Stocked up on bottled water and canned food, because every storm is the one that’s going to wipe out the city now, even if the city’s two hundred miles inland. Nobody ever regretted spending twenty bucks on hurricane preparation, I figure, at least not compared to how they may have regretted not doing the same thing. And isn’t the point of all that stuff that it’ll keep?

Anyway, Austin saw not a drop of rain from the storm, despite the drumbeat of flooding flooding flooding coming down on the local news. So instead of a hurricane, we get a drought. But Austin was always a feast-or-famine town, wasn’t it?

Still mostly out of the online loop at the moment, as AT&T has informed me that they won’t actually be able to turn on the Internet at the house for another week and a half. Which was shocking to me, because that’s how long it took in England, and I remember being irate about it then- don’t those bastards know how quickly this stuff happens in America? Everything takes two weeks in England- having your utilities activated, opening a bank account, hearing back from a job interview, taking the bus from Wood Green to Trafalgar Square… But we are proud Americans now, our hands over our hearts as we sing the national anthem, waiting for the opportunity to go to Camp Obama and join our comrades in ushering in a bold new era for our country… Sign up enough new volunteers for the Obama Youth and you can make Community Organizer by election day!

Lord, the world is weird. Do any of y’all who are involved in the political debate on the Internet ever spend much time on the forums for people on the other side of the spectrum? I’ve had to stifle that particular masochistic trait in the wake of AT&T’s foot-dragging, but when I do- jeez, do people on, say, the Conservatism community on LiveJournal not shy away at all from the Godwin-y arguments these days. Hitler was a community organizer, they type furiously while masturbating to the mental image of Sarah Palin fucking making love to a pitbull in bright red lipstick, so was Stalin… Well, comrades, I suppose that’s true in the semantic sense, but the more unhinged your opponents seem in a contest like this, the better your odds look to me. The storm never came, and I’m willing to double all bets against a McCain/Palin presidency.

(image via Lauren’s flickr stream)