Gunshots, drought and cruddy bumpers.

And now for a little late-night excitement from Howdygram headquarters! About 45 minutes ago I’m sitting here at my desk and I hear THUMP THUMP outside the window. I dash into the family room to wake Sam — he was asleep on the sofa last time I checked — but he was already sitting up because he’d heard the noise, too. To me those thumps sounded like gunshots. Sam decides to check around outside without turning on any lights and bumps into two neighbors who were creeping around in the dark doing exactly the same thing. Our neighbor to the south finds a dazed and confused dove sitting on his driveway and thinks it might have smashed into our garage door — or his garage door — a couple of times. I guess it could happen, but that stupid bird must be made of concrete because those thumps were so loud I thought somebody was shooting a rifle. This is a real possibility because Texans love rifles (see example below).

At the moment I’m still a little too freaked out to sleep so I thought it might be therapeutic to hang out with y’all for a while and write this post.

And the drought goes on. Even though we had twice our normal rainfall here during the month of December I just read that the North Texas Municipal Water District is considering “stage 4” water restrictions by the end of January. Stage 4 means we can no longer water our yards or wash our own cars ... no exceptions. This really isn’t such a huge inconvenience in the middle of winter since nobody waters their lawn, anyway, and you can always go to a commercial car wash when you want to scrape the crud off your bumpers. But if we don’t get some decent rain before spring we’re definitely going to end up with a lot of grim landscaping around here. Do a rain dance for us, okay?

I think I’ve calmed down enough to go to bed now. Thank you for reading this.