Rita

Around the middle of the week, the weather forecasters were saying that Hurricane Rita was going to make landfall southwest of Galveston (right through Bill Crider's backyard, in fact) and then track up across Texas, maintaining tropical storm force winds and torrential rains all the way to the area where I live. They made it sound so bad I got a little worried, in fact. I remember Hurricane Carla in 1960, which hit Galveston and then was still a pretty powerful storm by the time it reached North Texas. Of course, that's not the way it played out. The wind blew a little harder than usual this afternoon, and I saw some clouds off to the east. That's it. So now I find myself slightly peeved that we didn't even get a little rain out of it (we're in the midst of a fairly bad drought and have already had a couple of trees die, with several others looking pretty bad). I have to admit, though, that I'm glad the worst of the storm came nowhere near here, while at the same time I'm sorry to hear about the damage to Joe Lansdale's place.

Now I'm wondering what next week's hurricane is going to be called.