Good Morning All. 70° and mostly cloudy. High temperatures are staying in the 80's since last week, maybe summer is gone from around here. Global warming gave us only one triple digit temperature this summer, compared to an average of 30+ a year historically. Spent some time in the pool yesterday, the temperature has dropped to 81°, just barely tolerable for me. Wife won't even think of using it any time it gets below 84°. Looking like a short pool season this year, mid-May to Labor Day. Some years we can go until October.
Looks like most of the heavy hurricane rain is now in East Texas near the Louisiana border, and in SW LA. Still lots in South Texas, but not as heavy. Most of the area around Houston has received between 24" and 30". The area East of Austin has been hard hit as well. The outlying bands of rain are about 60 miles south of Dallas/Ft Worth, although they are moderately light. Too soon to tell yet, but the media is really preaching doom and gloom about gasoline prices. It's usually just a bunch of hype as these refineries are mostly hurricane-proof, some storage facilities are not, and they will fire back up as soon as enough employees can get to work. From what I've seen from past hurricanes, prices go up about 5¢ a gallon for about a week before receding...mostly from retailers riding the hype.
Didn't do much in the train shed yesterday, Sunday is a short day with church and all. I did ballast some more track and finished drilling and painting all of the fence posts needed for the first phase of barbed wire fencing.
Garry - Your BIL in Corpus should be OK, as the storm spared them for the most part. They have lots of damage from wind though, power is out in most of Corpus, but the authorities were telling people that it was safe to return there as early as Saturday, some inconveniences do exist. Your "F" units are looking good.
Joe/Jerry - Most of the folks along the Texas coast are used to hurricanes, they come and go a lot. This one is just worse than any past ones. Allison in 2001, Rita in 2005, Ike in 2008, are some of the notable ones from this century. In June there was tropical storm Cindy that gave them their first taste of the season.
Jerry - I'm about 300 miles north of the Houston area and 350 miles from the coast, so hurricane rains don't usually affect me. Occasionally the outer bands send some rain this far, but never in disastrous amounts. This time the closest that they got was about 25 miles away. Era TX is almost (20 miles) in Oklahoma. Of course Mother Nature treats different areas of the country differently. Some areas like yours get the forest fires, the Midwest and Northeast get major snow, California has crazy people along with earthquakes, mudslides and brush fires, most coastal areas have hurricanes, our thing is tornados.
Looking like a nice day here, sometime since I first checked at 4:00am, the thunderstorms were taken out of our forecast.
So everybody have a great day.
Willie
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