Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Sunday, March 19, 2006
And boy, do we need it! We've been under drought conditions since oh, last summer. We ended the year about seven inches under our annual average rainfall total, as I recall. Perhaps it was more. This has led to watering restrictions and almost daily Red Flag fire warnings. I've blogged about other fires in the area and the resulting asthma issues.
And what did we see from Hurricane Rita, which slammed the Texas coast?
Three drops of flippin' rain, that's what. And lots of clouds.
So this weekend the rain has arrived. I suspect we had over an inch yesterday, and today we've had a little over an inch since midnight, with more on the way. This will do little to catch us up on the rainfall totals, but it will help.
I took a couple of rain pictures, but I'm not happy with them. Perhaps I'll get a decent one today. And now that I'm officially a secondary driving instructor for Chris, I'm going to have him drive me out to Lake Lavon next week to grab a few pictures. He needs a lot of rural road time yet.
Yesterday we went and dropped $100 at Fry's - all stuff we needed. I finally found a replacement battery for my Casio. The battery that came with it doesn't hold a charge for very long, which is very frustrating as was the case yesterday when I tried to get a very surreal shot and the battery died. I also ended up with an ink cartridge and a pack of DVD media on sale. Paul got some resistors (oooh! A whole $.95!) and Chris picked up a new mouse for his notebook as the little pencil erasser-style mouse on it died. I hate those things. Anyway, it was all necessary stuff, and the price of a camera battery was far, far less than the price of a new camera. Yep, that's two camera batteries in as many weeks. I'm on a roll.
Chris drove us down to Herrera's in the rain for dinner. Herrera's is a very interesting place. It's one of the best places in the Dallas area to get good Tex-Mex comfort food. The crowds are generally eclectic: Walk-ins from the surrounding neighborhood, DPD officers, punks, cowboys, socialites, families - everyone eats at Herrera's.
Along with the food the two big draws are the hot sauce and the margaritas. The former is just amazing: It's not burn-your-tounge-off hot, but it's very flavorful. We've tried to duplicate it at home without success. The margaritas are a kind of flourescent green. I kid you not. They taste fantastic. And they'll do the virgin version if you're not inclined to imbibe. (We actually do virgin margaritas at home in the summer. It's like a lime Slurpee. Just get a pack of mix, add lemon-lime soft drink in place of tequila, and freeze. We also add some extra lime juice.)
Last night we got a surprise in the hot sauce: Habaneros! Yeah, I know what I said. And this stuff wasn't overly hot even given that. Paul talked to the cashier last night and she said the last batch of jalepenos they got in was very mild and so they experimented with the recipe a bit.
I spent the rest of the day banging away at the web site. I've got most of the "front end" of the journal finished, and perhaps I'll post a preview later today. Two things are driving me up the wall: The first is the calendar. That may have to come much later, but I do have the search feature. The other is a stuipd SQL statement to get the number of comments on a particular entry out of the database so you see "X Comments" instead of just "Comments." Once I get that issue figured out I have to start on the back end, where I actually manage the entries. I talked about that Friday. I'm looking forward to that because I've found a free component that will do formatting and apparently spell-checking. We'll see if I can get it to work.
Oh, and I do have a beta or the new home page Life, Pictures, Technology