It’s here, huzzah!

My definition of sweater weather is different from most people’s, I suspect. The temperature has dropped out of the 90′s since Ike, so last week at Target I felt compelled to buy two new sweaters in preparation. Yesterday the high was 88, and I wore my first sweater of the season. Today it got up to 90—sweater with a skirt!

The thing is, you see, that even though a sweater might not be ideal at 90 degrees, most of the day it’s not that hot. In the mornings and evenings it gets down into the low 70′s, which I find pretty uncomfortable without long sleeves or pants or both. I HATE being cold, even a little bit. It’s an awful, miserable feeling. There would have to be some SERIOUSLY ENTICING extenuating circumstances to get me to live someplace that has real winters. We’re talking daily massages, cookies that don’t make me fat, and Tim Gunn as my personal shopper.

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The Taiko Festival was every bit as awesome as I’d hoped. The performance went well, the crowd was great, and I had a blast. I love performing, but I don’t have many performable talents (I imagine I could command an audience no larger than a dozen from the entire city of Houston to watch me proofread), so this was a rare opportunity for me. Definitely the highlight of my whole year so far.

After the show on Friday, three or four little girls came up to me separately and asked me to sign their programs*. Seriously? Since when does anyone want *my* autograph? I totally didn’t see that coming. They came up to me, I’m sure, not because they liked me in particular, but because I was halfway out into the audience talking to my parents and friends after the show, and I was wearing the same costume as all the people who are actually *good* at this taiko stuff. At any rate, I still felt like a very, very small-time rock star, so that was fun.

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Okay, so I don’t think I’ve mentioned this here before*, but I’ve been playing with a (the) local taiko group since April-ish. What is taiko, you ask? Taiko is a Japanese flavor of awesomeness revolving around big loud drums. You get a lot of people, you give them all drums, and you blow audiences away.

I was a total taiko fangirl for a couple years before I actually started taking lessons with Kaminari. Why? Because taiko is super-awesome, y’all. It’s harder to explain why than to just show you this video.

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Having been at school three hours and attended class, I have just now discovered that I managed to walk out the door this morning with my skirt completely unzipped. Oh yes.

It’s a side zip from low waist to hip, and the front flap was hanging open, so we’re talking a good six horizontal inches of exposed underwear PLUS skin above and below. At least I chose particularly unobtrusive undies today since the skirt itself is white, but still, gah.

The fact that no one has said anything all morning surely means that almost no one noticed, right?

Six days after Ike, Houston is still pretty torn up. It’s strange to go about my normal business, more or less, and be surrounded by wreckage.

Tonight I came home after curfew (is that still on?) and man, it was dark out there. It’s like being out in the country, except you’re passing strip centers instead of cow pastures, and the tall buildings block out the stars.

I thought the curfew was just to cut down on looting, but it can be tough driving after dark. With many of the streetlights and traffic lights still out, trying to get through an unfamiliar area is dicey. The traffic-lights-turned-stop-signs aren’t flashing red*, they’re dark. On an unlit street. Sometimes they’re lying on the sidewalk.

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In my house! Internet in my house! Somewhat sluggish internet, to be sure, but still. Internet!

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.