm calling the white spider Luna.)

The good news: Luna rebuilt.

The bad news: It rained again.

The good news: Luna rebuilt again, and Sunny came back, but put her web in a different place (up in the trees, not quite as high as Luna's web, but also not across the sidewalk. And not as spectacular. I think Sunny is a bit depressed about the whole rebuilding thing.)

The even better news: There's a third one, another yellow face, in the backyard.

The worst news of all: I went to shoot a portrait of the new spider and felt a familiar, unpleasant tingle on my toes. It suggested the spider's new name: Queen Elizabeth. She is surrounded by palace guards, having built her throne directly over a fire ant mound. Ow ow ow ow ow.

Ain't nature great?

Aliens among us

First came the weeds.

The stuff that Houstonians call grass is considered a 'weed' in anyplace that has real grass. I grew up with "real grass" in the Midwest, and I am pretty sure we did everything in our power to kill any St. Augustine 'grass' that came anywhere near the state of Illinois. We did it with weed killers: chemicals designed specifically to kill "alien plant species" and thicken up the good grasses.

Here in Houston, we thicken up this alleged grass and kill the even more annoying alien plant species. It is a miracle of chemistry that we can be so plant-specific about our killing, but then again, the Perm-O-Green folks just gave me an estimate today so we may find out next week that they just arbitrarily kill everything plant-like in the yard. This would probably not be the end of the world, since I'm fairly sure that more than 70% of the green stuff out there is non-grass. Scary.

Perm-O-Green promises only to kill the evil aliens that lurk among the St. Augustine, not the stuff that has taken over the front garden. So I spent this lovely, sunny Saturday afternoon yanking things out by the roots (and no, I don't mean gray hairs). The front garden now looks much better, but the Perm-O-Green guy said it badly needs a layer of mulch. The Mini is not particularly good at carrying such things, so it will wait until I can find new yard guys.

Because, you see, my yard guys are a different kind of aliens. There is no way (cough) for me to know whether they are legal or illegal aliens, but they are definitely not from 'around here.' Anyway, they last came in October, and they do not apepar to be coming back anytime soon. Meanwhile, the yard is looking a bit shaggy. I'd love to hire a neighborhood kid, but I have never seen one mowing in my neighborhood. Buying a lawnmower is, of course, totally out of the question. For now...

And then there is the final kind of alien, which is the little dog who I found in my backyard Thursday morning. I went out to encourage Lakrids to return to the house so I could go to work, and there she was, looking at this little brown alien. Seems Scooby (the neighbor's adorable, sweet white dog) has dug a hole under the fence, but he's still a little too large to get through it. Instead, Cowboy (the neighbor's annoying little yapping brown thing) squeezes through. Heh. The neighbor came over today to apologize & say they're fixing the hole. Heh. Naughty dogs are so cute when they are somebody else's !!

Minding the Gutter

Since I moved in here, I have been pretty sure that my neighbor on one side has his 'mind in the gutter' altogether too much. I don't mean he's a dirty old man, but rather that he seems to be on his roof twice a month cleaning the pine needles & leaves off the shingles & out of the gutters. I've surmised that he likes it up there because it gives him a good view of everybody else's backyard, but he does always seem to be actively working and not just spying when he's up there.

I moved here because I love the trees, but I do appreciate the downside of trees, especially in fall. When we did the inspection on the house, it was clear that the gutters needed some attention, but I didn't think they were so bad as to require 'cleaning the gutters' as a condition of moving in. And they were not a high priority fix, which is why I ignored them until yesterday.

We finally have a real fall weekend here, with low temperatures in the low 60s and highs 'just' in the mid-80s and humidity around 50% (compared with the usual mid-90s and 90%. This may sound like 'summer' to those in heat-challenged climates, but trust me, it's quite cool here, which has the added value of keeping the skeeters away.

So after totally wearing out the dog, I decided cleaning the gutters would be a good, useful activity that would allow me to continue to enjoy the great day. I grabbed the ladder, some gloves and a determined look, and headed up onto the roof.

I'm not afraid of heights/ladders, but that transition from the ladder onto the roof is a mental challenge. I also don't much like critters crawling on me or goo on my hands. But hey, I dug in.

Having never done this before, I don't know how much gunk accumulates in an average gutter per year, but if what I found was a mere year's worth of gunk, then I begin to understand my fastidious neighbor. Because I'm pretty sure that water has not actually flowed in any of these gutters at least since I bought the house and probably much longer than that.

That said, I have a wonderful pile of the most gorgeous mulch any gardener ever made. Because essentially, the gutters were a long, tubular compost heap.

I also have a new appreciation for the guys who do this for a living. Although I did not encounter any crawling critters, I did have to sidle up some fairly steep -- even for Monkey Girl here -- roof sections to clean off accumulations on the shingles. I also had to engineer a solution to reach the gutters on the front of the house, since the gorgeous landscaping & huge tree/bush things pretty much don't leave a lot of room for such plebian concerns as ladders and gutter cleaning. (This would be, I think, the reason those front gutters were totally packed with silt: Nobody could get to them.)

Floor!

Fireplace and reading room with old floor


Fireplace and reading room while they are still working


Fireplace and reading room after mom & the dog have gotten comfortable with the new floor & rug!


TV space & cool front window with the old floor


TV space and cool front window with the new floor & rug


When I look at these pictures in the preview mode of blogger, I realize it's hard to see the difference in colors between the floors. The old floor was very light and didn't look very much like "wood"; this is more rich & cherry-stained with more realistic graining and wood color variations. Maybe this photo shows it best, although I didn't copy over a similar one of the 'before':


Entry to the house with the new, darker floor

I'm thrilled with it :) I'm still mad at Home Depot for making me wait two months for it without any communication, but I'm happy that it's finally in. The installers that Home Depot subcontracted did a great job & were very professional, and that part, at least, went great.

I have a Floor!!!!

Without some photographic explanation, you will not understand how excited I am about having my new floor installed. Therefore, I open with the part that makes you say, "And you paid money for that house?!" Yes, the floor was a mess. The previous owner had installed it in hopes that it would gussy up the place for sale. Bummer that -- should have actually followed the installation instructions. (The empty boxes are there to keep the dog's paws & my toes from getting pinched between the pieces of laminate. Nice, eh?)


I won't go into the specifics of the problems, but suffice it to say that the floor was a mess. Not only that, but it was ... cheap. The seller did offer to have it repaired, but I said oh no, you just discount the house & then I can install what *I* want. So that's how it happened that I've been waiting since the end of May to have a floor.

On Friday morning, the guys from Sunshine Flooring -- subcontractors for Home Depot -- showed up to rip out the nasty, cheap laminate and install my pretty new floor (still laminate, but pretty and definitely not cheap). I was at work during this segment of the festivities, but mom reports that they had a jolly old time tearing it out.

What you really want to know is, is the new stuff beautiful?? Well, of course it is. More pix to come.

Floor update

The delivery dude for Home Depot showed up with a load of flooring on Saturday morning. (Not exactly between noon and dark, but I'm ok with it because it's HERE!) Unfortunately, it looked as if part of the delivery had not arrived.

I called Monday to find out about the missing stuff and scheduling the install, and I got more run-around: "Well, we can't even think about scheduling installation until we know you have everything. But the person who is in charge of deliveries is busy loading a truck so I will have to call you back." (sigh) No one called on Monday.

However, apparently on Tuesday morning they called mom (she thinks they like her local phone number better than my metro-Phoenix area code) to talk about the delivery and convince 'me' that I got everything. It's all there, inside those boxes somewhere, they assured mom.

So she had to come over to the house to look. Part of it she found, and part she did not find so she called them back -- and they hung up on her three times. This, of course, made her very, very happy, and she stormed off to the store to speak to a human. At the store, a human showed her what the 'missing' parts looked like, and yes, of course they were all mixed in with other parts that looked just like them.

So, with everything confirmed, mom managed to get a human being to actualy commit to coming to the house on Friday to rip out this nasty mess of improperly installed (by the previous owner) cheap flooring and come back Saturday to install my gorgeous new, sweet-looking floor.

Believe it? I guess we will find out this weekend!

Pix of the Renovation!

..

Master Bedroom, looking toward Master Bathroom
Before.........................................After
The "after" wall color is more correct on the photos below. You know how the camera flash & other stuff affects the color of the image...


..

Master Bedroom looking away from the Master Bathroom
Before.....................................................................After
(what you can't see in the "before" photo are the spots where the home seller tried to 'touch up' the walls to cover nail holes... with the wrong color paint.)


.. ..
Master Bathroom
Before..............................After


..
New draperies (sorry, I didn't take any Before photos but they were PINK -- EEK!)
Master Bathroom..............Master Bedroom



Mom on ladder, sponge-painting the bathroom

Stuff before I paint

I have one more small section of painting to finish (up in the soffit, ugh!), but before I do that, I just need to clear my brain a bit:

-- I don't understand why everybody is so annoyed with iTunes. I have it, and I listen to music purchased through iTunes all the time, in my car even. One way to do this is the way that Apple most wishes us to do so: buy an iPod. I have one and an FM transmitter gizmo that lets me listen to music through my normal car radio. The transmittter works better in the Mini than it did in the Camaro, either because of the location of the antenna or the age of the vehicle... Anyway, I could also buy an adapter for my car radio to plug the iPod right in as if it were a multi-CD box, but since the FM transmitter works great, I haven't bothered to do that -- yet. Another way to listen to my iTunes-purchased music in my car is -- duh -- burn a CD. That would make it just like every other music-purchase service on the planet. If I prefered to use some other means of listening to my music -- say, some off-brand mp3 player, I could even (gasp) rip the CD I burned from iTunes, and have perfectly usable mp3 files. Some wag will suggest that they can tell the difference between first- and second-generation copies of the music. I say those people who can tell the difference probably are not shopping on iTunes to get music all squished by Apple's proprietary compression scheme. So can someone explain what's the fuss here?

-- The US Surgeon General has finally noted something that children of smokers have known since forever: second-hand smoke makes people sick. Oh, and I saw another smoking-related story today about how quitting smoking can relieve symptoms of asthma. I'm sorry but I don't see how this could possibly be news to anyone. What I really want to know is, we have a dangerous DRUG that obviously harms people's health, and yet, we do not include it on our list of controlled substances. I don't get it. No, I do get it, but to me, the arguments for keeping cigarettes legal are very much the same as the ones for letting illegal aliens stay in the US: It would be too hard to stop it now that it's happening, so we will just talk about it a lot and hope it goes away. Right.

-- CNN Money says The Woodlands, TX, is #73 in the Best Places to Live. Their #1 choice, some place in Colorado, has crime statistics suggesting that just thinking about the city gets you robbed. How is that good?? Apparently people are willing to have a high likelihood of becoming a crime statistic, in return for a 15-minute commute. I don't get it, myself.

-- When I am done with this last dab of painting, I would like to go see Johnny Depp prance around in a pirate costume. Who's with me??

Paint and microwaves (no, not together)

In the master bedroom, Wall #1, behind the bed, is the colored wall -- blue. It's done and looks fabulous. Covering up the small section of Granite was no problem. The other walls will be the same color as the background color of the master bath walls (yellowish), and I should get a couple of those done today. Maybe all, but...

This house is perfect for me because it has a very small kitchen. To me, 'kitchen' is wasted square footage. When I was looking at new construction, I joked with a builder about whether he had any floor plans with no kitchen, just a microwave built in to the TV cabinet somewhere. He said I was not the first person to ask for something like that, but the problem is that mortgage companies are weird about 'resale' and don't think there's a big enough market for homes with no kitchen. Go figure.

Anyway, the stupid microwave that came with the house is officially non-working. Oh, it pretends to work. Lights come on, it makes noise, the turntable turns, but ain't no cookin' being done. Last night for dinner I made one of my famous Marie Callendar Chicken Pot pies. They are a staple of my diet for more than 10 years I think, and so it's like rote to hit the 5 min button, then eat. Last night after five mins my pie was still frozen in the middle. After 7 it was barely thawed. This morning, my warmed up coffee is almost warm-ish so I've made another whole pot of hot, fresh coffee.

(sigh)

The annoying thing is that the home warranty thing that the seller bought among the various closing goodies covers microwaves -- but only built-ins. Apparently the built-in one long since expired, and the one left behind is just a countertop model crammed in the built-in space.

Now the crazy part. Microwaves are like $50. (OK, microwaves that will last longer than the 45 days I've been in the house are more than that.) And I don't cook. But I got spoiled when I was in NY because the ex won a GE Advantium in some online contest. The Advantium is a combination convection(?)/microwave thing that make the most perfect chicken pot pies you can ever have. Naturally, the Advantium costs more than $50. The only thing that might save me some money here is the fact that I think the Advantium is too wide for the built-in space. I'll have to go look at them today. I don't mind pulling my dinner from the freezer every day but I do prefer to warm it up a bit first.

No Floor; No Surprise

No reader who has ever done home improvements will be surprised to hear that the floor did not arrive on Friday. Nor will it be a surprise that as of Thursday afternoon, it had not yet left the warehouse. (sigh) Maybe, they say, next Friday? I am hoping to have it before Christmas, but I'm not holding my breath. Meanwhile, the dog thinks the gaps in the existing floor are great places to hide her toys.

The bathroom looks GREAT, which means I suppose I should get off my butt and figure out how to re-size pictures on the Mac. Or install the new hard drive in the PC, but that just seems like so much frustration (reloading the OS? EEK! ) when I still have a whole room to paint. I may try to do that later after I get a coat of some paint on the wall in there.

Off to paint. There's a story about Lowe's "Granite" paint but I'll just summarize it by saying if you are not 100% sure you want it on your wall, don't do it, because once it's there, it is never coming off. Well, I *was* 100% sure, but then when I saw it... well, you know. At least I only did a small section up on the corner of the soffit. I am hoping the new normal paint will cover or that the shadows in the soffit will sort of make you wonder exactly what DID happen up there...