Prepoceros

My apartment still doesn’t have internet. Yesterday afternoon I called AT&T to see if I could get an estimate on how much longer it would be out. The guy spent a few minutes looking it up—he seemed surprised that there were so many outages in my area, despite my having started the conversation with “I’m in Houston, and my internet has been out since the hurricane.” I guess they didn’t brief the call center folks on the weekend’s events and likely consequences, leaving them to learn from callers.

He described something that sounded like a double failure, where something further down the line would have to be fixed before they could work on my issue, and he couldn’t estimate when I’d have service again. I guess there’s a rule that they can’t let anyone off the phone without helping at all, because he left me with, “What you can do is watch that blinking red light next to ‘Broadband.’ When it turns green, your internet is working again.” Awesome, thanks.

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[Written Monday Sept. 15, 12:45 PM. Posted who knows when.]

As expected, we lost power early Saturday morning. My building was one of the lucky ones—we got it back midday Sunday. Even now, on Monday afternoon, much of Houston is still blacked out. Downtown is closed, a few major roads and freeways are underwater, and most businesses have yet to reopen. I drove around for half an hour this morning before I found an open Einstein’s Bagels*. I’m still on the hunt for that elusive combination of an open business that also has wireless internet access. My home internet is still down; the post I wrote early Saturday was the last bit of internet I’ve seen.

Ice is the hottest commodity in the city right now. Very few of the grocery stores that reopened yesterday afternoon had any, and the ones that got an overnight shipment are quickly running out. I went and stood in line at Kroger partly for kicks, and partly because I was out of cookies. They were on generator power, so they let about fifty people into the store at a time and lined everyone else up outside. When I got there the line was about a hundred people long, but it moved quickly, so that I only had to wait twenty minutes to get inside.

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In the face of an advancing storm, it’s generally a good idea to clear any items sitting around outside that might end up coming through your windows. If you have a good amount of patio furniture you can follow UH’s lead and pull it all into an interior hallway.

In a pinch, if you don’t have much extra room indoors, you can do what my apartment complex did and just pre-tump the furniture into the bushes before the wind gets a chance to.

The apartment folks also left everything in the open-topped dumpster (and the small appliances and other debris sitting near it) right where it was, i.e., next to my car. Even though the junk is inside a wooden enclosure, I’m not so thrilled about this plan.

In related news, the wind is supposed to increase steadily from now until 5 AM, when it will top out at a sustained 60-70 mph. John’s still fast asleep, lucky dog, but I’m thinking I might have to make mine up in naps tomorrow.

Lucky for me the power’s still on, so at least I have something to do besides sit in the dark and listen to the trees flop around. Most of the people in my apartment complex have stayed, it looks like, and a few of them have been sitting out in the outdoor-but-covered bit of the courtyard since dinnertime.

We’re definitely seeing rain now; I think it started around 10. I just found out on CNN that a curfew’s been ordered for Harris County from 7:00 tonight (as in five hours ago) to 6:00 Sunday morning. Who knew? I don’t think I’ve ever been under a daytime curfew before. I wonder how widespread the enforcement is. What if I go out in the rain, say into the street, but I PROMISE not to loot anything. Is that okay? Are newspeople exempt? What about ordinary citizens imitating newspeople?

I think I’m getting a little nauseated and headachey from anxiety, which I hadn’t expected, though maybe I should have. Not much to do for it but distract myself, so here I am. Man, it’s gonna suck if (when) we lose power and internet. We won’t even be able to follow the progress of the storm any more, beyond what we can see out the windows—we’ll have to read about it later.

Though really, since we don’t have TV and haven’t turned on the radio, we’ve been almost entirely unexposed to Ike-mania so far. We follow the radar pictures online and occasionally see what CNN’s deemed fit to announce, but I have yet to see a single slicker-clad reporter on a beach. In some ways I think we’re missing out on part of the cultural experience, but in others…meh. The storm itself is experience enough, regardless of any cutesy catchphrases the news stations invent.

Still no rain, but the wind has kicked up to a respectable level. I managed to get Sam to go poop already (he HATES rain and won’t go out in it)—a major victory.

Absolutely everything is closed now, so people are just wandering around outside to watch the bands of clouds roll by and chat with their neighbors. It’s disappointing that Ike will come ashore in the middle of the night, so that we won’t see the most exciting parts of it. If the eye is predicted to track over us, though, we’re setting an alarm. Seriously.

We took a walk along Buffalo Bayou earlier in the afternoon. It appeared to be up a foot or so already—probably the biggest sign we’ve seen on the ground yet that there’s anything more than a front coming through.

…and the power just blinked off twice. Ooooh, this doesn’t look good. I was hoping it would at least last until bedtime. Don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me for a while, though.

Many non-essential businesses have closed, including our favorite tapioca tea place, which had shut down three hours before we got there last night. Argh. I mean, I knew the storm would be rough, but I didn’t think I’d have to get through it without those tasty tapioca balls.

Gas stations, too, are closing as they run out of gas, much as they did before Rita. I’d have thought, with more people staying put this time around, that the majority of the stations might still be open right up until the storm hit, but maybe they all operate so just-in-time-ly that *any* run on gas is enough to crash the system. I’m drawing my conclusions from an admittedly small sample size of the three gas stations I’ve observed, but surely that’s representative enough.

The weather here is still lovely—sun, blue skies, 82 degrees. If it weren’t for those scary satellite photos, we’d all be planning picnics this weekend.

I really hope the eye comes right over us. That’s not the best thing to wish for, I guess, but come on, how neat would that be? I’ve never been in the eye of a hurricane before. Supposedly it’s pretty amazing, right up until the eye wall smashes your roof in.

There’s not much left to do around here except sit and wait, so that’s what we’re doing. We’ll probably take a good walk later in the morning. Maybe I’ll go to the grocery store and take pictures of the empty shelves again—for some reason that fascinates me.

I woke up this morning to a radio broadcast of a press conference by Mayor White and Judge Emmett about Ike’s progress and the city’s plans. The gist was that yes, it looks like it’s coming straight for us, but everyone without special needs who does not live in one of the few zip codes under mandatory evacuation should shelter in place, dear God, SHELTER IN PLACE. By the way, we’ve been telling you for months to get your hurricane supplies ready, so it’s not our fault if you get to the store and there’s no bottled water left.

All indications are that this will be the worst direct hit on Houston since 1983’s Alicia, though it’s likely to cause less damage than piddly little Tropical Storm Allison, which stalled and dumped rain until people started drowning in elevators and parking garages, and keeping your hospital’s generators in the basement suddenly didn’t seem like a good idea any more.

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While cycling to school, John found a brand new “sport psychology” textbook in the middle of the road. There was no hint as to who owned it or how it got into the street, so he brought it home. Before he shipped it off to the person who bought it from him on Amazon (not in College Station—he checked), I flipped it open and found a passage full of marvelously ridiculous acronyms.

Here are a few choice snippets from the thousand-word section titled “Basking in Reflected Glory.” I swear I’m not making this up.

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So I’ve been in law school for a week, and I bet you’re ready to hear all about it, right? Ha!

So far I’ve been a strict compartmentalizer. There is school, which happens in and around the law building from 8:30 to 6:00 four days a week (and 9:30 to noon on Fridays), there is not-school, which happens at other places during other times, and never the twain shall meet. The only not-school things I do during the school day are occasionally check email and answer important calls, and when I go home, I leave all my books in my carrel.

It’s then something of an open question which category blogging about law school falls into. Okay, so maybe it’s pretty obvious that telling the internet *about* school doesn’t help me *do* school one bit, but maybe I’m looking for an excuse not to recount my first week in detail tonight, mkay?

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This afternoon I was sitting on a patio outside the law school when a little boy, five-ish years old, walked right up to me and announced, “My name is Tigger. T-I-Double G-E-R, that spells Tigger!”

“Yes it does,” I said, being rather untalented at interacting with small children. I was afraid I was going to have to figure out if he was lost, but then his mother appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Dylan, please come carry your bag.”
“My name is—”
“Tigger, please come carry your bag.”

Dylan/Tigger got the bag as requested, then came back over to me and said “[mumble mumble] T-T-F-N! T-T-F-N! Ta ta for now! Ta ta for now!” before scurrying off.

“Bye!” I said, again lamely.

The only place I’ve ever seen TTFN is on a dorky list of “IM abbreviations” that my dad used to have taped to the side of his monitor. It listed the standard LOL, ROFL, etc., but it also included some weird ones (BG = big grin, FIIOOH = forget it, I’m out of here) that I couldn’t believe anyone ever used. The list seemed to be designed to make parents look silly.

But now I’m wondering . . . is TTFN/”ta ta for now” a standard thing people type/say? Is it a Tigger thing? Is there a TV show on which Tigger spells his name and then yells “TTFN! Ta ta for now!”? Maybe the kid is just an enthusiastic speller and collector of acronyms.