Saturday, August 30, 2008

Here We Go Again

Last time a Category 3+ hurricane headed toward my part of the Gulf Coast I was sitting at a meeting and living in a hotel in Sacrament, CA. All my church members were frantically preparing to evacuate and I was stuck in a hotel room, watching minute by minute on any tv within my range of vision. As Rita took aim, all I could do was sit there, jittering, thinking about all the stuff that could/should be done to get my house ready for the storm and worrying about whether my members needed any help to get ready and get out of town.

This time, I'm here. At the moment, Gustav is a Cat 4, and has just a little bit more to reach Cat 5. The local authorities have called for voluntary evacuation, especially for those with special needs. We may be looking at mandatory evacuation as early as tomorrow morning.

I'm not stupid. I remember well how little of our infrastructre was functioning after Rita and have no great desire to spend days in sweltering heat. And there WILL be sweltering heat after Gustav gets through.

There are some who think that the "tree cleaning" that happened with Rita has pretty much handled the tree-limbs-dropping-on-power/phone lines problem. Yes, I'm sure it will help. The electric company has done a really good job of keeping those dangling limbs away from the lines. BUT I have a tree in my backyard that will take out the power lines if the worst of the storm heads this way. It leans toward the back of my property, where the power lines are. One good hurricane-strength shove and it's gone! And so are the power lines.

So I'm leaving town. Not today, but probably tomorrow at some point.

Now I get to jitter about my members who've decided that, no matter what, they aren't evacuating. Which is more important? Lives and being available for family, children, grandchildren or a building?

My son hasn't experienced anything like this. He's leaving today to head up to Oklahoma and spend the evacuation with friends. Clothes are washing, he loaded the dishwasher, and covered the piano with a tarp.

Then he wanted to take the metal lining out of the brick planter that's just inside the front door. The goal was to put valuable stuff in the planter, then put the line back in it, so no one could steal the stuff in it. My response? They've just things. They can be replaced. I'm taking the important stuff with me, and the rest? Well, it'll either survive the storm, not get swiped if someone breaks in, or be damaged. I'll live. It's just STUFF!

Then there are those who heard the stories of how easy it was to evacuate if you just wait until the next day. So there are a lot of people I've heard say that they aren't planning to go in the first wave. Just what we need to ensure that there are 1,000's of people stuck in cars on the road when Gustav finally makes landfall. *sigh*

Part of the reason for this post is to give me a record of what's going on with me. I've been keeping an eye on Gustav since he became a legitimate threat. Even though I'm in town and there are things to keep me busy this time, there's still that nagging sense of being on edge which is right at the edge of my vision. Hard to describe the feeling. It's sort of a sense of excitement mixed with a healthy fear of what might come.

The dog has been aware that there's something going on. She's in mild freak mode, barking at the slightest sound that might be interpreted as someone encroaching on her domain. I think she finally wore herself out, 'cuz she's sleeping in the other room.

It's totally amazing what one can accomplish in terms of decluttering when you have a category 4 (they just announced it) hurricane aiming at you. I have stuff in my office that I've been putting off shoving into the file cabinets for almost a year. All of the sudden, it's become less important to save every single page of those old sermons. (I do have them on the computer, mostly.) And all of the sudden, I find myself saying, "Self, what's a lost sermon in the grand scheme of things? Probably the only person who'd notice is me, and there's a good chance even I'd forget!

The other thing which has been going through my mind is what our worship on Sunday should look like. Somehow, just the usual way of worship doesn't seem adequate. and I'm not sure that any sermon I could come up with would be sufficient. So I've decided to do something different tomorrow. Lectio divina, the reading of scripture, meditating on it, listening for what God is saying to you right now, I'm hoping it will feed some nervous souls. I've found some hymns to use with the scriptures I'll be using, so that may help as well.

After worship, we're putting tarps on the pianos and organ. That may help too! *chuckle* Nothing like some activity and visible progress to help soothe ragged and frayed nerves.

THEN, I hope we can chivvy all of us out of town!

Well, it's time to finish up a couple of pre-hurricane tasks, then I'll be ready to bail when the authorities say, "GO!"

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

The Scenic Route

I have a truly lousy sense of direction. Don't try and tell me to go north, south, east, or west, or any variation thereof. I've been known to foul up GPS directions, so I all to often end up taking the scenic route. The good news is that I tend to eventually get to the place I intend to go. It just takes longer.

On Saturday, I was returning from a meeting in Katy and decided to try following a different road from the old tried-and-true standby. Before striking out, I should have realized this would be an exercise in futility; however, there was no extreme hurry to get home, so I blithely hit the road with confidence that this route would work!

All of the sudden, I noticed that the route number I'd been following had just plain disappeared. Of course, the fact that the road suddenly became a much smaller farm-to-market road was a major clue. Being bold, I decided to follow the road a bit longer. Or was it being stubborn and refusing to backtrack?

In any case, the car and I turned left when it seemed appropriate to do so. After all, Katy is to the right of Beaumont, isn't it? At least it is when you're headed toward the coast. Unfortunately, I seemed to end up in a tangle of farm-to-market roads and began to get truly confused.

Stopping, I grabbed my rusty, trusty folding map out of the glove compartment and attempted to make it refold so I could see the part of Texas where my car was. Several minutes later, it appeared that I had two options: head on down to the coast where I couldn't drive any further, turn left, and take the Bolivar Ferry to get home OR capitulate, drive BACK to Houston, and then trudge down the dull, boring, flat road home.

Yep! The ferry won! One problem: I forgot how long it takes to wait on the ferry, especially on the weekends. The total trek ended up being almost 6 hours, instead of about 2 for the standard trip home.

But I got to see some dolphins play!

It's good to take the scenic route from time to time, isn't it?

Monday, August 25, 2008

Explanation Please?

Can someone give me a rational explanation?

It's 90+ degrees outside. The water pipes go through the attic to get to the bathroom faucets.

So why is it that when I turn on the cold water faucet, the water comes out blazing hot for about a minute or so, then finally settles into its usual cold temperature? AND, when I turn on the hot water faucet, the water comes out as cool as can be for a minute or so, then finally settles into its usual hot temperature?

'Tis a mystery!

Monday, August 18, 2008

Phelps Phelps Phelps

I'll grant you that Michael Phelps has attained a great accomplishment. In winning 8 gold medals at one Olympics, his individual wins set 5 gold medals with world record times. No complaints here that Phelps is a focused athlete and is deserving of attention.

Here's my gripe: 3 of those gold medals were team events, yet Phelps' teammates get only limited attention and, when they do end up in interviews, they get asked about how they feel about helping Phelps win his 8 golds.

The reality is that those 8 gold medals were a team effort, an effort where the teammates are worthy of attention in their own right. If they had not been competing with the same focus and at the top of their individual games, Phelps could have been 3 gold medals short of the record.

Somehow, whenever the Olympics come around, a few people become media darlings, generally deserving athletes, at the expense of other deserving athletes who have also worked hard to reach this premier event in their lives. I recognize that there are only so many hours of airtime available and probably more stories than the time available, much less to also cover the events.

It still seems a shame in this time of accomplishing a record that may well be impossible to improve upon (except by setting new time records) that ALL of those who made it possible are not being held up in the spotlight with the honor they deserve.

Monday, August 11, 2008

freecreditreport.com

Let's see. There are what? 3? 4? of those freecreditreport.com commercials floating around the airwaves now.

Each one of them has a somewhat different annoying song.

Each one of them has a scenario where some guy doesn't quite have the perfect lifestyle because he didn't check with freecreditreport.com to be sure his identity hasn't been stolen, or his fiance has perfect credit, or can only get a broken-down used vehicle instead of the latest dream machine. The latest of these has some guy "going green", not because he was being environmentally conscious, but because the only thing he could afford with his credit was a bike.

Now I haven't quite decided if this series of commercials implies that men are really too stupid to make reasonable credit decisions, or men are the only ones concerned about how their credit is perceived, or that women are so smart about this that we don't have to market to them, or that women are too stupid to even begin to understand the concept of keeping track of one's credit rating.

The only time a woman gets mentioned is when the fiance neglects to mention a credit default, so they have to live with her folks instead of in a home of their own. Now, I'm not completely nuanced in this stuff, but, as I understand it, that's not particularly accurate.

In any case, I'm not planning on using their "free" service anytime in the near future, just on general principle. The reality is that men and women need to check this stuff out and keep some kind of track on it. The other reality is that there are truly free ways of checking with the credit report companies, without getting rooked into joining a "service" which does the same thing you can do yourself.

Now if I could just get those stupid jingles out of my head!