Good Job
“When God invented sticks, He really knew what He was doing.”
- Nick, age 7→ B.Dunn, Mar 28, 2008, 04 56 am
This Damned Old House
So winter blew in yesterday, such as it is around these parts, with the temperature dropping to 27 at sunrise accompanied by a stiff north wind.
It gave us the first opportunity to try out our central heat, which was installed at the end of January 2005, when the worst of the cold weather was over.
Unfortunately, as usual, it becomes apparent more work is in order around here.
The furnace controlling the upstairs works just fine, and in fact hardly ever comes on because the warm air from downstairs drifts up the staircase.
But the downstairs, with those swell 10-foot ceilings and bare wood floors, is a drafty 63 degrees, tops. And that’s with a towel laid across the bottom of the front door.
At this temperature and with this wind, that’s the best the downstairs furnace unit can muster.
Which reinforces a few things we already knew:
→ The underside of this old 1913 house badly needs insulating
→ So do the walls, but that’s not going to happen because there’s no way to do it short of ripping out the plaster
→ The doors need to be weather-stripped
→ Most of the windows need to be replaced someday if we ever have the money, which is a laugh right now
→ We like sweaters.
It all beats last December, before the central heat and air system was installed, when the sole heat source was a 1930s gas-jet space heater about 30 inches tall and 36 inches wide. It kept you toasty warm if you were standing within 10 feet of it or sat in the stairwell. Otherwise things were pretty icy.
Luckily, no one has to take winter very seriously for very long around here; usually there are three or four cold snaps of three or four days apiece in which the weather drops into the 30s.
For instance, by Sunday it’ll be in the 60s again.
Meanwhile, I’ve been busy playing reporter again after a few years hiatus, and spending all my spare time trying to create charts to track basketball schedules and standings at every high school in the area. Why?
Because no other media outlet does, and that’s a gap my local news operation, FortBendNow, needs to fill in order to fulfill its mission as the most complete source of local news and information in Fort Bend County.
We’re only two months old, still have a tiny staff and have not yet opened the site to advertisers, but what I call the beta version of FortBendNow is drawing traffic at the rate of about 110,000 pages views a month. That’s just a fraction of where I think it should be, and where I believe it will be after a promotional campaign to allow people to discover it exists.
But considering the only promotion so far has come from these blog posts and the passing out of business cards, it’s a pretty decent first response.
→ B.Dunn, Dec 09, 2005, 06 25 am
Comments? [2]
Evacuating On Vacation
We were supposed to fly to Ohio to visit my family, out of Houston Hobby Airport late Thursday afternnoon.
That seemed like a dicey undertaking with more than a million people fleeing in the opposite direction. And at the time, Hurricane Rita appeared to be headed straight for Houston, so the idea of leaving one of our vehicles to be lashed by the storm appeared unwise, to say the least.
I was able to get our flight switched to Austin’s airport on U.S. 71, normally a 2.5-hour drive from Richmond. The flight was to depart Thursday at 8:15 a.m. At first I thought we’d be OK if we left very early in the morning, say 2.
But traffic was already getting heavy, so instead, we left at 7:45 Wednesday evening. I’d hoped U.S. 90 west out of Rosenberg would have less traffic than State Highway 36, but in the end it was all the same. By the time we got 10 miles down the road near the little town of East Bernard, traffic ground to a halt.
We sat in one spot for anywhere from a half-hour to 90 minutes. Then, traffic would surge ahead for one, two or three miles. Then we’d grind to a halt again. We went a total of 35 miles in four hours. During the lulls, we studied an atlas and found a route through the back roads that would take us to F.M. 102, which went north across Interstate 10 to Columbus.
But the entrance to the country-road route was still a few miles ahead – an eternity, it seemed. Finally, we made a dash along the shoulder of the highway, zipped right onto the proper back road and got into Eagle Lake where we quickly picked up 102. We were lucky to avoid crossing the totally jammed I-10 on 90, which was a huge parking lot by then.
Instead, we were able to catch U.S. 71 and head up to the airport. Traffic was heavier than usual, but moving fast. We reached the airport by 4 a.m.
It’s been eerie watching TV as Rita rolls ashore. When we left town, it was a huge Category 5 storm heading straight for Fort Bend County. Last night it was apparent the storm was weakening and pushing east near the Texas-Louisiana border.
I felt relief tinged with guilt for essentially wishing the storm on someone else. Relatives told us Richmond still had power as of this morning, and winds were around 40 miles per hour.
That’s plenty hard enough to blow limbs down out of the huge pecan trees ringing our house, however, and we still don’t know if the roof held.
Update: The roof is swell. One big pecan limb in the backyard, which I will cut up and use to smoke babyback ribs and chicken next summer, and that appears to be the extent of the damages.
→ B.Dunn, Sep 24, 2005, 08 11 am