Friday, September 19, 2008

Halloween Masks

This is a very strange political season this year. I really do not know what to make of it. I think both candidates need to make some hard selling for me, cuz neither is worth the trip to the ballot.

But today I was walking around the fabric store and came across a rack of masks for halloween. The choices were - Bush, - McCain, - Hillary and - Britanny.

But no Obama.

I can only imagine why. If I were a conspiracy theorist (or ideologist) I'm sure I could come up with at least one really good one.

Do those masks even exist? But I'm too lazy to google that...

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Hanna

Hurricane Hanna was pretty much a non-event for Raleigh. She didn't do any real damage, though a bunch of folks in New Hanover had power outages. I did not catch the injury counts directly from the storm.

It was in nearing full swing when I got up on Saturday morning. Just before noon it passed over and we were on the wayward side of the storm. About that time crabtree creek was peaking, so I decided to go take a couple pictures.

This is the greenway next to the creek. The inset shows what it looked like once the creek was back in it's shores (as always, hi-res pictures on a photo click). And yes, that is a Biscuitville restraurant in the background. Not a bad breakfast place for less than 5 bucks.

One thing I wished I had photo'd were the bare new car lots. The lots are on either side of the creek along Wake Forest. If the creek had come up another 3 feet after it's already rising 13 feet, it would have breached it's outer banks and flooded the lot. If that had happened, we'd have a bunch of New Orleans Specials next week.

After seeing that water level, I can easily see why the greenway has so much right-of-way through the city. It runs alongside a major rainwater drainage channel.

I took the post-storm picture while taking the pup on an adventure this morning. We stopped at the bear rock cafe for the first time, I got a coffee and newspaper and we sat in the shade and watched sunday morning get started. Such a huge contrast to yesterday morning. I think we'll repeat this morning in the future.

On the final stretch of our adventure, we scaled the big new embankment from the widening project and walked along the ridge at the top. It's actually pretty far up from the road, and steep. There is a private gravel driveway going into those trees up that hill ... tiz strange. But note to me, hiking boots next hurricane.

And for those Durham ladies, wazzup? under the bridge and go left.