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!

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:

More eagles

Here's dad (or mom?) eagle looking regally into the new 70-300mm lens from a tree near the Carlton Woods clubhouse.

The eagles were all in different trees today, but all looking over the lake on the 18th hole at the Carlton Woods Country Club. This one was mostly down near the south end of the lake (clubhouse/green) but s/he did a few fly-arounds (soaring photo below). 

Rumor has it that Junior has been out of the nest on occasion, but he did not make any moves in that direction while we were out.  

Although Junior was steadfastly boring, mom (dad?) seemed to be working on her tan, or acting as scarecrow, or just showing off her lovely feathers in a dead tree pretty far around the lake from where we were standing. 

The new lens is great, but there is quite a learning curve for using it Among other things, I'm going to need a heavy-duty tripod. (sigh) Why does every new hobby quickly turn into a money pit? 

Happy Family

Just a couple of photos of the eagles who have taken up residence on the edge of the 18th hole at Carlton Woods Country Club.

We begin with mom & dad, who actually look like bald eagles, with all the proper adult feather coloring. They are sitting, regally, on a tree branch overlooking the lake where they occasionally fish for their own dinners & for Junior. 

I was out on the golf course with my mom, and we agreed that the mom & dad birdies sort of look frazzled and weary. You get the impression, from watching them, that they are wondering, "How long before Junior starts catching his own dinners, or maybe moves out and gets a job?"

 Junior is in the enormous nest, in the next tree over, looking like a bird but not much like an eagle. I'm told that they get the white head feathers as they age. 

These are very cropped in (100%) images from my new camera, shot with a 40-150 zoom lens. I've also ordered a 70-300 zoom, which I hope will be here on Monday. So although mom & dad eagle are wishing Junior would fly the coop, I'm sort of hoping he waits one last weekend.

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.

"Sunny" is back

Last one, I promise. A big thunder-boomer is about to smack the area. I'm afraid my new neighbors may lose their homes (cry).

Anyway, all this photography has been fun. It will be interesting (or sad) to see what the thunderstorm does to the webs. If the webs are destroyed, it will also be interesting (and fun) to see how long it takes for the spiders to rebuild (preferably not across the sidewalk...)

Lunch with the new neighbor

I went back out around noon to find Sunny missing from her web and the white spider happily welcoming some very unhappy critter to his (her?) web. I think it's a fly -- you can sort of see a wing in the green-background photo below. I came out while the white spider was busily preparing it for lunch. The web has a few good rips, but the spider doesn't seem to mind. I imagine it doing the equivalent of spider whistling while s/he works.




For what it's worth, the camera for all of these & most of the rest is a Panasonic DMC-FX07. Some of the shots in the other blog entries may have been taken with my Olympus C-50. The Olympus has a little more in the way of manual adjustments for f-stops, etc., but it's a bit older & has been dropped a few times, so it has "issues." I don't use the digital zoom on these cameras, so everything you see here is max 3x zoom.... so yes, I'm really close to the spiders.

More spiders

The morning visit with the new arachnid neighbor turned up the exciting development that there are, in fact, two new neighbors: the yellow one with the enormous web across the sidewalk (photo, right), and a white one with a smaller, more subdued web up near the roofline (photo, below). By "smaller" I mean it's only about 1 foot across. (The web, not the spider, heh!)

I've been shooting my new neighbors since dawn-ish and have discovered that my cheap, compact tripod is not quite up to the task of capturing spiders that live more than 4 feet off the ground. However, that's the beauty of digital photography: You can shoot 200 images, delete 190 of them and still feel good about your "skill."

A professional photographer friend of mine says he hates digital photography for that reason. Once upon a time, an amateur had almost no chance of getting a good shot because they were always afraid of wasting film. Now... I can shoot more than 1,000 6-megapixel images onto my 4-GB memory card. So what if I shoot 25 pictures of the same spider? Surely, one will be in focus! And I might actually get a well-framed shot by accident!

(at right, the yellow spider's web across the front walk) Anyway, I was out there this morning shooting close-up portraits of the yellow spider (named Sunny after my car, for her charming disposition and her big smiles for the camera), with the camera on the tripod about 3 inches from the web. I was merrily snapping along when a wasp hit the web and scared the daylights out of me. Sunny was not happy at the intrusion either, as I think the web is made to capture smaller prey, like mosquitos (which is why I like having it there!) It was one of those "little seen in nature" events and it didn't take long enough to get the camera re-focused -- the wasp got away cleanly (perhaps with a bit of a fright), and the web was no worse for wear.


(Above, the backside of the yellow spider) My human neighbor came out in the yard later, and mentioned having seen us in the front yard the night before. I explained about my new pets (heh) and he came over to take a look. He is not a big fan of spiders, having walked into too many such webs strug across his own front walk. (Been there, done that. You wonder for days afterward whether you still have a spider living in your hair...) But he admitted he'd never noticed how beautiful the webs are, and said he appreciated my letting him meet the new neighbors -- from a distance. And he was glad they are at *my* house rather than his. Heh!

I shot a gazillion photos, and I put the best of them on Shutterfly. (below, yellow spider's web from the back, showing the "warning stripes" at the edges of the web -- the curved "dotted line" on the right side. According to one of the Web sites I read last night, the warning stripes may be designed to keep birds from smacking the web and tearing it to smithereens.)

New neighbor

A couple of families have moved into the rental houses on my street, but the coolest new neighbor lives in my own yard. A member of gasteracantha cancriformis seems to have built a new living space across my front walkway, which may or may not be the best idea s/he ever had.

G. cancriformis, as you may guess, is a spider. The "cancri" part of its name comes from the fact that the spider has what appears to be a 'crab' body. I know this because mom & dad & I went out to photograph the spider & its enormous web earlier this evening with little success. It was dark, and we're not exactly professionals at this. (I'll try again in the morning....)

The one photo that did sort of come out is shown above, a very close-up of the spider in the center of its amazing web. The web itself is a couple of feet across and dotted with brilliant white streaks. It's truly a work of art that I hope to be able to share.

Until I saw the photo all cropped for show & tell, I thought we were dealing with one of the much larger Texas banana spiders (Argiope aurantia), but those are much larger and scarier than this little guy/gal. Anyway, this one is plenty big enough.

I'll try in the morning for some better shots of the beautiful web. I picked up a few hints off the Web (Google: "how to photograph spider webs").

By the way, these spiders apparently come in a variety of colors. I'm not sure why this one has chosen to match my lovely yellow Mini heh

No gain?

It's now two days since the 2:08, and I have not had any pain. If you live by the 'no pain/no gain" rule, then I wasted two hours of my Sunday, but two hours of sunshine is always good. Unless you live by the 'avoid sun or die of skin cancer" rule, in which case I really had a bad Sunday.

The ankles, in particular, didn't care one whit about the bike ride. In fact, riding a bike is the one exercise that my doctor actually recommended if I felt a need to sweat. It's non-weight-bearing and really has very limited ankle movement (some, but nothing like the elliptical machine), so as far as the ankles are concerned, the bike ride was a non-event.

I'm thinking about getting a new seat, and sometimes I think about getting a new bike. Then I look at the bike and the seat and think, "You have a perfectly good seat on a perfectly good bike. And you have another bike in the corner over there. Stop this nonsense immediately." The practical Smukke is not nearly as much fun as the silly Smukke, but she does have a nice house.

Bike #2 is a mountain bike. The ex & I bought a pair of these one year as an anniversary gift. I rode mine once & realized I hate mountain biking. I rode it a few more times after that but I really do not like being out of control, having roots, ruts and gravel grabbing my wheel & trying to tip me over, and having constant threats of pain & worse. When I was explaining this to my boss at the office today, he pretty much summed up the mountain bike experience: "If you aren't bleeding when you get home, you didn't have fun."

The bike is a few years older than the snazzy, shiny thing on the Trek site, and it's bright yellow. It's actually not bad for geocaching because it does allow you to follow nice trails off into recreational areas where geocachers like to hide things. However, it's not nearly as much fun in a daily basis as a road bike, which can take you to the grocery store for milk, the library for a new load of books, or over to mom & dad's with the paper.

My road bike is a sweetheart, but she's a hybrid road/touring bike, a Trek 400. When I went to look for a link, I found it under "vintage steel road bikes." (sigh). I bought her in the late 1980s when I was living in NJ and needed to replace my 9000-lb Sears monster. She has ridden innumerable centuries (100 miles in a day), one double century (200 miles in a day) and across the US (LA to Boston, but no, not in a day). She's a hard worker, is happy to carry panniers (which I use almost all the time to carry stuff) and has no problems. She is not as shiny as she once was, and she is not a color I would choose on purpose, but I can't really justify replacing her.

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 !!

Playing with the Mac :)

Macs are fun :) See Plasq for more information about the ComicLife software I used to make this little window into my day. I can't seem to convince Blogger to publish it big enough to read it on my screen, but if you click on the image, it will open as a larger (i.e., readable) image.



(Yes, there's a fire in the fireplace. It's freakin' cold here. The Martian -- who is due here on Friday -- reports that it's colder in Houston than in Denmark. That just ain't right.)

I'm still playing with the 30 days of free trial on the Comic Life, but it is fun so far: