Last day of August.

I'm not up to calling this a momentous month. It's one to mark, of course.
Any time we get a storm on the Gulf Coast, it's a remarkable month.

My daughter's been through a few of these now. Rita, Ike. Katrina was down
the road a bit, but she got to see the aftermath. A couple other storms
here and there. Now Harvey.

They mark the time.

We spent some time in the Northeast. The week we moved up that way, the area
we were in got the worst snow storm they'd had in a good long while. We'd been
there two days, and found ourselves in the middle of a two-foot blizzard.

Not that big a deal by the standards of some, but for a couple of goofballs
from Texas and southern California, you can be sure that we were impressed.

The part that made me pause was the wind. It was pretty much exactly the same
thing as being in a hurricane. Wind like hell, noisy, pushing on the house
and calling for entry.

But it was also the quietest storm I've ever been in.

Snow doesn't pelt the roof and sides of the house the way rain does, even in
the middle of a gale force wind.

But then, the biggest difference in the world came when the storm was finished.

I got to bring my three year old daughter out into the snow. Not quite the
first time she'd seen it, but definitely the first time she'd been in it up
to her chest.

Stone construction goes a long way to making hurricanes, or the blizzard
equivalent in snow country, less of an issue than we get down here. Down in
the islands, they build with concrete blocks, the moral equivalent for those
of us with few handy mountains to denude. At some point, I guess we'll figure
out that it makes sense to recognize what works, and mandate that.

Until then? Well, I guess we'll muddle along like we always do.

And I'm gonna work on figuring out how to spend a little more time in snow
country. I miss the mountains.

Ah, dogs.

We've got a triplet of dogs, a boxer, a lab mix, and a shih-tzu mix
that we recently brought in due to unforeseen family circumstances.

The boxer's a 90 pound female (none of it fat, she's just the large
economy size) named Henrietta. The lab mix is a chocolate mess named
Tassle-Tail Underfoot (yes, she's a kinder. First night she came to
the house when we fostered her, she stole a blanket and started building
her nest five minutes after she was in the house).

The wee puppy is working on her name, she's provisionally named at the
moment until we're sure she and her name go together.

All the dogs have been less than enthusiastic about the hurricane. But
most especially the lab.

Tassle does not appreciate the fact that she's been stuck in the house for
a week. This is no bueno, especially when most of the time she'd have
been perfectly fine being out in the rain and the mud and the wind, thank
you so very much.

Explaining to a lab why the rest of the family doesn't quite see things
the same way she does when it comes to rain storms can sometimes be a
bit of an adventure.

But, the sun came out today. And, after a full day of that, I took her
out for a chase the ball session in the backyard.

Hettie the boxer and Agnes the wee puppy both came out for their own
enjoyment of the sunshine and the dryness. They're all pleasantly tired
at the moment.

And I didn't even have to remind Tassle that she didn't much enjoy our
summer adventure at the great big lake. It seems that it's one thing for
lab puppies to splash water. It's another thing entirely for the water to
splash the lab puppy...

Well, my lawn's certainly happy with the rain. The grass had just gone into
August dormancy. Harvey's mixed blessing let the grass know it was safe to
come back into green mode. The rest of the grass mowing season is gonna be
a lot of fun.

The pear trees and the gang of rowdy apples I've got are starting to
think there's a bit too much of a good thing, though. One of the pears is
store bought, the apples and the pear are up from cores I planted when we
first moved in as an experiment. A single pear tree has made it so far from
that core, the apple core is currently a cluster that I'm likely to cut back
to a pair or trio of stems this winter.

They've all got wet feet at the moment. It won't take long to dry out, though,
once the sun comes back out. It is still August in Texas.

The garden boxes were a mess anyhow. Weeds and open space, I haven't had
much time to keep them going past the first planting last spring. Then
again, I said at the time, if I got a few tomatoes and a good start with
the blackberry, I'd call it a win. And that's pretty much what we've got.

The roses are a little funky, but that's their right. The backyard roses
are in baskets that I'm planning on filling in around as my planter box
project this winter.

I'm terrified of one of them, though. She's our blushing pink rose, and she's
starting to take over the bed she's planted next to. I'm afraid of what she's
gonna be like when I give her room to spread her roots...

I see smart people showing off their intellect. Their superior logic as
backseat drivers with zero real information.

It's easy to make logical deductions based on your own preconceptions. There's
a reason that modern science prizes experiment above all else. I refute you
thus: Houston knows how many people die in evacuations. We know what would
have happened if we'd all decided to put close to seven million people on the
road in August.

And then dropped a hurricane on them. Look up the Rita evacuation before you
start telling me about how much smarter you are than the people who've actually
run the experiment. Learn a little humility, oh great internet commentators.

I see preconditioned responses. "Blue Teams can't handle this..." and "this
proves my ineffable ability to read the abstract of someone else's paper about
X (or Y or Z) and misapply their results to whatever I want..."

It's called cherry picking, and it doesn't make your conclusions follow. Shut
up about it for once. Learn that the first reason there is noise on the
airwaves is because you're contributing to it by running your yap. I refute
you thus: You've picked the data to support your conclusion while ignoring
that which contradicts your preconceptions.

I see people doing something remarkable. I've seen every named storm and
unnamed Gulf hiccup to hit the Gulf coast since the early 70's.

I can promise you, the response to Harvey has been extraordinary, especially
given that this is a cat 4 storm that's been stalled in place for four days
now, and is working on putting 50+ inches of rain into a 300 mile wide
stretch. That only two or three people have died so far is something so
remarkable as to approach the miraculous.

I refute you thus: Don't get in the way of the people who are doing the job,
and for damned sure don't be too busy running your mouth to know when to shut
up and learn something. It's possible that the people who do just might know
something the people who talk don't.

The internet has a tendency to magnify the voice of the talker at the expense
of the doer. If I have any goal as a writer, I guess it's to put my stake down
and do my best to write stories that matter for the daughters and sons of
Martha. I see Harvey. May I always remember what I've seen and learned.

There's a story about Henry Fonda.

Late '40s, I think, Henry's working in New York, Broadway show. His wife
passes away, but he still keeps showing up for work every day.

When asked about it, he said that, at least for those few hours of the day,
he knew what it was that he was supposed to be doing.

I don't want to talk about the fact that people called him a narcissist for
it. Think about that for a second. You're interested in your work, dedicated
to it.

And people call you names for it. Usually, I'd wonder what it was that someone
wanted from me, that they'd call me names like that.

Set that aside though. The thing for our conversation here is that, even as
Hurricane Harvey is working on the second half of what looks to be more than
fifty inches of rain dropped in my little neck of the woods, I've got some
time on my hands.

Enough so that I've been able to kick myself into gear a little on this side
of my life. The story side.

Well, ok, not the story side. The story writing side's been going well,
actually. It's the publication side, and this whole blogging thing, that have
dropped to the back of the queue recently.

Well, at least for the past couple days, I've had a chance to catch up with
it. The result is that my second book in the Open Wounds series is now up
and available at all the standard places.

I keep going like this, and I might even figure out how to put up a link page
for the books...

As we wait out the storm...

As I write, we're doing what half of Texas is doing today, battening
down the hatches and waiting for the hurricane known as Harvey to finish
his business with us and move on.

If you've never had the pleasure of a hurricane, this one's a little different
than the normal. Usually, in my experience at least, you've got a day or
two of the full brunt of the storm. The winds, the rain. Hoping everything
keeps together for just another hour. If it holds together just another hour,
that's all we need to make it through...

Harvey's going to be a little different. He's going to be around here causing
trouble for most of a week. Overnight, from Friday evening through now
Saturday morning, Victoria, as an example, has already had more than 16 inches
of rain. They're right in the bullseye for a projection to have more than
30 inches of rain by the time Harvey finally makes his exit sometime after
Tuesday.

This is a living example of the two varieties of rain that Texas enjoys:
too much, and not enough. Victoria, Corpus Christi, and Rockport are on the
dry side of Texas. Everyone in South Texas actually hopes that they get a
storm or two, on occasion.

It's the only time the reservoirs fill up. After a storm passes, down in the
valley, anywhere south and west of San Antonio, you can breathe easy, at least
as far as knowing whether there'll be water next year.

But south Texans don't generally pray for this. Even San Antonio and Austin
are getting hit with the rain. And if you've never seen what happens when it
well and truly rains in San Antonio and Austin?

Keep an eye on the news over the next few days. Houston's likely to be the
big news, simply because we're the big town. But people in Victoria, Austin,
and San Antonio are going to be dealing with a type of rain and flooding that's
pretty much the definition of a biblical event. If you can, be ready to reach
out and help.

And especially for the people living in Rockport, Port Aransas, Port Lavaca,
the coastal towns just north of Corpus where Harvey made his entrance. As of
what I see now, they didn't get the kind of storm surge that wipes towns off
the map. But a lot of people have moved to Rockport over the past few years,
building their retirement homes in a part of the Texas Gulf Coast that is
almost indescribably beautiful.

Until the storms come.