Coverage of Rita from Two Houston Apartments

Thursday, September 22, 2005

Ick

A few streaks of daylight remain to show me that the sky is no longer an unlit blue, but rather a grayish murk. Clouds are starting to drift in and they change the heavens from what would be a twilight rainbow into cold steel.

As I drop my girlfriend off at Rice after an afternoon of television, I notice that the city is starting to show its desertion. The normal bustle of a Thursday night, twenty-somethings preparing for a pub crawl, relaxed middle-aged men driving away their midlife crises in convertibles, is replaced with an eerie sense of purpose. The number of cars on the road feels more appropriate for Sunday night at 3:00 AM than for Thursday. You know anyone out driving at 3:00 AM has somewhere they really want to go. It feels like that now.

I run traffic signals carelessly on the way back to my apartment because the streets are nearly empty. Nobody's going to stop me; no one is around to care. Even the parking lots are empty. Rice University doesn't have many parking lots for its students, and the ones near the dormitories are coveted -- now they are empty as well.

The single shred of normalcy that persists are the runners of the Outer Loop. The dirt trail around Rice University hosts hundreds of runners per day, rain or shine. Will they still be running when Rita arrives?

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