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.

Our move over the holidays from Pittsburgh to Austin was a long, hard road… both literally and figuratively. Here are some of the lowlights (plus a couple highlights) from the hectic, stressful, and eventful month gone by.

Final week at Hobart Street

Boxing up Hobart Street produced an unanticipated cat fortress!

Closing the book on the Hobart Street apartment

Hell is real... especially in Ohio!

Home at last, after a 1,450-mile road trip

Orny broke a couple chairs out of the moving trailer to make the wait for our movers more comfortable

We successfully moved our huge pile of mess from one place to another

The lease on our new Austin home began on December 15, but there was no way Inna and I could finish packing up our belongings that quickly, so we made arrangements with movers for December 28th.

The overwhelming sensation in December was stress. All the packing, selling, giving away, donating, or trashing all our belongings took time and the dust we kicked up caused my asthma to start acting up.

Then there was the weather. A week-long arctic blast brought record cold and wind chills below -25°F, and of course I’d prematurely sealed up the box containing my winter coat and boots. It was like the northeast -- where I’ve lived for my entire life -- was taking one final, vicious swipe at me for daring to move south.

The brutal cold snap laid bare some of our old apartment’s frailties. The window in our spare bedroom fell apart in my hands. The jerry-rigged kitchen sink plumbing gave way on Christmas Eve, and the landlord’s Christmas Day repairs only revealed further downstream blockages, presumably due to frozen pipes, so we were left with no water in the kitchen. All this trauma happened while Inna was out of town for four days, visiting family. It made me very glad we would be getting out of that death trap, if only Mother Nature would let us! But all this sure made it easier for us to leave Pittsburgh.

During the bitter cold, I had to post no-parking notices and claim four parallel parking spaces in front of our house that would be required for the 28-foot U-Pack trailer that we’d be loading into. Although it was a nerve-wracking wait for other people’s vehicles to move on, I was finally able to clear the space and the trailer was dropped off on time.

That night before loading day, Inna and I stuffed our cat Begemot into the car to go set up a temporary household in her mother’s condo a couple blocks away. But in the middle of a quick stop to pick up Indian food on busy Murray Ave, the car refused to start! This did nothing to assuage my anxiety about setting off on a 1,450-mile road trip in a 14 year old car!

After some worried fiddling, we managed to get the engine to turn over and drove our reduced household over to our temporary digs. But Begemot immediately hid himself in an inaccessible corner of the basement. And after we fished him out and confined him in our bedroom, he kept us awake the entire night while he suffered his own sneezing/asthma fits and freaked out over being in an unfamiliar place.

That was our segue into:

Week at Mom’s

After our first sleepless night at mom’s, the cold snap broke, and we went back to the apartment to meet four guys from “Zooming Moving” of Salem, Ohio who would load our belongings into the trailer. They seemed smart and fast, taking 2½ hours to load our 155-ish boxes and pieces of furniture into less space in the trailer than we believed possible. It was magical watching our place rapidly clear out, then seeing everything stuffed trash-compactor style into a tiny section of our trailer (FYI that was a clever bit of foreshadowing, there). When we asked them at the last minute, they even squeezed in four chairs that Inna had feared she’d have to give away.

Once the trailer was locked and the guys gone, Inna called and arranged to have U-Pack pick it up. I visited my oral surgeon for a previously-scheduled followup that was painless but carried disappointing news. Afterward I circled back to the old apartment and found the trailer had been hauled away, so I pulled down the parking signs and went across town to visit El Burro: a favorite burrito joint.

That was on Wednesday the 28th, but we didn’t plan to leave Pittsburgh until the following Tuesday, to avoid being on the road over the New Years holiday. So we had a week to close up the old apartment and hit up some favorite places, which included ice cream at Bruster’s, lunch at Pamela’s diner, and dinner from Thai and Noodle Outlet. For Inna in particular, it was the end of an era, having lived in that apartment for 12 years!

On one hand, it was a major relief that we could stop working like slaves; all the packing and planning was finally done and over with! We even had time to run a load of laundry! And we watched with delight as our stuff traveled to Ohio, then spent the holiday weekend in Arkansas, and arrived in Austin on Monday, eight days earlier than our promised delivery date!

On the other hand, we found ourselves with too much time and nothing to do, combined with the uncomfortably cold temperature of Inna’s mother’s condo. The waiting was especially hard on Inna, who -- having committed to the Austin move -- was eager to hit the road.

And I had time to reflect on how even the holidays had been out to get us this year. Halloween featured my oral surgery; Inna twisted her ankle during our Austin trip over Thanksgiving, and our old apartment’s electrical panel went bad the night we returned; a frigid Christmas featured frozen water pipes and hectic packing while Inna was away visiting her father; and we were spending New Years living out of a suitcase at Inna’s mother’s condo, while our new house and all our stuff was already waiting for us in Austin!

But time passed, the calendar ticked over to 2023, and our long-anticipated departure date finally arrived.

The Drive

Between our fatigue, a stressed-out cat, and our 14 year old car, we allocated three days for the 1,450-mile drive down to Austin. We’d made reservations at Red Roof Inns along the way, relying on their open policy toward pets. Setting out, we were tired and nervous, but happy that things had gone as well as they did.

We left Pittsburgh on Tuesday January 3th in steady rain that tapered off the further we went. The three of us all fared well, and after nine hours we pulled into our motel in Nashville. I downed a terrible “jalapeno cheez chicken” from the Mexican place next door and settled in. The room was garbage, with broken lights, thermostat, and faucet. Bigi’s stress-response asthma was really bad. Then at 5am a group of assholes came around screaming and pounding on doors, and took three body-slams attempting to bust our door in. It was very reminiscent of our horrifying experience at our Austin motel in November. What the fuck is it with you Southerners that you turn into raving murderous assholes when you go to a motel?

After a horrible night we set out on the middle leg of our journey. Inna did most of the driving on a sunny day, enjoying the 75 MPH speed limit through memorable towns like Bucksnort, Tennessee. In the middle of Arkansas we had our one worrying car malfunction when our tire pressure monitor signaled too high air pressure. But it reset after we pulled aside for a lengthy stop, and we proceeded more gingerly. Our motel in Texarkana was less run-down, but I was so wary about the guys hanging out in the parking lot that I couldn’t eat. Fortunately we didn’t have any more overnight visitors, but the cat’s asthma made for another rough night.

On the final day we got up and showered, then faced our shortest drive of the trip, all of which improved our moods. After seeing a bunch of beaver-bearing billboards advertising “Buc-ee’s” truck stop, Inna decided to stop and check one out. It’s kinda of like Pittsburgh’s Sheetz -- a local favorite convenience store -- only with the ridiculous size, decor, and attitude of a huge casino. We definitely weren’t in Kansas anymore! Then, as Austin came into welcome view, we reflected on how well both the car and cat had done on the road trip; the latter experiencing only one outburst in response to Inna’s singing along with her chosen tunes.

Arriving midafternoon on January 5th, our first stop was of course the new house. After discovering that the real estate agent’s promised lockbox was nowhere to be seen, we found the key literally under the doormat and let ourselves in, giving the place a quick once-over. I got our fiber internet router set up while Bigi began to to settle in; meanwhile, Inna made a grocery run and tried to track down the king-sized mattress that FedEx was supposed to deliver for us.

We’d reserved a hotel in Austin in case we got in late, and decided that was preferable to sleeping on the floor, so we bundled poor Bigi back into the car. Our room was fine, but we had another restless night and checked out early the next morning to spend the day at home, watching for our mattress.

Taking up residence

Watching for deliveries proved very fruitful, as we received not only our mattress, but also Inna’s laptop, which we’d dropped off at an Apple store in Pittsburgh for repairs, and a huge grocery bag full of useful stuff (including notably non-Heinz ketchup) from Inna’s former Pittsburgh/now Texas friend Traci.

After making my own grocery run, I was hanging around and saw a kid park his car at the end of our cul de sac and jog between our house and the neighbor’s. I shrugged it off as a local picking up something he’d forgotten. But ten minutes later Austin cops swarmed the area, took possession of the car, flagged me to tell them if I’d seen anything, and started a manhunt complete with search dogs! Day One in our new house, and there’s both criminals and police crawling around our property. I’m afraid Bigi was the only one of who was feeling secure in our new home. But hey, it was January 6 and a delightful 78°F!

Over the next three days we worked to slowly make the place more livable. We didn’t have anything to sit on, but procured our new mattress, bed sheets, food, trash bags, a dish rack, and started laundering things. Bigi’s asthma receded and he became more adventurous, but – in characteristic feline style – he also managed to cover himself in ashes while exploring the fireplace.

Getting our stuff home

Meanwhile, our stuff had been sitting at a shipping warehouse for a week, and we were eager to have it delivered. Because our house is on a steep hill and a narrow dead-end street, U-Pack couldn’t drop our trailer off at the house, so we had hired another moving company -- a national chain ironically named “Two Men and a Truck” -- to transfer our belongings into a smaller truck and shuttle it from U-Pack’s depot to the house.

Since the trailer had arrived early, we got the movers to bump our job up to Monday, but when we met them at the facility, they showed up in a truck that was even bigger than the trailer! And that was the smallest truck they had. No way could they move our stuff, nor would they move it into a smaller rental truck like a U-Haul. We were completely screwed. After much wrangling, their chief agreed to use a company minivan the next day to shuttle our stuff from the top of our hill down to our house. To add one more frustration to the day, I grazed a low retaining wall trying to back out of our insanely un-navigable driveway and knocked an exhaust tip from our Accord.

The next morning – January 10th – we met up with the movers and they shuttled our stuff from the U-Pack trailer into their big truck. That was when we learned the downside of the “amazing” packing job that Zooming Moving did back in Pittsburgh: lots of damaged belongings. Three pieces of wooden furniture were broken and more than half of the 22 plastic bins we’d used had been crushed. Fortunately, not much stuff had actually spilled out, so I used plastic wrap to patch together the shattered bins. But our poor stone “Boo-boo Buddha” statue – so named because he had originally come with a chipped knee – was now fully decapitated! The only good news was that our two big glass desktops had somehow arrived intact.

After loading and the 20-minute drive to our place, I showed their driver why U-Pack hadn’t dropped our trailer in front of our house: the steep, curving descent down our street, the overhanging tree branches, the sloping narrow driveway, and the limited space in our cul de sac for turning around. While using a panel van to shuttle our stuff would suck, we thought it too dangerous to try to bring a huge moving van down that hill.

But the driver was a young Black guy fresh out of high school, and he fearlessly wanted to try it. I told him it was all on them, but he actually managed it. He parked the van at a precarious tilt and chocked the wheels.

The movers still had to carry our stuff down the driveway, but they were able to unload, saving us the extra time, expense, and damage that using the minivan would have required. It wasn’t quite as magical seeing all our stuff pile up in the living room. But despite all our pointless worrying, the entire job was done in just over four hours, leaving us shoulder-deep in a fortress of cardboard boxes, broken plastic bins, and randomly-scattered furniture.

And with that, our long-anticipated move south and the month-long moving ordeal was finally complete! Even after so much stress and all the trials thrown at us, we were now in our new place in Austin, complete with all our stuff, including Inna’s car and Bigi the cat.

Our next step was to begin digging out from the mess, but we put that on hold long enough to enjoy a well-earned celebratory dinner at Inna’s favorite: Lupe’s Mexican restaurant.

Life since then…

It’s been a week and a half since our stuff arrived, and we’ve had time to address most of the mess and begin getting comfortable in our new base of operations. In the wake of our move, there’s lots of organizing, arranging, and decorating to do, but we can thankfully say that the hard work is complete and behind us.

In addition to literally “getting our house in order”, Inna and I have made our first few expeditions afield, starting to explore all that Austin has to offer. We’re really excited to start going places, seeing people, and doing things… Finally building the new life that the two of us have dreamed about for so very long.

Stay tuned for our further adventures!

If there’s one thing my new job has been bad for, it’s my blogging. My two-month absence has not been due to lack of material (quite the reverse), but from lack of time and energy. But now that finally I have a long weekend largely to myself, allow me to correct that.

I had a fair amount of last weekend to myself, as well, but I was busy paying attention to the weather. You see, Hurricane Irene landed in NYC and made a tour of New England.

Of course, the local media went gaga. This time of year, weathermen get irrationally preoccupied with the tropics, bringing us updates every half hour about waves leaving Africa which have an infinitesimal chance of impacting us, and then only after taking two or three weeks to cross the Atlantic and mosey northward.

But I must say that once this hurricane was imminent, I appreciated the live coverage that was provided, and the accuracy of the forecast. We’ve come a long way from the days when ships at sea would encounter storms that arrived unannounced.

Despite that, people still take any weather event as an opportunity to bitch about weathermen. The storm’s winds, which gusted to 84 mph locally, left 7 million buildings without power. Torrential rains caused several rivers to set new records for highest flood waters, destroying many homes and bridges. Hundreds of roads (especially in Vermont) were closed due to washouts or fallen trees. Fifty-five people were killed. And yet despite all this, there’s been no shortage of self-centered morons who accuse their weathermen of alarmist reporting.

For me, I’d say this was the first hurricane I’ve experienced that actually verified, although damage here was minimal. As the wind picked up, the plastic covers on the dumpsters behind our building slammed open and closed all day long. A large temporary screen put up against the building next door, whose brickwork is being re-pointed, was partially ripped off and had to be removed by workmen during the storm.

The wind tore down the banner for the Copley Society of Art, across Newbury Street, blew a big tarp out of a pickup truck, and rolled a full bag of garbage down the sidewalk. My next-door neighbor was dumb enough to go away and leave their window open, and the wind tore the screen completely open.

On the positive side, I never lost power. Service in downtown is well protected and underground, so we don’t have those issues.

Like the aftermath of most tropical storms, as soon as it left we had stunningly beautiful weather. The next day was Monday; I biked to work and saw a lot of damage firsthand. Trees of all sizes were down, many taking power lines with them. I encountered closed roads and nonfunctional traffic signals and debris everywhere. But at least the floodwaters that had closed several streets and highways had receded by then.

Prior to this, my experience with hurricanes had been underwhelming. Three years ago, my buddy Jay and I sat out what was left of Hurricane Hanna in a New Bedford flophouse, then left early in the morning to do a debris-strewn century ride.

Twenty years ago, two weeks after my wife left me, I took a basketball outside and shot hoops in my apartment complex’s parking lot until I was exhausted during Hurricane Bob. That was only six years after another hurricane caused me to meet my future in-laws for the first time. I rode out Gloria at the New York City subway stop (Union Square?) my future wife and I had agreed to meet at. When she never showed, I went to her house and knocked on the door, only to learn from her parents that she had gone out to find me only once the storm had subsided.

Neither of those storms impressed me, nor did the one hurricane I remember from the mid-1970s. I was at a YMCA camp, and we were evacuated to one of the counselors’ homes. That was probably either Agnes or Belle.

That disregard is probably why I sent a curt response to my mother when she emailed me about taking precautions before Irene hit. I replied that I was probably in more danger from the dead bat they recently found a block from my condo that had tested positive for rabies.

One reason I’m blase about hurricanes is because I was born in the fishing port of Gloucester right at the height of a hurricane: Hurricane Ginny, which was one of those very rare late-season hurricanes that dumped a foot and a half of snow up in Maine.

While riding out Irene in my condo won’t be my most cherished hurricane memory, I don’t mind. Although I really enjoy dramatic weather, this was finally a storm strong enough that I didn’t really care to be out in it.

No promises about next time, though!