You gotta love living in Austin!

As long as we are on the subject of Great Escapes

Easily entertained

A couple of nights ago I surfed over to CNN and saw a "Live! Happening Now" banner that said California police were chasing a woman in a stolen U-Haul truck.

I confess that for a moment - just a teeny, tiny, fleeting moment - the thought came to my mind that Julie had flipped from the stress of moving across the country in a U-Haul, had hi-jacked the truck and was headed for who knows where. How silly of me.

Turns out it was a woman in LA, and sure enough, she was tooling down some major freeway in a U-Haul truck, passing cars right and left as she wove through traffic. The feed was was from a TV helicopter; no audio, just a continuous picture of this truck racing down the freeway. Now we've all seen news clips like this - some dude eventually heads up a one-way street, inevitably hits a car or two, jumps out of the car and runs through a backyard or two while the helicopter camera stays right on him and then the police tackle him, handcuff him and haul him off to face justice.

S0 I'm thinking, okay, I'll watch until the dramatic ending, which will be soon, right? It is late afternoon in LA; she's going to hit something pretty soon. Wrong. She successfully navigates through all the traffic and finally ends up on a four-lane highway heading up the coast. I still haven't seen any cops in pursuit so I'm wondering what kind of chase this is. Finally, the camera pulls back far enough for me to see a couple of motorcycle cops, leisurely following at distance. They eventually get replaced by a black-and-white, then another.

Meanwhile, the U-Haul lady is making time on the highway, mostly by driving down the the center turn lane. The camera gets close enough to see her in the cab and she looks like this is an everyday occurrence for her. She's calm, cool, and whipping through rush-hour traffic like a pro. She comes to the next community up the road and the highway turns into a city street, complete with intersections, but it's no big deal - she blows through them all.

Back on the highway, you now begin to see evidence that the cops have called ahead and most traffic has been pulled over - a la the O. J. Simpson chase. You even see local police cars in the middle of intersections, stopping all traffic to let her go by. In the mean time, the black and whites are being very cool about this - no hot pursuit, no dare-devil maneuvers. They just hang back, waiting for the inevitable.

Finally, you see evidence that the cops have laid down a nail strip - the truck starts weaving back and forth and slows to a stop. The woman hops out, makes a run for it and it ends up like paragraph 3 above. All in all, it only took an hour and a half from the time I started watching.

An hour and a half! You've got to be kidding! I watched this loony lady drive a U-Haul truck for an hour and a half? Oh, well. It was cheaper than a movie.

And if you want to cut to the chase - so to speak - here's the last three or so minutes.

Roasting marshmallows while the pole burns

I'm pretty sure this problem is not limited to Austin, but it certainly qualifies under the unofficial motto of the Chamber of Commerce - "Keep Austin Weird."

Today's American Statesperson has a front page article about all the utility pole fires around town - some 17 at press time early this morning. You don't have to make up stuff like this folks; you just read it out of the paper!

It seems that when there is a prolonged drought, such as we are experiencing, "grime" builds up on power lines. Then, if it drizzles - not rains outright, but drizzles - the mist causes the grime to "ooze" from the lines to the poles, creating a path for the electricity. The electricity seeping into the poles causes them to smolder, and in the case of 17 poles and counting, burst into flame.

Think of it as the old boy scout experiment where you attach live wires to frankfurters to watch them sizzle (unless you happen to substitute a finger or 2 for the wiener, in which case you only see stars - if you're lucky). Only in this case the wiener is 40 feet long and soaked in creosote. They burn like roman candles!

If it were not for the fact that your electricity goes off soon after the pole turns on, it would be a spectacular sight to see. At last count some 10,000 customers were without power for a period of time.

There's always something exciting going on in Austin. Gotta' love it.

Quick Connect

You may recall all the disruption we lived through when the City of Austin dug up all the neighborhood streets to install sewer lines. Well, that project finally finished and the work crews gathered up all their Road Closed signs and took their backhoes and went home. Now all that is left is for each homeowner to contract with a plumbing firm and get connected.

You have two years to make this happen (without penalty) and I was in no big hurry, since a) it cost a princely sum and b) you have to go through the selection process of which plumber to use. Part "b" sort of worked itself out. At first you saw a half-dozen different signs for companies doing work, and then you saw only two or three different signs, and finally you only saw one company's signs, and they would just move from one yard to the next as neighbors compared notes. Obviously, this was the company to do business with - the neighborhood was filled with satisfied customers.

So I called that company and they quoted a price far below what I anticipated, so we went on the list. Before Thanksgiving. Good thing I was not in a hurry. Last week they called and said they would start mid-week. Uh-oh. Rob and the kid's are coming this weekend. Are we going to be flush-able by then? Wednesday morning the crew came and by sundown we were connected! On Thursday they unconnected long enough to get the City seal of approval and when I came home from work there was no big hole in the lawn - just a small section of the yard waiting for new grass.

Only problem was I thought Luke would really like to see the hole and the machines. "You see that grass that's a little different color? There used to be this really, really big hole there."