Roblog

I've neglected my blog for a long time. Mostly, it was because my gargantuan entry chronicling my experience with Hurricane Ike was in a continually unfinished state, and it has served as an effective stopper to any other blog posts I might have otherwise done. And now I'm at a point where I don't remember all my detailed hurricane Ike experiences!

So I'm going to post my first half of my hurricane experience, which will be followed someday by the second half. In the mean time, I will feel free to blog about other topics that I, and I alone, care to post.

I have to record the events around Hurricane Ike in my blog, even though everyone I know who would want to know how my family fared has gotten phone or email updates from me.

But, for the record, Hurricane Ike struck the Houston/Galveston area the night of Friday, September 12 into Saturday, September 13. The downtown Houston office I work at was closed down at noon on Thursday, September 11. My daughters' last day of school before the storm was that Thursday, too.

I've always wanted to be able to do 3D modeling, but the professional tools are too expensive. There is an impressive open-source (free) tool available, Blender, but its learning curve is rather steep. But I've never lost interest, so when my wife and I started talking about remodeling our office, I finally had the spark that allowed me to actually learn and use Blender.

I relied heavily on the plethora of video tutorials available for Blender, and have read through many documentation sites about Blender. There is no way I could have ever figured anything out in Blender without those resources.

But after about a month of using it, I now feel like I'm competent with creating objects and scenes in Blender. I am still no good at animation or lighting, and only barely passable with materials, but I'm really pleased with my first finished product with Blender: a three-dimensional representation of our office (without all the piles of clutter that currently overwhelm the room). I can now reposition furniture, add new furniture, or remove walls, and see what that makes the office look like from any place in the room.

This desktop-picture-sized view of our office includes all the current furniture but has the closet removed.

I've been wondering for a while if the beach we visit in the summers, Bryan beach, survived hurricane Ike. I was never able to find anything specific about that particular stretch of beach. My curiosity got the better of me this weekend, so I loaded the girls in the car to drive down there, risking the possibility that there woudl not be a beach to go to.

As it turns out, the beach is as good, if not better, than it was this summer. The beach appeared quite a bit larger than it was before. The only noticeable effects 2 months after the hurricane was that the line of sand dunes behind the beach are now gone. I don't know what impact that will have on the beach long-term, but I suspect there'll be an effort to reestablish the dunes before the next storm hits.

So we had a fun hour at the beach on Sunday. It was breezy and sunny - perfect for playing in the sand. The water wasn't even that cold; it was too cold to swim but not too cold to wade. This was the first time at this beach we encountered lots of little clams (the absolute largest were the size of a dime) just under the surface of the sand. We couldn't help but dig a few up with every scoop of sand. They usually would rest for a minute, then tilt up and burrow back under the sand. We had quite a bit of fun with them.