So, uh, yesterday the rain from tropical depression Erin hit much of south and central Texas with lots of rain, including us good folks here in Houston. Dozens of surface roads, underpasses, and even one of the freeways (Hwy 288) were closed due to high water all around. A couple hundred idiots who should know by now not to drive through the water when you can't see the road beneath were forced to abandon their cars. Poor people all around town ended up at the shelters and ended up on the news crying for help because they got a little bit of water in their yards. One homeless lady stuck under a bridge did have to be rescued though. That's not good.

But forget all that flooding and shit. The highlight of the day for me, easily, was around 11:30 yesterday morning. That's when we heard a somewhat loud boom outside the building here and then...THE LIGHTS WENT OUT. All around the office, printers stopped spitting out paper, desk radios that had been turned up to unreasonable volumes were silent, and computer screens went blank, depriving dozens of workers of the porn they were looking at. A lightning strike had hit a transformer in the area and blown the power to the whole area. It was pandemonium.

Or not. Actually, other than a few "Oh my Gods!" from a few of the more exciteable folks around here, it was pretty calm. Most of the people here spent the next 2 hours gathered out by the elevators, bonding over awkward conversation and a round of singing by a few of our more shameless co-workers under the soft glow of emergency lighting. Me? I stretched out in the two chairs in my cube and took a nap. Why go out there and hang with them when I can catch a few winks?

After a couple of hours of having us just sit around in the dark with nothing to do, management sent us home for the day since they were told we'd have no power for "several more hours" by the light company. I'm sure the lost productivity killed them, but what choice did they have?

So I braved the rain and made it home in time to squeeze in a couple games of Madden 08 before the wife arrived home and killed the fun. Oh well. It was a good day while it lasted.

The bad news is that the real fun has just begun. Hurricane Dean is projected to enter the Gulf of Mexico early next week and make landfall anywhere from the Yucatan Peninsula to Houston. Of course, despite there being several hundred miles between those two points, the news crews have already started "gather up all your valuable shit, go into the closet nearest the center of your house, and duck and cover your head because Dean is going to be our armageddon" mode. Sigh. We'll see what actually happens. I'm not worried; George Bush has his ranch here so he wouldn't let us get destroyed, would he?