Category: Miscellaneous babble

The For Sale sign in front of the house next door disappeared yesterday. I wonder if the new owners will actually live there, or if it’ll become just another rental again. Would be interesting to find out how much it ended up selling for. Might have to pick up the Sunday paper for the next few weeks and see if it shows up in the real estate transactions section.

It’s an early flight tomorrow morning to Houston for a short course on PET/CT at MD Anderson. With the arrival of our own PET/CT unit coming sometime in the next couple of months, it will be a good learning experience for me and a chance to get some hands-on experience working with them. Things are shaping up to get busy in the coming year once the unit gets up and running.
It will also be an opportunity to meet up with friends from back home who recently (relatively anyway) transplanted themselves to the area. Looking forward to the trip.
Coincidentally enough, it’s almost a year to the day since my last trip.

There are a couple of 4-way stops around work that I usually walk past once or twice a day. Over the years I’ve noticed a few things about drivers’ behaviour at these intersections, particularly older drivers. I think it must be one of those ‘southern politeness’ things.
Driver N pulls up to the intersection and stops, followed shortly after by drivers E, W and S. Now normally, whoever gets to the intersection first. That way people get to go through nice and orderly.
However, people in the south tend to be extraordinarily polite, especially older folks. So Driver N, trying to be polite waits for the other drivers to go. Drivers E, W and S sit there waiting for Driver N to go, since he was there first. Everybody waits, holding up traffic until someone decides to go. Naturally, everyone decides to go at the same time. So they advance into the intersection, but suddenly, seeing the others go too, they stop (don’t want to get into a fender bender after all). Then you get this Mexican stand-off type of situation going where everybody is waiting for the other person to go.
Finally someone reaches the end of their patience and zooms through the intersection and traffic begins flowing again, until the next person comes along wanting to be polite.

With everybody dealing with the aftermath of Katrina and Rita still, and more finger pointing ever, NHC’s Tropical Weather Outlook says:

SHOWER ACTIVITY WITH THE TROPICAL WAVE ENTERING THE WESTERN CARIBBEAN SEA IS CURRENTLY LIMITED AND DISORGANIZED. HOWEVER… UPPER-LEVEL WINDS ARE EXPECTED TO GRADUALLY BECOME MORE CONDUCIVE FOR DEVELOPMENT… AND THIS SYSTEM COULD BECOME A TROPICAL DEPRESSION DURING THE NEXT DAY OR TWO.

Still two months left in the official season.

It’s all over the news. People evacuating Houston only to get stuck and/or stranded on the highways. It’s deja vu for Charleston residents, who experienced the same thing during the evacuation for Hurricane Floyd. I was lucky enough not to get caught in it, since we left early. I was heading out to Atlanta anyway to take the ABR board exams, so we just left a little earlier than planned. A friend of mine who was supposed to take the same exam left a little later and got stuck in the gridlock. 8 hours to drive what normally takes 2 hours.
After Floyd turned into a non-event for Charleston, there was heck to pay.
The Houston problem is a probably as bad or worse than what happened here. I imagine there will be much accounting and many people being taken to task once everything is over. Well, at least people seem to be taking the potential threat seriously and evacuating. Hopefully my friend Joe is making out ok. Last I heard via another friend was it took him 8 hours to go 60 km. It almost would have been faster to walk that distance.
With Rita back down to a Cat 3 storm, I expect that it will be less catastrophic than most people were anticipating back when it was a monster Cat 5 with 175 mph winds. Fortunately the NHC forecast doesn’t have Rita getting much stronger as it heads towards the coast.
From the 5 AM discussion:

TRACK GUIDANCE IS NOW CLUSTERED ABOUT A LANDFALL ON THE UPPER TEXAS COAST IN ROUGHLY 30 HR…WITH THE MODEL TRACK BEING SPREAD BETWEEN SAN LUIS PASS AND SABINE PASS. THE FORECAST TRACK UP TO LANDFALL IS ESSENTIALLY AN UPDATE OF THE PREVIOUS PACKAGE. AFTER LANDFALL…THE GUIDANCE BECOME VERY DIVERGENT AS HIGH PRESSURE BUILD TO THE WEST AND POSSIBLY NORTH OF RITA. GIVEN THE SPREAD…THE FORECAST TRACK WILL CALL FOR LITTLE MOTION AFTER 72 HR JUST AS THE PREVIOUS FORECAST DID. THIS STALLING WILL POSE A SERIOUS RISK OF VERY HEAVY RAINFALL WELL INLAND.