Update.
Morning, all.
Not a whole lot to report today. Yesterday I spent a couple hours in the car, which was good. We have a feeding center in a town called Uvalde, for local flood victims. Local to Uvalde, that is – Uvalde is eighty-six miles from San Antonio. Something like twenty-one counties in Texas have been affected so far, maybe more. . . The drive was all wet and mucky and almost entirely accomplished on US Highway 90. I actually prefer the US Highways to the Interstate, I don’t know why. I’ve never gotten lost or missed an exit while riding the old US Highways. This particular one went through a number of small towns with names like ‘Knippa’ and ‘D’hanis’ and ‘Sabinal’, where you knew you were approaching a town because the speed limit dropped from 70 to 55, then 50, then 40. There was a sign in Knippa that said ‘Go ahead and blink, Knippa is bigger than you think’, and that was true, but overall most of the US 90 towns I passed were pretty tiny.
Not that I object. I liked the drive. I got to be away from the office. I got to install a computer system at the new feeding center site, the Uvalde town fairgrounds. They had an amazing number of flies for a building nowhere near a stable (my baseline for ‘almost but not quite enough flies to qualify as a Plague of Egypt’ is a horse stable with about twenty horses in August), but they didn’t seem to be the biting kind, so I just installed the computer and chatted with our volunteers. I keep forgetting how big this country is, how different things are. . . they were absolutely shocked when I pulled our road map software up and showed them where I lived. They couldn’t see where New York was, because the highway markings made the whole thing look like one tangled nest of blue and green snakes (blue for ordinary interstates, green for toll roads) – oh, and when I told them the green was toll highways they looked at me like I’d grown another head. Forgot, they don’t much believe in tolls out here. One of the older gentlemen asked me if I was going buggy yet, ‘what with the snakes and insects and all, you must not get a lot of that in the city where you live’. . . I pulled up Great Swamp on the map, pointed it out to him, and told him about the snakes, frogs, deer, etc. that lived there. I didn’t bother telling him I live on a piece of property with its back to a forest full of white-tails, raccoons, rabbits, hawks and so on, or that a few months ago a black bear wandered into the local university and got loose in one of the campus buildings.
Eventually I got back to HQ, and was there for about 45 minutes when they made the announcement: gas leak, get out of the building. I grabbed my vest and my purse and my car keys, mostly on instinct, and headed out. Sure enough, after about five minutes’ milling around in the lot we were told to go home and come back in the morning, so I got a little time off yesterday. Spent it reading the last two books of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which was absolutely wonderful, and eventually drove back to Whole Foods for pumpernickel, cheese, and ginger ale for dinner.
So all in all, yesterday went well. I just wanna come home now. I’ll be out-processing on the twenty-fourth. Should be flying home on the twenty-fifth.
Not a whole lot to report today. Yesterday I spent a couple hours in the car, which was good. We have a feeding center in a town called Uvalde, for local flood victims. Local to Uvalde, that is – Uvalde is eighty-six miles from San Antonio. Something like twenty-one counties in Texas have been affected so far, maybe more. . . The drive was all wet and mucky and almost entirely accomplished on US Highway 90. I actually prefer the US Highways to the Interstate, I don’t know why. I’ve never gotten lost or missed an exit while riding the old US Highways. This particular one went through a number of small towns with names like ‘Knippa’ and ‘D’hanis’ and ‘Sabinal’, where you knew you were approaching a town because the speed limit dropped from 70 to 55, then 50, then 40. There was a sign in Knippa that said ‘Go ahead and blink, Knippa is bigger than you think’, and that was true, but overall most of the US 90 towns I passed were pretty tiny.
Not that I object. I liked the drive. I got to be away from the office. I got to install a computer system at the new feeding center site, the Uvalde town fairgrounds. They had an amazing number of flies for a building nowhere near a stable (my baseline for ‘almost but not quite enough flies to qualify as a Plague of Egypt’ is a horse stable with about twenty horses in August), but they didn’t seem to be the biting kind, so I just installed the computer and chatted with our volunteers. I keep forgetting how big this country is, how different things are. . . they were absolutely shocked when I pulled our road map software up and showed them where I lived. They couldn’t see where New York was, because the highway markings made the whole thing look like one tangled nest of blue and green snakes (blue for ordinary interstates, green for toll roads) – oh, and when I told them the green was toll highways they looked at me like I’d grown another head. Forgot, they don’t much believe in tolls out here. One of the older gentlemen asked me if I was going buggy yet, ‘what with the snakes and insects and all, you must not get a lot of that in the city where you live’. . . I pulled up Great Swamp on the map, pointed it out to him, and told him about the snakes, frogs, deer, etc. that lived there. I didn’t bother telling him I live on a piece of property with its back to a forest full of white-tails, raccoons, rabbits, hawks and so on, or that a few months ago a black bear wandered into the local university and got loose in one of the campus buildings.
Eventually I got back to HQ, and was there for about 45 minutes when they made the announcement: gas leak, get out of the building. I grabbed my vest and my purse and my car keys, mostly on instinct, and headed out. Sure enough, after about five minutes’ milling around in the lot we were told to go home and come back in the morning, so I got a little time off yesterday. Spent it reading the last two books of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which was absolutely wonderful, and eventually drove back to Whole Foods for pumpernickel, cheese, and ginger ale for dinner.
So all in all, yesterday went well. I just wanna come home now. I’ll be out-processing on the twenty-fourth. Should be flying home on the twenty-fifth.