The First Sign of Autumn

06 Sep 2012 4 Comments

by Kay Hudson in Life Tags: ,

It’s the first week in September and still hitting the upper 90s every day.  There may be a “not so hot” front coming this weekend, but we have a good bit of summer left on the Texas Gulf Coast.

But autumn is coming.  Really.  This morning the first hurricane lily opened in my front yard.

I’m not much of a botanist, or even a gardener.  I mow the lawn, prune a few low hanging branches, do a little weeding, but I don’t grow flowers, not on purpose anyway. For many years I knew these flowers by the name my gardener neighbor calls them, naked ladies, because they pop up and bloom on bare stalks, with the folliage coming up later.  Then a year or two ago I saw an article in the Houston Chronicle identifying them as hurricane lilies.  That makes sense.  They reach their peak around the middle of September, as does the hurricane season here on the Gulf Coast.

Last year was extremely dry, and the lilies, which grow in a wide strip across my front yard near the street, put up a rather meager display.  This year we had a decent amount of rain through the late spring and summer, so I’m hoping they’ll do better.  There have been years when they were so thick that people stopped to take pictures, and others when they barely appeared.  Hurricane Rita blew them down a few years ago, even though she made landfall well to the east of Houston.  Hurricane Ike came right up Galveston Bay and smashed the flowers flat.

The hurricane lilies are survivors.  Their bulbs were in the yard when we moved into this house in 1976.  I have no idea how bulbs propagate, whether the flower I photographed this morning sprang from a forty-year-old bulb or a seventeenth-generation descendant.  They’re not buried very deeply, and I’ve never done a thing to them–except run my lawn mower over them.  Yet year after year they reappear, splashing my yard with red every September.

There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere, but I’m not going to look for it.   For the next couple of weeks, I’m just going to go out in the morning and admire the flowers.

Weird Weather in Houston?

10 Jan 2012 1 Comment

by Kay Hudson in Life Tags: , ,

Weird weather is nothing unusual around here.  If you don’t like the weather in Texas, they say, just wait an hour.  Or drive to the next county.  2011 was the driest year in memory, breaking records decades old, but recently we’ve had enough rain to feel almost normal, although we’re a long way from making up for the drought.  In fact, the meteorologists tell us that may go on for a few more years.

You wouldn’t have believed that yesterday, when the sky opened up and dumped enough water to turn urban streets to rivers.  We knew a storm was coming, but when I left my house about 8:15 the sky was not particularly threatening, and I made it into Houston about 9 with no more than a scatter of rain drops on my windshield.

Fifteen minutes later the rain hit, complete with more thunder and lightning than we’ve experienced in months.  At the Scorekeeper we typically have three computers, a fax machine, a copier, and a printer running.  And a couple of radios, maybe a TV, sometimes a microwave oven.  Sudden power outages are not fun, even with the computers connected to UPS boxes.  Remarkably little gets done around the office when the electricity goes off.

We were lucky Monday.  While the power went off in swaths all over the area, trapping people in elevators and fouling up the traffic lights, we never lost electricity.  But we almost lost the garbage bin.

It rained so hard, and so fast, that the street in front of the Scorekeeper turned into a river in half an hour.  We were keeping a collective eye on the situation, because it’s happened before.  Between the rising water and the idiots driving their SUVs down the street at forty miles an hour and throwing five foot wakes, a small car doesn’t stand much of a chance.  The old Ford I drove when I first came to work for Jo Anne back in 2003 nearly drowned in a sudden, unpredicted street flood (it still ran when I sold it a few months later, but the automatic seat belt never worked again), and my Corolla narrowly escaped another.  When we looked out the window Monday morning and realized that the heavy wheeled trash can was on its side and floating away from the foot of the driveway, we knew we had a problem.

Fortunately we also have Ha Tran, the third member of our office team, a young man who is always willing to take care of us.  He took off his shoes and socks, waded out into the flood to corral the renegade trash can, and moved my car to the safety of the driveway and his own to higher ground across the street.

We were lucky.  We watched the water rise in the street–and the front yard–and recede almost as quickly, from the safety of our offices.  Jo Anne’s sister-in-law spent a couple of hours stranded in a parking lot.  People around the city found themselves swimming away from their stranded cars and shovelling mud out of ground floor apartments.  (Click here for a slideshow of flood photos at the Houston Chronicle.)

This wasn’t the worst flood Houston has seen, not by a long shot.  Today was dry, and twenty degrees cooler.  If you don’t like the weather here, wait a little while.  It’ll change.  It always does.

 

Odd and Ends and Updates, Oh, My!

08 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment

by Kay Hudson in Books, Kindle, Technology, Writing Tags: , , ,

Business cards:  The business cards I ordered Saturday morning from Zazzle.com were waiting on my doorstep when I got home from work this evening, and they are exactly as ordered.  I’m very pleased.  I only ordered the basic one hundred cards, being cautious, but I certainly won’t hesitate to order more when I need them.

The trip to New York:  My neighbor, LaRue, has kindly offered to feed Nutmeg while I’m gone, so I won’t have to board the cat.  I’m sure she’d rather stay home alone than spend ten days in a cage at the vet’s.  LaRue will turn 82 on Friday, and I only hope I’m that healthy and active when I’m her age.  Heck, I hope I get to be her age.

As for shopping, I think I’ve got just about all the essentials.  Clothes, luggage, business cards, lists of small stuff.  I’m not going to the North Pole.  They have drugstores in New York City.  I can’t believe the RWA conference starts in less than three weeks.  Today I started making arrangements with my bookkeeping clients to be sure they have what they need while we’re gone.  Better make a list there, too.

Kindle shopping:  I’ve been checking out the top hundred free downloads for the Kindle regularly, and I’ve downloaded several novels from publishers offering backlist novels free to interest readers in following up with newer (paid) books by the same authors.  Yesterday I noticed a novel (Cotillion) by Georgette Heyer  on the list.  Regency England is not my period of expertise, not by a long shot, but as a writer of romance, I’m a bit embarassed to say that I’ve never read any of Heyer’s books.  When Sourcebooks plunged into the romance genre a few years ago, they republished some of Heyer’s books, and this is one of their editions.  When I went browsing again today, I found another Heyer novel (The Grand Sophy) for the princely sum of $1.99.  When I one-clicked that onto my Kindle, Amazon suggested I might want Nail Your Novel for $4.99.  The book had racked up 26 five-star reviews, so I risked five bucks on it.

Writing:  No progress whatsoever on the Work In Progress.  Apparently I’m having too much fun blogging, doing this when I should be writing a hundred words a day.  Or at least reading over the forty-one thousand I have, and figuring out which forty thousand more to add.  And in what order.

The weather:  Always a good subject.  Ours has been extreme, even for the Houston area.  105° on Sunday and Monday, an average high of 99° for the first week in June, an all-time record.  What’s it going to be like in August?  It hasn’t been quite that hot where I live, southeast of the city, near Galveston Bay, but it’s hot enough, and we’ve had no rain at all.  What little has fallen in the last few months has landed well to the north–while other parts of the country are under water.  Hardly seems fair.

But then the weather in Texas is seldom fair.  Broiling hot, freezing cold, Sahara-dry, hurricane-wet, but not plain old boring fair.  On Sunday afternoon when I was taking a walk in a blast furnace, a friend was hiding in a bank drive-through to protect his new car from a hail storm.  In the same county.  If you don’t like the weather in Texas, wait a few minutes.  It’ll change.

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