Sugar Rush

So, in every city, there is always that mythical neighborhood where kids talk about houses that give out full size candybars…and all the children flock there in hopes that they may one day be the recipient of a King Sized Snickers bar (retail $.33).  Kim and I live “there”.

Last night was a harrowing experience.  Have you ever had >1400 kids coming up to you asking for candy in the dead of night?  We have.

Our neighbors were nice enough to prepare us.  They said Halloween is a big deal on the street and to be prepared for a bunch of kids.  Kim and I got into the spirit and bought 4 mega-sized bags of candy from Target, a bubble fog machine (big hit all week with the kiddo), some fun treats like glow sticks and mini-Play-Doh, and scary decorations.  We thought we were prepared.

The kiddo went out trick-or-treating around 6:30, leaving me alone to give out treats.  It started out fun, I was keeping track of the number of kids coming to the door with notches on a piece of paper and having kids knock on the door.  By the time it was 6:45, the onslaught had begun, where I could no longer go to the piece of paper to write the notches.  By 6:50 I wrote a texted Kim a message saying “We might need some more candy”, by 7:00 the message was “We need more candy NOW”.  Kim got back allowing me to run to the store, buying 5 grocery bags worth of candy and making it home in time to replenish Kim when she got to the last handfull of candy.  At 7:30, we ran low again, leading to a second emergency trip to the store.  This time 6 grocery bags of candy.

I didn’t have the heart to make another trip to the store, so we let our supplies run out around 8:45, pulling together as a group to get the house looking completely dark…which didn’t stop several people from coming to the door and asking for candy.

The current estimate is over 1,400 kids received candy from us on Halloween.  With another 800 or so seeing a dark house.  Kim’s arm is a little sore from handing out candy and the voice is a little hoarse from saying “Happy Halloween” 12 times a minute.

We’re making plans for next year…we shall be prepared.  We might even throw in a couple of King Sized Snickers bars just to add to the myth.

Ike blows

A few of you might be aware that there’s a bit of a storm outside of Houston.  All I know is the weather has been pretty decent today, the temperature isn’t too high, nice breeze, occasional sprinkles.  The roads are clear.  El Rey was a little busy for lunch, but not too bad (no rotisserie chicken plate sadly).

We’re “hunkering down” here, which is basically what the city recommends.  Allowing the folks in Galveston and near the flood plains to “get the fuck out” (paraphrasing the mayor).  We’ve set up Murrow’s room as the “safe room”, by boarding up the only window in the room.  The plan is to put the kiddo to sleep as normal today, hoping he’ll sleep through the majority of the storm.  Kim and I will be sleeping in the hallway.

The house is a pretty sturdy 20’s bungalow, so its seen plenty of these.  Our only real worry at this point is tree limbs…but most of these trees have seen their fair share of storms too.

For those watching the storm from afar, be prepared to see lots of videos of flooding, homes washed out, etc.  That will not be our home.  We’re out of the way of the flooding problems, we’ll be the folks who are picking up debris and bitching about how hot it is without the air conditioner, since the power will likely be out.

We should have plenty of water, our camping gear, a good amount of food, an inverter for the car to provide some power, etc.  We’re just hoping that AT&T’s towers don’t get toppled…because otherwise we’ll be out of internet…and very cranky.

If you’re following the storm, there’s only 2 places to check (please ignore everything else):

http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/hurricanes/ike/
and
http://www.stormpulse.com

We’ll post, twitter, email, etc as we can.

Making some sense

A quick break in the general grousing about Houston, to bring you 2 things that actually make some real sense down here:

1. Tax Free Weekend – This is one of those very targetted tax breaks that actually makes some sense in the real world.  Basically, one weekend right before school starts Texas removes the sales tax for clothing items under $100.  This amounts to an 8% sale on school clothing, in addition to whatever sale the retailer is offering.  The retailers win, working families win, plus the state gets a nice boost of goodwill.  It also provides a convenient excuse to me to avoid the shops because of overcrowding.
2. Electricity de-regulation – With the necessary switch from dirty fuels like coal, nuclear, and oil power companies need to be in competition to induce change.  Offering 100% renewable energy for a low price now becomes an competitive advantage and differentiator.  Kim and I will be cooling our home down to a cozy 52 degrees using 7 air conditioning units, powered by 100% wind power.

This almost makes up for the ass-hot summers, the 99% humidity, the lack of decent radio, the lack of an (above-ground) downtown, the megatropolis apartment complexes in historical neighborhoods, hurricanes, smog, insane highways, cell-phone obsessed drivers, huge crunchy bugs, tiny annoying bugs, and freaking 2.6% recycling rate.

Good Music, Where Art Thou?

It’s been a couple months and we’re still struggling, trying to find a radio station that doesn’t have us constantly reaching for the dial.

There’s your requisite Top 40 stations that play the same five songs every hour. There are some hip hop stations which we wouldn’t mind except that the state of commercial hip hop is pretty dismal right now. The rest of the dial seems to be taken up by big-talking proselytizers. Even the local NPR affilliate annoys us with it’s clasical music to news ratio.

The best thing I’ve heard on the radio of late is the Miley Cyrus pop diddy, and I’m pretty sure I’m not being ironic. It’s just been so long since I heard something I actually liked on the radio, it’s kind if hard to tell anymore.

There IS this one college radio station that I really tried to like. But it was a lot of world music. Ambient stuff. Random things banging together with a microphone in the room. I’m sure it’s been called interesting and avant garde, maybe even worth listening to. But it certainly isn’t enjoyable.

There was a time I tiraded against the indier-than-thou, where-the-music-matters-ness of Seattle’s KEXP. Now we’re just trying to jimmie up a solution to get out iPhones to stream it in the car.

Occassionally we’ll be in a coffee shop or some place reasonably hip and they’ll be playing decent, newish music, and we’re left wondering how people here ever find out about bands that AREN’T dating Pamela Anderson.  The search continues…

Reduce, Reuse, and Throw it Away

I had thought recycling programs like the one in Seattle were the norm. Until we moved here. This article in the New York times pretty much sums it up.

On-Ramp, Off-Ramp

We’re getting used to finding our ways around, at least in the central/western parts of town. The surface streets are bumpy, but generally pretty navigable. This is helped by the fact that half of the streets seem to be arterial, meaning there’s no shortage of LARGE streets to get you around town. Which is good, because I find the highway system to be completely unmanageable. It’s as if, when they were cobbling together the highways here, all they had at their disposal were a bunch of on- and of-ramp pieces. So every quarter-mile on the highway, it seems, you’re faced with a decision of whether to stay on the highway you’re currently on, merge on to one of several other highways (all at the same time), or get the hell off (generally my choice).

You know the Mercer weave, where you have to move over something like ten lanes in the space of a half mile? Well, imagine you’re doing that just to stay on the same highway you’re already on, every mile or so, and for the rest of your life. And keep in mind that the major highway here is actually a ginormous loop around the city, so you really are doing it for the rest of your life.

A Different World

One of my former employers used to say that Seattle is a city of neighborhoods. Now, I always thought that to be a pretty ridiculous statement. Of course it’s a city of neighborhoods. EVERY city is made of neighborhoods. But if Seattle is a city of neigborhoods, that makes Houston the city of segregated neighborhods.

There’s your black neighborhoods, your Latino neighborhoods, your super rich neighborhoods, the neighborhood with all the museums, the neighborhood with all the medical facilities. I know, I know, you’re thinking “Seattle has all those neighborhoods, too.” True, but it’s just so much more marked here.

The Asian neighborhood, for example, is miles and miles of strip malls (everything comes in strip mall form here), all emblazoned with vietnamese lettering and chinese characters. You can go for blocks without seeing a sign in English. This gem of a sign was spotted at the entrance to Hong Kong Market, which is arguably better and definitely bigger than our beloved Uwajimaya. Not sure what a pop pop is that isn’t already covered by the other no nos on the list. But the sign is just so comically stereotypical…

Someone told us before we left for Houston that there are like five different downtowns here. I wasn’t sure what to make of that statement then, but he was right. If you were to try to judge your location by looking for the typical highrise skyline, you’d be in trouble because there are several stands of skyscrapers around town, all miles apart, and all, well, ugly. This is, evidently, what happens in a land with no zoning codes.

Too … Much … Sun

So I got my eyes dilated yesterday. This was not a new experience for me. Usually I tear off the oh-so-attractive shades they give me and power through the next few hours, squinting at text and being, generally, unaffected by the whole thing.

Evidently I’ve never had my pupils dilated in a place with sun before.

When I walked out of the optometrist’s yesterday and detached the stick-on shades from my face… Well, I can’t say for sure, but I might actually have pulled the I’m-a-vampire-shielding-my-burning-eyes-from-the-holy-sun recoil maneuver.

Watching the Sky

First of all, I still check the Seattle forecasts, and all I see is clear skies. If you check Houston’s you’ll see lots of clouds, lots of rain and lots of lightning.

Of course, whereas a gray day in Seattle is actually several days of constant cold and drizzle, a gray day in Houston rarely lasts more than a couple hours… but with torrential rains.

Here’s something I hear a lot in radio and tv forecasts… “with a fifty percent chance of scattered thunderstorms.” Now, this gives me several points to ponder. (1) Is there ANY value to a prediction that is going to be wrong half the time? (2) What is a NON-scattered thunderstorm? And (3) predicting the weather in Houston might just be as easy a gig as it is in Seattle.

Of course, there’s this pesky little thing known as the tropical depression turned tropical storm turned hurricane, which I’ve avoided thinking about until now. I think this would qualify as a non-scattered thunderstorm.

It’s looking like the hurricane will pass about 300 miles south of us, but we should get PLENTY of rain and miscellaneous storminess. And the odd tornado warning.

One final observation… People actually carry umbrellas here. The big ones, with the big chrome pain-inflictor at the tip. Being caught in the rain here is no minor thing, evidently.

Bug Crunch

When we announced we were moving to Houston, everyone warned us about the heat and bugs here. I was pretty much in denial about all of it.  The heat accosted us the moment we walked off the airplane. But I had to spend an entire day here before stepping on something very crunchy.  I mean, it sounded and felt like I’d stepped on a taco shell.  

Remember when Homer’s toaster sends him back to some pre-historic age and he swats and kills some monstrous, ginormous bug?  Well, it was exactly like that, but grosser.  Still not sure exactly what kind of bug it was, besides large.  

Then there was the cockroach in our apartment.  A big, brown, well-endowed-in-the-antennae-department thing that Gary killed and left in the laundry area for a few days before finally disposing of it. I really hate bugs.