dsandler.org

I hadn’t planned to post anything here until after a modest redesign, but nature has forced my hand.

So there’s this hurricane. It’s kind of a big deal—currently forecast to be nearly as large as Katrina, if not her equal, and currently on a beeline for Houston/Galveston. Dr. Masters of the Weather Underground projects damage in the tens of billions of dollars as a result of a massive storm surge and damaging Category 4 winds at landfall.

I don’t expect to update dsandler.org a whole bunch; instead I’ll be posting to Twitter over the course of the next few days as E and N and I shelter in place down in Sugar Land with the in-laws. We’re likely to be slightly closer to the center of the storm, but on much higher ground, with access to more resources (larger vehicles, a generator, more people to watch the Boy, etc).

With any luck, this will be just another Adventure to tell and re-tell. “You know, you lived through a major hurricane, when you were just two months old…”

Source: Weather Underground

In 2004 E and her mom read about the Ballunar Liftoff Festival, an annual hot air balloon/race/get-together, down at the NASA Johnson Space Center (about 45 minutes’ drive southeast of here on I-45). On a whim, the three of us got up early on a Sunday morning, got drive-thru coffee and breakfast, and drove down to Nassau Bay to see the sky full of balloons.

We drove up and down Nasa Road 1 to chase them. Not knowing where they were headed, we ducked into some subdivision (which we have since been unable to find on the map—Brigadoon Estates, maybe?) just in time to see a few of them passing low—including this guy:

We offered him coffee; he said he’d really love some, but if he touched (anything in contact with) the ground he’d be disqualified.

2005’s Sunday morning launch was cancelled due to a storm that tore through the balloon crew camps. Weather wasn’t a problem the following year, as you can see from my roll of photos from the 2006 event.

This year, however, commitments with family and friends took priority. We’ll be back in ‘08, for sure, but in the meantime here are some of the best photos already posted to Flickr by other photographers (who made it to yesterday’s launch):

More in the Ballunar Flickr group’s photo pool.

The temperature in Houston should drop nearly 20° in the next couple of hours:

Through noon…rain with embedded showers and thunderstorms will continue moving eastward across the area as a strong cold front moves on through. Rainfall amounts should generally average around 1/4 inch…with localized totals around 1 inch possible with the stronger and slower moving storms. Expect temperatures to fall into the lower 60s and possible the mid to upper 50s within an hour or two after frontal passage. It will be breezy too…with the strongest winds and wind gusts developing across the coastal counties.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority board voted today on a Richmond-Wheeler route for its controversial University light rail line. But that was almost an anticlimax: It also voted to put light rail — not Bus Rapid Transit — on all five planned lines.

“We now feel we can pass federal muster (to obtain 50 percent funding) by going to light rail on all five lines at once,” board chairman David Wolff said. “We can’t help but believe that people will be thrilled by it.”

Today’s news is equally welcome and surprising. Mas, y mas.

“The first thing you have to do when remediating a gas station,” the daughter of an environmental lawyer said to me, “is take out the underground gas tanks.”

I think it looks like a hatch out of “Lost.” Or a breaching sandworm.

[taken at the defunct Conoco, San Jacinto at Alabama]

Houston has apparently moved to a “hurricane? what hurricane?” posture now that Dean’s trajectory has leveled off and will be taking it far south of us. Oh, well.