Water, Water, Everywhere

True to forecast, it rained most of Sunday and Sunday night. Since my office becomes nearly inaccessible when there’s street flooding, and since there was a broken water main there on Friday, I sent email to my department’s early birds, asking what was up. The verdict:

• Water in building: In pipes (good) and in a few ceilings (not so good)
• Water outside building: underpasses filling up

The flooding underpasses were enough to make me decide to stay home until I could be sure I would be able to make it in, but then I got word that the university would be closed until noon. Yay!

I wiped off my lipstick, got back into my comfy bathrobe and settled in with the cat, the bunny and the husband, to watch a little of the traffic and flooding on TV. After a bit, Dan went to get us some coffee, and I settled in at the computer. Since I did have some important work to get done today, I set up the laptop with VPN and leisurely worked on office stuff while reading the news of the day on my other computer. Bliss!

As it got closer to time to make a decision about going in to work, I managed to catch a news report about two women who had died in their SUV in a flooded underpass—one of the two by my office! If one is flooded, the other one always is, too. If an SUV can't make it, neither of my little cars can do it, either. So it was a definite work-from-home day for me.

And boy, did I work! It was go, go, go, all day, while bands of storms boomed and crashed outside my window. But it was all pretty low-stress, even though three o’clock came around and I realized I had been so busy that I hadn't eaten since breakfast around 8:00. So I had some lunch, wrapped up a few last items, talked on the phone with one of my bosses, and since he and all the other senior management had gone home by this point, I decided to call it a day.

The rain was easing up by this point, so I got dressed and went outside to check the bayou. I’ve seen it a lot higher than it was today, but it still made for some good pics.

Here’s one of my running trails:














Here’s where the track meets were, weekend before last—ready for sculling races now:














Another trail to nowhere:














No, trees in Houston don’t typically grow in water:














I think I could’ve gotten even better pictures if I had followed the bayou toward downtown, where I understand it jumped the banks. But Dan would be coming home soon, it was getting dark, and since I was encumbered with umbrella, camera and phone, I didn’t want to put myself in a situation where I might have to do anything acrobatic to get around flooded spots. So I headed home, but not before getting this shot of the tops of the trees near the Waugh Drive bridge, where the resident bats were chittering like mad. The bayou usually runs quite low, in a channel just beyond that first line of tree tops:














Yesterday a bayou, today a river.

As I said, I’ve seen worse. But this was still a pretty good size flood.

Back to the salt mines tomorrow!