We don’t often get snow days here in Southeast Texas, but rain days we get. Yesterday we had the (according to one source) rainiest day ever in the Houston area. Harris County, the county that contains Houston and comes to within a few miles of where I live, received enough rain yesterday alone to fuel Niagara Falls for three and a half days.
The rain started Sunday night, and thunder and lightning occurred throughout the night. When I got up at my usual time and looked out the window from my exercise machine, the water was flowing fast and furious in the ditch out front, and the yard was soggy. Our subdivision must be just a few inches higher than everywhere else around us, though, because we’ve always been able to withstand these heavy storms (10-12″ in one day, apparently) without any threat of flooding. Lots of people in the vicinity weren’t so lucky. At least five people died, many in their cars when they were inundated or attempted to drive through standing water. The city came to a standstill. All schools closed. All government agencies closed. The IRS is going to try to extend the deadline for people who waited until the last moment and then couldn’t make it to the post office to file returns.
I’m always amazed by how much water is involved. Imagine looking out your front window and seeing six, eight, ten feet of water and then try to figure out how much water that involves everywhere around you to achieve that level! That’s what it was like in downtown Houston, which is prone to flooding. Apparently we’re going to get more rain today and tomorrow—nothing like what we got yesterday, but with the ground saturated, it probably means more flooding. A lot of schools are still closed today because feeder roads and surface roads are still covered in water in a lot of places, and the rivers and bayous are still rising.
This from a storm that didn’t even get a name. It wasn’t even a tropical depression.
My wife and I like Sam Elliott, so we decided to give the new Netflix series The Ranch a try. Elliott is the patriarch, Debra Winger plays his somewhat estranged wife (they live apart but they still hook up regularly), and Ashton Kutcher plays the prodigal son who left to pursue a pro football career but now has to slink back home to small town Colorado and nurse his wounds and ego. The “responsible” brother is played by his That 70s Show costar Danny Masterson, whose brother Chris I met when I visited the set of Haven a couple of summers ago.
The humor is fairly sophomoric, but it’s Debra Winger who saves the show. Elliott is good, but Winger is the only one who plays it straight. She gets some good, funny lines, but she doesn’t play them for laughs, with a deliberate pause for yuks. She delivers them like they’re normal, regular dialog, and that works so much better. We’re five episodes in (out of ten) and we’ll probably watch the rest. Not “must-see” TV but it’s okay. Sitcoms seem to have left me behind over the years. The lafftrak on this one gets on my nerves. The only sitcom we watch regularly is The Big Bang Theory and even that one is starting to wear thin. We also came to realize that sitcoms aren’t really binge-able. Two episodes in a row is about our limit.
I’m not at all happy to hear that ABC has decided to not renew Stana Katic’s contract for Castle. I’m hoping it is a ploy to build suspense at the end of the season. Nathan Fillion is fun, but Katic has always been the bigger attraction for me. She’s the kind of actor who I enjoy watching when the focus is on another character, because she’s always doing something interesting. Not upstaging, but she’s present in the scene, not waiting to say her lines. The show won’t be the same without her. In fact, I can’t think of any way for them to have her leave that maintains the show’s premise for another season.
Funny thing—we saw a guy wearing a t-shirt that said “Muir” something or other, which led to a discussion of the TV show The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which led to the mutual realization that neither of us had ever seen the 1947 movie on which it is based, so we queued it up on Amazon video last night. The TV show was set in Maine, but the original is on the British coast, with Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison, George Sanders, and a very young Natalie Wood. Tierney is a feminist in 1900, unwilling to let anyone tell her how she should feel or live. The score was by Bernard Herrmann, which lends the movie a Hitchcockian atmosphere. It’s not perfect: Mrs. Muir ignores her daughter for huge chunks of time, and it leaps ahead twice at the end to a kind of saccharine finale, but it was pretty good, if you can adapt to the glacial pacing of the era. The “coarse language” (blasted this and blast that) is amusing.
