Hurricane Ike

When you live in the Gulf of Mexico, hurricanes are just a fact of life, I guess. Having gone through 2 in the past three years (Katrina and now Ike), I am a pro!

The 2 were very different. Katrina was more powerful, but moved faster. Ike just lingered on and on and would not go! We were West of the eye, so we took an 8-hour beating. Multiply the video below times 8 hours and try to imagine how much rain and wind and noise...It's surreal.

Two days later we can say we were lucky. We are dry, our power came back Saturday night and a cold front blew in and the weather is beautiful and cool. This is important since the crews are out cleaning and repairing and most Houston residents are still without power and the heat here can be unbearable.

I got the most unusual phone call yesterday: a reporter from my hometown's newspaper, Porto Alegre, in Brazil. But that was not the unusual part...he interviewed me three years ago, in the aftermath of Katrina, when we were in New Orleans, with water up to the belly button. The piece ran in today's print edition of Zero Hora.

Squidoo Lenses

I have been spending some time working on my Squidoo Lenses. It is a bit addictive and I don't know HTML enough to give them that supercool look that some lenses have. They are very informative, though, and here is a list of them:

Pull Tab Crochet on crocheting with pull tabs and different kinds of fiber.
Plastic Bags, Let's Do Something About Them on different uses for the pesky plastic grocery bag, including turning it into yarn ("plarn") and crocheting with it.
Pull Tab Art on other things besides crochet that can be done using aluminum pull tabs.
The History of the Can Pull Tab that tells you how the pull tab was invented and how it evolved.
Exotic Pets: The Degu about the cutest, most interesting rodent ever, which I happen to have 2 of...
Hydroponics with Kids on soil-less agriculture and kids.
Pull Tab Redemption Myths that talks about all myths involving recycling of pull tabs and what you can REALLY do with them.
Loren Eiseley about a sensational person and his impact on the scientific and literary world.
Edgar Morin about a sociologist and philosopher and his take on science (among other things).


Now I have to study HTML code and start revamping them...

I have a BLOG!!!!

OK, I gave in...I was afraid this was going to turn into some kind of slavery..."must post to blog, must post to blog"...so I'll try to go slow. So many things to do and not enough hours in the day.

I am kind of excited, though, and probably have a lot to learn.

That said, excuse me, but I have to go...learn "how to blog".

See ya.