September 30, 2005

Olifactory Triggers, or: Embarassing Tequila Recollections.

Today I was in the middle of a meeting with a couple of programmers about the project I'm working on, and I needed to describe a particular detail of the UI I'm designing. I grabbed the nearest dry-erase marker and began sketching my idea on the whiteboard (this was not my cube) when I lost my train of thought. For some reason, I was thinking about a trip Jen and I took to Houston.

A brief note here: My wife will no doubt add in clarifications to the record after I post this; My intent is not to lie, obfuscate or mislead, but merely to spin a good yarn.

We were in town to attend the wedding of her roommate from college, and staying at another house across town with her friend J.P. They've also been friends since college, and as college friends often do, they share the collective knowledge and experience of being friends in one of the more formative times of one's life. Fortunately, unlike many college friends, they haven't fallen out of touch, so when we met up with J.P., they settled into a comfortable banter with one another, and I played quiet man, enjoying their company.

The wedding was beautiful, the bride and groom radiant; the reception was gracious and the families charming. We sipped wine, ate some food, and chatted with folks until the reception broke up at an early four or five PM. There was talk of gathering people together in town for drinks in the evening, so we made plans, returned to our host's house, and invited him out with us.

After changing, we met up with a bunch of folks at the prescribed bar and continued drinking and chatting with folks. Because we were at a Mexican-themed restaurant, I ordered Margaritas for Jen and I, and we got pleasantly squiffed in short order.

Now, J.P. is a connoisseur of many fine things, and on this trip I learned that one of them was tequila. Not your regular rotgut drink-the-worm kind, but the sipping, $100+ a bottle kind. I had never known about expensive tequila, much less try it, so I decided to have some when J.P. offered to buy a round of shots for the table. (Courting one of his best friends, I didn't want to come off like a milquetoast; sadly, this was a strategic mistake.)

My opinion on fine sipping tequila is that it's much like fine Kentucky bourbon: Other people like it, but the sensation of drinking 95-octane gasoline is not so much for me. Unfortunately, this realization (and my sense of better judgement) showed up after four or five shots of the stuff, so by the time our "dinner" arrived, I was righteously shitfaced.

I don't remember much about the meal, other than that I was hungry, but Jen tells me I ate everything that was put down in front of me. Then I ate everything else on the table, until it was all gone. I figured, in my state, that eating would be good to pad my stomach. This too was a strategic mistake. The cheesy, greasy food we ordered had the opposite effect, so I left the table and quietly (I think) walked outside for some air when the room begain spinning.

Fortunately for me, the party broke up soon after this point, and we all headed to our cars. I walked to J.P.'s new Chevy truck and waited for he and Jen to catch up, and I felt the first of several waves of green wash over me. Not wanting to blow chunks on J.P.'s shiny paint job, I walked to an adjoining fence and prepared for the worst. Somewhere at this point I realized there were two angry dogs on the other side of the fence, mere inches from my face, and I remember thinking that I would aim my puke for their snarling heads until Jen grabbed the scruff of my neck and threw me into the back seat of the truck.

The ride home is a blur, but here's a breakdown of my mental state:

don'tpukeontheleather don'tpukeontheleather don'tpukeontheleather don'tpukeontheleather don'tpukeontheleather don'tpukeontheleather

Reaching J.P.'s house, I scrambled upstairs to the third floor bathroom, where, out of sight, I hoped to alleviate my problem and rid myself of dinner. Here again that trickster Murphy decided to fuck with your humble, bumbling correspondent, and after I had purged myself of several gallons of the cheesy gloop, the toilet backed up. Now, in my sober moments, nobody is faster with a shutoff valve than the Idiot, here. In my sick, drunk, embarrased, panicked state, it took several crucial moments to find the valve, while the floor puddled with a good inch or so of bile. And, as we all know, that particular smell does not play well with one's already tenuous grip on recovery. What does one do in this situation? One throws up again, as if one had any choice in the matter. I think I might have used the sink for this part, but I'm not sure. Things get fuzzy around this point.

I do remember Jen knocking on the door (i'd locked it) and asking me if I was alright. I opened it, and she good-naturedly got me into bed, cleaned up my mess, and returned downstairs to sip expensive tequila with J.P. while I slept the restless sleep of the hopelessly drunk.

At the end of the weekend, I left Houston with a monumental hangover, a new nickname ("Tequila Sunrise"), a vow to never again touch the vile poison, and another chapter of embarassment to add to my life's novel.

So here's where I try to bring this rambling tale home for you:

I'm standing in front of two blinking programmers, struggling to finish my sentence (and remember just what it was that I was talking about), holding a stupid dry-erase marker. I held it close to my nose, took a sniff, and held it out to them.

"Does this smell like tequila to you?"

I swear to god. It smelled just like tequila. I wouldn't make any of this up.

Posted on September 30, 2005 3:58 PM | link to this entry | Comments (6)

September 29, 2005

Mac/Printer Information.

Now that my wife is working from the house, she's going to need a color printer for proofing files. Instead of running ot the stupid Kinko's every five minues, I found a review of the Minolta/Magicolor 2450 online, which apparently has PostScript support, an Ethernet jack, and also supports PictureBridge connectivity, which means we could theoretically just hook our cameras straight to the printer and make prints. Drawbacks: it's only 8.5x14", which makes tabloid-sized printing, or letter-size with bleeds impossible. It's also $700, which is pricey, but the alternative is a $500 11x17" inkjet and a $300 software RIP to emulate PostScript (blech). I'll have to keep an eye on this.

Whoa-wait a minute, what's this? An external, 160GB hard drive with three FireWire ports and four USB ports on the back? (Brand name: MicroNet MiniMate) All in the same form factor and ready to roll, for $138? Here's a larger sibling, the 250GB version, for $190. I may be looking at a $700 Mini instead of a $2K iMac after all...

Posted on September 29, 2005 1:45 PM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

links for 2005-09-29

(Testing the del.icio.us auto-posting feature. Good deal. I think I may have to finally give up my links page, if I can find a way to display the de.icio.us links in category format.)

The Morning News

(tags: blog daily humor)

Posted on September 29, 2005 10:20 AM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

September 26, 2005

Do You See The Light?

This weekend Jen and I ventured up to the Towson mall to get replacements for our glasses, which were responsible for seven of the last ten Richter-scale headaches recorded in the greater Baltimore area this summer. Jen has an inner ear more sensitive than a baby's bottom, and she's been fighting the urge to puke for about the last three weeks now. Repeated adjustments to her frames have left them bent and her eyes completely fucked up.

My own glasses have been a travesty for longer than I care to admit. Two years ago, I paid top dollar for Ray-Ban frames, and the plastic on them has been delaminating and flaking off for the last year. The expensive lenses have gotten increasingly cloudy and hazed over; when I put on the new glasses, I felt like I'd just had sucessful cataract surgery. The new frames are much the same as the old ones, although they're a different manufacturer and not tortoise-shell. Jen found a pair of frames that have highlights of gold and blue which accent her eyes and skin tone perfectly. She's still on the fence about the prescription, but she sure does look durn pretty.

While we waited for the lenses to be cut, we ventured over to the Apple store to lay hands on a Nano, which is about the most beautiful little piece of hardware I've ever seen. Apparently there are some issues about scratching screens, but overall it's very sexy. I also looked at the larger hardware, and realized that I'm better off waiting to pick up a 17" or 20" iMac than spending money on a Mini and another monitor—I wasn't aware that iMacs had full-size harddrives, which is crucial to our home upgrading plans. So I'll have to wait out a few more checks for that to happen. (a 20" model with a gig of RAM is roughly $2K.)

Posted on September 26, 2005 12:17 PM | link to this entry | Comments (6)

September 25, 2005

Planer-Fu.

This weekend I finally got to the two projects that have been bugging me for weeks now. The upstairs bedroom (The Cream room) has been closed up for months, waiting for an electrician to come and hook up the wiring. Since that got accomplished two weeks ago, It's been waiting for me to cut new baseboards and reinstall everything I ripped out. After I ran data, phone and cable to the basement and made several trips to the Lowe's for lumber, I put in new shims and tacked the boards back into place for fit. Everything checked out, so the baseboards and cap molding are in and ready for primer.

Downstairs in the kitchen, the sticky mess on the floor that's been collecting cat hair and dust finally got addressed this afternoon. I started at about 3 and by the third quarter of the Patriots/Steelers game I had everything on the east side of the kitchen up and clean. Observe:

There's more under the cabinets and under the range, and the perimeter of the floor needs to be hand-scraped, but it's beginning to shape up. After a good drum sanding to the point where it's all an even tone, it'll look much nicer.

As for the installation, we had a brief freakout with the cabinet colors. The color we thought was "red" was actually a sort of yellowish brown, and that was definitely not cool. After cancelling the original order, we got a pair of full-size cabinet fronts and compared colors with a sample of granite (the color is called Bianco Romano), and finally decided on the red. This set everything back by about two weeks, but that's fine—we can use the time to get all the other stuff organized. The other good news is that the quote for the granite is actually a couple hundred dollars cheaper than the original ballpark I'd been given.

Posted on September 25, 2005 7:07 PM | link to this entry

September 23, 2005

Hitachi P20SB Hand Planer

This is a link for the Hitachi P20SB Hand Planer. Mine came with a case and a tool for aligning the blades; it's got a heavy action while still being very light, and the blades are strong and sturdy (unlike the thin, easily chipped blades on a Bosch model I rented.) I'd recommend this. I paid somewhere around $99 for it at Lowe's.

Posted on September 23, 2005 6:50 PM | link to this entry

Quick Update.

I took fifteen minutes out of the day and while I was waiting for other things to happen, started a sub-weblog for the house over here. At some point I'll put it on the side as a permanent link, and add pictures and probably backlink all the various pictures and entries I've done so far, but for now, it's plain-jane and informational. There you have it.

Posted on September 23, 2005 5:09 PM | link to this entry

Kick Heater Information.

This is a link to a seller's website. It's information on the Beacon-Morris K84 , a forced hot-water heater used in minimum-space applications (e.g. under a cabinet, in recessed floor spaces) and destined for use in our kitchen. We're using Schumacher & Seiler, a local Baltimore plumbing supply house, as our vendor (luckily, they have a warehouse not 5 miles from our house.)

Update: This will not work with our heating system, which is steam radiator based. From what we are told, it's only compatible with gravity/hot water systems.

Posted on September 23, 2005 3:46 PM | link to this entry

September 20, 2005

Back To The Grind.

I'm going to be boring here for a while, folks, because I'm juggling about 50 projects at once. The kitchen has been moved back three weeks due to some discussion about the cabinet color. I'll have more on all that later, because right now I'm too swamped to sit still.

By the way, for all you comment spammers out there: Comments on posts more than a few days old have all been turned off. You may bite me.

Posted on September 20, 2005 5:39 PM | link to this entry

September 14, 2005

Progress Report.

Yesterday B. the electrician was at the house for a full day, wiring the hallway, dining room, and upstairs bedroom into the panel. Feel that rumbling underneath your feet? That's the earth shifting on its axis. He installed two work lights in the hallway so that the switch actually lights something, until such time as we can stop to breathe and pick out lights to install. They also highlight the imperfections in the cieling that I didn't catch when I was mudding and sanding it...swell. Apparently the hideous chandelier in the dining room—the one that features a pull string for a switch—is actually wired to the dimmer switch on the wall, but the wires were cut at some point and they never did anything with it. The mysteries of this house continue to confound me. B. also pulled the legacy plug hanging from the baseboard in the guest bedroom so that I can install the cable/ethernet/phone jack in there, and he'll do the one in the front bedroom when he returns for the kitchen rough-in.

On that front, Jen and I stopped in a local counter-and-floor showroom and looked through displays of floor tile on Saturday. The choices were at the same time overwhelming and unsatisfying. Too much foo-foo "fancy" tile, which either is produced to look "rustic" (usually meaning it has a rough, beveled edge, like it's been worn away by years of use) and looks cheap, or suffers from a printed surface (when examined closely, one can see the dot-pattern that makes up the color) which I'd wager would wear off in about two years of medium-duty use. We left the store without finding what we were looking for for either the counter or the floor, but we had a better idea of what we were looking for.

As a proof of concept, I decided to introduce our tarpaper-covered floor to Mr. Hand Planer, on the advice of our friend Mark, who I now owe several strong martinis. I got a Bosch planer from the local rental center and pulled up about five square feet of tarpaper in five minutes, until one of the thin, hand-crafted German blades snapped. The rental center exchanged that one for a Hitachi model which suffered from a frozen adjustment knob (meaning it was set permanently for a depth of about 1/8", or a quarter of the depth of the wood) which made it unusable. Pissed, I charged a new Hitachi and pack of blades to the HELOC account, and in about 2 hours had roughly one-third of the floor stripped. Once I can get a solid day blocked out (and the cabinets are finally gone), I'll be able to plane the rest of the floor, run a medium-grit sanding drum over the whole thing, and we can stain/polyurethane it in preparaion for cabinet install—maybe a little more work than underlayment and tile, but the result will be so much better.

(I'd show you a picture, but I can't find my camera-to-USB cord anywhere, and I have no way of getting the pictures off my camera right now.)

Posted on September 14, 2005 12:07 PM | link to this entry

September 13, 2005

'57 Chevy

One of my co-workers, a guy who wears crisp button-down shirts and slacks every day, drove in his custom Chevy yesterday. He's had it since he was in college (20+ years) and it's absolutely cherry. I can't say I like the colors all that much, but the car itself is beautiful to look at.

Posted on September 13, 2005 10:20 AM | link to this entry

September 12, 2005

iBook Thoughts.

How cool is it that the new version of iPhoto handles movies? I always wondered why it didn't recognize them as viable media, and I was always worried I'd erase movies that it didn't copy over. Nice. (It's also about 300% faster on this machine.)

Widgets: Sweet.

Apple; THANK YOU for getting rid of those dropped off the network. And THANK YOU for fixing/modifying Windows logins to recognize my Keychain. Not having to enter a password every time I mount a shared drive: Priceless.

Built-in Superdrive (CD/DVD-writer combination): Sweet.

The screen on this machine is easily twice as bright as the screen on my Pismo. That could be from age, or damage, or the fact that the technology is just better. And the keyboard feel is wonderful.

I'm happy to bid adieu to the old hockey-puck power adapter.

Posted on September 12, 2005 10:56 AM | link to this entry

September 9, 2005

Thinking...

I don't like gambling all that much. I always thought it was kind of stupid to go to someplace like Vegas and actually spend money to lose—especially because everybody realizes it's rigged. It's kind of like expecting a politician to be honest. I spend too much of my life trying to make money to be stupid enough to give it to people I don't like. That having been said, I don't get the new poker craze that seems to be sweeping the nation. Card games are fun. Poker is fun for about fifteen minutes, until the assholes show up and ask to play "Texas Two-Card Flipside Straight Holdem". Um, What? I've just finished my fourth beer, and you're asking me to learn a game more complicated than my SAT's? Sure, you can play nickel and dime leagues, and that's cool, I guess, but I just never got into the whole thing. I think it's because I'd rather be doing something active with my free time, like sleeping.

When I was twelve, our camper broke down on the way to our summer vacation spot, and we limped to a repair shop on a Friday night. Having nothing else to do for two days, my parents taught us Canasta, a particularly complicated card game involving multiple decks of cards. I think this was probably to keep from having to kill us. If you asked me to play it now, I'd be hard pressed to remember the first thing about it other than the cramps in my hands from holding all those cards, but I'd probably enjoy it. Plus, my Gramma Dugan was a Canasta genius, and she was fun to play cards with.

I think the only thing worse than losing money playing poker could be the people that go to watch other people play poker. It's kind of like watching people play pool. If I'm watching somebody play pool, it's because I'm waiting to play after them. Pool is ancillary to being with friends and drinking beer; it's an activity that makes the evening more exciting than sitting on somebody's couch and watching reruns of "Desperate Housewives".

I suppose it's fitting, then, that all the comment spam I'm getting here at Idiot Central comes from "party poker" sites and online casinos. Here's an industry built around the need to play poker against a computer. Nevermind the fact that it's a computer in Costa Rica, it's programmed to keep you playing long enough to lose lots of money, and it's tied in directly to your credit card. I guess I just want to know: What occupation pays well enough to be able to afford to lose so much money gambling? Because I need that job. Maybe it's got something to do with moving to Costa Rica and opening an online casino...

Posted on September 9, 2005 10:43 AM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

September 8, 2005

One Up, One Down.

My iBook made it all the way from Suzhou, China to my doorstep last night, courtesy of our friend Sara and her educational discount. It's white, it smells like new fresh plastic, and it looks beautiful. I booted it up, it walked me through the migration process (Firewire Target Disk Mode is awesome), and within about 45 minutes I was pulling email down from my server on a familiar desktop, where all my files and contact information were in their rightful, normal place. The iBook sync'ed up with my phone in five minutes. That's about the best result anybody could ever hope for.

However, an attempted upgrade to Movabletype 3.2 didn't go as well as planned. Hopefully everything is functioning normally again as of 12:30PM after a cleanup of my cgi directory; I'm going to have to follow some better directions than the ones supplied by Sixapart and do the whole thing over again.

Posted on September 8, 2005 12:24 AM | link to this entry

September 7, 2005

WOW.

This is the best commentary I've heard so far from anybody, and I think it should be reprinted everywhere. (via)

Wow. Right on.

Posted on September 7, 2005 11:40 AM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

September 6, 2005

Not Laboring So Much.

Hot on the heels of our successful kitchen planning visit, Jen and I decided to set aside Saturday for research and informational purposes. The plan was to get an early start and hit the Sears to view the selection of shiny appliances, but I realized that the grass on the front lawn was getting higher than the house, so we spent the morning outside cutting, hacking, weeding, and taming the greenery in the front yard. Then, armed with five recent copies of Consumer Reports (thanx, mom) and a notepad, we hit the top floor of Sears and rebuffed the first of fifty offers for help. (Next time, I think we're going to wear shirts that simply say, in Large Capital Letters, NO, WE'RE JUST BROWSING, THANKS.) We found a dishwasher we like, and then a range, and finally a refrigerator, after opening, closing, reading, crosschecking, pricing, and consulting our articles. (More information on our front-runners later.) That evening we returned to the house and plucked the second of two eggplant from our garden, followed Martha's recipe, and made eggplant parmesan. My history with eggplant has been a rocky and contentious one (or, an oogy and slimy one, as the case may be) so this was big experimentation for the Lockardugans. It didn't make me gag, I didn't turn into mush, and it was right tasty with some fresh parmesan cheese. Will wonders never cease!

Sunday morning we drug ourselves out of bed, put on our Going To Town Clothes and drove to Frederick for a romantic day of antiquing. The sun was out but not hot, the streets were full of people, and we only spent $11—the stores full of bargains are slowly giving way to upscale expensive antique boutiques and new craftmade furniture dealers, signs that they've turned the corner from loveable run-down old-timey city center to Washington Suburb. However, we stopped in at a spanish/mexican restaurant and ate one of the tastiest seafood dishes I've had in years.

Monday we returned to the yard and continued straightening up our ghetto-fabulous house. I got a finish coat of paint on the back atrium windows and the attic peak, and installed two screens for better ventilation, something I've been meaning to get to for, oh, about two months now. All this just reminds me of the long list of stuff still to do—there are two more sides of windows to go outside—but it's always good to feel like something got accomplished.

Posted on September 6, 2005 2:46 PM | link to this entry

Is Anybody Home?

Memo to Babs: Fuck you, too.

Read this and tell me if you find anything disturbing about it.

Liar, liar. Pants on fire.

Here's a random account of a survivor's story after the hurricane. Here's another.

Update: Here's your crackerjack federal agency at work.

Posted on September 6, 2005 10:38 AM | link to this entry | Comments (4)

September 2, 2005

Donate.

www.redcross.org

Posted on September 2, 2005 7:02 PM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

Oh, Yeah...

There's a new 14" iBook heading my way, as of last night. I don't know what to do with myself.

Posted on September 2, 2005 5:16 PM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

You, Sir, Are A Douchebag.

"The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Thursday those New Orleans residents who chose not to heed warnings to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina bear some responsibility for their fates." Tell that to the thousands of people who live below the poverty line and can't afford to leave, asshole. Isn't it your job to, um, figure out where they should go?

Update: This is disturbing...

Posted on September 2, 2005 10:54 AM | link to this entry | Comments (4)

Call The Electrician.

So we've begun the complicated dance they call 'professional home renovation'. It's a complicated number; it involves being clean and dressed by a certain time, and the steps are more tightly choreographed. I've always compared it to swing-dancing in a minefield, based on my previous experience.

Up until the reality of hanging thousand-dollar cabinets in an out of square room hit me, I was happy to do just about everything myself. For the more specialized and dangerous tasks, like hooking high-voltage circuit breakers up to the board, or sanding oak floors, I was happy to hire somebody in. But this kitchen is a whole project; there's demolition, plumbing, electrical, carpentry, framing, and finish work to be done in a particular order, and it's all pretty specialized. If I had a million dollars and a month off work, I'd actually be looking forward to doing things like moving the gas line, or hanging the cabinets myself. But this house is out of square in four dimensions—which means I'd wake up two weeks after I started with nothing done, holding a pile of sawdust and some nails, and have no recollection of where I'd been or how the basement got flooded.

We're thrilled with the kitchen planning company we went with (more info on that later: Movable Type now has unlimited weblogs, which means the house will get its own specific page) and we already have a plumber we know and like. We had an electrician, too, but I kept losing his number. I'll back up:

Two years ago, we moved into this wreck of a house with a few conditions on the settlement. One of them was for the sellers to merge both electrical services into one (the doctor's office was separate from the house) and upgrade the panel, which dated back to the 60's and was a brand known for its ability to spontaneously catch fire. BG&E Home sent out a crew the first week we were in the house, which was a minor miracle based on further experience—I'm not recommending them—which consisted of one very nice man named B. who came to sort out the rat's nest of wiring in our basement. I was at work, and Jen was upstairs in the kitchen unpacking our collection of orphan dishes, when she realized somebody was standing in the back doorway: The doctor's son, who smelled like he'd fallen into a bottle (this was before noon on a weekday.) Jen's curiosity got her talking to this man, and she felt safe enough to walk outside with him, knowing that B. was downstairs and by the window. (I'll let her tell the rest of that story.)

Later on, after seeing the work he'd done, we got to talking with B. and asked him if he did electrical work on the side, pointing at all the ancient, deadly outlets around the house. He gave us his cell number, and I promptly lost it in the shuffle of housework and an upgrade to OS X. We tracked him down through BG&E, who gave us the number of his current employer, and I did a little social engineering with their receptionist to get his cell number. He came back out to hook up the wiring I'd prepared in the bedrooms, and a fair price for four hours' work turned into a fair price for eight hours' work (through no fault of his). He also got to meet Jen's Mom, who had that particular ability of the terminally ill to ask probing questions into his personal life. He took all this in stride, which meant he was Good People. At this point he'd left BG&E Home and was working for another company, but was doing work for us on the side so we weren't paying the markup. Unfortunately, I lost his number again during one of the many moves up and down the stairs before the wedding, and my focus was directed elsewhere after we returned from the honeymoon.

I should also add that my previous encounters with electricians have all been expensive and unsatisfying: For example, the job done in my first house was three times as expensive for half the work (and I'd done most of the prep, thinking it would save money.) This did not make me happy, and I decided never to re-hire that particular white trash electrician and his toothless apprentice.

Now that we've got the gears whirring, I realized we had to track B. down again through the various things we knew about him. Jen did a search online and found his old address down the street. (Aren't the internets wonderful? Isn't that also a little frightening, too?) There was no phone number associated with the address, and 411 couldn't tell me anything. We decided to do a little footwork, and stopped at the address last weekend. I rang the doorbell, and we waited outside for a few minutes, but nothing happened. As we were walking back down the sidewalk, the door opened, and a woman in the throes of a massive sinus infection asked if she could help us. It turned out that this was B.'s wife, and that she didn't have his number (they're separated) but she'd pass along our information. We gave it to her, apologizing for getting her out of bed, and put the whole thing in the hands of the Sky Pilot.

As I was driving home yesterday evening, I called Jen to talk about dinner plans, and she told me she was talking with B., who was standing in our living room! He'd heard part of the story from his wife, knew of only one family on that side of Frederick road he'd done work for, and stopped by to see if it was us. As Jen explained all the work we had, his eyes got bigger and bigger. We stood and caught up for about a half hour, and he seemed happy to know we were looking for him. The sense of relief we have for getting him on the job is immense—he's reliable, he's good, and we like him. We've got first dibs, but if you need a good electrician in the Baltimore area, let me know. Because we have his number.

Posted on September 2, 2005 8:25 AM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

September 1, 2005

Because I Feel Like I Gotta Say Something.

Two years ago, only a few scant weeks after Jen and I moved into an old, creaky house surrounded by old, creaky trees, hurricane Isabel flew through our neighborhood and knocked out the power. The two of us hunkered down on our mattress in the living room (this was before we'd accomplished anything upstairs) and and waited out the storm by candlelight, hoping we wouldn't wake up in bed with the neighbor's car. It turned out alright, though a family down the street had their house crushed by a tree (and almost wound up getting crushed themselves.)

I suppose, since there were dire predicitions of disaster earlier this year, that I got a little callous with Katrina. I also figure because I wasn't watching as much TV this past week, I wasn't getting the breathless "Storm Warning Updates" by the chuckleheads on our local newscasts. I was dimly aware of the hurricane and its aftermath, but it was only last night, sitting in front of CNN and watching footage of the disaster, that I really understood how fucked up the Gulf Coast actually is. Jen and I talked about making a donation to the Red Cross (which is apparently the best thing to do right now-they can't handle canned goods or delivering supplies just yet) and we'll get some money out to them in the next day or so.

My heart goes out to the folks in Louisiana and Georgia. God bless, and good luck.