When our newly seated President has to be the adult in the room and tell the American public to be more self-reliant and responsible (excerpts at the end of this post), it certainly makes one worry about how far the American public has fallen away from our core values. At the very least he appears to be walking the talk, taking responsibility for some poor cabinet nominations (or at the very least, some horrible background checks by his staff).
Recent events, especially hurricanes in my near vicinity, have brought to the forefront that Americans (or at least Texans!), when we have to, are quite self-reliant, and very good at helping thy neighbor. The image burned in many minds of Hurricane Katrina is the picture of people sitting on their suitcases outside the SuperDome awaiting Government rescue…quite the opposite of self-reliance. It may be a media perception of national media coverage versus local media, but those type of pictures were not evident in the Hurricane Ike disaster…though there were many of people helping each other.
The fact remains that many in our country took the President’s admonishment that we need to take care of ourselves as something new and revolutionary when in truth it is, as he says, part of the core principals our country was founded on. (more…)
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My family and I visited Galveston this past weekend, our first sojourn there after 
Hurricane Ike hit them and us in September. Our plans were to visit the Strand for some shopping, dine at Gaido’s, and see the lights at Moody Gardens.
We were unprepared for the level of damage still remaining. Since we’ve repaired most of what Ike did to our home and our neighborhood is pretty much back to what it was before the hurricane, it’s easy to forget. (more…)
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What could be more enjoyable than a Zombie story anthology? How about enjoying one 
during and after Hurricane Ike, with no power and candlelight?? How about one that includes three of my all-time fav authors (Dan Simmons, George R. R. Martin and Stephen King)? How about one nearly 500 pages long (at least the ARC is)? How about one edited by John Joseph Adams, who also brought us the anthologies Seeds of Change and Wastelands (which, yes, I need to finish).
Many of these stories have been previously published, but almost all were new to me. One obvious component: sex angles and zombies seem to mix. Not all include that perspective, but this is certainly not PG-13.
My favorites from this LARGE collection were Ghost Dance by Sherman Alexie, The Third Dead Body by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Malthusian’s Zombie by Jeffrey Ford, Home Delivery by Stephen King, Deadman’s Road by Joe R. Lansdale, The Song the Zombie Sang by Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg. Thoughts on each after the break. (more…)
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We are going on day ten of no power here in lovely Tomball Texas. Luckily the weather has mostly cooperated, the generator is working, and the water well is hooked up; and of course, Texans being the self-reliant folks that we are, are helping out our neighbors in any way that we can. The major concerns are mosquitoes (lots of them, some the size of my dog) and no trash pickup.
I’ve noticed that many experts have bloomed in the aftermath of the hurricane: experts on generators, the timing of the repair of the electrical network, the weather (we always have experts on the weather), beard growth (reference picture of my son and mine 8 days growths after the jump), grilling all the stuff you’ve had to salvage out of the fridge and freezer, and experts on scrounging needed materials. It is definitely creating experts in survival…in our “normal lives”, we don’t have to take action every day to ensure we have the basics of food, shelter, DSL, coffee and cold beer…but without the grid, we have to work at it everyday. (more…)
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I definitely enjoy a morning cup of joe, but still without power going into the 5th day after Hurricane Ike, I think I may have taken more steps than normal.
- I filled the coffee maker with water from one of the three bathtubs we filled up on Friday night;
- I washed yesterdays coffee grounds off the filter with last night dish washing water (hey it was clean);
- One of our many splendid neighbors gave us some excellent ground coffee so I did not have to search for our grinder in my pre-caffeinated stupor;
- Ready at last for the moment of truth, I pushed the coffee maker power switch and nothing happened;
- it was then that I realized that the sound of silence was my generator not running! I had miscalculated how much gas it needed overnight;
- I stumbled outside, poured in 5 gallons of bartered gasoline, unplugged my spaghetti power cords, jerked the pull cord and started that puppy up;
- Replugged, went to the end of the driveway and retrieved my newspaper for a sense of normalcy;
- Then I plugged in the coffee maker and listened to it perk.
Damn good cup of coffee, if I do say so myself!
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Sitting here in the dark, reading by candlelight (and typing on my blackberry) and drinking some white wine (we have to, of course, because the power is out)…
…With my family.
…In my house.
So all in all, we’ll call it a tie.
Ike took out about 100 feet of fence in my backyard, one tree amd three leaky windows. Power has been out since 2:30am and may be out for quite a while.
But we are safe, and making the best, laughing, reading, telling jokes. My wife has a high ranking in gin online, but I kicked her butt with real cards.
Could have been a lot worse.
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Insert your fav weatherman joke here…man cannot accurately predict the weather or the future. We are about to create black holes, and maybe Higgs bosons at the LHC in CERN, Switzerland…but we cannot tell with 
anything approaching accuracy what path a hurricane will take. It’s quite humbling for us homo sapiens.
In Thursday morning’s Houston Chronicle:
Ike’s forecast 60 hours before landfall called for a Palacios landfall. Rita’s forecast three days before landfall called for a Palacios landfall, and it struck the Texas-Louisiana border 190 miles away.
During the Rita evacuation, I was driving down I-10 to Austin via hwy 71 on my way to a meeting…took almost four hours for what is normally a two and a half hour trip, as the gulf coast was evacuating (along formal evacuation routes and informal). When my meetings were over, I headed back to lovely Tomball…I was the only car going SE, and there was a traffic jam from Houston to Giddings. I got home, tied everything down, move possible projectiles, and waited….
Nothing happened. At least not in Tomball in NW Harris County. Hurricane Rita went east, so we were on the ‘clean’ side of it.
So here we go again: gas stations out of gas (even the neighborhood ones here in good ole Tomball), newscasters on 24/7 about Ike (a decent replacement for round the clock McCain/Obama, but I turned both types off after a few minutes of repetition), evacuations and dire predictions. Like before, everything that could be a serious projectile (except them damn acorns) has been put up or tied down.
I like the fact that we collectively do not know where this thing is going, just like we don’t know if a black hole or Higgs Boson will appear at the LHC. There are ‘too many variables’ (you anti-mathies remember variables? I love variables, best thing ever for a Math Major) to accurately predict many outcomes.
It’s a good humbling thing for the human race to not know or be able to predict everything.
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