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am_Unition  ·  1015 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: ERCOT triggers Texans with another warning on conserving energy

The three years I lived in Houston, I commuted to class and my on-campus office on light rail and foot. The first day, new student orientation, I checked the radar and left the apartment wearing my swimsuit and flip flops, with dry clothes in a plastic bag. An umbrella is actually a handicap in storms that intense. That first day was only the first time I was nearly struck by lightning. It struck behind me so close that by the time the sound reached me and I turned around, the bolt was still active. Maybe 100 yards away. Cool.

In the summer (about mid-March thru mid-October), "good weather days" consisted of me arriving for class or meetings dripping sweat from a mere 20 minutes of walking, with a sweater in my backpack. See, pretty much every building on campus was blasting A/C in the hopes of preserving documents, computers, or lab equipment, and within 5 minutes with no sweater, I'd be a wet, shivering mess.

Because of (I guess?) the non-industrial-strength A/C unit in my "luxury apartment", when things like bags of chips went "stale", the chips became soggy and wet. We bought a dehumidifier, and it'd pull about four gallons out of the air inside our apartment every 36 hours. We had black mold that couldn't be eradicated. We would have moved if we could have afforded the time.

And people wonder why Houston is such a car-centric city. It ain't all an oil and gas company conspiracy, but yeah, prolly some of it is.

Winters were alright, though. But yeah, no one should've ever built a city there. I get it, it's the furthest point inland you can get to by boat on the Gulf Coast west of the Mississippi, but blegh.