Aftermaths and Fire Ants

This flying siding could have literally cut someone in half. This was one of the most beautiful cedar elms in the meadow. Twisting winds took it down. Photo by: Suna

When flooded, fire ants build these necrotic islands and float their colony to a new location. What a difference a day makes!

Anyone knows an ant, can't.

Move a rubber tree plant.

—Sammy Cahn

I didn’t originally intend to post these pictures, but then it hit me. I’m trying to be as honest as I can about our move to the ranch, and that means talking about scary stuff, too. I know I already did that by talking about yesterday’s tornados and floods, but I thought these two pictures would drive my point home.

UnIdentified Flying Objects

First, I mentioned the flying siding yesterday. I’ll be brief. Just look how far that piece of siding buried itself in the ground when it hit. Now imagine if it had hit somebody. It would be like when I worked in Houston, and a gust of wind blew a sheet of plywood off the roof of one of the skyscrapers. It cut a lawyer in half.

Now some of you will say, “Lawyer…no big loss.” But it could have been anybody. This siding, too, could have cut someone in half if it hadn’t landed harmlessly in our woods.

Fire Ants

Living underground, fire ants are particularly susceptible to floods. They have evolved a cutthroat survival strategy. As their mound floods, the ants flee to the surface.

If water continues to rise, they build floating islands on the corpses of their siblings. The islands are attached to the original mound by a thin string of dead ants. If the water rises enough to break that “string,” the island floats away. It has everything it needs to rebuild the colony where it lands. Notice the princess ant is at the very top of the island in the picture.

The big problem comes when the island floats into an animal or maybe a person. The ants swarm all over that refuge, sometimes millions of them. And they’re not happy. Stay as far away from them as you can.

 

Seeking Shelter From the Storm

The new pond crested the dam that doubles as the entrance to the property. Where the water spills into the arroyo, it is at least eight feet deep.

That X sticking up above the water is the top of the fence. The creek bed is a quarter-mile away.

  Try imagining a place where it’s always safe and warm

  Come in, she said

  I’ll give ya shelter from the storm

—Bob Dylan

We found out why we have a storm room this afternoon—the one I have always joked is our “zombie apocalypse room.”

A severe storm blew up—heavy rains, gusting winds, tornados. It dumped almost three inches of rain in less than an hour. Given that the ground was already saturated and the ponds were already full to capacity, there wasn’t much hope to avoid a serious flood.

The house is on one of the highest points of the ranch. So I wasn’t worried about the flooding. The tornados were another matter. We all—Suna, me, Jaime’s family, Grillo, and Stella—all crowded into the storm room and locked the metal doors. Rose insisted on running upstairs to hide, but she and the house came through without a scratch.

The winds were strong enough to blow Jaime’s wet saw off the front porch. We also found a 4x8 sheet of metal siding buried six inches in the ground just on the other side of the gate. The siding was the wrong color to have come from any of our buildings or any of Ralph’s.

Ralph stood on his back porch taking pictures until he realized pieces of his hay barn were flying over the house. He was uninjured. In fact, the only injury sustained on either property was a small cut on one of the horses.

Our neighbors in Pettibone weren’t so lucky. The tornado touched down in that area several times. It destroyed a huge swath of trees and phone lines. It also took out at least two houses. And, yes, there were fatalities reported there. I don’t have the details.

As bad as the storm was, I’m glad we, our neighbors, and most of the country came out fairly well.

 

The creek hardly ever floods the bridge, but it did this time. Suna is fast enough to be on both ends of the picture.

Storms always make for the best sunsets—when they don’t occult the sunset.

Ike’s Aftermath

Yup. That’s me watering the sagging sunflowers while Ike inundates the Texas coast. Just shows to go ya how big this state is.

Photo by Beccano

It’s a good thing that Friday’s Feast remains dormant this week. Most of my day seems to have been taken up with preparation for Ike. Now we knew that we wouldn’t feel much impact from the storm, so much of my preparation involved watching the radar images of Ike advancing on the coast. Oh, and there was that bit of working with kids to bring the plants and lawn furniture into the garage.

I have touched base with all my friends and family, and all of them seem to have survived. My remaining brother even evacuated to Central Texas, in spite of my dad telling me that they were going to ride it out at home. My did did, but he said the clouds never even covered the moon last night.

My heart goes out to those people whom the storm hurt.

So what happened here? Nothing. We got a little wind but not even one drop of rain. Don’t get me wrong. I certainly don’t want to have gone through what they did on the coast; I have done enough of that in my time. But I would like have have had a little rain. This is the third storm to hit the Texas coast without giving us any rain at all—much less breaking the drought. Sigh.

Big Storms Last Night

MacGillivray’s Warbler Photo Source: Wikipedia

I met this little guy this morning. We had some terrible storms blow through last night, and they must have pushed him along with them. He was at least a hundred miles east of his normal migratory path from Central America to the forests of the American and Canadian West.

I’m sad to say that he didn’t make it this year. The storms were just too much for him. I found him on the front porch. I said a few nice words over him and buried him in the flowerbed where I hope he rests well.

He was a truly beautiful bird. He had a brilliant yellow underbelly. His head and cape are supposed to be slate gray, but his head looked almost purple (as seen in the painting). The gray cape had almost a greenish tint.

Other than the little MacGillivray’s warbler, we came through very lucky. A funnel cloud was spotted in our neighborhood about the time we were coming home from choir practice, but it didn’t touch down. Beccano is terrified of tornadoes, so he had a bit of a rough patch. I am proud of the way he handled himself. Not being afraid is stupid. Learning to work through your fear is what courage is all about.

We had a lot of wind and hail, but no downed branches on our block anyway. (Suna says the University campus took quite a bit of damage.) And the hail at our house was apparently small. It didn’t even stay on the ground long enough for me to measure it after the second wave. I didn’t see any hail damage or even any shredded leaves. Other places in town reported hailstones up to 4”—the largest ever recorded in the Austin metroplex, according to News8.

We did get about 1.5” of rain over night. (That’s on top of about .6” the night before.) I am worried that one of our plants is so top-heavy from the rain that it may have damaged its stem. I’ll check it out when I get back home.

Texas Cookin’

These are not real enchiladas.
Where’s the beef? Where’s the grease? Photo credit: Leonor’s Restaurant

Get them enchiladas greasy

get them steaks chicken fried

>Sho’ do make a man feel happy

to see white gravy on the side

—Guy Clark

I decided to join Suna in posting a Friday Feast. Here is this week’s menu:

Appetizer: How are you today?

Antsy. Frustrated. Excited. Happy.

Soup: Name 3 television shows you watch on a regular basis.

1. The Daily Show
2. The Colbert Report
3. Football

Salad: What’s the scariest weather situation you’ve experienced?

I can’t think of one. When I was a kid, I used to really enjoy hurricanes because we got out of school. I didn’t know to be afraid of them. Actually, I am more afraid today of the things engineers do to protect us from storms than of the storms themselves.

Main Course: If you could wake up tomorrow morning in another country, where would you want to be?

I loved Canada and Panamá, but I would have to say that waking up next to Suna is more important to me than which country we are in.

Dessert: What do you usually wear to sleep?

I’m like an actress whose name I can’t remember. She said, “I used to sleep in the nude…before the earthquake.” No earthquake, but I learned my lesson when a drunk slammed his pickup into the light pole outside my bedroom one night. Fumbling around for clothes before I could go make sure nobody died slowed me down too much. BTW: nobody was even seriously hurt, although the guy whose sister was in the truck was not happy with the driver. Mayhem may have ensued at a later date.