Streets Full of Water

I was just reading a post on Roberta X's blog about the rain storm and the flooded streets they got this weekend and it reminded me of the time I lived in Houston a long time ago. Houston has an elevation of about six inches above sea level, so anytime it rains, the streets flood. It happened at least once a year, maybe more often.

One day I was driving home from work somewhere down near Clear Lake. All the way into Houston it was fine, but once I got off the freeway, traffic was a mess. I kept trying to find a way home, but every road I went down was blocked or a dead end. I went down one street that had about 18 inches of water covering the road. It dead ended, and I ended up backing out to where I had turned off the main road, which was still high and dry. The car I was driving was an old hundred dollar Buick, and driving down this road, the interior of the car had become flooded to a depth of about a foot. I was sitting in my own little pond. When I got back out on the high road, I decided to drain this pond and opened the door to let the water run out. The water poors out in big gush. As it happens I was right in front of an ice house (an open air bar). All those smart people who had decided to wait out the disaster were nice enough to applaud this bit of foolishness.

I don't know how long it took, but I eventually made it to my neighborhood. I think it probably took me a couple of hours. Once again, the main road was high and dry-ish, but the streets through the neighborhood were totally flooded. At this point I figure I can't do any more damage to the car, so I headed on down the street. The water was a little deeper here, more like two or two and a half feet. The motor is still running, so we putt on down the road. The car is setting up a little bow wave as it pushes through the water. The height of this wave is enough that the water is breaking over the hood of the car. You can see the headlights glowing through the water. I am only going about five miles an hour. The water covers people's lawns right up to their houses, and in some cases it has reached the lower levels of the siding. The wake my car is setting up is generating little waves, which are just high enough to lap over the window sills that must only be a foot from the floor of the house. The car makes it all the way to my house, drives up the driveway until it is mostly out of the water.

I don't think I ever did anything about the flood, other than draining the water out of the footwells. It did not faze the car, though it died of a faulty fuel pump not too long after. Okay, the fuel pump could have been fixed, but it was only a hundred dollar car to start with. Do we really want to spend the effort?

Senior Projects

My wife and I went over to the high school this evening to see our senior's project and the senior slide show. Evidently every senior is required to complete a project in order to graduate, and this evening is when they present their work to the public. It's kind of like a science fair. They each get a half of a folding table to put up their display board and whatever else they wanted to show. Some of them were pretty straight forward, some were a little edgy (for me), but most of all, we had a couple of hundred seniors in their graduation gowns standing around being bored waiting for the judges.

I did talk to one young woman about her project which was about personality traits and poverty. She had interviewed a bunch of kids at one of the local elementary schools and the answers she elicited she was able to make some generalizations. She did not have enough information to draw any conclusions about causation. So I'm thinking what we have here is a budding psychologist, but no, she wants to become a flight attendant. She tells me she likes serving other people and likes being told what to do.

This brought to mind my father who didn't really want much and I think even prided himself on being able to get by on very little, but who was happiest when he was able to do something for someone else. It's nice to be needed. I look at myself, and I see some of the same traits. I don't think I would have admitted to anything of the sort when I was younger. Back then it was all about what I wanted, or least I thought it was. Curious business, this.

All these displays filled both gymnasiums and the music room, but unless you knew about the music room, you would be hard pressed to find it. There were some art projects on display down one vacant hall way. I only knew about it because that's where my son's project was two years ago.

Then we had the slide show in the auditorium. Pictures of the seniors when they were babies, little kids, growing up, in high school. For some reason when they started the show, they brought up the lights over the audience, which I found really annoying. I almost shouted "lights", but I would have gotten grief from my wife, and I don't know if it would have done any good. This is a difference I have noticed between my wife and I. When I am watching television, I want the room to be completely dark. It doesn't matter to my wife, she can watch the tube with all the lights in the room turned on and it doesn't bother her. It is something else I do not understand.

Almost all of the pictures were of white kids. The majority of the students are white, but there is a sizeable contingent of Mexicans (Latinos?). There were a few photos of Latino girls, but I did not see a single picture of a Latino boy.

Update November 2015. Replaced missing picture.

Picaresque

I don't like authors who use words I don't know. I especially don't like authors who use words I don't know and are not even in the dictionary.

My daughter is doing some homework and she asks me to read the first paragraph from a book review written by Francine Prose. The next to the last sentence:

One reason "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" remains so affecting and so profoundly threatening is that Huck shows us what it meant to grow up in a slave-holding society and learn to navigate its pathologies.

Okay, affecting I can understand, but profoundly threatening? Where does she get this? What the devil is she talking about? Who is being threatened? By what? I am sorry, I just do not understand.

And the word I didn't know? Well, we find it in the second paragraph, so technically I could have avoided it, but it was a pretty good essay and I was enjoying it. So the word is picaresque, which at first I thought was a misspelling of picturesque, but it's not. It is a word in it's own right and means something like rogue. I've never heard this word before, and I am not sure I approve of it. It is too similar in spelling and pronunciation to picturesque, and too different in meaning.

So there Francine Prose.

I like the Merriam-Webster online dictionary because they give you an audio pronunciation, which really helps with these stupid obscure words that nobody ever uses. Oh, did I say that already?

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Memorial Day Weekend Wreck

I took my wife furniture shopping in Beaverton yesterday evening. We got on Highway 26 Eastbound at Jackson School Road. We have gotten about a mile down the road when we spot congestion up ahead. By the time we get there traffic has come to a complete halt. This often happens, but usually not for another five or ten miles. We are going really slow, too, only five or ten miles an hour. Even at it's worst 26 seldom drops below 20 MPH. Must be an accident. Well, there is an exit about a mile up ahead, if the freeway is still jammed up when we get there, we can take the exit and go wander the byways. We are creeping along, but nobody has moved over and started driving on the shoulder yet. Oh wait, I spoke too soon. Here they come. The leader of this pack of renegades gets half a dozen car lengths ahead and comes to a stop. Oh, look, there are police cars. We can see the flashing lights. The wise guys on the shoulder are trying to merge back onto the traffic lanes. The left lane is trying to merge into the right lane. Creep, creep. There are police cars in the left Eastbound lane. There are police cars in the left Westbound lane. There are police standing on the shoulder. There are at least a half a dozen police cars. Oh, look! There's the wreck. It looks like small black VW that has been rolled. Pretty well beat up. One ambulance shows up, but drives on through. It looks like it's all over but the shouting.

I am pretty sure it must be policy for the police to try and hold up traffic as long as possible just to put on a show hoping that it will encourage people to be a little more careful. Or maybe the bureaucrats have added so much paperwork to an accident report that it takes them hours to clear the scene. Whatever, it's really obnoxious, and to my way of thinking, dangerous. Bringing freeway traffic to an unexpected halt increases the risk of someone driving at freeway speeds running into someone who is stopped and causing a REALLY horrendous accident. This happens here occasionally. Or maybe setting up these situations helps keep people aware of the unexpected and helps prevent that kind of thing.

There is a side benefit to these kind of jams and that is that it was clear sailing the rest of the way into town.

Update: Just scrolling through the old stuff and I noticed the picture did not appear, so I checked it out. Picture was still on the net, but this time when I looked at the image, I realized it was for Washington County, Florida. Not the same place at all. So I replaced it with this image, which is from Washington County, Oregon.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

Uncooperative

There was a line in a book (or was it a movie? I forget). The rich 19th century Englishman, says there will always be the poor. You can feel sorry for them, but what else can you do? Or words to that effect.

One thing all young girls dream of (or so the story goes) is going to a fancy dress ball. Another popular story is that all those people who go to those fancy dress balls find them tedious and boring.

One of the big problems in third world countries is that the rich think themselves superior to the peasants. This breeds resentment which can eventually lead to revolution, often with communist affiliation.

I am thinking that the ability to cooperate is what makes civilization work. People by nature are uncooperative. Only through training and conditioning can they be convinced that cooperation with others can benefit themselves. Some people are more easily convinced than others. Some people would rather be independent and do without the benefits than have to "make nice" enough to be considered cooperative.

Leaders are people who can convince, persuade or coerce others into cooperating. The more cooperation you can generate, the more you move toward the center and the more powerful you become. The more independent you are, the farther from the center you move and the less powerful you are.

Update December 2016 replaced  missing picture with something different.

Today's Jumble

Things I learned from Today's Jumble. One of the words could be construed as CYDER, which is the British spelling of CIDER, but this is an American puzzle, so British spellings are not allowed. DECRY was the answer.

ENTRANCE [1] (to enter) has the same spelling as

ENTRANCE [2], which is to charm or captivate. Just different pronunciation. I knew how to spell the two words, it just never occurred to me that they were spelled the same. Or maybe it's just one of those things I used to know but forgot.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

Bike to Work?

Shelby Wood (not Green) writes a column (yes Green) for our local paper, the Oregonian. Today's column was about biking to work. She writes:

My Top Three Reasons for Not Riding a Bike to Work:

1. Fear of being killed or maimed by a car or truck.
2. Fear of being killed or maimed by something I do that causes me to slam into a car or truck.
3. Fear of arriving at work, or back home after work, stressed out by spending 30 sweaty minutes trying not to get killed or maimed by a car or truck.

She goes on to discuss her views on the subject.

I used to ride my bike to work a couple of times a week. I did it for at least a year, maybe more. I gave it up for all the reasons she mentions. I don't know whether I was ever afraid, I don't recall anything really scary happening to me, and I wasn't riding downtown. I was riding mostly on side streets or in designated bike lanes.

But I looked at the situation: me, riding a bicycle next to multi-ton blocks of steel traveling at 3 or 4 times my velocity. It just did not seem like a prudent thing to do. It's kind of like guys who stick a gun in the front of their pants. It might be perfectly safe, but geez, if something did go wrong, it would be really bad.

I don't ride my bike hardly at all anymore. I don't think I will be doing any more riding on paved roads. If there is even a chance there is going to be a motor vehicle on the same road, I don't want to be there on a bicycle.