Today has been

one of those quintessential September days in this part of Texas. Cloudy, drippy, dark. I did manage to get the yard work done before the drizzle set in but it's been steady since before noon.

I love these days, the harbinger of fall, the forbearer of October, my favorite month, with it's warm days and crystalline nights.

Beginning in August, I fight a losing battle with the morning glory vines that push their way up the hedges in our front yard. They're persistent and the purple flowers finally peek through the shrubs where escapees have been hiding. They always bring memories of fall at our country home. I didn't fight the vegetation there. Nature was closer than it is here in the city and didn't require the deed restricted regimen of a landscaped yard. We've been gone from there for five years. I miss it still.

Junk mail headline:

Defy Old Age--Try It Free

Well, look what happens when you try it.

Of course,

even a category 2 storm can cause lots of problems. Reports now say that 14 people have been killed in the storm and there will probably be more. Reports also say that, other than the electrical outages (about 4 million without power), damage has been fairly light. I still say the media overblows these things along with just about every other event that comes down the pike.

Hurricane Isabel

has plowed through North Carolina, Virginia, and points north bound for Canada. This storm had ramped up to a strong category 5 at times but weakened to category 2 before making landfall. I've accused the media many times of hyping these things and now a media type has even taken notice. Greg Easterbrook's blog at The New Republic lays it out pretty well.

I've been gone.

But now I'm back...for what it's worth.

I noticed in my absence that Blogger changed their mind about their "premium" service. Seems they have rolled all the features we use to pay for into all the Blogger blogs. That's probably a Google thing because they want to put ads on everything. Actually I don't have a problem with it. I have another blog to record work related things and it's pretty cool because the ads are very targeted to what I'm writing about. A lot of my entries lately have been about things electrical because we've been having things electrical problems around the work place. Lo and behold, banner ads for generators and surge suppressors started showing up on my site. When I was writing a lot about towers, there were ads for tower lease space up there. Ah, the power of Gooooogle.