Month: July 2025

The Latest Texas Floods

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Even though I was born in Houston and grew up in a small town near there, my Texas heart is in the Hill Country, so the recent flash flood disaster hit close to home.

I have family in New Braunfels, which is a little southeast of the disaster in Hunt, but also on the Guadalupe River. A year ago, we rented a place near Hunt to see the eclipse and spent much of our time downhill from that place floating in tubes on the river. It was a peaceful time and we enjoyed hanging out with relatives for several days.

I assume that the place where we stayed survived the damage (it was across a road and uphill from the river) but I’m sure the steps down to the river and the facilities there are gone. The worst loss there would be a bathroom and some tubes for floating. Fortunately, no one built homes too close to the river at that location.

Flash floods are a fact of life in that part of the world. In fact, the saying “turn around, don’t drown” was started by Hector Guerrero, a warning meteorologist for the National Weather Service in San Angelo, Texas, which is about 150 miles northwest of Hunt and also experienced flash floods in the latest storm.

While the Guadalupe River and other rivers in the Hill Country flood regularly, this event was particularly bad given the extreme amount of rain that fell quickly — about 15 inches in a few hours, which is about half the yearly average rainfall.

I listened to weather expert Daniel Swain’s discussion of the disaster on Monday morning and learned that one of the reasons the Hill Country is at great risk for erratic rainfalls like this one is because the Gulf of Mexico is so warm.

I knew the Gulf was warm, since I spent so much of my childhood at the beach playing in that water and was surprised when I moved to the East Coast and discovered that the Atlantic is not as warm, even in summer. (Much less the Pacific.) And of course, with climate change, the Gulf is getting warmer, which is why there is now greater risk from hurricanes.

But I didn’t realize how much affect such warm water has. In fact, the warmth of the Gulf and the winds and storms that it produces also are a cause of tornado weather all the way north to Canada. Different weather patterns crashing into each other – and that’s not the scientific explanation, just my grasp of it – cause a lot of problems.

Some of the flooding was also related to a tropical storm in the Gulf that hit Mexico and moved north, just as an example.

I was not surprised by the flash floods, because I know the area. I used to drive my father around the area west of New Braunfels since he liked to look at the wildlife. We would stop as we crossed every creek, to see if there was any water in it. Many of the creeks and even some of the rivers are mostly dry or close to it, except when it rains. Continue reading “The Latest Texas Floods”…

Handling things

personby Gillian Polack
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This week I don’t want to write at length. I’m still dealing with a bunch of nasty stuff done in Australia on Friday night. It struck me, though, that most readers of this blog are also dealing with bad things. We are not having an easy time of it, any of us.

What I would love to know is how we all handle things.

My best approach (and the most difficult) is to think everything through and understand. Twenty years ago I could take that understanding and share it with activists I knew and we’d find ways fo helping people and moving past the logjam that the impossible creates. Right now, most of those people aren’t talking to me because I’m too Jewish, but I still delve deeply and understand, and when someone asks, I can help them reach the stage where they can identify the hate and the slogans and the dark alliances and make their own decisions for their lives. I really miss teaching – I don’t get to explore ideas with many people and certainly don’t get simple solutions. This was once the best approach, but now makes me feel helpless. Also, I find it exhausting. It’s especially exhausting when friends tell me “The group I marched with was not at all antisemitic. You are imagining things.” Perfectly good people can march alongside vile bigots and as long as the bigots are polite in their presence and the good people accept the rhetoic unquestioningly or don’t know the dowhistles then those good people do not know what is being done in their name.

Solitaire is not the best way to deal, I have discovered. I start playing when things get too much and then cannot stop.

Cooking was a great support (because I love cooking) when there were friends around who could eat my food, but, between COVID and our charming new present, not many people eat my coking and so all I have is too much food and… my freezer is full.

Last time there was a wave of antisemitism (the Molotov cocktail years) I did a lot of walking and enormous amounts of dancing. They were so good for me. I cannot walk far these days and I can only dace for maybe 2 minutes. I am so proud that I can now dance for two minutes, it’s like life returning. I needed 2 hours of dancing back then, to give me a break from everything. I would lose myself in the music and my feet would replace my brain in ruling my life and over time, my body forgot the burdens it carried and life was wonderful. If my illnesses would go into abeyance, I would dance again, but, right now, dancing has a Jew has its own aches. Walking doesn’t. I will work on improving my walking.

Superhero movies and TV and K-drama help a lot. They’re not my everyday and I can take a break from my everyday when I’m watching them. Crime dramas and sad stories of sorrow… less good. A couple of friends suggested I watch things to do with the Holocaust, or one of the documentaries about October 7. If I want to sleepwalk, I promise, I will watch those things.

These are a few of the things I’ve tried.

We all live different lives and we all have different approaches to turning the impossible into something we can handle everyday. The impossible for someone in the US is quite different to the impossible for someone in Australia. I’d love to know some of your ways of dealing.

The 4th of July

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Black t-shirt with the words Mundus Sine Caesaribus on it.

I grew up with Fourth of July celebrations, though the ones I remember were not particularly patriotic – I don’t recall any speeches, much less any on the topic of loving one’s country – but rather an excuse for a community gathering.

In Friendswood, the then tiny town outside of Houston where I grew up, there was a parade every 4th followed by a barbecue and small rodeo in the community park. My sister and I rode horses in the parade most years, sometimes accompanied by our parents (depended on the number of horses we had available at the time).

I recall participating in the rodeo a few times, doing barrel racing and pole-bending on my horse Sue, who was quite good at those things, having been trained as a cutting horse. However, we never practiced enough, plus Sue was part Mustang, which gave her short legs. We never won anything.

In high school I remember marching with my high school band in a nearby town for the parade and even playing in a half-assed band for that town’s rodeo.

Much later on, when I lived in Washington, DC, I went down to the Capitol grounds for the symphony concert and watched the excellent fireworks display on the mall from there. No speeches at that event, either. I recall singing “This Land Is Your Land,” though. Reagan was president and most of the people at the concert were not big fans.

So my thoughts on the 4th of July have more to do with horses and parades and barbecue and music than they do with patriotism. Which is a good thing, because this 4th I am fresh out of patriotism. The regime in charge of our government is busy undermining almost everything I hold dear about the United States of America and bringing back all the worst aspects of our country. Continue reading “The 4th of July”…

Dash It All

personby Madeleine Robins
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I have for been several weeks preparing four books for publication: re-releases of the first three Sarah Tolerance Mysteries, to be followed a month later by the release of The Doxies Penalty, the fourth in the series. Because I’m publishing with an independent micro-press, I’m doing a lot of the production work myself, which means I have been engaging with my own text up close and personal.

The good news? I still like all four books. I can find passages that give me pleasure (and have found comparatively few that make me wince and say “what was the Author thinking?” This is not always the case when looking over your old work. But of course, as I read, I notice things. Like,” damn, the Author uses a lot of em-dashes.”

A thing to know about me: my major in college was theatre, and while I mostly did behind-the-scenes stuff (props and costumes and especially stage management) I did a good deal of performing. Having read a lot of plays and thought in terms of performance then, when I’m writing now I think in terms of the weight and rhythm of words as they’re spoken aloud. If I’m reading my own work I  want markers, flags for performance. Thus em-dashes, which I think are most useful pieces of punctuation for capturing the rhythm of the way people speak.

Much as I love Jane Austen’s books, in real life people rarely speak in full sentences. People interrupt themselves–and others–all the time. For people interrupting themselves, I suppose one could use the parenthesis (another of my favorite forms of punctuation). But because there’s usually an imperative quality to interruptions, and abruptness, I prefer em-dashes.

Here’s a bit from my new Sarah Tolerance book, The Doxies’ Penalty:

“I would think you’d prefer to hand him to Sir Walter—”

“In the general way, we’d find ‘im some justice from our own—if ‘e’s one of ours. Look, I cannot promise to look out for the fellow, nor give him up, without I ask a blessing to it.”

There’s an interruption of the first speaker, which really demands an em-dash. And the second speaker interrupting himself to qualify what he’s saying. I could, in justice, use a comma to set off “if ‘e’s one of ours.” But the comma doesn’t imply the sort of emphasis that self-interruption usually requires. 

You could say that I’m leaving myself—and other performers—information on how to read the words, aloud or otherwise.

When I was doing a final pass on the manuscript for Doxies I did a search for the old-style double-hyphen which (in typewriter days) stood in for an em-dash, which would be added later in typesetting. Because sometimes I use a double hyphen rather than Option-Shift-Hyphen (on a Mac keyboard). And inevitably I find some. I also find inconsistent spacing around my em-dashes, and other typographic horrors requiring repair. I am closing in on my deadline to hand the MS over to the formatter, and I want to make their work as pain-free as possible.

If all goes well, The Doxies Penalty, Sarah Tolerance #4, will be available mid-October.* And yes, that was a plug. When you’re working with a micr0-press you also have to pitch in on marketing where you can.

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*The first three books in the series, Point of Honour, Petty Treason, and The Sleeping Partner, will be re-released in September. See comment above about marketing.