infobong.com

I've been back in Austin for a few days, but I've been pretending that I'm still out of town: avoiding school, not calling people, and, of course, not blogging. I'm going to direct my bloggy energy toward migrating this site to WordPress and designing a new template, so this site will probably be silent for another week or two. I'm leaving comments off until I've migrated, so email me if you have something to say.

For a quick recap of the holidays, it's really dry and hot in Texas and Oklahoma. I'm sure most readers have seen the news reports of the wildfires raging across tornado alley. I suspect they received a lot of coverage because it's a slow time for news, but it's a little frightening. On Thursday, I could see huge plumes of smoke when I was 50 miles outside of Oklahoma City. I spent the night in Norman, and I felt pretty sick the next two days - I suspect that all of the smoke set off my allergies. It seemed strange that the temperature hit 85F on New Year's Day. Of course it's Texas where people expect hot weather, but it was a record high. Yesterday, I went hiking down in the Barton Creek Greenbelt. The creek was completely dry and so was all of the surrounding brush. I found it a little frightening, since the whole place was a giant tinderbox. A stray match or cigarette would have quickly set the whole park ablaze.