Texas Is Trying to Kill Me

I say this with love and no small amount of terror: Texas is trying to kill me.

First, it was the fire ants.  There are literal mounds of these damn things in my yard.  I don't know how such small creatures do it, but parts of my sod are gone, and in its place are these crumbly giant mounds of something I can only guess is ant poo.  I believe these fire ants are the original creators of The Matrix.

Then, there are the hurricanes and tropical storms. It rains Biblically here in Houston.  Except if there was an Ark here the fire ants would swarm the boat, and all that would survive would be longhorns and armadillos, and, of course, the fire ants.

We started the season with Hurricane Alex, which turned out to be nothing but a great excuse to sit inside and eat too many Doritos because it didn't really come this way at all.  So we were all, I love hurricanes.  We get to stay in and watch movies and eat junk food.  But now we're up to Tropical Storm Hermine and it's enough already.  And I know perfectly well we haven't seen anything compared to the real storms they've had here.  But any time the wind picks up to more than a light zephyr, the power flickers out.  And then the kids start panicking.  The girls panic because they're phobic about that kind of stuff, and Little Dude panics because without power there can be no Lego Star Wars on the Wii.  And then I have to listen to the panicking.  And I think we'll all agree that it's not appropriate for me to start drinking Frodkas at ten in the morning, no matter what the weather is.

The other thing about this Tropical Storm is that it is named Hermine, which is a beautiful name for a storm I'm sure, but it makes me think of Carmine from Laverne and Shirley.  And then I'm walking around for days singing "Making Our Dreams Come True."


Now you'll have it stuck in your head too.  Sorry about that.

Here in Texas we have tornado drills at school.  The tornado alarm sounds different than the fire alarm, but it's alarm-y enough to let you know that something is terribly wrong.  I know this because I happened to be at the school on Tuesday when they had the first tornado drill of the year.  It was extremely believable, since we were under a tornado watch for the day, it was pouring out, and the sky had kind of a swirly look.   So when the tornado alarm went off, I almost peed myself.

For those of you who have never experienced this particular joy, it's very much like that "Duck and Cover" movie from the Cold War era. One important difference is that "duck and cover" actually works in protecting you from flying debris from a tornado.  A-bomb radiation, maybe not so much.

In the tornado drill, everyone moves toward the center of the building and lines up in the interior hallways.  They all hunker down on the floor and the teachers try to keep the kids (and um, any visiting moms) from having a panic attack.  At least the teachers who know what they're doing do that.  One of my daughters has a brand-new teacher who may have missed that page in the manual, because she didn't know what the alarm was or what to do.  The really jaded fourth-graders who have lived in Texas all their lives were like, Meh.  It's a tornado alarm, Ma'am.

Also? The excessive rain apparently makes the fire ants stay inside their cozy, dry anthills and breed like rabbits in conjugal visit trailers.  Or maybe the rain drives them out of the ground and into our house.  Or something.  But the basic equation here is more rain equals more damn fire ants.

This storm season could end any time now and that would be super helpful.