Ornoth

Eighteen months in Austin. Here’s a monologue about what I expected, or more properly the numerous things that surprised me, as a lifelong New Englander. If you’re curious, read on…

The Climate:

We knew Texas would be hot; it’s supposed to be hot. Guess what? It was hot. In fact, 2023 was Austin’s hottest summer ever recorded, and the driest year since 1910. In fact, it was hot enough that a friends’ house caught fire when empty wine bottles in his outdoor recycling bin spontaneously combusted!

But ya know what? We handled the heat. In fact, we handled it better than most Austinites, who surprised us with how much they complained about it. Granted, we do cherish our air conditioner, but even outdoors the lower humidity usually made the heat feel a lot less oppressive than we expected. It surprised us when Inna, a lifelong hater of hot weather and bright sunshine, caught herself complaining about a rare string of overcast days.

Still, when summer provides eighty days above 100°F, it changes how you look at things. The reggae song “96 Degrees in the Shade” by Third World doesn’t really justify its lyrical description of “real hot” anymore. It brings a wry smile when the Heat Miser – the main antagonist in the holiday special “The Year Without a Santa Claus” – sings “I’m Mister Hundred-and-One”. Pfft! Call me when it reaches 108°, dude.

With warm air baking the ground around our shallowly-buried water pipes, we had the novel experience of 94°F water coming out of our cold water tap, often warmer than what we got from the hot tap, where some water sitting in our indoor pipes got cooled by our air conditioning! And thanks to South Central Texas’ extreme drought, our tap water often tasted like moldy water from the bottom of a pond.

Another thing we had to get used to was that our two-story apartment has significantly different climate zones. Due to its open plan, the upper story is far warmer than the ground floor, both in winter and in summer. This has actually worked out for us, where my work space is upstairs and Inna’s is downstairs.

Another surprise was that even though it doesn’t often get very cold, the days’ length still shortens noticeably in the winter. Granted, Austin’s 10¼ hours of winter daylight is still 90 minutes more than I got growing up in Maine; but it’s still dark enough to discourage one from going out after 6pm in the winter.

That brought Inna some cognitive dissonance. She’s used to going out and being most social during the summer because that’s when the days are longest and the temperature is most comfortable in Pittsburgh. But in Austin, you have to choose comfort or daylight: either you socialize in the summer when the days are long but it’s too hot to be outside; or you force yourself to go out in the winter when temperatures are comfortable but it gets dark early.

And heat and drought aren’t the only dramatic weather we’ve experienced. A month after we moved in, Austin was crippled (and we lost both a huge tree and our water lines) in a destructive ice storm (writeup & pix). There are frequent thunderstorms which can be both intense and immense, and we recently had a two-day power outage after a storm fried two transformers on our street. The worst storms can bring sudden hail, and there’s nothing like being bombarded by grapefruit-sized chunks of ice falling at 180 km/h to get your attention (and that of your auto and home insurance adjusters)!

Nature:

Moving south, what did I fear most? Bugs! I expected all manner of nasty, poisonous, invasive critters. And yeah, we got a few, but there weren’t all that many, and they mostly stayed out of our house.

When we arrived, our space was home to a handful of ladybugs, but they were quickly removed and never returned. Yeah, we had to deal with a couple small German and large American roaches that found their way indoors, but they were a rare shock.

But one day we discovered one small scorpion in a ceiling light fixture – the first any of us had ever seen in our lives – which sent the entire household into a panicked killing frenzy. That underscored a Texas rule that we hadn’t been aware of: always check your shoes before you stick your feet into them!

There’s been ample wildlife in our yard, which backs up to a wooded creek. We’re plagued by an absolutely fearless herd of deer that own the area. And summer was an uninterrupted eight-month cacophony of cicadas. The fireflies were so numerous in spring that a neighbor called out the electrical company, thinking he was seeing arcing power lines!

We’ve had green anoles, hummingbirds, a ton of cardinals, and nesting hawks. On rare occasions we’ve seen garter snakes, armadillos, and even a coyote. Farther afield, on the bike I ran into actual vultures and real-life roadrunners!

Another completely unexpected delight were the flowers, which were profusely strewn everywhere. Spring is heralded by vivid bluebonnets and red Texas indian paintbrush that are seemingly everywhere. Crepe myrtle trees decorate the streets a little later. And brilliant fiery red and orange Pride-of-Barbados bushes bloom for most of the year. There were also flowers that didn’t open until October and November’s “second spring”. And after a hard freeze, our backyard frostweed plants were decorated with shockingly elaborate ice sculptures around their bases. It really was an amazing, year-long, colorful show; tho I’ll always miss New England’s lilacs and lily of the valley.

Government & Politics:

Speaking of New England, I grew up in Maine, so I’m used to being an urban liberal within an area where the countryside is dominated by conservatives. And I most recently lived in Pittsburgh, another progressive enclave surrounded by the election deniers who led the 2021 insurrection against the United States of America. I expected more of the same from Texas, and it mostly delivered, being about as full of rednecks as Western Pennsyltucky once you venture outside the city.

But it also surprised me in some shocking and disturbing new ways. I’ve never lived in a city that was so openly besieged as Austin is. The arch-conservative state legislature and governor make no attempt to hide their pervasive attempts to make the state’s liberal cities fail – and Austin in particular – in any way they can. This includes sending in state troopers (essentially military shock troops) to terrorize (“police”) the population.

They can do this because Austin’s police force has essentially abdicated its responsibility to ensure law and order. Like most places, Texas’ police officers are right-leaning, and would like to see Austin fall into chaos to prove that progressive ideas inevitably lead to social disorder. So after the violence of the Black Lives Matter protests, when there were calls to de-fund the police, many of them left the force, leaving it chronically understaffed, or stayed on but simply stopped doing their jobs… even though the Austin PD’s budget was never reduced, and has actually grown significantly.

Augment their quiet-quitting with an understaffed and underpaid 911 system, where emergency callers might wait on hold for 45 minutes before their call is even answered. Think about how this situation – continued over years and decades – plays into the hands of thieves, gangs, violent criminals, drug addicts and dealers, and everyday self-important egomaniacs unwilling to check their selfish impulses. Then you begin to understand the degree of lawlessness and sense of vulnerability that one has to endure living here.

It was an interesting coincidence that a thief ditched a car on our street and sped off on foot through our yard on the very day we moved in. And then there’s the need to make an appointment three to six months in advance to get anything done at the DMV. The state of Texas is fatally broken in several ways.

I wasn’t wrong to expect rednecks in Texas, but what really surprised me was the level of barefaced organized warfare against the state’s largest communities and their citizens. The resulting undercurrent of unsafety is by far the biggest negative we’ve experienced as part of our move. It’s profoundly scary.

Social:

Finally, just a few random observations about how things work down here.

I expected life in Austin to be way more dependent on motor vehicle travel than Boston or even Pittsburgh. That proved out. On the other hand, our house is in a great location: less than a klick to a major highway, but at the end of a small dead-end street that’s buried in a quiet, wooded valley. It’s really quite delightful. While it’s not required in our hilly northwestern suburb, much of the city needs to actively water the clay around foundations of their homes to keep them from moving and cracking!

I expected there to be more stuff going on in Austin than in Pittsburgh, and that’s been a mixed bag. There’s a lot of collegiate-level partying and drugs and soulless entrepreneurial ventures, but much less art and cultural stuff than we expected. Tho to be fair, Pittsburgh did very well with that for a small city, given its philanthropic heritage.

One surprising way that Austin is like Boston is that – although people are quite friendly – deep friendships are hard to form and usually quite casual and transient. Because there’s lots to do, people are usually already busy and booked up with their own stuff, and don’t respond well to ad hoc get-togethers. Because it’s a boom town with college students and young professionals constantly moving in and out, it discourages making permanent connections. So there are definitely challenges on the social front.

And every so often we have a little food dissonance. Sometimes it’s just that Thai restaurants here serve curries containing just meat… no veggies! Or perhaps it’s the Bumble Bee Jalapeño-Seasoned Tuna? Or the Heinz Jalapeño Ketchup?

Overall:

After reviewing dozens of possible landing spots, it was obvious that no city would be perfect. And once we settled on Austin, Inna and I knew there’d be some major trade-offs required. Some of our fears were legit, and some of the drawbacks make life here extremely challenging.

But we made our commitment and followed through, and so far, we have both been very happy here. Over the past eighteen months, Austin has fulfilled our needs, provided an exotic new adventure, and become the background for this new chapter of our lives. And we continue to learn new things about life here every day.

People really seem to appreciate my candor and openness. That’s been true for years: I was even given a company-wide Core Value Award for epitomizing Sapient’s value of Openness. And readers of this blog have told me that they admire me for my willingness to publicly share my most intimate thoughts.

So in that spirit, let’s talk about my underwear.

Every so often, when I feel it’s about time, I buy underwear. I usually buy it in big bunches, then go for quite a while before deciding it’s time to buy another batch. Buying in bulk and minimizing shipping costs is basic household efficiency, right?

Earlier this month I decided it was time, so I placed another big order. That piqued my uncannily acute sense of Ornoth curiosity, so I looked back at my previous purchases… And I discovered that the truth of being Ornoth is even more amazing than I had previously imagined!

So, I only have records of my last three underwear purchases. As I give you the details, remember that despite their similarities, these were three completely independent transactions, years apart, with absolutely no conscious or planned parallelism.

The first oddity is that all three times I spent almost exactly the same amount of money: $81, $82, or $92. I suppose that makes sense, given that I’m essentially swapping out collections of approximately equal size. That’s a little interesting, but not a shocker.

A more curious bit is that all three of those purchases were made at almost the exact same time of year: February or the first week of March. So it seems like springtime is underwear time, according to YT. Okay, that’s odd, but not exactly evidence of a vast alien conspiracy.

Finally and most interestingly, those purchases were not just at the same time of year, but the interval between the orders was always exactly six years, every time: early March 2001, February 2007, and early March 2013. Okay, so that is actually kind of surreal.

What it all adds up to is this: I’ve discovered the Hexannual Universal Internal Vernal Underwear Interval! (Say that three times fast!) This theory (which is mine, and belongs to me) you may abbreviate as the HUI-VUI.

What value does this hard-won insight have, you might ask? Well, that should be obvious.

First of all, this triumph of order and logic brings to light yet another amazing and heretofore undocumented super-power of the entity we lovingly know as Ornoth.

But more important than adding another item to the long list of miracles I’ve performed, now I can go and update my calendar and add ticklers for the next two decades of regularly-scheduled $100 underwear purchases: in March 2019, 2025, and 2031!

Oh, and speaking of my underwear, have I told you about how my medieval recreationist persona earned the nickname “Naked Man”? Well, I suppose that’s a story for another time…

Happy first 12-hour day of the year!

Every so often I’ve mentioned my former wife here, mostly in terms of her effect on my life or my current emotional state. She really is one of the best things to ever happen to me. But bless her soul, she had the homemaking skills of Paris Hilton. Here’s one of my all-time favorite stories…

At one point during college we lived in a tiny apartment that was essentially carved out of a hallway in a New England farmhouse. As such, the front door opened directly into our kitchen.

My love did most of the cooking, and usually did passably well, but she was just learning, and there were occasional accidents. When something got a little bit smokey or reduced to a sticky goo, she’d take the offending pan outside and leave it by the door until it had cooled down and stunk less.

Now this was up in northern Maine, where snow happens eight months of the year. So usually it got dropped on a snowbank. And often it would be actively snowing during one of these culinary misadventures. The snow that piled up on the pan kinda made the mess a little worse, but only if you went out and got the pans afterward. If you didn’t…

Yeah. If you didn’t get them, then by morning the snow would have piled up and hid the entire offensive mess from view under a pristine layer of pretty white fluff. And my wife quickly realized that if that happened, no one noticed, and she didn’t have to deal with the mess at all!

Of course, as winter dragged on, the little woman’s culinary repertoire would be increasingly limited by the dwindling stock of available cookware. When the spring thaw finally came, we celebrated Easter by finding six to ten rusted skillets, pans, and pots strewn all over the front lawn. And then we could eat anything we wanted for four whole months, until October’s first snows, when the cycle of the seasons began again…

Do you enjoy the cold weather and snow for the holidays?

Well, I’m a high summer sort of person, really. Autumn really depresses me, because it heralds the end of the world and eight months of cold, barren, deadness. On the other hand, winter biking can be a lot of fun; it’s a good challenge, there are fewer people out, it’s more peaceful, and everyone thinks you’re insane. As for the holidays, I think I’ve already said enough about that in my recent friends-only tirade.
 

What is your ideal holiday celebration? How, where, with whom would you celebrate to make things perfect?

But no, you had to keep poking, didn’t you? Okay, then. I celebrate the solar holidays, not the secular or Xist ones. My ideal celebration, therefore, is somewhere off amidst the power and beauty of nature, far away from man. Recently I have tended to frequent a few specific spots, including Castle Island, which is a tiny outcropping in the middle of Boston Harbor, or the Arnold Arboretum’s Conifer Path, or atop Great Blue Hill.
 

Do you do have any holiday traditions?

See above.
 

Do you do anything to help the needy?

Sometimes, if a close friend has a catastrophic need, I help if I can afford to, but in general the charity that I support is the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, through my annual Pan-Mass Challenge rides.
 

What one gift would you like...

Well, a new job is the number one goal right now. But if we’re limiting ourselves to traditional petty western materialism, two things I’ve wanted for some time are the Ciclosport 434 cyclocomputer and cadence kit, which includes altimeter and inclinometer functions; and the Garmin Etrex Vista handheld GPS, which is like my original Etrex but also includes base maps and an altimeter, as well as a number of other new functions. But the easiest thing for people to get me would be a gift certificate to www.performancebike.com, www.coloradocyclist.com, or www.nashbar.com.