Storms

Well, we survived the remnants of Hurricane Gustav pretty easily. Weds was quite stormy (even by Wellington-winter standards), and produced quite prodigious amounts of rain: enough to persuade me to stay & work from home for the day, rather than risk the car aquaplaning all over the road: but other than that, it wasn't too bad.

The creek in the back yard must have risen by 8 or 9 feet I guess - almost to the top of the banks - but that's no real threat to the house, as there's another 8 feet or so of elevation before it would get to the foundations (and much wider, of course). The dead tree out the front yard shed quite a lot of branches, and has kinda broken in half, with the upper half now dangling down in the fork of the bottom half - we're waiting for the landlords to fix this, lacking appropriate tools (a decent length of rope, essentially).

Parts of the city lost power for the day, but nowhere near us (they appear to be the, umm, poor parts of town, for whatever reason). We did have a lot of N'orleanois up working in our Little Rock office for the week, as it seems to have been moderately badly hit again.

And afterwards, we've had just a stunning few days of weather - warm, sunny, and with just enough wind to be pleasant.

We had Betty & Dennis over for lunch on Sunday - Betty works in the quilting shop that Cat goes to all the time, and is (of course) a keen quilter, and Dennis is her husband - an interesting mix of Texas hick and sophisticate. I think it went very well, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and the food seemed to work well : I made bacon&egg pie, and Cat made corn/cheese/onion muffins, neither of which they had ever had before - Muffins in the US seem to be exclusively of the cakey, very sweet, saturated with syrup variety, so savoury ones were a great surprise :)

Other than that, just trundling along, trying to find friends, and trying to fit in.